How to Build Brand Loyalty with Amazon Customers
June 29, 2021
Brandon Young 3:10
Great to see you, James.
James Thomson 3:12
So Brandon, let me start by asking you to tell us a little bit more about the mastermind that you run. You’ve got private label sellers that are leveraging the Amazon channel. How do you support them with your mastermind? What differentiates your mastermind from other mastermind and seller groups?
Brandon Young 3:28
Yeah, so when I first decided to start teaching, private label, I wanted to do it a little differently. There was a lot of course content out there that had been recycled and regurgitated a bunch of times, a lot of it had been outdated. And I knew that with Amazon constantly changing, the only way to really do it correctly would be to get a living, breathing mastermind and course, where the content is constantly updated as Amazon changes. So that’s where Seller Systems was born. We created this mastermind, maybe three years ago now we’ve got over 1000 members. To this point, we still haven’t run ads, it’s mostly been from word of mouth and from speaking engagements and people realize the difference. The difference in what we do is that we do live weekly calls as well. So we’re doing what we call office hours where we do two calls a week. One is pre launch, and one is post launch. And we have a lot of large sellers that join. We have over 207 and eight figure sellers that have joined a lot of brand managers that have joined in order to fill knowledge gaps. Our understanding of the algorithm, how to efficiently launch how to look at data and base all of our decisions based on data is what really differentiates us.
James Thomson 4:47
So how do you take all this lack of advertising that you’ve needed? How do I take that and learn how to do that on Amazon? Or am I having to spend money on advertising?
Brandon Young 4:56
So what’s funny is that our methodology for PPC is Really to be as efficient as possible. So it’s, it’s more to drive organic rank and profitability rather than to try to over just drive a lot of revenue, right. So, when the algorithm changed a little over a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago now, PPC used to be something you could throw a lot of money at, and it would help rank no matter how it performed. But now Amazon’s ranking algorithm relies on your click through rate conversion rate as a whole. And typically, pay per click or paid advertisements will have a lower click through rate and lower conversion rate than organic. And so what ends up happening is if you overspend on PPC, typically, you’re lowering your overall conversion rate, right, and you’re hurting your organic rank. And so what happened was, there was a massive flip, where a lot of market leaders suddenly started to slide in ranks, and they started to lose their business. And they were spending more and more on PPC. And in getting less organic sales and their tacos were going, we’re going the wrong way. Yep. And so we’re trying to teach the opposite of that rank, efficiently, maintain ranks efficiently, and then drive profitability. So our approach is a little different. And like I said, based more on data.
James Thomson 6:18
So we’re here today to talk about this crazy development that happened during COVID. Not the COVID part, not everybody rushing to e-commerce, but all these new investors who are starting to finally pay attention to private label brands on Amazon, in your view, what happened to generate all this new interest, but why now when private label brands have been around since the beginning of the Amazon Marketplace.
Brandon Young 6:43
So I think the real catalyst was the acceleration to e-commerce from traditional retail, that was something that was going to happen regardless, but I think with COVID, it was just massively accelerated. We looked at trends in international marketplaces to understand where e-commerce is going, particularly China, they went straight to e-commerce, they didn’t have regional or large brands of retailers within China, and they went straight from, they didn’t really have desktops either. So they went straight to mobile as well. So you see a lot of trends in China, where 60-70% of all shopping happens online. Whereas here, it’s still 30% or less. And so you have you, I feel that America is going to move in that direction. And there’s still a large opportunity for growth within the e-commerce space in America. And what happened was, during the lockdown, people had to shop online, people had to get used to trusting online retailers and building a relationship with them. And so they realized the experience was so much easier, so much better. And so these habits are being formed now where I think we’re just accelerating that movement and that growth in that direction.
James Thomson 7:59
So you’ve got all these investors that are starting to pay attention. And it’s exciting if you’re a private label brand, but it’s also a little bit overwhelming. What do you think’s going to happen in the next couple of years as the number of investors continues to increase and the awareness among private label sellers that there is this possible exit opportunity?
