How to Secure a Successful Private Label Business Exit

March 1, 2021

Meet The Speakers

Tony

Co-founders of the private label beauty brand, TruRemedy Naturals

Carol Meibock

Co-founders of the private label beauty brand, TruRemedy Naturals

Listen to the podcast

Tony and Carol Meibock were the Co-founders of the private label beauty brand, TruRemedy Naturals. After growing the business for over three years on Amazon, they sold it to one of the big FBA aggregators in 2020.

Tony is currently consulting with other brand owners to support them in their journey to sell and exit their businesses.

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

Tony Meibock talks about the increased demand for private label Amazon brands
Carol Meibock shares why she started her own natural beauty business and how they developed their products
Tony and Carol discuss the preparations they did prior to selling their business and the consultants they worked with to help them with the sale
The standard operating procedures that Tony and Carol had in place that helped with the smooth transition of the business
What surprised the couple the most in the process of selling their business and the things they considered before making their final decision
Why Tony and Carol decided to sell their business to Perch and how selling their business made them realize that they made a great team
The challenges Tony and Carol faced as they were going through the sales process
How Tony and Carol ensured that their business had growth opportunities available for the new owners
Carol and Tony’s advice to a new entrepreneurs who are just getting started with brand building on Amazon

In this episode…

Being an e-commerce seller requires a lot of sacrifices, both personally and professionally, in order for the business to succeed. Many private label business owners on Amazon started their businesses to earn a living and because of their determination, they have grown them into valuable brands.

The rapid growth of profitable private label brands on Amazon has led to their increased demand by FBA aggregators in the last couple of years. The COVID-19 pandemic has also led to increased growth of e-commerce businesses as more investors choose to invest in players within this industry.

Join James Thomson in this episode of the Buy Box Experts Podcast as he interviews Tony and Carol Meibock, Co-founders of TruRemedy Naturals, about their successful e-commerce business exit. Tune in as they share what made them decide to sell their business to FBA aggregator, Perch, and how they prepared for the sale. They also discuss the challenges they faced in the process, the people who were instrumental to the sale, and what they learned about themselves from selling their business.

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 for 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 book, “Controlling Your Brand in the Age of Amazon”. 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. Buy Box Experts combines executive level advisory services with expert performance management and execution of your Amazon channel strategy. We also support investors with due diligence services. Go to buy boxexperts.com to learn more. Before I introduce our guests today, I want to send 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 month after month. Check out disruptiveadvertising.com to learn more.

I’m very pleased to have two guests today on our podcast, Carol and Tony Meibock, the co-founders of a private label beauty brand, TruRemedy Naturals. After growing this business over three years on Amazon, they sold to one of the big FBA aggregators in 2020. We welcome Carol and Tony today onto our Buy Box Experts Podcast to learn more about their journey from creation of their brand, to decision to sell to the actual sale and exit. Carol, Tony, thank you for joining us today.

Tony Meibock 2:49

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

James Thomson 2:52

I want to start with a sort of a broad question around these FBA private label businesses. They’re very hot commodities. But they’ve been around for 20 plus years, as long as the Amazon Marketplace. What What do you think has caused all this recent interest in investors wanting to buy

Tony Meibock 3:09

Amazon businesses? I think because the pandemic started and the growth of e-commerce, that’s really what’s happening. Most of us, as we started several years ago, start pretty small. And we’re smaller revenues. But now the revenues are a lot of these companies have grown so much with so many reviews that they have that now it’s kind of time for aggregation. You start seeing these aggregators start to come in,

James Thomson 3:40

Carol Meibock 3:48

Because that, for me, was a lifestyle approach because I wanted to have more flexibility. So in order to have flexibility, I had to compromise. I like to be active, but didn’t like to sit behind a computer. But when you know that it’s more important for me to have a great little business of my own and then be able to do whatever I want when I want like see grandchildren which we’re coming down.

Unknown Speaker 4:13

Yes, yes. Yeah. So

James Thomson 4:16

So why this category of products of all the products you could have created, why this type of product, I

Carol Meibock 4:23

I think it was becoming more interesting for people to have more natural type products. And I saw in amongst my friends starting to use tea trees and things like that people weren’t used to it. Right. Right. And I really liked those products. So I for me, it was it was I could I could really enjoy doing. Yeah, yeah, totally identified with it.

