Podcast appearances and mentions of mark daoust

The power of recurring revenue and breaking down key metrics for running a membership site with Bjork Ostrom ----- Welcome to episode 480 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week, we're excited to air the second episode of our mini-series with Memberful, in which Bjork discusses the ins and outs of membership sites and the power of recurring revenue. The Secret to Generating Recurring Revenue with Bjork Ostrom Tired of chasing after millions of followers? In this week's podcast, Bjork spills the beans on how you can build a thriving business with just a small but dedicated community. He discusses the power of recurring revenue and how that can translate into stability for your business. He also breaks down some key business metrics that can help you track your progress and make smart decisions. Let's face it: Building a sustainable business isn't about getting everyone on board. It's about finding your tribe and serving them really well. This episode is a must-listen if you're looking to grow your business in a more sustainable way! Three episode takeaways: You Don't Need Millions of Followers: It's a common misconception that you need millions of followers or subscribers to build a successful and profitable business. The reality is that even a small, dedicated community can be enough! By focusing on quality over quantity and building strong relationships with your audience, you can create a sustainable income stream that allows you to thrive. Recurring Revenue is Key to Stability: One of the biggest advantages of membership sites is the predictable income they generate through subscription fees. This recurring revenue provides a stable foundation for your business, allowing you to focus on growth and improvement without constantly chasing new opportunities. Unlike one-time sales or advertising revenue, which can fluctuate, membership fees offer a reliable source of income. Understand Your Business Metrics: To make informed decisions and evaluate the health of your business, it's essential to track key metrics such as MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), churn rate, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost. These metrics can help you understand your business's performance, identify areas for improvement, and make strategic decisions. Resources: Memberful Episode 45 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast: How to Use Facebook Ads to Reach the Right People with Tony Rulli from IntentionalSpark.com QuietLight Episode 32 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group Thank you to our sponsor! This episode is sponsored by Memberful. Learn more about our sponsors at foodbloggerpro.com/sponsors. Interested in working with us too? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities and how to get started here. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Learn more about joining the Food Blogger Pro community at foodbloggerpro.com/membership.

Evolving your business to fit your audience's needs, assembling a team of recipe developers, and growing an email list from 1,000 to 75,000 subscribers with Jason Norris from Recipe Teacher. ----- Welcome to episode 464 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Jason Norris from Recipe Teacher. How Email and High-Quality Content Helped Jason Norris Reach Millions of Monthly Pageviews with Recipe Teacher Jason Norris has gone on quite a journey with his site, Recipe Teacher. From trying to sell the site for $1000, to growing a site that reaches millions of monthly pageviews and is worth well over a million dollars. In this interview, Jason shares more about the growth of his site, how he has built a team of recipe developers, his approach to SEO, and more. He also explains how he grew his email list from 1,000 to over 75,000 subscribers by working with our friend Allea at Duett and, in the process, learned that many of his readers are seniors! Jason's journey to success is a really fun one to hear about, and one that we know will inspire many of you to keep plugging along. Enjoy! In this episode, you'll learn: How he went from trying to sell his site (Recipe Teacher) for $1000 (with no offers!) to building the same site to be worth over a million dollars. How he developed and sold his first website — WindyCityFishing (and his second website)! The origin story of Recipe Teacher (and how the Instant Pot changed his life). The importance of evolving your business and being adaptable. When he first felt like he had made Recipe Teacher successful, and what it felt like when he first qualified for Raptive and saw his earnings skyrocket. How he has grown his team of recipe developers. Why he has been focusing on updating old recipes. When he decided to take Recipe Teacher full-time. His approach to SEO and keyword research. Why he prioritizes outsourcing certain aspects of this business. How he grew his email list from 1,000 to 75,000 subscribers in 3 years. How focusing on email marketing helped Jason learn more about his site's demographics (spoiler alert: he has a huge audience of seniors!). Resources: Recipe Teacher WindyCityFishing Flippa Quiet Light 032: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light 159: Different Ways to Create an Income Online with Mark Daoust Raptive Google AdSense Upwork Pinch of Yum Keysearch Semrush Google Search Console Google Trends Duett Allea on The Food Blogger Pro Podcast here, here, and here ConvertKit Constant Contact Email Jason Follow Jason on Facebook and Instagram Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group ----- This episode is sponsored by Clariti and Raptive. Learn more about our sponsors at foodbloggerpro.com/sponsors. Interested in working with us too? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities and how to get started here. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Learn more about joining the Food Blogger Pro community at foodbloggerpro.com/membership.

Acquiring an existing food blog, navigating traffic drops, and reimagining a site to make it your own with Parker Thornburg from Foodness Gracious. ----- Welcome to episode 457 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Parker Thornburg from Foodness Gracious. How to Acquire and Grow a Food Blog Starting a food blog or business is hard work. It can take months (years!) of determination, practice, and consistency before you start to see results. So what if you just… skipped ahead?! That's exactly what Parker Thornburg and his business partner did when they acquired the existing food blog, Foodness Gracious. But just because the site was up and running (with thousands of recipes!) doesn't mean the transition has been an easy or seamless one. In this interview, Parker shares more about the process of acquiring a site, what the transition has been like, how they've navigated hiring and traffic drops, and have started to come out the other side. Whether or not you're thinking about acquiring a site (or selling your own), there are lots of great lessons to be learned for anyone! In this episode, you'll learn: More about Parker's professional background (including time at Yahoo and a start-up). Why Parker decided to acquire an existing food blog. About the process of acquiring a site and using a brokerage site. What factors to consider when acquiring a site (including calculating potential profits). How they hired their team and what the early days of the site looked like after acquisition (including lots of lessons learned). How Parker and his business partner have navigated traffic drops since acquiring their site. The importance of consistency and habits when trying something new. How he balances his full-time job, family life, and growing Foodness Gracious. What he wants the legacy of this site to be. Resources: Foodness Gracious Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game QuietLight Empire Flippers 032: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light 159: Different Ways to Create an Income Online with Mark Daoust Mediavine beehiiv Maray Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones Snackdive Follow Foodness Gracious on Instagram and Facebook Join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook Group ----- This episode is sponsored by CultivateWP and Memberful. Learn more about our sponsors at foodbloggerpro.com/sponsors. Interested in working with us too? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities and how to get started here. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Learn more about joining the Food Blogger Pro community at foodbloggerpro.com/membership.

