The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] Kyle: there are certain things in your business that you can’t hand the ball off on, but there are other times where I think we hold onto the ball too long, and , we are the source of our lack of momentum on certain things
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[00:01:02] Jason: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the e-commerce leader. Collin show. We’re thrilled to launch another episode here. We’ve got a good one in today’s conversation. We’re going to do a behind the scenes. Each of us has been working on in the last month and I share what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and why it’s giving us.
[00:01:23] Joy and hope and or frustration, drama, and pain either way. You’re going to hear about it guys. How are y’all doing? Are you ready to jump into this fun topic? Ready?
[00:01:35] Kyle: This is going to be fun.
[00:01:38] Jason: All right. Very cool. I’m going to just go around the table and I’m going to ask the first question, which is what was your highest impact project in January that you worked on and why were you working on it?
[00:01:49] And, share a little bit about it. Don’t be shy on the details. Give us the real low down and, how it’s impacting or, benefiting your business, that kind of thing. Chris, you want to go first?
[00:01:58] Chris: A fairly large project that I can’t believe. I thought I was going to get done in three weeks. Additionally, the plan for this thing with her. Diligently every single day, it would have not been done in three months. It is kinda getting close to being done. It’s a pretty massive project around CVP. So it’s creating basically an online course that I’m publishing it through KDP, Kindle, direct publishing.
[00:02:24] So it will be available as a paperback book. Hardback book is a Kindle book, a digital. And it’s pretty thorough in depth and I’ve had highs and lows and a word that came to mind today. So we’re thinking about this is just the momentum. I would say if you Google momentum.
[00:02:48] Wow moments are with you and with anybody listening to be like, oh, okay. I can see how I can identify that for myself in my life and keep it going when I do, because as I’ve been working on really just the past two weeks, getting close to the end and finishing a chapter and being like, this is really good.
[00:03:05] This is really going to help a lot of people. These are amazing examples that are gonna make what I’m trying to teach and communicate. That, that makes me excited, that excitement weaves into being happy and excited to work on it. It doesn’t feel like work anymore. And by noticing that and acknowledging that, then I can ride that wave of momentum.
[00:03:22] I don’t want to fall out of it because falling out of it means I got. So I think people should try their best to tell when they’re in a phase, a momentum it’s not the same as like work or flow or that excitement to work on something versus seeing it as, ah, I don’t want to work as work. I’d rather go do something else.
[00:03:42] I’m like, this is what I like doing this work is going to turn into fancy launch. It’s going to make one on one at the same time and that’s an exciting place. And yeah, I’m happy to stay there. I’m riding that momentum two weeks, but of course, people in whatever product they’re working in, I know we talked about a lot of different business opportunities on the shuttle to, just paying attention to yourself.
[00:04:06] Are you excited to work on it or are you like dreading working on it? Maybe change things up. You might just change up the stuff on your desk and find a new way. Really. I’m excited for my second monitor on this. Little things like that can start and create that momentum. And when you can acknowledge that and notice it, then you can really apply it possible for as long as possible.
[00:04:26] And he gets them done after you got to do your work. And I would make the case that we’re going to be happier and more fulfilled because it’s either your life isn’t providing the personal and work anymore. It’s no, I’m doing stuff that I enjoy helping people. And I want to make money. I think that’s honestly, that’s the way my course is about doing something that you like to do.
[00:04:45] And being able to put it into a business, help people making money at the same time. And that’s where you’re really never working actually
[00:04:56] Jason: momentum. And the project is a book that you’re launching really. It’s a course. We call it a course or a book with a course.
[00:05:05] Chris: Yeah. The books that I write are generally communicating with
[00:05:11] books. So these people have it. They can take it around with them. They can read it, they can get a package in the mail from Amazon. They can trust the reviews. It’s got one quick, check it out.
[00:05:21] The book, they don’t have to fight for a refund or anything. It’s so much fun. I can talk about it for days, but I don’t want to take them for show
[00:05:28] Jason: no, that’s awesome. The launch is going to be coming up soon. I’m sure. So any guesstimation on winded, OB actually out there for the wide world to check out,
[00:05:36] Kyle: January for me in my Amazon businesses is a opportunity for us to reflect not just on what worked well and, we’re tracking throughout the year on sales and profitability and all that operational, Tactics and goals and strategies, and really refining some of our processes.
[00:05:56] And so January for us was an audit and we audit all of our processes down to every single SOP that we have, what was working, what needs to be updated because. And we live. If you are working with Amazon as a seller, you fully know, wow. The dynamics and change in that marketplace. And so it’s up to us to make sure that we’re updating all of our SOP to be in line with what Amazon’s putting out in terms of changes in what they’re doing.