Brandon Young 8:17
Yeah, I think that there’s two major things that are going to happen from this. First of all, I think a lot of the brands out there that are that are acquiring businesses don’t fully understand the breadth and the complexity of selling on Amazon, they don’t truly understand how to drive results efficiently, they don’t understand what data to look at, and how to manipulate that data for ranking and growth and profitability. And they don’t understand that the product life cycle can be short on Amazon, depending on the type of product, no matter how good you are at Amazon products will die eventually. And so the issue becomes that you have all these aggregators coming in that are going to acquire a lot of brands at a high multiple, because the multiples are increasing based on demand a lot of buyers, you know, of brands, so you’re going to see that trend, and a lot of them are going to fail. So I think that who you sell to matters, I think that the trends are higher multiples. And I think that a lot of them are going to fail.
James Thomson 9:21
We’re seeing situations now where brands will put themselves up for sale, and they might get 10 cash offers. And quite frankly, I mean, that’s completely nuts.
Brandon Young 9:32
Yeah, it’s absolutely incredible.
James Thomson 9:33
It’s exciting for the brand owners, but it’s also perplexing in terms of if there’s new investors coming on board, how are they actually going to get a seat at the table when there’s so many companies fighting over the same ingredients? Well,
Brandon Young 9:48
not only that, right. So here’s what I think also, if you know what you’re doing from an aggregator or buyer standpoint, you know what to look at. You can realize that most sellers are bad at Amazon right? 99 percent of the sellers on Amazon haven’t done a great job of maximizing the potential of their products and their growth. So paying a higher multiple for brands that show a large opportunity beyond what has already been done is fine. But if you’re paying for a brand that has been driven to the brink of you know, maximum efficiency and and growth, and you’re paying 567 times, EBIT up, you’re gonna be in a position where you’re likely gonna end up losing on that purchase, unless you continue to really maximize the the brand scale, whether it’s from outside Amazon, the goodwill of the customer base, you know, other marketplaces, expansion, things that you can do to really grow from there. But within Amazon’s ecosystem paying 567 times, many products don’t last three, three years, let alone five years. So I don’t understand I don’t understand some of the multiples that are being paid right now.
James Thomson 10:58
So talk to me about how the conversation changed within your mastermind? What kinds of discussions are being had now that a year ago, your members weren’t talking about very often?
Brandon Young 11:11
Yeah, I mean, what’s amazing is there’s and there’s now a definite need to prepare your business for exit. Whereas before, it was something that most people were like, No, I want to continue to grow my brand, almost in perpetuity because a two and a half x was not enough motivation to get out of this great cash flow business. Yeah. But if someone’s willing to pay you 567 times EBIDTA. Like it’s almost a no brainer. So what we’ve done is we’ve put together a few classes with some experts out there that are two part series, a three part series, on preparing your brand for exit. So it’s how to handle the finances. So we have an investment banker who’s coming in and talking about how he works with brands to prepare them for exit, how to maximize your profit and how to maximize what you’re going to receive on your exit. So I think that the talk has become, well, if it’s this easy to research, find launch products and create a brand, you can literally do a seven figure exit within 12 months, if you know what you’re doing. That’s amazing. Now the conversation has become Okay, maybe I should just launch, sell, launch, sell, launch, sell, rather than create a legacy brand or create a brand that’s going to give me cash flow for many years to come.
James Thomson 12:37
What do you see as brand owners biggest concerns today, given this new investment attention?
