The Best Approach to Documenting SOPs for e-Commerce Brands
August 17, 2021
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Yoni Kozminski is the Founder and CEO of Escala, a low-cost, boutique process improvement and digital transformation consultancy for Amazon and e-commerce businesses. Escala reinforces sellers’ abilities to scale their businesses to multimillion-dollar status and beyond.
As a serial entrepreneur, Yoni is also the Founder and CEO of MultiplyMii, an offshore staffing solution for global Amazon and e-commerce businesses. He also hosts the Successful Scales podcast, where he speaks to business owners and early startup employees about their roads
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- The types of services that Yoni Kozminski’s company, Escala, offers to e-commerce businesses
- How Yoni built his team at Escala and the main obstacles they face with prospective clients
- The most common operational gaps for current Amazon sellers
- The biggest mistakes businesses make when documenting SOPs and Yoni’s best practices for developing them
- Yoni’s thoughts on Amazon sellers building businesses without disciplined SOPs
- How Escala has benefited from Amazon brand owners selling and exiting their businesses
- The value of documenting SOPs when looking to sell an e-commerce brand
- What is the minimum viable operational excellence that you should have in place before exiting your business?
- How FBA investors can generate more value from their portfolios
In this episode…
Documenting standard operating procedures (SOPs) is one of the best things an e-commerce brand can do to grow efficiently and scale. However, most Amazon-centric brand owners don’t document their SOPs as they build their businesses. This ends up posing a great challenge later on when they hope to transfer knowledge to new hires or exit their brands.
With the increased demand for investments in FBA brands, it is becoming more and more important for brand owners to think about growing a business that is both scalable and sellable. That’s where Yoni Kozminski comes in. Yoni and his team at Escala help business owners analyze, build, and document their SOPs to effectively prepare for a future exit.
In this episode of the Buy Box Experts podcast, James Thomson interviews Yoni Kozminski, the Founder and CEO of Escala, about his best practices for documenting SOPs for e-commerce brands. Yoni explains how he helps business owners increase revenue, scale effectively, and prepare for a successful exit. He also shares the common mistakes businesses make when documenting SOPs. Stay tuned.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Buy Box Experts
- Controlling Your Brand in The Age of Amazon: The Brand Executive’s Playbook For Winning Online by James Thomson and Whitney Gibson
- James Thomson on LinkedIn
- GETIDA
- Escala
- Yoni Kozminski on LinkedIn
- Helium 10
- Tyler Jefcoat on LinkedIn
- “Why e-Commerce Brands Should Invest In Proper Accounting Records” with Tyler Jefcoat
- Clubhouse
- Thrasio
- Global Wired Advisors
- Chris Shipferling on LinkedIn
- Jason Somerville on LinkedIn
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, 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 the 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. We also support investors with due diligence services. Go to buyboxexperts.com to learn more.
Before I introduce our guest today, I want to send a big shout out to the team at GETIDA, a global leader in Amazon FBA auditing and reimbursements. GETIDA analyzes your Amazon data, reconciles your FBA inventory and files claims for reimbursements on your behalf. To learn more, check out getida.com. Our guest today is Yoni Kozminski, Founder and CEO of Escala, a low cost boutique process improvement and digital transformation consultancy for Amazon and e-Commerce businesses. Leveraging an e-Commerce focused process improvement consultancy reinforces sellers’ abilities to enhance the experience of scaling their businesses to multi-million dollar status and beyond. A serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple other agencies prior to Escala, Yoni joins us today on the Buy Box Experts Podcast. Thank you for being with us today, Yoni.
Yoni Kozminski 1:52
James, it’s an absolute pleasure and honor to be sitting here chatting with you again.
James Thomson 1:56
Thank you. So the only many of the services that your firm offers to e-Commerce companies are not the sorts of services typically offered by e-Commerce consultants. Tell me more about what kinds of problems you help e-Commerce business owners solve?
Yoni Kozminski 2:12
Yeah, great question. I would say to put it really bluntly, I think one of the major problems that most e-Commerce and more specifically Amazon sellers are facing is how do I actually work on the things that I’m most passionate about and good at. And what tends to happen is you get stuck into the minutiae of things like my listings aren’t optimized, or I can’t handle PPC management or things like that. And the major cause of that is that the owners typically have all that information stored up in their head, and then it has a process or they aren’t investing the right amount of time. So what we do is we come in, and we actually, you know, with a team of professionals, we analyze what’s happening in the business, we document what’s happening. And then we build it so that it’s both scalable. And you know, we’re talking earlier, also sailable, we’re looking to help enable businesses to achieve whatever their term of success looks like.
James Thomson 3:07
You have a rather seasoned group of consultants that you have on your team, types of folks who aren’t normally seen in the Amazon seller space, tell us a little bit more about the kinds of folks that you have on your team and the kinds of experiences they bring to bear.
Yoni Kozminski 3:26
Definitely, so definitely a different approach in how we built this out. And if I’m totally honest, it was a little bit of an accident. We had one of the team members actually interview for a project management role. She was why had spent five years there as an analyst or consultant rather in process improvement. And when I met her I just said, You know what, these are a lot of the things that most businesses that are this size and scale, have issues with, we’re gonna we’re gonna make something work here. And so okay, we started doing the first project together internally. But what ended up happening on the back of that is we effectively brought in a ready made team out of Ernst and Young Philippines. So we brought in, I think, in our first cohort, or our first batch, we have batchmates. Now that ends up at about 25. We took in six consultants who would all specialize in process improvement and work together. And we effectively reimagined and re engineered the model for what does it look like for e-Commerce brands having come from that space and being an Amazon, a former amazon seller as well, growing a business from two to 5 million, we really looked at it as one of the one of the things that businesses of this size really need and what can we actually do to remove? You know, I don’t want to, it’s not rhetoric, but there’s a lot of stuff that companies that have 10,20, 50 employees or 100 employees are going to need or not need that 1000, 5000, 10000 strong companies will need so we really sort of cut through that. I ended up adding people also from Accenture and BCG. And we’re yet to have anyone from McKinsey, but we’re working on it.