[00:06:24] And they made some significant, in terms of service. In the last few months as well. So we had to really make sure that we were aligning on that. And that was part of our process. And, it’s doing that sort of audit is boring, but for me, it also is, it is momentum giving to use Chris’s language because.
[00:06:41] The better your processes are the more in theory, the more efficient your business is going to run in the more efficient the people that are working for you are gonna be able to implement it. And so it’s about getting clarity on those processes and really defining where there was, bottlenecks, mistakes being made issues along those lines.
[00:06:58] And yeah, we should have that wrapped up here, this week. And so we’ve been working on it for the last month, on the RMS, on FBA business. Yeah, I’m excited to see what the results look like in this. They bring those reports and we start to implement some in.
[00:07:10] Jason: How do you implement this course?
[00:07:12] How do you implement in your business? Like you’ll get feedback and ideas, recommendations that you’ll then just make changes in your business.
[00:07:19] Kyle: Exactly. Yeah. So we just will basically, they’re going to report back and all this stuff that they did all review it all important. There they’re aggregating it together, essentially.
[00:07:27] And their recommended changes as well. How from our employees side and, VA’s and people that were used for it. What was there because I really wanted it to be almost like, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term. And sometimes in corporate America they use a 360 degree review, where it’s obviously you reviewing your employees and the work they’ve done, but then they review you as a leader and that’s a boss.
[00:07:49] How that works. And so I was wanting to get that sort of fat back into our process of communication as well. So it’s helpful, it’s humbling a little bit when you they’re like, Hey, you were really terrible at this particular thing. And I’m like, that’s fair enough. That’s fair enough. And, and so we were making adjustments to that process as well, but yeah, we then implemented in this next month in terms of how we use it moving forward,
[00:08:11] Jason: dude.
[00:08:11] That’s really cool. Wow. So data work heavy. Work that will result in a positive outcome for the rest of the year. Yeah. All right. Cool. Michael, what’d you do in January? What’s top of mind for you.
[00:08:24] Michael: Yeah. It’s something that I’ve been intending to do for about a year and a half and not even started, which is bad.
[00:08:32] And like you, Chris, I tend to put incredibly optimistic deadlines on things. I’m not even going to resist the urge to put one on here, but finally getting down to depending a book from the podcast, and we’ve done a lot of podcasts over the years. I’ve interviewed a lot of very intelligent people on some important topics for my audience, for them, for clients on a film.
[00:08:49] Th a long, for a long time, that will make a good book. If I could get the format right. If I could get going with it. And somehow I just didn’t get off the sign in blocks, finally doing it now. So this is the working title is aggregators aggregated. It, and first of all, it should really be helped with my clients who a lot of him should be considering some of the businesses this year, I believe.
[00:09:06] And that’s another topic, another conversation where he had one sale, a couple of brands, seven cigarettes in the last couple of months, it’s fresh. It’s a fresh take on my corner of e-commerce. It’s forcing me to look at customer and private label, Amazon focused businesses from a very different angle.
[00:09:21] And in buyer’s view, and with this of investment mindset, the wall street background, some of these guys have, and finally it means I’m getting into digital product production. Which is something I’ve been, I remember I listened back a while ago, the e-commerce leader podcast from 18 months ago, mid 2020, where I said to Jason on there, I’m going to write this book, probably in the next few months.
[00:09:42] So I was completely wrong about the timing, but I’m finally getting onto it incredibly happy. It is, an extension of my comfort zone, which is the COVID. Podcasts and audio and stuff, which I’ve been doing for years and audio editing is something I’ve done, but not with this particular angle on it.
[00:09:55] So we’ll hone our game as well. So there’s so many upsides to it. I’ve already got the relationships with the guests in place that I can reach out to, to paint things on like conferences to do, basically that Nick, what you did, Jason and Kyle at the book launch was I thought was so good with your launch for e-commerce power.
[00:10:09] Facebook ads sell the books, virtual conference on the backend and just block that the consulting side of the thing. So I’m really looking forward to, the upsides when they work and survive in the lows as well on the journey. So I’m really pleased to be finally
[00:10:21] Jason: getting them with that.
[00:10:23] Oh, the deadlines are brutal on the author. It’s always a struggle. Very cool. Okay. I’ll share mine. In January we had two, really significant websites launch, for our businesses. I’ll talk about one and then if we have time we’ll circle back, you mentioned the other one, the big launch that really my wife led the charge a hundred percent, but it was it’s called sewing with cinnamon.com.