Brandon Young 12:45
Yeah, I think that some people are concerned that some of the better aggregators that are very good at being efficient, are going to continue to squeeze markets, and you’re going to end up being harder and harder for the small guy. I’ve heard that repeated multiple times. But the evolution of Amazon and e-commerce and any brand out there is that people, there’s two levers, right? No one really has brand loyalty. That’s one thing. And then there’s incentivizing sales. So if you understand sales, and you understand how retail typically operates for brands, it’s either you have massive brand loyalty where people are willing to buy you no matter what else is out there. Yep, that doesn’t exist on Amazon, people will there is no brand loyalty, there’s, there’s, you know, you can be brand agnostic, and it doesn’t matter. The other part is that incentive incentivizing sales matters a lot. So whether that’s through bundling, whether it’s through additional offers, whether it’s through discounts and coupons, you’re going to you’re going to be able to continue to drive sales to your product, no matter how big the brand is, typically, unless they’re actually out there searching for the term Lego. They, they, you can’t compete on that search term, right. But if they’re searching for bricks, you can probably compete on that. So the knowing what keywords are out there, how to do the research and understand what products couldn’t be brand agnostic, and what keywords drive sales, you’re going to be in a position where no matter how big the aggregators get, how big the brands you’re competing against, are, you still have an opportunity as the little guy to come in and build a brand and to compete on Amazon. It’s all about optimization, the data and understanding how to find the keywords that are driving sales, the search volume behind those keywords in optimizing your product.
James Thomson 14:33
Those are a lot of the same concerns that every private label brand has had for the last five years. last 10 years. How do I become relevant? How do I show up on the first page? Let me ask you this. Are our brands going to different places than they used to? To find the information they need to be able to answer those types of concerns?
Brandon Young 14:53
Now the software’s only gotten better, right. So software out there answers we use Helium 10 for example. For reverse data, we look at our competition. Here our approach is pretty simple. We look at the top 10 sellers at once and we aggregate all of the keywords that they’re currently selling that are indexed for. And then we ask the question, how are our competitors getting their sales. And then when we aggregate all the data, what we usually find is pretty complete what we call a master keyword list, which is all of the keywords that can drive sales for a particular product. And here’s where the opportunity lies. Typically, what we’ll find is that the best sellers are only on a small percentage of those keywords, whether it’s 70% of them, they’re leaving 30% of that opportunity on the table, the next best seller might be on 60% 50%, for the next seller, 30%. For the next seller, these guys, these are guys that are generating profit that are doing well on Amazon. But they’re not good at identifying the proper keywords that drive sales, they’re not good at optimizing for those keywords, those routes, those different ways people will search for products. And so we can rank for hundreds of keywords in the top 10, within three to five days of almost any product launch. Whether we stay there is based on our offer and the merit of the offer, we need to still drive that click through rate that conversion rate. So that’s what we teach our students. That’s what we do on a regular basis in our own brand. We’re launching 10-20 products a month in our own brands. And we’re typically successful on an 80% basis for launching and sticking for those keywords. And so it is solved. And here’s where that to get back to your question, here’s, here’s where that growth is going to go. In order to incentivize your ability to stay there, you just have to have a better offer. How do you have a better offer? Well, it’s price tip typically, like everything’s price sensitive, it could be bundling, it could be adding an additional gift or offer or improving the product, a different different design that people that have that appeals to people more testing that design with an audience through like a service, like food, for example, could be a way that you can test the product before you even spend all the money to launch it. So we have the data to understand, and the ability to beat our competition on a regular basis. And things are just going to keep moving in a more efficient direction. And I think a lot of the aggregators just aren’t good at any of that.
James Thomson 17:22
But let’s come back to the aggregators for a minute. And I want to talk about the members of your mastermind group, many of the sellers that I’ve been talking to, as they indicate that they are now thinking that selling their business is actually a viable option. One of the biggest concerns they have is how long is this gold rush going to continue? Is a gold rush just a new development that’s here to stay? What are your thoughts on this?
Brandon Young 17:50
I think that if you look back at the 80s and 90s, it was all p&g brands, it was all it, it was all retail. There’s tons of money out there, in the form of, you know, private equity firms, pa firms and investment firms that are looking for an opportunity to sell physical products. It’s just moving in the e-commerce space now. So I don’t know that this is going to go away, I think it’s only going to continue to grow. But I think it will equalize at a more realistic valuation for brands. So I think in the short term, there will be a push for competition to acquire as many brands as possible to get into a space to continue to raise money, a lot of them will not be profitable, many will fail. But at some point, the ones that are really good at it, that are driving real growth in those brands that are able to, to combine them and take advantage of economies of scale, to take advantage of the customer base to market multiple brands to so if you can aggregate the customers from brands A, B and C together, and then drive product launches and drive efficiencies that way, I think that those guys will will be successful. But I would say that 80% of the people that are in space are going to fail. And you’re going to start to get more realistic multiples.