James Thomson 4:52

When you decided that this is the type of product you want to get into, how did you learn enough about the industry to be in a position to start making products for yourself

Tony Meibock 5:02

having a background in developing products and bringing them to market. So having worked for the large sporting goods firm, for about 1213 years, I was over in Asia quite a bit, you know, in the r&d centers developing working with the designers, keynote packaging and shipping into the US. So it’s kind of a natural fit to how can I get your products up and running?

James Thomson 5:32

So you decide to get into the naturals product space,

you start building products, you start generating sales on Amazon, tell me about that first year, year and a half putting products on Amazon, what did you learn? What were you surprised to see?

Carol Meibock 5:49

Because it was a learning process as we went along. Like, you’d start something you’d learn a little more and then you’d add it you try different things.

Tony Meibock 5:59

And you change the label quite a few times. The first label was just okay. Kind of a

Carol Meibock 6:08

Yeah, a typical marketing plan wouldn’t work on Amazon. So you really had to add to throw things by Tony because he’s the creative one. I was the one that was the Dewar. And then we have a family of young girls who are young women, who we say we need to get them all together and say, What do you think about this? Better than

Tony Meibock 6:29

this? Yes. Small focus groups.

Unknown Speaker 6:32

Small focus groups. Yeah.

James Thomson 6:34

So eventually, you ended up with a handful of products that you have in your catalog. Now, how many different products did you end up? Trying out and eventually having to throw away or decide? This is not going to work?

Tony Meibock 6:49

A couple out three? Yeah.

Carol Meibock 6:53

Three, one, we tried changing the label a few times. And and it probably would have, if we had a solid company, we probably would have let that one go. But a lot of them really had, we had a great response from people. So

Tony Meibock 7:08

no family started once, once a hero product started merging, then it was obvious to start building more products around that hero product. Right, right. And then that became pretty obvious that the product on the fringe didn’t really fit the family of products where we’re headed. And so yeah, that was interesting, because it was definitely trial by error in the beginning, right? It’s just a theory. So yeah.

James Thomson 7:33

So you’ve got a corner of your garage that’s full of this product that nobody wants. Is that what you’re saying?

Carol Meibock 7:39

We’ve got some interesting samples.

James Thomson 7:43

Yeah. So you build up the business, the revenue starts to come in, you’re getting excited, because this is not just a lifestyle business. It’s a business that’s generating some real revenue. And at what point did you decide Wait a minute, we might explore potentially selling this business? What was the trigger point?

Carol Meibock 8:02

think about the lifestyle again, so all of a sudden, I got so busy, I have no time to do anything. And Tony started to create a plan for building or creating an environment where we’d have more staff. And all I can think of is, oh, this is getting too big for me.

Tony Meibock 8:21

Right? Yeah, I mean, we, you know, when it first started, I was running the business and on the back of our minds, okay, at some point, there’s gonna be some value to the business. So we structured the company so that they could be sold at some point, but we didn’t know when that was. And it was, it was a very loose plan very to begin with. But I think in the past, this past year, the growth we have so much growth, and we realized, Okay, are we going to grow, and we’re going to grow especially growing internationally and growing other platforms. And however we’re going to grow and new products and marketing. When we broke it down, we needed a lot more internal teams to really help the overall logistics, right? As you probably talked a lot of sellers and logistics have been a real big issue this year. And Carol handles all that, you know, all the all the shipping all the deliveries, pos and that’s there’s a lot that we had to do trying to get a blue bottle

Unknown Speaker 9:25

was very tough.

Tony Meibock 9:28

Around either raw material and raw materials are very difficult to get. And so we were at that level, trying to deal with raw material suppliers domestically and internationally. So we got to the point where it’s okay. No, either. I’ve always believed that if you’re going to be in business, you’re either leaning into it and growing it. Yep. Getting a motor. Yeah, I’m just gonna cruise along. Just kind of harvest some profits off of this. I think that’s true. You’re To start losing your focus, and chances are the brand may not do so lovely forward.

James Thomson 10:09

So you’re in a mental state that may be selling the company makes sense. Was there a particular point in time where you said, let’s get serious, we actually want to sell it in the next six months or the next year? But was there somebody to call you? Did you reach out to someone? How did things start moving?