[00:10:45] It’s built on Vimeo’s OTT programming platform tools, and that is, an app constructive. Tools toolkit so that you basically have a website, but you also cross create, apps for iOS, iPad, iPhone, Google play for Android devices, and then fire TV, apple TV, Roku. Basically OTT programming is called over the top.
[00:11:11] Programming basically creates an app version of all of the video-based content for public consumption on all of those, streaming platforms. And, It’s been really cool to see it come together. January was our big push and, she crushed it on the work with their team on building that website, but the marketing strategy and that kind of stuff, I helped with a little just how we were going to approach launching it.
[00:11:39] And. We’re really proud of it. And we have people now signing up every day from Roku and fire, Amazon fire TV, and all these various places that we’re like, how are these people finding this? But it’s the wild west. Really. If you think about. Non YouTube video, distribution. And that’s really what the heart and soul of this project was.
[00:12:00] Having basically you’d go to Amazon, go to Amazon fire TV, to Amazon, and look for videos on prime. Searching a key phrase you want that’s relevant to you. You’ll find very little content. Like shockingly small amounts of content because what’s happened is all those platforms have built content for mass consumption, just normal shows that are like TV shows, but all the niche content, it hasn’t even been put on there yet.
[00:12:30] It is literally like the beginning of the beginning for. Niche content on these platforms. So if anyone is peaked in their interest by that, go check it all out. Vimeo, OTT, is the phrase to search for and look into. It’s not only the day, one of the day, one, it’s like the first few minutes of the, the story for original niche content.
[00:12:57] On these platforms. And most people just never even heard of it or thought about it, but it’s going to become more and more the thing, those platforms like Amazon prime video and Roku, they’re not going away. They’re never going to stop doing what they’re doing. And it is a new normal, it’s a new paradigm.
[00:13:15] And we started to look into this about a year ago, and it really led us to the conclusion that we have to have her work out there broadly cross platform, cross, channel. And so that’s what the project is all about. So you can see how it works. It sounds and.com. I don’t think anybody in our honest would probably be interested in the content itself, sewing stuff, but I’m just to see what it looks like and how it operates and all that.
[00:13:36] Or just search on any, any device you want, any platform you want for sewing the cinema, you’ll see the app version of at all. So that was our big project. And again, all the pro go to her and the Vimeo team, we were really impressed.
[00:13:50] Really nicely not to get.
[00:13:53] All right. Do we have time for version two? Topic, number two, I want to go around the table again, Chris, you got a second. When you was talking about.
[00:14:04] Yeah. Anything else that you want to mention? That’s top of mind digging into, if not, it’s fine.
[00:14:10] Chris: I would say my second topic is my first one in the sense of I can get easily distracted and check this and oh, let me pull this up there. I wonder what over here. Oh my gosh. Those are the things that can break momentum.
[00:14:24] So I’ve been trying to. The one thing like working on the thing, move everything forward.
[00:14:28] Jason: Let me ask it this way. What else did you do last month? That brought you energy optimism. Excitement. Anything else? Top of mind, first project.
[00:14:38] Chris: Yeah. I get
[00:14:45] over there and being disciplined enough to know which ones. The pursuit and which ones are truly shiny object construction. And while they might be fun, they don’t actually mean anything. For their personal life, I think it’s important that people don’t get so focused and be like wake up early and stay up late.
[00:15:05] Like you should have a nice balance. I know the people we can get paid for it and be able to, yeah. I’d love to spend time over there, but you know what? My wife, my family, my work, and my project for my customers and be okay. Doing things. I’ve tried to remind myself a lot of that last month. You’re like, it’s okay to not do things.
[00:15:31] FOMO. In 2021 in the moving forward. And we’re like on Amazon, there are 28 different business
[00:15:44] checking all these things. We do all of them. I just want to share it personally. So anybody that kind of feels the same way. Like you’re not alone. It can be overwhelming to have to choose what to work on when there are so many options, because the opportunity cost of saying, look, I take this, but that also means I didn’t pick all of these.
[00:16:04] It was really where on people who psychologically, at at least for me, I’m trying to get better at it and be like, you know what? Someone else can do this. It’s cool. But they’re ideal for someone else. These are the ideas that make the most sense for me, because my interests, my skills, all these things, I just have to commit to doing these things.
[00:16:24] Jason: And you’re saying focus is helpful.
[00:16:29] Chris: Either from a personal experience, as it applies to their business, based on their experience, based off your, they have found that they can share with you and then you can identify. I feel the same way as that person that I talked to that identify with, for me, it’s a struggle. I don’t feel bad admitting that I struggled with something else.