Pat Yates is the President and Owner of Happy Feet Slippers, a novelty business providing high-quality, comfortable house shoes for the entire family. The slippers garnered nationwide attention after a 2014 appearance on Shark Tank, where he struck a deal with Robert Herjavec. Since then, the company's grown into a multimillion-dollar e-commerce operation. The deal led to licensing agreements with DreamWorks, NCAA, NFL, and Disney. By 2015, he formed a relationship with Mark Daoust, the Founder of Quiet Light, where he now serves as one of the broker's mergers and acquisitions advisors. In this episode… Happy Feet Slippers started as a kiosk retail venture over 25 years ago. Today, the slipper company is a global success thanks to an appearance on a popular TV show. Soon, more opportunities followed when the founder, Pat Yates, signed lucrative licensing deals with prominent brands. Although licensing helped elevate his company, the experience was the start of a new lesson in business for the seasoned e-commerce entrepreneur. If you're an established business owner interested in licensing your products, Pat advises doing your research first. To license a product involves giving another company rights to your intellectual property to produce and sell. Leveraging license agreements has benefits, such as passive income, brand recognition, and acquiring new customers. On the contrary, there's a risk of intellectual property theft, losing control of your brand, colossal licensing fees, and profit loss. In this episode of the eComm Breakthrough Podcast, Josh Hadley interviews Pat Yates, President and Owner of Happy Feet Slippers and Business Broker at Quiet Light, to discuss the complexities of licensing. Pat talks about protecting your brand, his various licensing partnerships, and the steps to acquire licensing. Pat also switches gears to discuss mergers and acquisitions, offering sage advice on exiting a business. Resources mentioned in this episode: Josh Hadley on LinkedIn eComm Breakthrough Consulting eComm Breakthrough Podcast Email Josh Hadley: Josh@eCommBreakthrough.com Hadley Designs Hadley Designs on Amazon Pat Yates on LinkedIn Email Pat Yates: Pat@QuietLight.com Quiet Light Happy Feet Slippers Happy Feet Slippers on Amazon Special Mention(s): Kevin King Howard Thai on LinkedIn Roland Frasier on LinkedIn Rich Goldstein on LinkedIn Licensing Expo Loom Book Mention(s): The EXITPreneur's Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success by Joe Valley Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen Related Episode(s): “Kevin King's Wicked-Smart Tips for Building an Audience of Raving Fans” “Mastermind Level Strategies From a Former Top 50 Amazon Seller With Howard Thai” “Seven Acquisition Strategies to Scale to Eight Figures and Beyond” “How to Double or Triple the Value of Your Business With Intellectual Property (Ip) Protection”

Mark Daoust is the Founder, President, and CEO of Quiet Light, a business advisory firm that helps online entrepreneurs achieve amazing exits. Since starting the firm in 2007, Mark has guided dozens of entrepreneurs and small business owners through their exits. Before his work at Quiet Light, Mark founded Site-Reference.com, an online publication with a subscriber base that he expanded to more than 220,000 members. Now, Mark is a well-known presenter and guest author, as well as the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. Joe Valley is a Co-owner of Quiet Light. Joe joined the firm after selling his own e-commerce business through Quiet Light in 2010. He has advisor expertise in all web-based niches, including SaaS, e-commerce, and content businesses. In addition to this, Joe is the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast and the author of The EXITpreneur's Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success. In this episode… The aggregator appetite for quality brands is strong, so, how can your brand meet their needs? If you're concerned about an unpredictable market, what steps can you take to help strengthen your brand? When it comes to having traction in the aggregator market, Joe Valley and Mark Daoust recommend you educate yourself on the marketplace. The year 2022 caused fear-mongering and confusion in the market, but to help your brand strengthen and grow during the upcoming years, it's best to keep a level head. This is how Joe and Mark plan to build out their upcoming year so they can continue the Quiet Light mission: helping people achieve their goals.  Join Joe Valley and Mark Daoust in this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast as they review the year 2022. Together, they discuss the rollercoaster of marketplace fears, why individual buyers are taking the scene, and how the Quiet Light team has grown over time.

Amir Salihefendic is the Founder and CEO of Doist, a productivity software company. He is the Creator of both Todoist, an online task-manager and to-do list app, and Twist, an asynchronous messaging app that makes collaboration easy from anywhere using threads to organize your conversations. Amir was the Co-founder and CTO of Plurk Inc. and a Developer of Bioinformatics research activities at the University of Aarhus. In this episode… What if you could create a plan without pulling your hair out? How can your brand outlast and compete in a thriving market?  When Amir Salihefendic created his brand, he wasn't looking for a means to an end. He desired to bring consumers a quality product he was passionate about — and one that would solve consumer problems around creating and organizing schedules. Building a better product means constantly changing with the times and staying committed. To Amir, that means no plans of exiting in his future.  In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Amir Salihefendic, Founder and CEO of Doist, to discuss pivoting and growing a business with no exit strategy. Amir talks about a business model that lasts, governance structures, and how artificial intelligence can aid in task management. Stay tuned! 

Mark Daoust is the latest guest on the Niche Pursuit podcast. Mark is the founder of Quiet Light Brokerage. He talks about developing websites correctly and offers some excellent advice for those looking to sell their business in the future. We're talking expert tips and advice from a guy who has been on both sides of the fence.

Shane Hohenstein is the Founder and CEO of Voyageur Group, an e-commerce agency that supports consumer brands across Amazon, Walmart, and Target through merchandising, marketing, content creation, and advertising services. As an expert in retail advertising, Shane spent 10 years in Target's marketplace where he held a variety of roles including Lead Strategic Account Executive, Omnichannel Partnership and Negotiation Expert, and Merchandise Planning Analyst. Shane is also the Co-founder and CEO of Paddle Commerce. In this episode… In today's dynamic e-commerce marketplace, it's essential to have an omnichannel strategy to sell your products. Target creates a viable opportunity for brands to expand their services. So, how can you leverage the potential of this marketplace to maximize growth?  One of the advantages of selling on Target is that they guarantee product authenticity by curating their assortment and preventing resellers. Their detailed vetting process for each product and brand helps you mitigate competition and ensure customer trust. And, with Shane Hohenstein's guidance and expertise, you can develop a selling strategy for Target's developing marketplace.  In today's episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust talks with Shane Hohenstein, Founder and CEO of Voyageur Group, about optimizing your growth prospects using Target's online marketplace. Shane explains Target's customer categories, their mass-market strategy for product quality and authenticity, and the benefits and criteria of selling on Target.

When you want to buy or sell a business, you need to start from both sides – marketing and sales. First, you need to create your business model. You should think about how the company will be distributed, its target group and various channels of marketing. Then you need to make sure that your product…

Did you know considering the selling factor for your business is something you should always keep in mind?  On today's episode, host Roland Frasier speaks with guest Mark Daoust who shares the secrets you need to ensure your business thrives to its potential. As a business broker and founder of Quiet Light, Mark has had personal experience of brokering billions of dollars of acquisitions and mentions the importance of honesty when doing deals. Mark talks about how businesses today can improve their valuation and  a big mistake that business owners make by viewing their business simply in terms of cash flow. His philosophy is that your business is an asset, and growth and profitability can improve your businesses' valuation. He also shares some things that can be done to enrich your business to its best state before considering selling it. Listen in to discover how you can avoid underestimating your business asset with or without a business broker, and why the guidance may be worth it. IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN: Why you need to start viewing your business as an asset for future revenue instead of focusing on cash-based accounting. How a broker can help you calculate working capital. At what point do you absolutely need a business broker? The difference between an M&A attorney and an investment bank advisor - does it matter in the face of brokerage companies like Quiet Light? How to assess and add value to your company before contacting a broker What quality of earnings is and why it matters LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: https://quietlight.com/ (Quiet Light Brokerage) https://quietlight.com/learn/podcast/ (The Quiet Light Podcast) https://www.amazon.com/Buy-Then-Build-Acquisition-Entrepreneurs/dp/1544501137/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= (Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game) https://www.amazon.com/EXITPreneurs-Playbook-Business-Reverse-Engineering/dp/1544522223 (The EXITPreneur's Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success.)  OUR PARTNERS: https://scalable.co/7-levels-assessment/?utm_source=business-lunch&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=lead-gen (7 Steps to Scalable workbook) Get a free proposal from https://conversionfanatics.com/ (Conversion Fanatics) Get 3% cash back on your ad spend with https://www.funneldash.com/adcard (AdCard) https://yourzerodownbook.com (Get my book, Zero Down, FREE) Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Business Lunch? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/perpetual-traffic-by-digital/id1022441491?mt=2 (iTunes) and leave us a review! Mentioned in this episode: Get 3% Cash Back on Your Digital Advertising! The Highest Cash Back Card For Your Digital Ad Spend. Made By Advertisers. https://business-lunch.captivate.fm/adcard (Ad Card) Optimize Your Website with Conversion Fanatics Put A Creative Team Of Fanatical Split-Testers To Work On Your Site! https://business-lunch.captivate.fm/conversion-fanatics (Conversion Fanatics) Get Roland's Training on Acquiring Businesses! Discover The EXACT Strategy Roland Has Used To Found, Acquire, Scale And Sell Over Two Dozen Businesses With Sales Ranging From $3 Million To Just Under $4 Billion! https://business-lunch.captivate.fm/epic (EPIC Training)

