The Evolution of FBA Businesses and the Future of the Amazon Marketplace

February 18, 2021

Meet The Speakers

Ryan Gnesin

CEO of Elevate Brands

Listen to the podcast

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Ryan Gnesin’s thoughts on what has generated the recent interest in FBA private label businesses
What the next few years will hold for Amazon brands as more FBA aggregators join the market
How Ryan’s background in commodities trading informs his view on Amazon’s seller environment
Why the most expensive mistake you can make as an Amazon entrepreneur is to learn by trial and error
Ryan’s approach for finding FBA businesses to acquire and invest in
What are the best practices that private label brands should pursue before deciding to sell?
Ryan talks about Elevate Brands and his strategies for long-term success
The software tools and services Ryan uses to effectively run multiple businesses on Amazon

In this episode…

Without a doubt, FBA businesses are experiencing a boom in acquisitions and investments. But, what exactly is generating this recent interest in FBA private label businesses, and what does it mean for the future of the Amazon marketplace?

As the Founder and CEO of Elevate Brands, Ryan Gnesin has years of experience acquiring, launching, and operating Amazon businesses. According to Ryan, there are a number of contributing factors to the recent spike in FBA brand acquisitions, from updates on Amazon to the COVID-19 crisis. And, as he says, this spike is having a serious impact on the Amazon flywheel, causing an increase in sellers, customers, and aggregators. So, what is Ryan’s advice to FBA private label brands looking to sell their businesses this year?

In this episode of the Buy Box Experts podcast, James Thomson interviews Ryan Gnesin, the CEO of Elevate Brands (formerly Recom Brands), about the recent spike in acquisitions of FBA private label businesses. Ryan shares his criteria for finding businesses to invest in, his best practices for Amazon brands looking to sell, and his perspective on the future of the Amazon marketplace. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage their clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of their clients’ business fundamentals and their in-depth expertise in the Amazon Marketplace.

The team works with marketplace technicians using a system of processes, proprietary software, and extensive channel experience to ensure your Amazon presence captures the opportunity in the marketplace–not only producing greater revenue and profits but also reducing or eliminating your business’ workload.

Buy Box Experts prides itself on being one of the few agencies with an SMB (small to medium-sized business) division and an Enterprise division. Buy Box does not commingle clients among divisions as each has unique needs and requirements for proper account management.

Learn more about Buy Box Experts at BuyBoxExperts.com.

Podcast Episode Transcripts:

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

Intro 0:09

Welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast. We bring to light the unique opportunities brands face in today’s e-commerce world.

James Thomson 0:18

Hi, this is James Thomson from the Buy Box Experts podcast. Today’s episode is part of a special series of interviews that we’ve done to dive deeper into the recent phenomenon of private equity companies and FBA aggregators investing in private label brands that are leveraging the Amazon sales channel. As part of this series, we interview a wide range of investors, brokers, consultants, and entrepreneurs that have recently sold their private label brands. We peel back the layers on what’s happening in this new investment space, and look at how private label brands are finding financial success through the building and eventual sale of their online businesses. For three weeks from mid February through early March, we will release a new episode every weekday on this topic, sit back and enjoy today’s episode. Hi, I’m James Thomson, one of the hosts of the Buy Box Experts podcast. I’m a partner with Buy Box Experts and the former business head of the selling on Amazon team at Amazon, as well as the first account manager for the Fulfillment by Amazon program. I’m co author of a couple of books on Amazon including the recent Controlling Your Brand in the Age of Amazon book. Today’s episode is brought to you by Buy Box Experts. Buy Box Experts takes ambitious brands and makes them unbeatable. When you hire Buy Box Experts you receive the strategy optimization and marketing performance to succeed on Amazon. We also support investors with due diligence services. Go to buyboxexperts.com to learn more. Before I introduce our guests today, I want to do a big shout out to the team at Disruptive Advertising. For off Amazon advertising, Disruptive Advertising offers the highest level of service in the digital marketing industry, focusing on driving traffic, converting traffic and enterprise analytics. Disruptive helps their clients increase their bottom line from month to month. Check out disruptiveadvertising.com to learn more. Our guest today on the Buy Box Expert podcast is Ryan Gnesin, CEO of Recom Brands, a firm that acquires, launches and operates a portfolio of e-commerce brands centered around Amazon. Prior to Recom Brands. Ryan was a commodities trader and financial planner. Ryan, thank you, and welcome today to the Buy Box Experts podcast.