[00:16:52] I think things like that can really just move forward and be okay with changing and pivoting. There are no plans.
[00:17:07] When they feel overwhelmed.
[00:17:09] Jason: Yeah, love that.
[00:17:10] Michael: I was just gonna say, cause it ties in with Chris and then we make space for Kyle. But I just want to say, first of all, thank you, Chris. It sounds very disingenuous, but genuinely, you’re somebody I look up to, you’re a very, big thought leader in the e-commerce space and have been for years.
[00:17:22] Thank you for giving me permission to screw it up and be very late for my projects and to nevertheless, be okay with getting one good thing done, because I was giving myself a hard time coming up with far too many lists of things I should do. And then I also have to sign the objects syndrome like everyone does.
[00:17:36] And I don’t agree with the amendments and things. For example, this book projects. Thing that’s winning for me is relentlessly. And last night I went to 2:00 AM because I’m like every single day I’m going to get an hour and a half of editing done on this thing. And last night it wasn’t done by midnight.
[00:17:49] I’m like, okay, I’m going to say goodbye to my wife and put it to bed. Cause he’s ill and go to sleep on the sofa. And then I’m going to sit down and do the other town I did. Thank you for that. And I think there’s great wisdom in that really simple insight. That’s it?
[00:18:01] Chris: What was the hot plate show before you get back in the word?
[00:18:07] What am I going? And that’s the word that I use a lot in like my personal coaching, because I’ve worked with so many people who they’re unable to move forward or make a decision because they feel they need permission from somebody. And they typically need that permission from somebody that they look to as like the best celebrity type thing or a guru, or it might be.
[00:18:29] And I get that for some people. Okay. I think it would give them permission. It would give them confidence and they can move forward. And from my point of view, it seems silly, right? So Michael, we’re your friends. We can talk about this openly. There’s a part that says it’s silly, Michael, that you need permission from Chris green provenance like need permission from me is different people realize we understand that.
[00:18:54] He said you don’t like permission from somebody that he looks up might give me that. I’m happy to be part of your story and able to move forward on whatever project it is. And that permission is not unique to me or Michael or anybody. It’s very common. So if anybody’s listening and they’re like, you know what I feel, I just had that I look up to give me permission to move forward.
[00:19:17] It’s just like a solid thing that. If you need to hire him as a coach or go ahead and get them, then you can hear it. But that’s all it is. It’s permission. It’s something simple, flip a switch in your brain and be like, yeah, I got permission to move forward when nothing actually changed.
[00:19:30] Other than that, you just got the endorsement from somebody that you look up to somebody and they’re like,
[00:19:35] Jason: Chris has gone full motivational speaker on us this morning, which is awesome.
[00:19:40] Kyle: But that what’s that book come out. Is that what the book is on? Where’s the momentum course. Where’s the momentum course.
[00:19:47] Jason: It’s so great. No, honestly,
[00:19:54] Kyle: I’m going to go, but I do want to comment on this because it did spark a thought for me. What happened? I think one of the maturing processes, or as an entrepreneur is to know what do you do when that momentum begins to fade? And the thought that came to mind is it’s like running the option, play in American football.
[00:20:14] Football everywhere else in the world. It’s soccer, football, soccer, but in America, football is American football and they run this play where the quarterback who, who gets as the ball on offense has a choice. And he can either hand it off to the guy behind him as the running back and they take off and start running or the quarterback can keep it and they run, or they throw that it’s an option.
[00:20:33] You got options. I think the wisdom with momentum is to understand when you need to hand the ball off to somebody. And there are certain things in your business that you can’t hand the ball off on, but there are other times where I think we hold onto the ball too long, and we are these, we are the source of our lack of momentum on certain things.
[00:20:55] And and I think that there’s this wisdom of learning when to hand the ball, when to keep it and why you keep your offense running smoothly as possible. And by that, your business is still. That’s my take on that. I love that I think momentum is really powerful to lean into and push into it.
[00:21:10] So with that, the second thing that essentially we worked on, this last month was something that I do feel a lot of momentum around and that is working to put together a new. Mastermind group. It’s still a little bit under wraps because we’re still working through part of that, detail, but w with a cool, a couple of cool guys who, some former Amazon employees, that are now in the consulting world will be coming together and doing, training and conversations around brand building on Amazon as a platform.
[00:21:41] Like where, how do you launch, what do you do? And so I’m excited about. Their take on it, their insight, and putting that community together. I put a lot of momentum around it. I think it’s going to be a huge value to the community as we rolled into 2022. And so I’m pretty excited about that.