Mark Daoust is the Founder, President, and CEO of Quiet Light, a business advisory firm that helps online entrepreneurs achieve amazing exits. Since starting the firm in 2007, Mark has guided dozens of entrepreneurs and small business owners through their exits. Before his work at Quiet Light, Mark founded Site-Reference.com, an online publication with a subscriber base that he expanded to more than 220,000 members. Now, Mark is a well-known presenter and guest author, as well as the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. Joe Valley is the Co-owner and Director of Brokerage Services at Quiet Light. Joe joined the firm after selling his own e-commerce business through Quiet Light in 2010. He has advisor expertise in all web-based niches, including SaaS, e-commerce, and content businesses. In addition to this, Joe is the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast and the author of The EXITpreneur's Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success. In this episode… Do you want to increase your investor pool for a greater exit in the new year? Are you looking for customer-focused representation to help you achieve your goals? It's difficult to avoid unnecessary risks and find authentic and honest instruction when exiting your brand, especially as a new entrepreneur. That's where the team at Quiet Light comes in. Over the past year, the firm has grown exponentially, thanks to the value, support, and million-dollar exits they deliver to business owners. As a client-driven team, Quiet Light is focused on developing connections that are crucial to the success of you and your brand. So, how can Quiet Light help you start to scale your exit in 2022?  In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley and Mark Daoust sit down to review Quiet Light's growth over the past year. Listen as Mark and Joe talk about the 37% increase they saw in closing transactions, their tips and tricks to avoid risks when exiting your brand, and how Quiet Light is changing the game for buyers and sellers everywhere. Stay tuned! 

Transitioning to full-time blogging, leaning into your strengths, and following your own path as an entrepreneur with Bjork Ostrom. ----- Welcome to episode 332 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, we're sharing Bjork's episode from the Eat, Capture, Share podcast with Kimberly Espinel. Featured Podcast In today's episode, we're switching things up because it's actually Bjork in the interview seat! We're really excited to be featuring an episode of the Eat, Capture, Share Podcast. Kimberly recently interviewed Bjork about his journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur and online business owner. You'll hear what the first streams of revenue were for Pinch of Yum, Bjork's advice for those wanting to make a living through food blogging, and why he believes in the idea of 1% infinity. It's a really inspiring conversation, and we know you'll enjoy hearing more about Bjork's story. We hope you enjoy this featured podcast episode! In this episode, you'll learn: The quick story behind Pinch of Yum, Food Blogger Pro, WP Tasty, Nutrifox, Clariti, and TinyBit How Bjork and Lindsay leaned into their strengths when building Pinch of Yum What the first streams of revenue were for Pinch of Yum His advice for how to transition to making a living through food blogging Why he launched the Food Blogger Pro Podcast His top tips to quickly monetize doing what you love The biggest mistakes that he sees creators making when trying to grow their businesses Resources: Eat, Capture, Share Podcast Pinch of Yum WP Tasty Nutrifox Clariti TinyBit Crush It!: Why Now Is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion Pinch of Yum Income and Traffic Reports 324: Building Strong Partnerships – How Bob's Red Mill Works with Content Creators on Sponsored Content MicroAcquire FE International Quiet Light Brokerage 032: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light Flippa Eat, Capture, Share Episode #67: Your Pathway to Success 322: Going All In – How Sarah Cook Went From 17k to 600k Monthly Pageviews Check out the Food Blogger Pro YouTube channel (and subscribe while you're there!) If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Learn more about joining the Food Blogger Pro community at foodbloggerpro.com/membership

What an exitpreneur is, why we're not able to run our businesses forever, and what factors to keep in mind when deciding to sell your business with Joe Valley. ----- Welcome to episode 321 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Joe Valley about making a great exit and maximizing your profits when selling a business. The EXITpreneur's Playbook When it comes down to it, we're not able to run our businesses forever. And most business owners wait to sell until they're exhausted and emotionally rundown, and by that time, it's too late to have a great exit. Enter: Joe Valley! After facilitating nearly half a billion dollars in exits, Joe has written the bestselling book, “The EXITpreneur's Playbook” to help online business owners get the maximum value and best deal structure possible when selling their businesses. Even if you're not quite ready to sell your own business, this interview will show you what areas to focus on to create a successful pathway to your own eventual exit. In this episode, you'll learn: What an exitpreneur is Why it's important to be on top of your financials What the difference is between a CPA and a bookkeeper Why it's important to consider risk, transferability, documentation, and growth when deciding to sell Why you need to have specific goals in mind when it comes to selling your business What SKUs are What the transition period looks like after selling a business What most people do after selling a business Resources: The EXITpreneur's Playbook Read the first three chapters of The EXITpreneur's Playbook for free! Quiet Light The Quiet Light Podcast 32: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light Quickbooks Xero Pilot EOS TinyBit Puerto Rico's Tax Incentive Code 176: Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers with Chris Guthrie Follow Joe on Twitter and LinkedIn Check out the Food Blogger Pro YouTube channel (and subscribe while you're there!) If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Learn more about joining the Food Blogger Pro community at foodbloggerpro.com/membership

Roger Hardy is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of KITS, one of the world's leading eyewear companies. In 2000, Roger founded an online company, Coastal.com, and later achieved the largest exit for an e-commerce business in Canada at the time. He has investments in real estate and holdings in companies including Cymax, Sonder, Flexday, Mogo, and Privé Revaux.  Roger is a recipient of Business in Vancouver's Forty Under 40 and a two-time winner of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Business-to-Consumer category. He enjoys spending time with his family and empowering communities across the globe through his charity, the Hardy Family Foundation. In this episode… Do you want to know how to achieve a successful, multimillion-dollar exit? Are you looking to build a transferable company that is pushing for growth? Building and growing an e-commerce business takes work, and getting it ready for a sale can be even more challenging. Many businesses and investors are looking for a brand to purchase and scale — which means a profitable exit for you — but they also want to verify each business' structure and profitability. Roger Hardy's departure from his online business was the largest in e-commerce history for Canada: a whopping $450 million. He knows how to make groundbreaking steps to grow and transfer a business, and today he's here to share his insights with you.  In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Roger Hardy, the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO at KITS, to discuss the key to achieving a multimillion-dollar exit for your e-commerce business. Listen in as Roger discusses the importance of client feedback, the evolution of culture and cadence within his company, and the value of a net promoter score to scale your business. Stay tuned. 