James Thomson 19:12
Let’s come back to the brands in your group. So I want to talk about some of the changes that they’re having to make today in order to adjust to some of these new levels of investment. So talk to me about changes you’re seeing around operating procedures, managing p&l. Tell me a little bit about what you’re seeing. Yeah,
Brandon Young 19:36
I think that brands like the brand owners are starting to pay attention to those things earlier now. Like for example when we first teach Amazon it’s more like don’t focus on brand, find the best potential products you know, create a pipeline of potential products across multiple markets like across multiple categories. People are starting to think more about branding, and building a brand, and having more of a niche focus earlier, how to become more efficient with your finances, how to organize your finances, and be more prepared to exit sooner. A lot of these things for the first year, most people wouldn’t pay attention to them, it would be let’s go to the path of least resistance, let’s build up a pipeline of 10 products and pick out the three best, but now you might be picking the first, the third and the seventh because they’re in the same niche. And you can exit that brand in 14 months. If you do it properly, rather than worrying about an exit year two, three, or four, which was typically the life cycle previously.
James Thomson 20:43
So talk to me about how members are changing the way they think about the time from launch to the time to sell their business. Is it becoming shorter? Or is it Yeah. Is it more than just shortening it up?
Brandon Young 20:58
Yeah, so it’s, it’s more about building a proper brand earlier. And it’s definitely the thought of exit is definitely on their mind, even from their launching their first skew. Whereas before it would be, I want to be successful, and I want to start generating cash, that I can scale, without even the thought of exit, right, etc. It would just be that I want to be successful and generate $10,000 profit a month. So I can walk away from my job and focus on this full time job. Now if I want to generate $10,000 profit a month, I can get a check for $600,000 in my pocket, or 500, right pocket in 14 or 15 months, and then start all over. And then do it a little differently next time a little bit bigger next time.
James Thomson 21:46
So the companies that join your mastermind, I would think that they’ve already been at this a while, by the time they’re now talking to you talking to other members of the mastermind, you know that there’s a certain level of sophistication that comes by way of being a member of your mastermind. Where do they still need to become more sophisticated?
Brandon Young 22:09
everything for us is a lot of the brands that join. So we have about 25% of our members that are already making seven figures a year on Amazon and about 30 or 35% have never sold before. And then you have everything in between people that have failed people who are, you know, going along, okay, but you know, in the six figure range. So where we’re seeing the more sophisticated buyers fill knowledge gaps are going to be on product selection, data analysis, keyword analysis, and then building processes around that to increase their success rate. Typically, what you’re, what you’re seeing taught by other courses are the traditional methods of, hey, let’s look at our competitions, reviews, let’s look at the revenue that they’re driving on page one. But on one keyword, really, you know, nothing, right? Like you really have no idea of data analysis there that can give you any type of confidence in launching or choosing that product. So what we’re doing is we’re looking at the product and the market as a whole around the product, and helping make better decisions, understanding what the true opportunity if a product is the true risk behind the product is and then treating our portfolio of products like a portfolio of stocks, having some low risk having some medium risk, having a little bit of high risk and, and being as aggressive as possible. So the efficiencies around understanding the keyword data, the keywords that drive sales, the search volume behind those the roots that really matter, understanding the algorithm of how Amazon treats many keywords from the sale of one keyword, are very important to understand. So we’re able to choose products that have a better risk, optimize our listings, launch more efficiently, increase the success rate, and then help those larger sellers build processes around those systems, so that they can increase their success rate. That’s why most people that are already doing well join. And then what’s funny is people come in and say, Wow, that’s really complicated, like I’ve never sold on Amazon, do I really need to know all that? And it’s like, well, why even bother doing it unless you’re doing it right?
James Thomson 24:17
I just want to be an open heart surgeon. It can’t be that hard. There’s many that have gone before me. So let me ask you this. You use the word branding several times. I mean, heck, it’s even in your first name, the word brand. But tell me more about what branding means on Amazon? Because quite frankly, if we’re doing transactional purchases as consumers, it’s generic, it’s unbranded search terms. How do we, as brand owners, create something that really is meaningful as a brand?