Ryan Gnesin 2:35

Thanks very much. Great to be with you, James.

James Thomson 2:38

I want to start Ryan with an obvious point. FBA private label businesses are a hot commodity these days, what has happened to generate this recent interest in such businesses, which have been around since the start of the Amazon Marketplace?

Ryan Gnesin 2:53

Yeah, it’s a it’s a fair? It’s a fair question. Yeah, it was, you know, I, I wondered that question. When I first joined, right. So you know, I first started looking into Amazon, I left my old commodities trading world in middle of 2016 and moved to the US. And you know, at the end of 2016, I started really looking into what I wanted to do next and came across, you know, Amazon and the opportunity. I had a friend who was selling on Amazon and and I thought it was very intriguing boat off. But I also found it surprising when I went to a couple of Amazon conferences at the noticeable lack of sophisticated what you would call sophisticated capital, right? There were no investment bankers. There were no private equity guys, I wasn’t seeing many management concerns. I just wasn’t you know, it was it was almost as though it was like a wild west, Mom and Pop type of environment. Right? You know what I’m talking about? And, and I found that surprising, because when I was talking with some of these people, they were people who had serious businesses. I mean, you know, they were, you know, I had this friend of mine, who started his business and within two years had a $10 million business on Amazon. Right. And I mean, that’s impressive in any industry, right. And so I found it surprising at the at. Yeah, I just found it surprising at the time. And at that stage, I think ecommerce penetration was was under 10%, right of total of total retail. And, and it was clearly growing. I mean, it was growing at around 1% a year. So the trend was there, the market was growing. But there were tons of horror stories, you know, in those days, you know, it was very, very common to have your Amazon account shut down. I mean, anyone who’d had an Amazon account for like, a couple of years, like, had a story about their account getting Yes. I mean, and, and by the way, we’ve had our accounts shut down a couple times to just being caught up with the wrong with the algorithm and, you know, some mistake that Amazon made and we have our account shut down. And the other key factor was that you know, it was against Terms of Service to own multiple Amazon accounts. Right. And there were all these horror stories about people who would be sitting in the same Starbucks, even if they had two different Amazon accounts. And Amazon would think, oh, because you’re using the same IP, right to log into your Amazon account, you must therefore be working in the same office together running multiple accounts illegally. And so Amazon would shut down accounts. Right, it was happening all the time. And so, you know, initially, when we started looking into this sort of aggregation play and rollout, like, it wasn’t possible, because you couldn’t own these multiple accounts, working from the same location, there was all these reasons why we felt it was too risky at play, which is why it took us three years to finally decide to make the plunge. So I mean, you know, you know, so so so, I mean, that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s become much more popular now. Because Amazon has sold a lot of those issues, right? I mean, now you can have multiple accounts. And e-commerce is obviously continued to grow tremendously. I mean, you know, obviously, we’ve had this massive step change this year. So there’s a number of reasons. And, you know, I guess, I guess, COVID just accelerated everything. I think this was always gonna happen. But COVID, you know, you know, as the expression goes, right, I mean, decades. You know, sometimes, you know, nothing happens for decades. And then and then decades happen in weeks. Yeah. I don’t know, who said that. Someone said that. You know, it’s I think it’s been attributed to to, to styling, but I’m not sure who’s it anyway, it’s, um, it’s clear now that what’s happened is that it’s just this trend that was gonna happen over 10 years, it just happened over several months, now.