Paul Benigeri is the Co-founder and CEO of Archive, a software company that automates e-commerce digital marketing workflows. Archive has worked with a number of leading e-commerce companies, including The Feed, Prose, Four Sigmatic, Ample, and many others. Paul is also the VP of Growth and Engineering at H.V.M.N. (Health Via Modern Nutrition), a health foods company that helps customers unlock increased metabolic health by spending more time in ketosis.  Before this, Paul helped build and lead several startups and graduated with his BS in Computer Science from Stanford University in just three years.  In this episode… Do you want to optimize your current marketing strategies to help your business boom? Are you looking for ways to utilize leading voices on social media to gain more exposure and sales?  In 2021, influencer marketing is all the rage for e-commerce entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses. Not only is influencer marketing more personal than traditional social media advertising, but, by engaging with a loyal, pre-existing audience, it is also more effective. However, big influencers can be difficult to work with — and, at the end of the day, the return isn't always worth the cost. That's where micro-influencers come in. These smaller influencers are much more accessible, affordable, and, in the long run, profitable for your business. So, how can you utilize micro-influencer-based marketing campaigns to expand and scale your business today? In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Paul Benigeri, the Co-founder and CEO of Archive, to discuss how micro-influencer marketing strategies can grow your business. Listen in as Paul talks about the various types of influencers, the key steps to creating a successful micro-influencer campaign, and the kinds of products and offerings that yield lucrative results from working with micro-influencers. Stay tuned!

Mark Thompson is the Co-founder of PayKickstart, a reimagined payment and affiliate platform that enables vendors and digital publishers to sell their products online. PayKickstart is trusted by many esteemed businesses, including Viddyoze, Body FX, Doodly, and others.  Mark is also the Founder and CEO of Digital Kickstart, a company that offers results-based digital marketing products, services, and coaching programs that help users jumpstart their online success.  In this episode… Do you want to increase customer loyalty and reduce your churn rates? Are you looking for simple — but effective — ways to grow your business? According to Mark Thompson, an entrepreneur and e-commerce expert, there is one sure-fire way to not only establish but also exponentially expand your company: listen to customer feedback. To some business owners, reading consumer comments and reviews can be a chore — especially if the feedback is less than ideal. However, reading and engaging with both satisfied and dissatisfied customers can give you a crystal clear look into the areas where your business is thriving and the areas where it can improve. So, how can you start to interact with your customers, lower your churn rates, and scale your business today? In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Mark Thompson, the Co-founder of PayKickstart and the Founder and CEO of Digital Kickstart, to discuss how to grow your business by engaging with customers. Listen in as Mark reveals how PayKickstart helps its users reduce churn rates, the key to creating great affiliate relationships, and why interacting with your consumers is the secret to success that your business has been looking for. Stay tuned! 

Kristin Ostrander is an Amazon FBA business owner, speaker, teacher, author, e-commerce specialist, and entrepreneur. She is the Founder of Mommy Income, a company that helps sellers create and scale profitable Amazon businesses through Kristin's Wholesale Bundle System and Framework™ strategy. Kristin is also the host of The Amazon Files, a podcast that breaks down the truth about selling on Amazon.  Kristin has more than 17 years of experience in the e-commerce space and has generated over $5 million in sales. Her goal is to teach online sellers the skills they need to take their businesses to the next level and build a life they love. In this episode… Do you want to know how to build more value into your business before selling it? Are you looking for ways to turn a profit, establish loyal customers, and utilize your creativity as a seller — all at the same time?  When shopping on Amazon, many customers prioritize speed and convenience above everything else — even the price of an item. That's where bundling comes in. Bundling provides the ease and efficiency that consumers are constantly looking for in the buying process. What's more, bundling helps you build more value and worth into your company before transferring it. So, how can you implement effective bundling in your Amazon business today and reap the benefits of your hard work when selling your brand in the future? In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Kristin Ostrander, the Founder of Mommy Income and the host of The Amazon Files podcast, to discuss the ins and outs of product bundling on Amazon. Listen in as Kristin talks about what bundling is, how to price and sell your bundles, and the various ways bundling builds lasting value for your Amazon business. Stay tuned! 

Most people start an online business for the freedom, autonomy, and money that comes with entrepreneurship— but what they often find instead is the feeling that they're running on a hamster wheel and can't jump off. If you were looking to exit your business, would you know how? What is your business truly worth?00:0000:13 Joe Valley, Author of EXITpreneur's Playbook09:59 Introducing Guest: Joe Valley11:00 What is EXITpreneur's Playbook About? 13:55 Joe Valley asks his readers to write their monetary and feeling goal15:50 What are the Common Answers to "Why did they run their business? What drove them to do what they are doing? How are they going to replace that if their business is sold?"16:45 What percentage of Joe's deals involve buyers who plan to gut or re-organize the eCommerce team after the deal closes?16:12 What have you seen change in the marketplace in the last 6 months?19:45 What percentage of Joe's deals are 100% Amazon vs Direct-to-Consumer vs Blended Amazon & Direct-to-Consumer?20:50 What was the first item you purchased online?21:27 What was the first item you sold online?22:00 Is the aggregator trend a bubble?25:00 Is it smart to sell on other marketplaces like Walmart and Shopify? Or just focus your energy on Amazon?27:04 Which chapter was the hardest to write and why?27:55 What did you enjoy about writing the book?28:55 How much of a problem are "tire kickers?" How can Joe tell if a business owner is serious? Does Joe work harder to qualify clients, or disqualify them? How high is the "full-of-crap" factor?30:33 What are most people get wrong about selling their business?32:32 Is it easy to switch from cash basis to accrual?34:14 Is it harder or more challenging to find, a buyer or a seller?35:15 What is next for Joe Valley?36:45 “Your business strategy should be your exit strategy." Does this idea apply to eCommerce?39:25 Which tends to be worth more in today's market: a business with a phenomenal customer, a phenomenal team, a phenomenal brand, or a phenomenal product?41:19 How can they get in touch with you if they are interested in using your services.42:50 Joe Valley's podcast: The QuietLightAssess the value of your business and reverse engineer a path to an incredible exitAvoid the “ignorance discount” when selling a business on your ownNegotiate favorable deal terms and conditionsCalculate the all-important Seller's Discretionary EarningsThe Quiet Light PodcastLearn the skills and methods you need to turn your online business into a powerful profit engine that you can sell when you want, for the price you designate, to the buyer you choose. Our hosts Joe Valley and Mark Daoust, along with leading M & A, eCommerce, SaaS, marketing, and content experts, will share their decades of experience to give you the tools you need to buy, scale, and exit an online business on your terms.The Quiet Light Podcast is your best source for actionable insights from innovative and successful entrepreneurs who have built, bought, and sold online businesses. If you want to benefit from the most successful strategies and thought leadership to propel yourself toward your goals, look no further.Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/myamazonguy)