Brandon Young 24:51
So I always try to answer this . It’s a great question and like I said, there is no real brand loyalty on Amazon to begin with. people searching for toilet The tree bag, for example, don’t really give a shit what brand toiletry bag, they’re gonna find the design they want in the price range they were looking for, and they’re gonna buy one of the first results, they see that match what they were looking for, right? So here’s where you start to think about a brand, I think will be in your A plus content and then how you touch that buyer after the purchase. So what type of insert card do you have in your packaging? How do you get them into a funnel where you’re re-engaged with that customer? Now, it doesn’t make sense for certain products, because they’re not looking for a second toiletry bag for another couple years, usually. But if you have a product that is reusable, or that has any type of room that needs to be replenished, that engagement for that branding is super important. How do you build brand loyalty with that customer? Now, the other way to do that is like if you have toys, for example, we sell a lot of toys, we know that someone that bought a toy for a two year old girl or a three year old girl is now going to be in the market next year for a four year old girl toy, or more toys of the similar right away. You know that for that child that they have? How do we re-engage with that person? How do we create a brand loyalty program and touch that person to let them know, hey, we’ve got these new products we’re launching. And because we’re just launching them, and we want to drive some additional traffic for ranking, we’re willing to give you 25% off? And then how do we get that person to engage in that process? So I am how do you how do you how do you do that all
James Thomson 26:33
within Amazon’s Terms of Service. So within a very fine line. Yeah, it’s
Brandon Young 26:38
very difficult, right? Because the insert card can’t have marketing on it. But it can have a free gift, it can have a loyalty program written into it, it can have a warranty. Like there’s many ways that you can dangle the carrot to get them to come into your ecosystem, your funnels are where you can start to remarket. Now, when you have that loyalty program on a Shopify site, and you only have two products, it doesn’t work. Right. So what I tell my students is, you need to build out the branding. But you don’t need to worry about outside traffic to a Shopify store right away. I think that a lot of that is a lot of extra effort, you don’t need to build up a social media page and start posting pictures of your product and your customers. Because that’s time that can be better spent developing new products to grow your brand on Amazon has a much higher ROI for your time, right? You have a cost benefit analysis for all of that. And, you know, you need to be thinking along those terms. Now, when you hit 20 skews, or 15 skews. And now that outside traffic that you were sending to Amazon through a landing page for launches, bringing them into your own ecosystem and creating some kind of loyalty program, creating a Subscribe and Save on your own website. Yeah, that’s where that value really starts to pay off. And Amazon’s really rewarding outside traffic for ranking if you know what URLs to use and how to bounce them off your site properly. You know, for example, what activities the person should take on your listing versus just a straight purchase. All of that adds a ton of value. So you should be thinking along those launch funnels pretty early on. But the branding that drives them to my own website doesn’t work unless you have a certain threshold of skews and a certain offer around it. And because of that agnostic idea on Amazon, most shoppers on Amazon don’t really care. What’s interesting. Another thing that’s really interesting is when you’re running ads for your brand on social media or Google or wherever you’re running ads, Pinterest, people will there’s a spillover, an amount of spillover traffic to Amazon to your branded search terms, because people trust Amazon more. So just that thought alone should, you know, should tell you where people’s minds are at. They’ve never heard of you before, it doesn’t matter how nice your brand looks. There’s a lot of scams out there. If they’re not going to trust putting their credit card in on your Shopify site more than they’re going to trust just hitting a buy it now on Amazon. And so you, you really just need to understand where you’re at in the growth process and in the growth phase, and then how to maximize that effort that you’re going to put up put into it versus the effort you’re going to put into you know, developing more products to launch on Amazon, which is the highest ROI of any of effort you can you can have.