James Thomson 6:35

It’s fascinating to think that, for so many of these private label sellers, they’ve been bootstrapping it for years, getting friends and family to kick in money to help grow, because traditional banks often weren’t excited about the FBA model. Now you’ve got all these investors that are happy to come in and buy the whole business. And quite frankly, there’s so much money entering the space. When it comes to acquiring businesses, it’s not lending money, it’s actually acquiring the whole business. It’s kind of a fascinating turn of events, for folks that are used to making a good living running these businesses, but now are in a position that they can exit and make potentially life altering amounts of money, so selling their baby. So with so many companies now interested in buying and rolling up FBA businesses, I’m curious your perspective on what’s going to happen in the next two years as so many new aggregators rush in, I think, of simple dissemble of supply and demand. But I’m also seeing a significant tearing of different sizes of FBA aggregators, going after different types of private label businesses. Yeah. Tell me more in your thoughts there.

Ryan Gnesin 7:42

Yeah. So it’s gonna be it’s gonna be really cool to see what happens to the market. So the first thing I would say is, is you’re absolutely right. I mean, there’s been a ton of activity here. I mean, I heard some numbers earlier today that there’s been something like $700 million of equity that’s been injected into the space this year, or roll ups and something like $2 billion of debt. So there’s so there’s a lot of liquidity, a lot of liquidity in the space. But what that means is, that’s great for sellers, right, because you know, your FBA business has number one, it’s obviously grown as a result of COVID. But also, there’s more guys looking to buy the business. Yes. But what that also means to me, and suggests to me is that there’s just going to be more sellers entering the space. So what so when you talk about supply demand matrix, yes, there are more buyers coming into the space. But a lot of the sellers then when we bought their businesses, and we asked what are you doing with the money, they will definitely start a new Amazon business. I mean, it’s just been so successful in this one, why wouldn’t we go do it again? Right, so so, you know, there’ll be more sellers coming into the space. And it’s the beauty of the Amazon flywheel, right. I mean, this is the beauty of it, you know, more sellers means more customers. And more customers means more variety and lower prices, right. And that means more aggregators. And it also means more sellers and more set and, and the flywheel just goes round and round and spins faster and faster. And we’re all living in, in Jeff Bezos as well now, right?

James Thomson 9:10

Jeff, of course, is doing very well from all of this activity. But that’s, that’s, uh, Amazon always wins as I’ve come to learn.

Ryan Gnesin 9:17

That is that is true. That is true. But you know, I think, you know, to your point about the aggregators, and how, you know, everyone’s got different strategies, and everyone’s got different criteria they’re using to buy businesses, and the market is big enough. I mean, you know, when you look at, you know, when you look at the numbers, Amazon third party marketplace, last year was $200 billion $200 billion of gmv. Right, this year is going to be something like 280. And according to guys, like JP Morgan is a report, you know, by 2022, it’s going to be well over 400 billion. So you know, there’s room for the room for a lot of sellers. There’s room for a lot of aggregators of the whole pie is expanding. So rapidly that there’s going to be plenty of m&a activity. And it’s a it’s a great space to be in.

James Thomson 10:07

You didn’t grow up as an FBA private label seller yourself, you came in from the banking side, I’m curious to get your thoughts on the kinds of issues in the space. You know, you the most surprised you, as you’ve learned more and more about the subculture of entrepreneur, you talked about some of the issues, the very beginning of how disorganized or Wild Wild West it was. But are you seeing things within the way that the sellers run their businesses that have kind of caught you off guard?