Joe Valley is the Co-owner and Director of Brokerage Services at Quiet Light, a business advisory firm that helps online entrepreneurs achieve amazing exits. Joe joined the firm after selling his own e-commerce business through Quiet Light in 2010. He has advisor expertise in all web-based niches, including SaaS, e-commerce, and content businesses.  In addition to being a frequent speaker and podcast guest himself, Joe is also the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast.   Mark Daoust is the Founder, President, and CEO of Quiet Light. Since starting Quiet Light in 2007, Mark has guided dozens of entrepreneurs and small business owners through their exits.  Before his work at Quiet Light, Mark founded Site-Reference.com, an online publication with a subscriber base that he expanded to more than 220,000 members. Now, Mark is a well-known presenter and guest author, as well as the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast.  In this episode… Are you ready to sell your business — but don't quite know how to negotiate a deal? Do you want to ensure that you're agreeing to a fair contract when buying or selling a company? If your answer is an enthusiastic “yes,” this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast is a must-listen! There are many variations of deal structures to choose from when transferring a business, and each option is full of nuance that the average buyer or seller might not understand. So, how do you know which structure is right for you? Today, Joe Valley is here to break down the nuts and bolts of each deal structure — and share his tips for determining which option is best for your business transfer.  In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust and Joe Valley explain everything you need to know about deal structures, as featured in Joe's new book, The EXITpreneur's Playbook. Listen in as Joe and Mark give an overview of each option and share their strategies for negotiating a profitable deal. Plus, they reveal how you can access an in-depth, written explanation of deal structures in The EXITpreneur's Playbook today. Stay tuned!

Joe Valley is the Co-owner and Director of Brokerage Services at Quiet Light, a business advisory firm that helps online entrepreneurs achieve amazing exits. Joe joined the firm after selling his own e-commerce business through Quiet Light in 2010. He has advisor expertise in all web-based niches, including SaaS, e-commerce, and content businesses.  In addition to being a frequent speaker and podcast guest himself, Joe is also the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. Mark Daoust is the Founder, President, and CEO of Quiet Light. Since starting Quiet Light in 2007, Mark has guided dozens of entrepreneurs and small business owners through their exits.  Before his work at Quiet Light, Mark founded Site-Reference.com, an online publication with a subscriber base that he expanded to more than 220,000 members. Now, Mark is a well-known presenter and guest author, as well as the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast.  In this episode… Are you thinking about selling your business, but don't quite know where to start? Do you want a resource full of expert advice to guide you through the ups and downs of exit planning? If so, this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast is for you! According to Joe Valley, selling a business is a lot like running a marathon. You could choose to avoid the pre-race prep, and when race day arrives, you could probably get out of bed and finish the marathon. However, without proper training beforehand, the race itself will be ugly, painful, and simply not worth it. Long story short: training matters, both for running a marathon and transferring your business. So, what are the key concepts and strategies you need to make a successful and profitable exit? In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, co-hosts Mark Daoust and Joe Valley sit down to discuss Joe's upcoming book, The EXITpreneur's Playbook. Together, they talk about Joe's motivation for writing a book about exit planning, some of the key lessons and stories from the book, and where you can grab a copy of The EXITpreneur's Playbook — starting June 15th, 2021. You don't want to miss this exciting episode!

Greg Heilers is the Sorcerer in Residence at Sourcery, a HARO pitching platform for editorial link building that helps business leaders increase brand awareness and find their audience. He is also the Co-captain of Jolly SEO, a company that provides SEO, content marketing, and backlink services to businesses of every size. Outside of the office, Greg volunteers as an Ambassador for Pionero Philanthropy, an organization that matches philanthropic businesses and individuals with Guatemala-based causes. In his free time, Greg is also an avid gardener and hiker. In this episode… Are you looking for a way to put your hard-won expertise to good use? Do you want to be featured in esteemed publications like Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and more? If so, this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast is for you! HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a free service that connects specialists like you with reporters or journalists who need expert sources. The benefits of using HARO are innumerable: expanding and diversifying your network, becoming a guest on popular podcasts, and, of course, growing and scaling your business. However, HARO is full of experts — so how can you make yourself stand out from the crowd? HARO expert Greg Heilers is here to share his tried-and-true strategies for growing your presence and scaling your business through HARO today.  In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Greg Heilers, the Sorcerer in Residence at Sourcery and the Co-Captain of Jolly SEO, to discuss all things HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Listen in as Greg reveals the many advantages of using HARO's platform, the ins and outs of complicated backlinking policies, and his best-kept secrets for crafting a persuasive pitch that will help you grow your company in no time. Stay tuned!

This week, the Ecwid E-commerce Show hosts Jesse and Richie are joined by Mark Daoust, founder of Quiet Light. Quiet Light is a brokerage for buying and selling websites and e-commerce businesses. Mark gives listeners some inside advice on how to make your domain a valuable web property, and how to eventually sell a successfully developed domain or business. The discussion touches upon: The value of buying an existing domain rather than starting a business from scratch Structuring a company for eventual sale Making your domain a valuable web property The value of landing pages to capture niche markets and drive them back to your site The benefit of finding successful domains related to your business, which you should consider buying Activities to help with building a successful ongoing business, while creating a sellable asset The brand as a big piece of the value of your business Moving beyond just reselling someone else's brand. Four pillars of value: risk, growth, transferability, documentation. Want more insights from Mark? Lucky you! He also has a podcast and a special business course.  Quiet Light website: https://quietlight.com/ Mark's podcast: https://quietlight.com/podcasts Mark's course: https://courses.quietlightbrokerage.com Ecwid Podcast on Ecwid https://www.ecwid.com/blog/podcast Ecwid Social Social Profiles:  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ecwid Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ecwid/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/EcwidTeam Twitter: https://twitter.com/ecwid Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ecwid/ Jesse Ness Social Profiles: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesseness/ Richard “RichE” Otey Social Profiles: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardotey/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/RichardOtey 

Elliott Holland is the Founder and Managing Director of Guardian Due Diligence, a boutique firm that supports ETA, acquisition entrepreneurs, and self-funded searchers looking to execute business acquisitions. Elliott has over 10 years of experience executing middle market deals and has worked with the nation's best family offices, independent business buyers, and management consulting firms. In addition to this, Elliott is the Chief Financial Officer of Collab Capital, a growth solution that leverages financial, human, and social capital to aid Black founders as they build sustainable, innovative businesses. He is also the Chief Financial Officer of TTI USA, a boutique telecommunications installation service provider. In this episode… Do you want to ensure a seamless transfer when buying or selling a business? If so, Elliott Holland has one word for you: communication. Communication is one of the most important skills to master when buying or selling a business. That's because it not only sets clear expectations for the exit process, but it also builds trust, establishes credibility, and ensures the smoothest transfer possible. However, there are quite a few roadblocks that hinder effective communication during the transfer process—so how do you know exactly what to communicate and when to communicate it?  In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Elliott Holland, the Founder and Managing Director of Guardian Due Diligence, to discuss the vital lessons he has learned throughout his career in the due diligence space. Listen in as Elliott reveals the importance of building trust during a sale, the secrets to ensuring a great deal, and the value of consistent—and honest—communication when transferring a business. Stay tuned!