Tony Meibock 10:27

I think that we we started having conversation, maybe September, October timeframe, just beginning saying, well, maybe in the spring, couple months today, you’re

Carol Meibock 10:39

always saying, Mark. Yeah,

Tony Meibock 10:41

It’s kind of like starting in 2021? Yes, they’re pulling the are creating our balls, right. And really doing their role? Yes. Well, we

Carol Meibock 10:50

had the ball. Yeah. But you always said, Tony’s experience in the past kept me organized. And he said, you know, you’ve got to create your vault, have everything in there organized and right. And, but then we realized we’d have to update it, because labels changed, and we might not quite change. Right, right.

Tony Meibock 11:07

And so but at the same time, we were starting, we started fielding calls from aggregators calling us, okay, okay. I think, you know, we’re fortunate to be in that position. And so we said, well, let’s just feel these calls, know what’s out there. This is just a sense of what they’re thinking about our business.

James Thomson 11:25

So they were proactively finding you and reaching out to you and you were getting these random, cold calls.

Carol Meibock 11:31

Yeah, we did ask what? Well, I was always curious why they called us or how long they’ve been, you know, find us kind of, and they said that they were looking at specific brands who had a minimum of 5000 reviews on an app product. And so that’s what they’re looking at, on Amazon for? And that’s how they looked at that.

Tony Meibock 11:52

For sure. Yeah. So and overall reviews of our business.

James Thomson 11:57

So you’re getting these calls, you decide to take them seriously and explore where these conversations go. In the meantime, what are you doing behind the scenes, to get better organized to be able to engage in these types of discussions where people are asking some tough questions.

Tony Meibock 12:14

And one of the, one of the first things we did was, this year we moved to New becomes a big accounting firm. And, and so we really focused on any of her books, we wanted to have a very strong 1200 p&l, step two, because we knew that was the metric that it was, it was an aggregator, and the buyers were going to be looking at our business. So we clean everything from the past several years. Our team P & L for this year, and our car lines, we’re hitting the targets. And our, you know, our health account has been very positive under our EMS and made sure that everything was just kind of up to speed.

James Thomson 13:09

How long did that process of starting to clean up your books to actually having them ready to go so that you could share them with someone externally? How long did that take you?

Tony Meibock 13:21

Yeah, sorry about the tumor process?

James Thomson 13:24

Did you have to do other things behind the scenes that have nothing to do with the financials to be able to make the financials actually be accurate? Or are there other operational steps you had to take? aggregating costs or anything like that?

Tony Meibock 13:38

Yeah, we just from as, as the year goes on, right, we’ve had some price increases for products. Yes. What we’re trying to try is take a look at the profitability, you know, taking a look at what’s the profitability of our business, before price increases, what’s the probability of the business after price increases? How will that affect the sale of our business? Is that a positive or negative effect? You know, we have certain profit margins we want to maintain. And to be in a position where we thought we could start a business. And so that’s kind of betting that we did just make sure that we were in a position to actually move forward.

James Thomson 14:21

Were there consultants or advisors or other folks that you brought in to help you get ready for this process? You talked about e-commerce, accountant, other types of formal or informal consults?

Tony Meibock 14:35

Well, you know, I think over the years, like we went across the show and met with a number of the other brokerage firms, I spoke to them. Yep. And various blogs and information that are trying to get that they’re sending out and suddenly had a sense of what the valuations are and how an e-commerce business is Not even just what kind of metrics they’re looking for. And I think that’s kind of what we started putting together and making sure now I’m, you know, Caroline both want to make sure that we’re any over business that was in top performance both in from a revenue standpoint, the product, the the supply chain, or the entire end to end of the business.

James Thomson 15:25

As you went through the process, what kind of standard operating procedures did you have to document so that you could hand somebody the recipe for sourcing or hand them the recipe for running the business day to day on Amazon?

Tony Meibock 15:40

We worked on it, we worked on that two years on

Carol Meibock 15:43

our recipes. Well, that’s okay, too, as we’re mostly done. So that I think we we wanted to make sure it was really

Unknown Speaker 15:51

crisp and, and

Carol Meibock 15:54

it would be easy for someone else to look at

Tony Meibock 15:57

all the same things in time, because, you know, Amazon’s growing through all this as well. Their compliance requirements have become much more strict over the past seven years. And we’re super fortunate to work with a manufacturer that we can have full as a piece of how the product is made, all the way through to finish packaging. So we work diligently on that SAP process. But also your recipes for reaching out to customer service, right, because you handle customer service. And you know that?

Carol Meibock 16:36

Yep. All right. And even as technical as making sure your product has been tested by third party testing.