Ryan Gnesin 10:36

Yeah, I mean, I mean, some of the noticeable things, initially was an I came from the commodities trading world, which is, and it was a physical, it was physical trading, it wasn’t papered, it wasn’t so much paper trading on a screen, it was actually physically moving commodities around the world, putting it on vessels and selling it to you for whatever it was. And in that environment, you almost, you know, you like never spoke with your competitors. Or it was rare, right? You just you did. Whereas, you know, I’ve found Amazon’s environment to be quite collaborative, you know, sellers are, there’s plenty of Facebook groups, and there’s plenty of forums. And that would be a really great environment where people share information and get to know each other and help each other out. And I think that goes towards an abundance mentality, right? Because I think the ones who are doing that are getting the most out of it, right? I mean, those guys are the ones who are benefiting most from sharing information, because it’s not a fixed pie. I mean, the pie is truly expanded. So so you know, that’s one of the things that I found to be interesting. You know, I mean, something else that’s just so interesting about this space is how easy it is to get set up. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s part of the reason, Amazon’s just made it so simple for a seller to come in. And with, you know, a few 100 bucks in their pocket, you know, we started out businesses, resellers, I mean, you can literally walk into a Marshall’s store or a Nike factory, oh, yeah, buy a pair of shoes, or Nike set up an Amazon account and start selling on Amazon. And, and so Amazon’s just made it super easy. And the beauty is, the beauty is just this variable cost structure. So you can go from zero to a $20 million business. Without ever investing in any real fixed cost overheads, you know, you don’t have to buy the trucks that deliver the goods, you don’t have to set up the warehouses that, that that inventory, the material. I mean, Amazon’s just made it so simple, and so inexpensive. That, you know, it’s created this great environment.

James Thomson 12:33

When I was first working in the FBA team at Amazon, I got to talk to a lot of sellers. And, to your point, the low barriers to entry, sometimes that attracts people who think that they can be the, you know, the next multimillion dollar seller, and they really have no business being anything in business, they shouldn’t be in business. And so the lack of sophistication sometimes that we run into when it comes to how to figure out whether you’re making profit, to look at the economics of your business and say, This is going in the wrong direction. To know if you actually are up today or down today, you know, that those kinds of things are often lost, even today on companies that do 10-20 million a year. And they’re waiting for their accountant to tell them if they’ve made any money. That’s kind of an absurd situation. But Amazon makes it easy for anybody with any level of business training to get in, not that they’re necessarily going to be successful or not that they’re necessarily going to be up to speed on what it takes to succeed on Amazon. But yes, you can get in and you can start selling product. So it’s an amazing place to be, but it’s also a very dangerous place to be if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Ryan Gnesin 13:45

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I agree. Now, you’ve reminded me of this of a of an expression a guy, you know, there’s one of one of the one of the guys I’ve met early in the early days when I asked him how his profit margins look, and what is something what some of his metrics, where is it Ryan, the only thing I know is that at the end of the month, my lights are still on, I’m paying my bills. And I have enough money to do that. And beyond that, I couldn’t tell you the first thing other than my revenue, which Amazon makes obvious, I couldn’t tell you what my profit margins were, like, my inventory turnover velocity was I couldn’t tell you any of that stuff. So I agree with you. And there’s a there’s what I like to call a dumb tax. Right? And there’s a cost of education, right? And you’re either going to learn something by making the mistakes yourself, right? Or you’re going to learn it by going to a consultant, you know, like you guys, for example, and letting you guys help manage the business or you’re going to go find someone to teach you the business but one way or another, you’re paying, you’re paying something you’re paying something to someone. And what I’ve found the most expensive mistake you can make is is by learning from trial and error, right, because that’s the most expensive time consuming way to do it. So yes, while it’s easy to get in, if you are going to if you are going to scale and you want to do it properly, you you got to get those things right. And if you don’t have the skill set yourself or the partner with someone who has the skill set, or go find a consultant or an agency, I totally agree. You know, these are, you know, this is a business like any other business. And you know, if you don’t, for example, know your your metrics, it’s like flying blind, it’s like, like trying to fly an airplane without your dials and gauges. And, you know, just, it’s a recipe for disaster.

James Thomson 15:24

Let’s talk about the ease with which companies can enter as an Amazon seller, the marketplace is here to stay, Amazon will continue to tweak its policies, but the continued desire for cheaper, better versions of products among Amazon customers, combined with lots of accessible manufacturing capacity, here and overseas, that will keep drawing people into wanting to become private label sellers. How does an investment group like yours leverage that enthusiasm, while having to call through what’s worth keeping? And what’s worth throwing away?