Not many people from the corporate world know that buying businesses is one way to switch careers or start a new one. So, in this episode, I bring in Mark Daoust, Founder, and Owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, and today, we discuss the process involved in acquiring a business, and Mark shares the story behind Quiet Light Brokerage. [00:01 – 07:23] Opening Segment- I introduce our guest, Mark Daoust- Mark shares why he started Quiet Light Brokerage- Mark talks about the businesses he started before Quiet Light[07:24 – 11:43] What is an E-Commerce business?- E-Commerce businesses vs. Physical Businesses that produce physical products that utilize the internet to sell their products- What’s the difference?- Mark shares why he sold his prior businesses before finding Quiet Light[11:44 – 26:56] Opportunities in Buying Businesses- We discuss why buying a business is a tremendous opportunity to switch or start a new career- Mark talks about the process - Mark compares the “startup artist,” “entrepreneur,” and “corporate people”- Mark shares who their most common buyers are[26:57 – 37:09] Buy Yours Now!- We talk about how YOU can get started!- Visit Quiet Light Brokerage to learn more[37:10 – 39:51] Closing Segment- Final words of wisdom from Mark Tweetable Quotes: “I think buying businesses is a tremendous opportunity to switch careers or to start a new career.” – Keith Leimbach“Know your strengths.” – Mark Daoust“Unlike a job, you can’t sell your job. You can sell a business. And so, really, if I’m gonna oversimplify this to a point of being ludicrous. This is like buying a really nice dividend stock, but you just have to manage it.” – Mark Daoust Learn more about Mark:Email: mark@quietlight.comWebsite: https://quietlight.com/Podcast: https://quietlight.com/podcasts I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU! If you have questions, comments, or want to talk about life-changing opportunities, reach out to me through LinkedIn or visit https://dincpie.com/

Brad Wayland is a Business Advisor at Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that helps online business owners achieve amazing exits. As a successful entrepreneur, he has almost 20 years of experience marketing and operating online businesses. Starting in 2003, Brad helped create an online custom t-shirt company that he later developed into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. In the years that followed, he started building other e-commerce businesses and investing in existing companies. Over the last 10 years, Brad has constructed, purchased, or sold more than 30 web properties. In this episode… Are you in the process of selling your Amazon business but don't quite know where to start? Do you need help understanding your options so you can make the most profitable choice for your business? Right now, aggregators are the most prominent sources of transferability in the FBA space. With their dramatic increase in recent years, they have boosted the value of Amazon businesses and made a positive impact on FBA sellers. However, there are a few things you should understand and anticipate before transferring your business to an aggregator. That's where business advisors, such as Quiet Light's Brad Wayland, come in: to help you assess your options, ensure fair treatment, and achieve the most lucrative exit possible while selling your business!  In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, co-host Mark Daoust sits down with Brad Wayland, an experienced Business Advisor at Quiet Light, to discuss the current role of aggregators in the Amazon space. Listen in as Mark and Brad explain how aggregators became so ubiquitous on Amazon, the various ways they have impacted FBA sellers, and what the future has in store for popular Amazon aggregators. Stay tuned!

Mark Daoust is the Founder, President, and CEO of Quiet Light, a brokerage and business advisory firm that helps online entrepreneurs achieve amazing exits. Since starting Quiet Light in 2007, Mark and his team of experienced advisors have worked with hundreds of brands that sell on Amazon. Before Quiet Light, Mark founded the online publication Site-Reference.com and grew its subscriber base to 220,000 members. Currently, he is a well-known presenter and guest author, as well as the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. In this episode… According to Mark Daoust, there are a number of factors that have fueled the increased interest in private label businesses on Amazon—from press coverage of companies like 101 Commerce and Thrasio, to the current COVID-19 pandemic. While brokerages such as Mark's company, Quiet Light, have been helping FBA brand owners sell their businesses for some time, these recent events have skyrocketed them into the limelight. So, what should private label sellers expect when working with a brokerage to sell their businesses? For starters, the broker will want to know the ins and outs of the business, including the defensibility of its revenue, the type of market it's in, and how prepared it is for a transition. As Mark says, he looks for details about each unique seller and brand in order to determine when it will be most valuable for them to sell their business. Mark Daoust, the Founder, President, and CEO of Quiet Light, joins James Thomson in this episode of the Buy Box Experts podcast to explain what private label brand owners can expect from working with a brokerage to sell their businesses. Mark talks about the advantages of working with a broker versus selling directly to an aggregator, why some sellers decide to postpone selling their brands, and what differentiates his brokerage from other players in the market. Stay tuned.

Adam Hudson is a serial entrepreneur and a highly regarded Amazon thought leader. Currently, he is the Co-founder of Reliable Education, a company that provides high-quality educational resources and a tight-knit community to current and soon-to-be Amazon sellers all over the world.  Adam boasts over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience in a wide variety of industries, including Amazon, software, animation, and real estate. He has built multiple multimillion-dollar companies in both Australia and the US—including one of the world's very first crowdfunding platforms, which raised more than $100 million for start-ups and early-stage businesses. In this episode… Do you want to know the secrets to radically growing your business right now? Are you looking for sage advice and actionable tips from Amazon experts that will lead you and your business to unprecedented success? One of the most accessible—and effective—ways to grow your business quickly is through consistent, high-quality education. Hearing stories and strategies from the biggest leaders in your industry can inform you, inspire you, and give you a clear vision for immediate business growth. Fortunately, this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast has an inside scoop—and a huge discount—on The Rhino School, an educational virtual conference featuring high-caliber keynote speakers and attendees who have successfully started, scaled, and sold their own Amazon businesses!  In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Adam Hudson, the Co-founder of Reliable Education, to discuss the importance of high-quality educational resources for growing your business. Listen in as Adam reveals how he got started in the Amazon industry, why his Reliable Education program benefits both fresh and experienced Amazon sellers, and how Quiet Light Podcast listeners can attend his conference, The Rhino School, for a third of the listing price. You don't want to miss this!

Mihkel Moosel is an experienced entrepreneur and Amazon growth consultant who has successfully built three 7-figure businesses on Amazon and sold more than 100 products in various industries. Currently, Mihkel is the Founder and Head Amazon Expert at Digital Merchant, an Amazon partnerships agency that builds 7-figure online stores for both brands and manufacturers. In the past three years, Digital Merchant has scaled its personal Amazon brand from $0 to $350K a month on Amazon and has additionally grown five 6-figure accounts and two 7-figure accounts. The company has also boosted a client's revenue 10 times through its expert SEO, pay-per-click, and positioning strategies. In this episode… Are you eager to sell your business, but aren't sure if now is the right time? While many entrepreneurs want to make a profitable exit, it's important that a business is in good shape before a sale. So, how do you know if it's time to sell—or if it's time to sit down, crack your knuckles, and get back to the daily grind? Transferability is one of the core pillars of creating a valuable business. However, timing is an incredibly important aspect of transferability—and sometimes your preferred exit schedule just doesn't work in your favor. If this happens to you, don't give up! Instead, take this as an opportunity to scale, improve, and continue to profit from your business. By waiting for the opportune moment, you can make a business transfer that results in greater profit and a smoother sale. In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Mihkel Moosel, the Founder and Head Amazon Expert at Digital Merchant, to discuss the ins and outs of transferring an Amazon business. Listen in as Mihkel explains how waiting to sell his business actually increased his profits and boosted his brand. He also talks about his entrepreneurial burnout, the sale that fell through unexpectedly, and the proven strategies that helped Mihkel's company explode. Stay tuned!