[00:21:53] Jason: Dude. I love that I don’t have any inspirational and motivational thoughts or any ones, but, I’ll just hear a second project we worked on in January was a Shopify site building, that we’re really proud of it’s for our own charitable work. And it’s in support of the three esters. Which is our property in Zambia and our programs there.
[00:22:13] And we built it on Shopify, which is unusual for a charitable, sites, charity sites. But, we loved the platform so much. We just figured we’d build it that way. We use the Shogun page editor a lot. And so you can check it out three Esther’s, farm.org. We’re really proud of the visual effect of the site and what it’s looking and coming together and, it was really a team effort.
[00:22:33] I kind. Led the way a little bit. And it was a rehash and redo of what we had previously on the internet. And so that was a big project. And Shopify continues to impress me and my team. Every time we build a site, like we love this to be honest, Looking into WordPress for this one, because it was like, it’s just charity, but, and really Shopify functionality in a lot of ways didn’t apply.
[00:22:58] But once I got into WordPress for a day or two, I was like, I am not building this site on WordPress. I’m back in Shopify. That’s what I love. That’s what I know how to build on. And who cares if it’s a charity, I can make this work on Shopify. And we did. And I think it came up. And so that was my second project for January.
[00:23:17] And, to the motivational and, inspirational points, Chris that you made and in Egypt we made. I do totally agree with you. Momentum is, energizing and fun when you’re not in a place of momentum, it sucks. And, when you get momentum as a team, it was a different level for me, getting momentum personally is one thing, getting momentum with your team or under the concept of having team members.
[00:23:42] To do stuff. And then they lead the charge. They lead the way and they build out parts of process that actually stack up and align with what you had hoped and dreamed. And even your hopes and expectations. To me, that’s really a fun part of being an e-commerce operator as well, a business and a nonprofit leader as well.
[00:24:02] So hopefully that’s helpful today. Okay. I’m going to go around the table. Final thoughts, final takeaways. This episode went in a different direction than we expected, but of course that’s the fun of the show is we are always figuring out on the fly what’s inspiring us in that moment. Any final thoughts for the day?
[00:24:16] We’ll go back around the table. Chris closing thought.
[00:24:20] Chris: I think we crammed so much into this. I don’t think we need to throw anything else on top of. Complete
[00:24:27] Jason: overwhelm people. I think we give people
[00:24:29] Chris: actionable and motivational information. They need to do something with it. And that’s my challenge to listening.
[00:24:35] Do something like make the conscious choice to do something. That’s going to move your business forward. They’re listening right now.
[00:24:47] Jason: Nonstop motivation from Chris green today. I love it. Love it. Love it. Okay, Michael, you got.
[00:24:51] Michael: By the way, permission, Jason, you gave yourself permission to say, I hate WordPress.
[00:24:55] I love Shopify. I’m going to use Shopify for purpose. It wasn’t intended for, and because you love the tool and know it well, you made it work. And I think that’s one thing that strikes me is that, we’ll develop great skills in certain. And you need to just dig into that and double down, even if the external world will tell you, that’s not actually what you should be doing.
[00:25:10] I’m trying to create an audio book from a podcast. I’ve never heard anyone try to do that. So I don’t care. Cause I’ve been doing podcasting interviews for six, seven years. I’ve probably done 800 episodes of podcasts, so I’m comfortable with it. So I’m going to roll with it and see where it goes.
[00:25:22] And I think that’s also a great piece of advice for anyone. If you’re in some kind of momentum don’t mess with the momentum, just cause it isn’t conventional solutions.
[00:25:29] Jason: I love that title.
[00:25:31] Kyle: My final thought is I give you permission. Listener to go back and listen to Chris green, inspire you and give you some fire for your week. I saw I’m giving you permission to go do that
[00:25:44] Jason: buyer for the week. Love this you guys. And we are all about the inspirational encouragement, motivation, and, honestly, it is it’s fun.
[00:25:53] To really inspire people. We hope. And that’s the effort behind the show and the energy behind the show is to inspire, encourage, educate, motivate e-commerce operators. And it really is an honor. So if you’re listening to this, to, in the call app, we, we’d love to have you follow the show. That’s one of the signs by which we, Yeah, something positive happening.
[00:26:12] It’s an honor to have people coming in and listening. We’re number eight right now in the educational, section of call-in app, which is amazing. If you want to check out a broader set of conversations, you can go to the e-commerce leader.com and check that out on Spotify or apple podcast player, all of the players that are out there or
[00:26:32] the e-commerce leader. Podcasts Jen’s as always, it’s an honor. I’ll end it here. And we’ll see you next week. Thanks guys.
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