Ryan Gnesin 15:59

Yeah, I mean, when we look at a business, you know, we’re looking for example, to one of the criteria we look for is how much upside the there is for us to grow the business. Right? So, you know, we look at all we look at all areas of the company branding and creative, right, you know, whether that’s videos, better photos, a plus content, you know, we look at supply chain, you know, is there a way we can somehow figure out how to improve costing? Can we repackaging it in a certain way that’s going to be cheaper for us? And for our customers? We look at SEO and PPC, do we think these guys have optimized their title and their description and their back end keywords? Do? Do we think they’ve done everything they can, all their variations, we could add to the listing size, color difference? You know, we look at, look at all of those things, even customer service, is there a better job we could be doing to manage customer service? I’m just plugging in my, my laptop, it’s about to go dead? Yeah. So we’re looking, yeah, we’re looking at customer service. So we’re looking at all those areas. And, and we, you know, no matter what business we bought, we’re trying to, we’re gonna try and optimize all those different areas and pull all those different levers to be able to, you know, to juice the business as much as we can.

James Thomson 17:15

There are 1000s of private label brands out there. When we think of all the aggregators that are getting in to the space, if you go back a year ago that a couple of companies that were doing this, they were they were able to rely on on brokers as their primary source of deals. Too much competition, everybody can’t be looking at the same deals from brokers. What is your approach for finding deals? And how are you finding companies that might not otherwise be shopping around to be available for sale everywhere in anywhere?

Ryan Gnesin 17:46

I mean, honestly, today, we’re starting to get a lot of, I mean, for the last few months, we’ve been getting a bunch of referrals. So people know us in the space, we’ve been around a long time, we’ve been to a bunch of the conferences, we’ve been networking, you know, for years in the space. And so now that people know that we’re, you know, one of the buyers and one of the aggregators. And they know, we’re nice guys, and we’re very easy to deal with, and we have a good reputation in the market. So I mean, we’re getting a lot of a lot of that deal flow coming to us directly now. We do some direct outreach to certain sellers. And we have a couple of other, you know, things that we do online. But broker websites is still a great place, you know, to find to find deals, I think.

James Thomson 18:28

What would you like private label firms to do before they go to market? When you think of all the different offers that you may see, I’m sure that they’re not all signed up just the way you want? Yeah, what what are the best practices you’d like to see these private label brands pursue before deciding to sell?

Ryan Gnesin 18:50

You know, we don’t require much. Okay. I mean, I mean, I’ll tell you, you know, in terms of what we look for in a business, and that’s different to that’s different. I mean, if it’s a great product, and it has a lot of reviews, right? That’s a business that we’re interested in. Yep. But in terms of how someone packages it up for us, you know, we’re pretty easy there. Because we’ve got some super strong M&A guys. Our guys have something like, you know, 40 years of M&A experience and billions of dollars worth of deals. So we don’t need anything packaged up in a certain way. We, you know, we’re happy for silicon says and says, here’s our user permissions, gives us user permissions that says, pull a couple of reports. Yeah. You know, that gives that tells us, you know, most of what we need to know, and then it’s just simply an equation of understanding the supply chain a little bit better, and understanding the cost of the actual cost of goods, right, so like a few invoices of the materials, but we build the balance sheet and we build the profit and loss statement, and we do all of that, you know, whether even if a broker gives it to us, we’re going to rebuild it ourselves, of course. So what we like to say to people is don’t stress just you know, just let us have access to the information. And then we’ll we’ll put everything together and make it, you know, we we make a concerted effort to make this as simple as possible for a seller, it’s, you know, it’s typically not a fun process selling a business, right? Particularly if you are going through a broker, if you’re going through a broker, you know, you there’s great value there. But you know, you may talk to 10 different buyers, and that’s a lot of, or 22. I mean, who knows, you may be more than that. And it’s a lot of effort. And it’s a lot of energy, and it’s a lot of time. And sometimes you don’t know if a buyer is serious, or if they have the, or if they have the financial bandwidth, or whatever it is to be able to close a deal. And, you know, we make things super simple. We close our deals in, you know, 30 days or so on average. And we just try to make the process as simple as possible.