Mark Daoust is the Founder and CEO of Quiet Light, an entrepreneur-led group of advisors who help people buy, grow, and sell their online business for six, seven, or eight figures. He is also the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast, and a contributor to Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc. ⭐️ SELL YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS!

Jon Hainstock is a SaaS entrepreneur with decades of experience. He recently sold and exited his software business, ZoomShift, a tool that helps small businesses manage their work schedules and employee timesheets. Before this, Jon was the Co-founder of Tailwind Creative, a digital marketing agency.  Jon's biggest professional goal is to be a full-time creator and the owner of multiple software companies. Currently, his creative outlets and hobbies include Ruby on Rails web development, music, photography, and local lead generation. In this episode… Do you want to successfully build, scale, and sell a SaaS business? Are you looking for tried-and-true strategies for when, why, and how to sell your company? If so, this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast is for you. In order to ensure the most successful exit possible, you first have to evaluate the transferability of your business. In other words: can your business thrive in someone else's hands? By identifying and analyzing key elements of your business, such as staff, vendors, workload, and more, you can discover—and create solutions for—any issues that will impede its transferability. In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Co-host Mark Daoust sits down with Jon Hainstock, SaaS entrepreneur and former Co-founder of ZoomShift, to discuss the process of founding, scaling, and transfering a SaaS business. Listen in as Jon reveals the difficulty of finding a true product/market fit, how to begin the exit planning process, and why the most important question to ask yourself is this: are you happy in your job? Stay tuned for more!

Joe Valley is the Co-owner and Director of Brokerage Services at Quiet Light Brokerage, a business advisory firm that helps online entrepreneurs achieve amazing exits. Joe joined the firm after selling his own e-commerce business through Quiet Light Brokerage in 2010. He has advisor expertise in all web-based niches, including SaaS, e-commerce, and content businesses. In addition to being a frequent speaker and podcast guest himself, Joe is also the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. Mark Daoust is the Founder, President, and CEO of Quiet Light Brokerage. Since starting Quiet Light Brokerage in 2007, Mark has guided dozens of entrepreneurs and small business owners through their exits. Before his work at Quiet Light Brokerage, Mark founded Site-Reference.com, an online publication with a subscriber base that he expanded to more than 220,000 members. Now, Mark is a well-known presenter and guest author, as well as the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. In this episode… Regardless of whether you're a business owner, Amazon seller, individual investor, or consumer, essentially every single person in the world can agree on this one statement: 2020 was a difficult year. However, 2020 is now, finally, coming to a close—which means it's time to reflect on the challenges and trends and construct a hopeful plan for 2021. With the new year quickly approaching, many entrepreneurs and business owners are scrambling to identify and implement effective strategies to grow their businesses in 2021. Thankfully, Mark Daoust and Joe Valley are here to share their goals for 2021 and illustrate how you can find tangible ways to improve your growth prospects right now. In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, co-hosts Mark Daoust and Joe Valley sit down to discuss the ups and downs of 2020 and share their goals for Quiet Light Brokerage in 2021. Listen in as Mark and Joe talk about their end-of-year growth strategies, the unmatched value of referral partners, and the lessons they've learned and will carry into the new year. Stay tuned for more—and happy holidays!

Joe Valley is the Co-owner and Director of Brokerage Services at Quiet Light Brokerage, a business advisory firm that helps online entrepreneurs achieve amazing exits. Joe joined the firm after selling his own e-commerce business through Quiet Light Brokerage in 2010. He has advisor expertise in all web-based niches, including SaaS, e-commerce, and content businesses. In addition to being a frequent speaker and podcast guest himself, Joe is also the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. Mark Daoust is the Founder, President, and CEO of Quiet Light Brokerage. Since starting Quiet Light Brokerage in 2007, Mark has guided dozens of entrepreneurs and small business owners through their exits. Before his work at Quiet Light Brokerage, Mark founded Site-Reference.com, an online publication with a subscriber base that he expanded to more than 220,000 members. Now, Mark is a well-known presenter and guest author, as well as the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. In this episode… As a prospective seller, you want to build as much value as possible into your business before you exit. However, one of the most common strategies sellers utilize to establish their business' value or reputation can actually be totally ineffective: list price multiples. Many buyers or sellers are obsessed with multiples. But, are multiples really the most accurate calculator of your business' value? According to Mark Daoust and Joe Valley, multiples are incredibly complex and can often be a deceptive measurement for both buyers and sellers. So, how can you navigate the messy world of multiples as you attempt to create a well-documented, transferable business? In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, co-hosts Mark Daoust and Joe Valley sit down to discuss why list price multiples aren't as accurate or important as most buyers and sellers think. Listen in as Mark and Joe discuss the reality of multiples and share more effective methods for demonstrating and transferring value. They also illustrate how you can build, buy, or sell an incredible business without losing blood, sweat, and tears over your multiples. Stay tuned!

Joe Valley is the Co-owner and Director of Brokerage Services at Quiet Light Brokerage, a business advisory firm that helps online entrepreneurs achieve amazing exits. Joe joined the firm after selling his own e-commerce business through Quiet Light Brokerage in 2010. He has advisor expertise in all web-based niches, including SaaS, e-commerce, and content businesses. In addition to being a frequent speaker and podcast guest himself, Joe is also the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. Mark Daoust is the Founder, President, and CEO of Quiet Light Brokerage. Since starting Quiet Light Brokerage in 2007, Mark has guided dozens of entrepreneurs and small business owners through their exits. Before his work at Quiet Light Brokerage, Mark founded Site-Reference.com, an online publication with a subscriber base that he expanded to more than 220,000 members. Now, Mark is a well-known presenter and guest author, as well as the co-host of the Quiet Light Podcast. In this episode… Do you want to successfully sell your business? Are you looking for resources, strategies, and expert support that will help you attract the right buyers? According to the team at Quiet Light Brokerage, there is one thing that will set your business apart from other companies in your industry: transferability. Potential buyers will lose interest quickly if you are the superglue holding your business together. Luckily, the advisors and brokers at Quiet Light—including President and CEO Mark Daoust and Co-owner Joe Valley—have experience transferring their own businesses to new owners. With first-hand expertise and tried and true strategies, they can help you effectively and efficiently do the same. In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Rise25 Co-founder John Corcoran sits down with Mark Daoust and Joe Valley to discuss their real-life experiences selling and growing online businesses. Mark and Joe know the importance of transferability when establishing a sellable business—and today, they discuss the ins and outs of their exit planning processes and their unique approach to helping entrepreneurs achieve profitable exits. Stay tuned!