James Thomson 16:42

Oh, yeah. That thing about testing? Oh, yeah, right. Right, right. Let me ask Carol, you go through this process, you’re having to get things organized so that you can show other people your business? What surprised you the most about this whole preparation process?

Carol Meibock 16:59

Well, to be honest with you, I realized how much I love the products. We’re gonna give them away. So I think there’s things you have to do. And then there’s the heart things. And like, I’m kind of more of a heart person. So, I found that I really did love these products. And I was able to say it, I would have said that through the years of working it, I would have just, you know, I was doing my thing. And I liked what we sold, and I thought they were good products. But then too to think that they were gonna be gone. I was like, Oh, no.

Tony Meibock 17:34

See, now what do I do? Now at the same time, it was like it was like having two jobs. Right? It’s just all the prep work. Reading. He was so busy and, and so yeah, we did have a vault. But going through the process, we learned that our vault was not as up to speed as we had wanted it to be. And it required us to revisit every single document and make sure that the handoff was as clean as possible for the new buyer. And that is the right thing to do. Right for the new buyer. And in some cases, we need to make some changes to whether it’s a label change, or whether it’s a SRP change or cleanups on the way we send emails we would send to a customer. Just to get everything in line.

Carol Meibock 18:28

Yeah, some things we had just naturally, they had evolved with us and we hadn’t, we hadn’t documented them because of the changes that were happening so quickly. In Amazon last year.

Tony Meibock 18:39

Okay. Yes. And that documentation is very important. Yeah. So

James Thomson 18:44

There’s a lot of stuff that happens as you’re getting ready to show somebody these materials and show off your company. Was there a point where you said, Maybe we should stick around for another six months, or stick around for another year, and continue to build this business?

Carol Meibock 18:59

I love you because that was you. That was me.

Unknown Speaker 19:04

Both Tony

Carol Meibock 19:04

and I don’t even Oh, maybe we should keep going? And I’m like, no, please. I think the company that purchased us, and their name is Perch, actually. And it was like a great name. They were so kind and so smart, just wonderful people to work with. So they really nurtured us through it. I’d say they were very good. You felt very comfortable. I was so comfortable with them. Yeah, really helped make it easy to pass the baton. So and I wasn’t thinking it was going to be like that. I thought it would be very difficult to pass it off. But I was like these guys, these guys are going to do a good job with what we have.

James Thomson 19:50

What would have had to be different for you to stay an extra year or an extra two years. You talked about needing more internal staffing, but were there Other things, you know, emotionally, psychologically that you would have had to work through to say, let’s keep going, let’s do what we need to do to keep growing.

Carol Meibock 20:08

Well, we had a couple of products that we were just launching go just about to launch. When parents were interested in us, and I love them, like, I just thought they were awesome. I thought they were going to be our best product ever. Okay. And that was that, for me, was really tough. Because I was going for such a great

Tony Meibock 20:30

product, I really want you to see the growth, and I wanted

Carol Meibock 20:33

to see the growth of it. And I yeah, so

Tony Meibock 20:37

from my side, you know, and we kept on going, bringing in some other output has been really beneficial. And it breathes right out, right? What is really important, right? And really, it’s resetting our targets of what we want to grow towards, because we had hit our targets we were trying to reach. And, and so we were saying, alright, it’s a good time to exit. But no, the entrepreneur in me wants to keep on going. Right? So

James Thomson 21:14

when you eventually sold the business, had you had multiple people seriously, look at your business? You no one bought them. But was there a little bit of a bidding war or some urgency where one company wanted to get in there first and make get that Li signed?

Tony Meibock 21:30

there? There were a couple of companies that said we got some debt? And

James Thomson 21:36

did you end up with different perspectives from these different companies around how they were looking at your business as a potential growth opportunity?

Tony Meibock 21:44

I did. Yeah. It’s, and they all have various different strategies, and how are they going to grow the business? And, and for the reason we chose to work with purchase, as we’d like to strategy and direction that they’re in the business. And Carol said, we felt very comfortable with the team. This is gonna imagine moving forward.

James Thomson 22:10

So let me ask you a little bit of a personal question. What did you learn about yourselves going through this process? What did you learn about your comforts and discomforts about actually preparing something you’ve built and selling it to someone else?