James Thomson 20:46

So let’s spend a few minutes and talk about Recom Brands. How is your firm differentiated from other firms that are in the same same business of buying FBA businesses?

Ryan Gnesin 20:56

I think we’ve probably been around for longer than most, right? I mean, a lot of the new guys that have raised a lot of money are relatively new to the Amazon world, maybe they may have a lot of business experience in general and have yes, yes, full previous businesses, but but maybe less on Amazon, you know, we’ve been, we’ve now been in the Amazon game on myself for you know, four years. And we’ve learned all the hard lessons, and we’ve made all the mistakes, and we’ve had our account shutdowns and, you know, we know what it means to sit on to statistic to sit on the phone, banging your head against the brick wall. That is that is seller support and not getting anywhere. And we know all those things. And we know the tips and the tricks, and we know the the pitfalls. And so we’ve just been around. And we know the game and you know, we were managing a business of you know, with 8000 SKUs before we started the roll up. So you know, we’ve got a bunch of experience in the space.

James Thomson 21:50

Are you, I mean, today, your team is based all over the world? Are you looking to buy companies that are private label brands from all over the world?

Ryan Gnesin 22:00

We’re so we’re only looking on buying businesses that are primarily on Amazon. I mean, sometimes we buy business that is, you know, let’s say 70%, Amazon and 30% Shopify, for example, which is fine. So we’re primarily focused on Amazon. We we’ve to date, we’ve only acquired businesses that are Amazon USA. Okay. But we’re also interested from q1 of next year, we’ll be buying businesses in Europe as well. Amazon Europe, I should say. Yes. So yes, we plan to go global. Some of our investors are actually based in Asia. So you know, and you know, in my commodities trading days, I was living in Southeast Asia for eight years. So I’ve got a got a great sort of strong network there. And e-commerce is exploding in Southeast Asia as well. So we see all of it as as as tremendous opportunity. And it’s early days. I mean, you know, you know, we’re somewhere between the national anthem and the bottom of the first here, right. I mean, this is early days in the in this in this Amazon rollout story. So yes, yes. Global, global acquisitions and sales is absolutely part of our strategy.

James Thomson 23:05

Yeah. Ryan, what do you think’s gonna make your business successful in the long run?

Ryan Gnesin 23:11

You know, I always say to my guys, like, it’s never what you do, it’s how you do it. And, and so I think, I think just just real focus on on operations and execution, right, just just doing a really good job of growing these brands, right, paying, paying really close, I mean, retail is detail as, as the saying goes, right, and just, and just making sure that you, you know, you optimize, you optimize these businesses as best as you possibly can, creating a great culture for the company, right? Because I mean, having great people who, you know, if you building a big business, you know, I’m not of the view that you micromanage people, right? I always say, you know, you hire people to hire really smart people, so they tell you what to do, and not the other way around. So, you know, I believe that if we hire really smart, really great people, and give them a you know, give them the resources, give them a great environment with which to work, and a great business model and strategy, then, you know, then we should be, we should be just fine.

James Thomson 24:13

For the companies you’re buying, how often do you or how long do you typically keep the leadership teams around?

Ryan Gnesin 24:20

So, to date, we haven’t, we haven’t acquired anyone, when you say, keeping the leadership team around, you know, my team’s got is super, super strong in managing these businesses. So, you know, we haven’t yet had any sellers who wanted to stay on. If a seller wanted to stay on, we could discuss that. I mean, we’re certainly open to that. You know, we can learn from sellers as well. But so far, all the businesses we’ve acquired, the sellers have sort of explained and taught us everything that they’ve that they felt was pertinent. And you know, we’ve stayed in touch with sellers and they love to see how their brands grow over time is a super fun thing, for them to see what we do with their business. And, and, you know, one of the businesses we acquired was from an 80 year old couple and you know, the business is up sort of 200% since we acquired it. And, and you know, it’s exciting for them to see what we’ve done with the business and how we’ve that. So, yeah, so, so we haven’t yet brought anyone on but from from the seller side, but we’re open to it.