James Thomson 29:24
It’s fantastic to hear you say these things. I want to transition now and talk about what you’re hearing from members around this question of Okay, I’ve decided it’s time to sell. And I’m presented with brokers, bankers, aggregators coming directly to me, how do I make sense of all this as a brand owner who’s looking to exit? There’s obviously trade offs to each of these options. I keep hearing about brands who aren’t ready to sell. I got an incoming inquiry from one of these aggregators, saying We’ve been watching you, and you’re really interesting. And we want to pay you x million dollars. The brand said, Whoa, whoa, I wasn’t ready for this call. But that’s a big number. How do you help people think about all these different types of options of how you go to market?
Brandon Young 30:15
Yeah, I think that the most important thing is that all of my members, we put a focus on the financials, and we let them know, Hey, be on top of your numbers from the beginning. So you know whether that offer is good or not. So when someone does so, make an unsolicited offer, which happens on a regular basis, if you have any type of market leader, people are just going to the top 100 of every subcategory and spamming out messages, right. So they’re looking for market leaders. Another thing I want to touch on today with you is so interesting, and I’m sure you heard this is that every aggregator has their own checklist of things that they want. And they’re vastly different. Some people want brands that have done a great job of expanding off of Amazon in order to limit risk. Some want only Amazon only brands because then they’re good at expanding off of Amazon so that represents growth for them. Some people want only a hero skew like their SEO wants to buy a best seller and doesn’t care about the rest of your poorly performing or underperforming skews, whereas others want a nice diversification of sales across many skews. That’s, that’s better. So understanding who you’re talking to, and what they’re doing and where your business fits in their business model. And understanding your own true EBITDA with your add backs and understanding the way the financials work with Amazon and e-commerce business. And, you know, that’s the most important thing. So there will be buyers that are more preferential to your business model. There will be buyers that will make you offers. But if you don’t know your own numbers as a foundation, then you really don’t know if that’s a good offer or not.
James Thomson 31:53
So how do you as an owner and manager of a mastermind? How do you help your sellers? Get ready for that awkward conversation?
Brandon Young 32:03
Yeah, so it’s just the same way we’re having this conversation right now. We do live calls, like on a weekly basis, and people ask about it inevitably, every other week, right? It’s just I had this solicitation. It’s like, well, what is your true habit? When do you do your ad backs? What are your true numbers, right? And so if you know your own numbers, and they’re offering you six, seven acts, I think you’re kind of foolish not to take it almost, unless you know what’s on the horizon for your own brand, you’re like, you’re two weeks away from launching 20 new skews, and it’s going to triple overnight. And so maybe that’s not good. But um, so a lot of I’ve had, I have many students who, like us, we have a lot many brands. And at some point, you stop pumping one brand just to maximize profits, because your intention is to cause an accident. And so then you create multiple other brands, where you’re growing those because growth cuts into profits. And so you understand basically how to maximize your EBITDA when you’re getting prepared to exit and then understanding what your what a fair valuation is for your business. If you’re offered way more, if you could use the cash to pump those other brands, and then just repeat the process, but also make yourself more comfortable allowing them to scale faster. Yeah, I think that that’s the play, I think that that’s a smart way to go about it. Because for a lot of people the two things that stifle growth are capital and time. You can replace time with employees, you can replace capital by exiting a previous brand, borrowing, raising capital and selling some equity. So, you know, if you can solve those two problems, and you have the right processes in place, you can really go big in this business.
James Thomson 33:39
Let me ask you this among the members of your mastermind that have sold, what have you and fellow members learned from these from these now, excellent brand owners? What are some of the things you didn’t expect to learn that lo and behold, I’m really glad that so and so who sold share that with us?
Brandon Young 34:00
I’ve heard multiple times that the people purchasing just don’t know Amazon, they’re surprised at how little they really know. Because when you truly No, no Amazon when you truly know Amazon’s algorithm, and you truly understand how Amazon ranks products, how to properly select products and optimize those products. And then you have a conversation with someone that doesn’t. It’s very apparent. And so what ends up happening is the biggest takeaway I would say is when you have that conversation with an aggregator that, you know, doesn’t know what they’re doing. Don’t take more money on the back end, based on their performance. All right. And so it would be how you base that deal. Or like if you’re super protective of your brand, and that’s your legacy. And even if you know you do want to see it, survive and go well, just don’t do a deal with that buyer like more. Make sure that you stay on to help. So I think that there are a lot of brands out there that just don’t know what they’re doing, that is buying brands or buying brands. That was the most surprising thing. But at the end of the day, I think it’s pretty indicative of the cash cow, the golden gold rush that you’re talking about. Right?