Carol Meibock 22:24

I think from my perspective, I said all night, I’ve never worked with Tony, he’s the

Unknown Speaker 22:31

Creator,

Tony Meibock 22:32

like we work in different parts of the house. Understood, understood, basement.

Carol Meibock 22:39

But we were a great team. So it was pretty exciting to be able to work with your husband and create something. I mean, relationships can get a bit sluggish, you know, if you don’t try new things together, and we found that working on this together, working hard and having successes, for me was super exciting. Yeah. And I was very proud of myself. And if

Tony Meibock 23:06

you build something great to build something that adds value to somebody else. Does, does that was very validating. And yeah, and I feel pretty proud about that. Yeah.

James Thomson 23:18

How do you react to, you know, family and friends who say, well, you built a business, some cool products, and now you’ve sold it? That’s pretty cool. That’s not something that happens every day in the neighborhood.

Carol Meibock 23:31

founders, they just go, Wow, you guys did such a great job. And, and I’m just like, Okay, thank you. I’m not used to getting praise like that.

Tony Meibock 23:43

But yeah, it was.

Carol Meibock 23:45

It’s exciting. It’s been exciting all the way through the process. It’s been hard work. But I think the opportunity to work at home was great. I think the opportunity now to create something and pass it off, is also wonderful.

James Thomson 24:02

So where did you lose the most sleep? As you went through the sales process?

Carol Meibock 24:12

I didn’t lose any sleep.

Tony Meibock 24:15

You know, just everything goes through your mind. You need it, you want to go through it. Right? And, and, you know, you want to make sure that the buyer seller is engaged, you want to make sure that everything you’re putting forward is all right information. So it can be delivered on a timely basis. I want to make sure Amazon doesn’t come in and take a product down in the middle of it. By the way they did. Okay, that’s exciting. Yeah, exactly. So you know, you’re letting the buyer know. Okay, well, Amazon now just took a product down and you know, typical new policy, a keyword is probably flagged and is suddenly going to get some lab testing done to prove something. And they’re great, you know, the purchase said, Fine, not only do we keep working through it, you know, it wasn’t our main prize. So that was fine. And, and so that gave me a lot of comfort. But at the same time, we want you to all the issues that you need to go through to get your product back live, and all the support calls and so forth at the same time to do all your due diligence or pre building the balton materials. And so that was pretty stressful. At that point,

Carol Meibock 25:35

I think the only stressful thing for me would have been if it didn’t actually go through after all the due diligence. Because then you’d be back to square one or operating your business.

Tony Meibock 25:50

So we’d have once we made a mental decision, right? Yeah, yeah. So once you make a mental decision again to sell, yes, the decision right. And we were, we went back and forth quite a bit. Well, actually, I was going back and forth, you could have been, and, and so but once you made that decision, okay, now you’re, you’re moving forward, right? You’re working on the ball, you’re working on all your documents here. And so you want to make sure it goes through. So you sold the business.

James Thomson 26:23

But you talked about having the perfect business to hand off? I’m curious about what discussions Did you have between the two of you around? How do we make sure there’s still growth opportunity? For the next owner? We’ve taken the business from zero to one, how do we prepare this company? So somebody can take it from one to two, in the next phase of the business?

Carol Meibock 26:44

Well, we got a, we had lots of opportunity to talk to the staff at birch. And ask them, you know, where are they going to get rid of any products? Or they knew what they were going to do and they were very open throughout the whole thing, they were all having a huge team of wonderful people. So that I think gave me comfort that they would totally take this and grow it, but at the same time,

Tony Meibock 27:10

they’re gonna re hadn’t quite grown internationally yet. Right. And again, it comes back to needing more staff because logistically, we will need to have more infrastructure in place to be able to do those kinds of pios and have them shipped over internationally and have to prs internationally or change labels and change labels. And so that’s a growth opportunity for them.

Carol Meibock 27:37

And Amazon did approach us about selling overseas like, they were ready to provide us with working with them, right. Yeah, we were working with them. But it was just that being overwhelmed physically was more challenging for us.

Tony Meibock 27:51

Yeah, yeah. And then we had other processes developed, right, so we have a couple of new products that we’re just launching, right. And so now they have that opportunity as well to launch. And, you know, like anything, when you have a new set of eyes come into your marketing and your your, your strategy towards marketing, they’re able to grow that way as well.

James Thomson 28:18

So now that you’ve sold the business, what do you miss the most about no longer running a day to day? Or do you miss anything about running stuff day to day?