James Thomson 25:23

I’m curious, where do you see the FBA aggregator business going as a whole in the future, when these companies start to try to essentially take the value out of the companies they’ve raised? It’s all very nice and well, to have a half billion billion dollar valuation. But if these are all privately held businesses, what do you think will be the way in which investors will be able to get their money out of out of the aggregator businesses?

Ryan Gnesin 25:50

I think you’ll start to see some of these businesses IPO. I mean, I don’t know this. But I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if you start to see some of the bigger aggregators IPO. Right? There’s no reason for that. And I don’t see any reason why that wouldn’t happen. And then I think you’re gonna start to see the aggregators aggregating each other at some point, right. I mean, that’s, you know, that may start to happen. I mean, I think it’s already starting to happen to some degree, but I think that’s gonna start happening to a greater extent in, in 12 months time.

James Thomson 26:21

One of the fascinating stories that has yet to be told, is what happens when one of these aggregator businesses buys a brand, and it doesn’t work out? Do they try to sell it on the secondary market? Do they just write it off and move on? Who’s gonna buy those brands?

Ryan Gnesin 26:41

I guarantee you, anyone who’s buying dozens and dozens of businesses is going to come across one that doesn’t work, right. I mean, it’s gonna happen. Yeah, touch wood, it hasn’t happened to us yet. Right? I mean, one of our businesses we acquired, and then it dropped by 50%. In fact, our very first business we acquired dropped by 50%, within the first couple of months. And that was more to do with our doubt. I mean, there were a few factors, partly was our fault partly wasn’t our fault. We’ve since recovered data, and it’s now way, way up from where we bought it. Right. So we recovered nicely. But it will happen. And when it does happen, I guess part of the strategy here is that you have a diversified portfolio. So I mean, it shouldn’t kill the business unless you do it on several of them. Yeah. And, you know, it’s rare that you would discard a business, I mean, there’s, you know, you would have to, you would have to have a pretty compelling reason to do that, where you just felt like, there’s just nothing you can do this business to help it grow. But if you if you have some skill on Amazon, and the market is growing, if the market happens to, to, to shift the bid, right, for that particular niche, you know, you bought a fidget spinner business, and now no one wants. If that happens, and they like, I’m not sure there’s much you can do. Yes. Right. But, but otherwise, hopefully, there’s room to recover the business if you make a mistake.

James Thomson 28:09

I want to I want to ask you one last question. As part of our time together today, talk to me about some of the favorite software tools or SaaS services that you’re using to help support the running of all these businesses.

Ryan Gnesin 28:23

Yeah, I mean, you know, we use so I mean, we use Helium 10. Like most guys, Viral Launch, Jungle Scout, you know, we use those guys like a lot of other guys do. Some of our other back end infrastructures is is being overhauled, so I can’t say too much about it at the moment. We’ve just had a new CTO join us and so we’re doing a bunch of we’re doing a bunch of work on that stuff. But But I’ll tell you armed with armed with a good accounting system, and you can use Xero or QuickBooks or whatever, I mean, armed with a decent accounting service. And, you know, Jungle Scout, and, you know, and, you know, Helium 10, for example, you know, you’ve there’s a lot you can do we use, we were using Seller Cloud as well as our EIRP which, which, which is, which is very nimble, and can do a lot. I mean, it’s not super user friendly, but it’s um, but it can do pretty much anything. And we’ve used in our reselling business for you sell a snap, which I thought which I thought was great, which is our repricing software. So I think that’s been a that’s been a great piece of software. Yeah.

James Thomson 29:38

That’s great. Well, Ryan, I want to thank you today for joining us on the Buy Box Experts podcast. For those of you who are interested in learning more about Recom Brands, please visit recombrands.com.

Outro 29:51

Thanks for listening to the Buy Box Experts podcast, be sure to click subscribe, check us out on the web, and we’ll see you next time.