James Thomson 35:19
Alright. So let me ask you this in light of what you’ve just said. Should brands be looking to exit now? wait a year, wait two years? No. Well, how should sellers be thinking through that problem specific to their own business?
Brandon Young 35:35
Yeah, I think you have a good 12 to 18 months of this rush, the economy is gonna stay strong. I think for the next 18 months, at least, I would be looking to sell as soon as I can maximize profits, if you’re not ready to sell, don’t rush it like maximize your profits, understand your numbers, get your skew skews, right? Understand what buyers are out there that fit your business the best. So you can maximize your, your you’re, you know, your multiple and your return. I think that Yeah, it really depends where you’re at in the business selling now is fine. I’m seeing insane multiples for businesses that are barely doing seven figures in EBIT, I’m seeing 7x I mean, yeah, in order to get 7x a year ago, you had to be 30 40% off Amazon and revenue, you had to have a massive brand appeal, you had to be doing 345 million and EBITDA. And like everything had to be right, like you had to be a brand that was almost in retail at that point. And now you’re seeing that for an Amazon only brand just because they have a million dollars in revenue.
James Thomson 36:37
Right, right. So let me ask you this, as someone who runs a mastermind, what do you see your mastermind group continuing to have to evolve and continue to have to do to help your members to remain successful in a world where lots of people want to buy their businesses? Yeah,
Brandon Young 36:58
I think that the focus on maximizing your, or understanding your financials from the beginning, making sure that you’re approaching the business as a real business from the beginning is really something that we always harp on. Other than that, I think that what we teach is the foundational basis of what we teach. Make all decisions based on data, understand how to get the data, how to make decisions on the data, and then and then move forward. We’re setting our students up for success, you know, more than then other courses and other other masterminds. Some people like, even were only successful 80% of the time. So on your first attempt, if you’re not, you know, you can just go back at it. It’s just a numbers game at that point.
James Thomson 37:43
So I want to wrap up our conversation today by asking you a little bit of a loaded question. How do you see these investors buying up these brands? How do you see them getting their value out of whatever growth efforts they’re putting into these portfolio brands?
Brandon Young 37:58
I think that the model that Thrasio through SEO has put together his phenomenal brand managers, mark a whole marketing team, taking advantage of economies of scale with regards to logistics, and having teams that focus on individual processes. Yeah, I see them doing it like there’s a reason they’re the market leader and that they’ve had the success they’ve had with the brands that they’ve acquired. That’s really the best approach is really to understand and drill down, understand each process, get experts trained, get the right human capital to be able to handle that. And then start thinking about how to leverage each brand across your portfolio, so that you can really start to take advantage of those and aggregate the customers and the economies of scale that you get by owning so many skews, right? Like it wasn’t until we as a brand hit 50 skews that we could really start to see make a dent in that. Now imagine a brand that comes in and immediately purchases 200 skews. You can start to know across multiple brands, you can really start to drive down costs, you can really start to drive down your marketing expenses, your outside funnels, and become super efficient. If you’re not thinking along those lines, then you’re probably doing it wrong.
James Thomson 39:30
Brandon, I want to thank you for joining us today on the Buy Box Experts Podcast. For those of you interested in learning more about the Inner Circle Mastermind Group, please visit seller-systems.com/innercircle. Join us again next time on the Buy Box Experts Podcast. Today’s episode is brought to you by GETIDA. GETIDA is a global leader in Amazon FBA auditing and reimbursements. GETIDA analyzes your Amazon data, reconciles your FBA inventory and files claims and reimbursements on your behalf. No obligations, no hidden fees, just GETIDA recovering your money. GETIDA helps you get your money back into your pockets so you can focus on investing in more inventory and growing your business. To learn more, check out getida.com. That’s getida.com.
Outro 40:20 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.