Carol Meibock 28:28

Hi, I actually still get up. So I’m still working with Perch and supporting them. And so I get to look at my computer every day just for a really short time just to make sure they’re still on track. And so I think once I can’t go back to my Amazon and look at all my babies that are on the screen and how well they’re selling, then then I might then I might miss it. But But right now, it’s right now it’s the perfect balance.

Tony Meibock 28:59

It’s nice not having, you know, you wake up every day. It’s like okay, actually. So my strategy was to wake up, turn the computer on. Put on my mental hard head. today. Yeah. Okay. I don’t have to do that every day,

James Thomson 29:20

no have to go to battle every single day. I totally get that. And as you think about this process of selling, and then have been involved in transition for a period of time. You have to negotiate a certain period of transition. But it’s also a way of slowly letting go of the business and seeing that there’s somebody else who’s now handling this part of the business and this part of the business and so on and so forth. What is the part that you’re going to miss the most, where you say, you know, I geek out on this particular thing that I like doing about running my business.

Carol Meibock 29:53

I think it’s the success that gives you really good feelings and If the pandemic has been really hard for people that are staying at home, but all of a sudden we’re at home, it hasn’t changed for us. It’s made it busy. But I think that that little success that you get each week or each month with things growing or creating new products, that I’ll miss that

Unknown Speaker 30:18

for sure.

James Thomson 30:20

Would you ever consider building another private label brand?

Carol Meibock 30:25

I think there’s a time for that. Yeah.

James Thomson 30:29

I’m not talking about non competes all the stuff. I’m just talking generally in the future.

Tony Meibock 30:33

Yeah. Something else? Yeah. Well,

Carol Meibock 30:36

you know, so much now, like, we have so much information, it’s crazy, like the knowledge we have, is, we can easily start something new.

Tony Meibock 30:44

Yes. Yeah, it’s about what the right opportunity is, and we’re passionate about it. I can get behind, you know, and find some that we can have a good product market fit, right? So understanding who that persona is, is that the buyer persona and data rates, product design developments, for new products, you know that and that’s like Amazon’s growing so much, and there’s so many new sellers, so many products, and different types of products out there, that, you know, it’ll be good to be innovative to really bring something new to the market. We just don’t want to do a me too product. Right?

Carol Meibock 31:28

Yeah, I think the customer, customers are looking for boutiques, they’re looking for that bowtie type of person. That’s why they will purchase yours on Amazon. So I think there’s lots of opportunity for people to jump in. To sell on Amazon, they just have to be, they just have to know who they’re selling to. And they have to have the right product.

James Thomson 31:53

So Kara, let me ask you, what advice would you give to a brand new entrepreneur who’s looking at building his or her own brand on Amazon today? Knowing what you know, now, if you were to start all over and give advice to an entrepreneur, what would you say?

Carol Meibock 32:07

I think I’d reach out for people who have knowledge, because learning yourself is great. And we were lucky because it was a few years ago that we started or I started a few years ago. And it maybe wasn’t as technical, then I’d say like anyone could throw anything up there and it didn’t matter, you know, really didn’t matter. There weren’t really many rules. I’d always say it was a bit like the Wild West. And then all of a sudden, you know, different boundaries started pulling tighter and tighter on what you were doing. So I think I think if someone was starting now, I would I would, or if I if I was starting again. Now just wait, sorry. If I didn’t know anything, you know, starting? I would reach out for advice. I would try and get a bit of advice. So your team, you need you do need a team, there’s so much you need to know. Yeah.

Tony Meibock 33:04

I mean, it’s um, I wouldn’t approach it as a hobby. In order to approach it this is gonna be a serious business. And every decision I make, I have to be the CEO of this decision. And then when you know, what a shortcut and I could get my product tested, and cry, I can get away with it with a big deal and then take the product down, then I took the test right. So those are all risk reward decisions that I think there’s a lot more than 10 decisions for new entrepreneurs today. on Amazon.

James Thomson 33:43

Carol and Tony, I want to thank you both for joining me today on the Buy Box Experts Podcast. Tony is currently consulting with other brand owners to support them in their journey to sail an exit. And we will add a link so the listeners can reach out to Tony at the bottom of this podcast. Thank you both Carol and Tony. We look forward to hearing about your future ventures.

Carol Meibock 34:02

Thank you. Thanks.

Outro 34:05

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.