Joe Valley is the Co-Owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, a business brokerage firm that helps entrepreneurs sell their online businesses. Joe is also the Founder and Co-Host of the Quiet Light Podcast with his partner, Mark Daoust. As an expert in advising and brokering for web-based niches, Joe is a successful speaker, frequent podcast guest, and soon-to-be-published author. In this episode… How can you effectively prepare for a successful exit? This is a question that plagues entrepreneurs across the globe. If you want to achieve a profitable and clean exit but don't know where to start in the preparation process, you are not alone! Today on the Amazing Exits podcast, Kellianne Fedio and Paul Miller sit down with Joe Valley, the Co-Owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, to discuss how to prepare for a successful exit. As an advertising and brokering expert, and the Co-Owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, Joe Valley understands the stress and frustration involved in exit planning. Thankfully, Joe is on the Amazing Exits podcast to offer practical tips and tricks for Amazon entrepreneurs who are in all stages of the exit planning process. Tune in to hear Joe, Kellianne, and Paul discuss how to make your Amazon brand sellable, knowing the value of your business, and how to optimize your exit options.

While COVID-19 caused the shutdown of many businesses, the e-commerce space saw a massive spike. As people were forced to stay at home, they turned to online businesses to provide them with what they needed. But the question on many people’s minds is, will the trend of online buying continue, or will things go back to ‘normal’ once we emerge from the coronavirus pandemic? Listen in as Founder and CEO of Quiet Light Brokerage, Mark Daoust, talks with Gene Marks about the impact the pandemic has had on the e-commerce business space, what that means for the future, and how the buying and selling of these online businesses have been affected. For more information regarding COVID-19 and your business, including workplace health, business continuity, payroll processes, health insurance, financial assistance, new legislation, and more, visit our Coronavirus (COVID-19) Help Center. DISCLAIMER: The information presented in this podcast, and that is further provided by the presenter, should not be considered legal or accounting advice, and should not substitute for legal, accounting, or other professional advice in which the facts and circumstances may warrant. We encourage you to consult legal counsel as it pertains to your own unique situation(s) and/or with any specific legal questions you may have.

How do you buy or sell an Amazon business? Today we talk to an expert broker who will shed light on this question. Mark Daoust, Founder and CEO of Quiet Light Brokerage sits down with us to talk about strategy.How do you buy an Amazon business?Type of car? Budget? Buy business with weakness where you have strengthWhy buy a business instead of build one?Buy then build - book.Most important thing to avoid or mistake to avoid when buying a business?Product protection, intellectual property is super important. Background of Quiet Light Brokerage.70-mil in transactions average about 1 mil per deal.Maturity phase - sophisticated sellers buying other businesses. When selling business in next 12 months, what is the prep work?4 pillars of valueRiskIP protectionSku diversityMarketplace diversityGrowthHow to go from 1 mil to 5 milReasonable ways to growth.Transfer-abilityEtsy hard to transferVendors may not work with someone else. Licensing issues?DocumentationDocumentation is the largest impact. Financials - Recorded accrual highly valuable. Switches value of business hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mistakes to avoidReasons why you should sellFeather in the cap - I sold a businessIf selling just for financials, don’t do it.Lower end of spectrum - want one payday.Build to holdIf you’re able to sell it, it’s because someone wants to buy it to hold.Get an evaluation - 2.5-3.5 close variation of EBITAWhat will buyers get excited about? Object to?Are buyers excited about niche but too specific into a couple of skus vs diversifiedPrepGet all information that buyers want. Answer buyers questions before they ask them.Sell into the objectionsAverage time on market: 90 days200 inquiries per business. Several conference calls. Offers. 30-60 days of due diligence. Hopefully then close.Broker adds value PrepNavigate transactionStressful.If you have an offer just take it, don’t use a broker.Find out more about Quiet Light Brokerage at https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/myamazonguy)

Quiet Light as founded before the Great Recession, so founder Mark Daoust has seen first-hand how economic downturns can affect the value of online businesses. Today he is joined on the podcast by Jason Yelowitz, Quiet Light's most tenured advisor – who has been with us for ten years. Congrats, Jason! They discuss the possible implications of the economic downturn, and some of the things buyers and sellers need to consider when thinking about a transaction.   Episode Highlights: How buyers have a big appetite for deals, but they might not find as big of an opportunity for steep discounts Will our shopping habits permanently change after COVID-19, and what impact will that behavior have on the value of businesses? Are online businesses a stable investment? Will blips in the supply chain have an adverse effect on valuations? How profitable businesses will always have some value to a buyer How much impact might there be on multiples?

Mark Daoust, founder of Quiet Light Brokerage, discusses the intricacies involved in the selling of an e-business regardless of its size and the preparation it would take to prepare a business to sell.WHAT YOU’LL LEARNBackground of Quiet Light BrokerageHow to pick a Broker when selling the BusinessDifference between selling a small e-business (5 figures) and a large one (8 figures)The Four Pillars of Business ValueApproaches of a BrokerUnderstanding the Levers of a Business ValueKEY POINTSQuiet Light has been in existence for fourteen years, selling e-businesses. The experience of selling both big and small businesses have helped them identify key elements in a business to make it palatable to buyers.Go with the broker that the seller would feel comfortable with and not just their offers.The size of the business being sold would attract different buyers. Small businesses often attract informal buyers seeking to increase their portfolio. The seller should think of what kind of seller they want to attract in order to determine at what size they will sell their business.Documentation affects the valuation of the e-business. It is through the correct documentation can one see just how much the business is making and its growth potential.As a broker, their concern is the deal structure; not only how much the seller will get but from where it would be coming from and conditions in the payment.Getting to know your company’s value is very important, whether you want to sell or not. This would help you make crucial decisions on the business.-------Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to the Ecom Exits Podcast with Nate Ginsburg? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review! Your feedback will not only help us improve the show, but it will help us connect with more high flyers like you.

Putting you Amazon FBA business up for sale can sometimes bring about mixed feelings. Learn if you are in a position to sell your Amazon business. Who Quiet Light Brokerage work with Quiet Light Brokerage help online entrepreneurs to plan and execute successful exits. They work with both Amazon and E-commerce, plus SaaS. They work with a lot of “bootstrappers”. Most clients have a business around for 2-3 years or more. At the moment, one business around 25 years (ancient for internet business!). Business sales About $75M in enterprise value in 2019. In 2020, expecting $100M. Last year,  80% of Transactions were E-commerce businesses. Around 55% of those were based around Amazon: - 46% was strictly Amazon 10% mixed platform - including Amazon A lot of businesses have an off Amazon element. But to qualify as a “mixed platform” business, it needs to have about a 50/50 split between on- and off-Amazon revenue. Mark Daoust's  Background Been doing online stuff for going on 20 years. 15 years ago had a content website. He was newly married. Thought it would be fun to sell this. Hired an advisor (broker) and was very unimpressed. Marked looked at the broker's work and thought, “He gets 10% off the sale value - how hard could it really be?”. This presented itself. Mark sold the business. Mark worked in some fledgling businesses for a year - a good friend decided to sell a company. He knew Mark would help him with it. Mark did indeed get the business sold. The first 2 years was about honing processes two achieve two main aims: Making the transactions safe and secure in the M & A industry. How to really prepare a business for sale. How Mark felt like a business seller There were the usual exclusive contract and long agreement. But the broker didn't seem to do much! For the business brokerage, the industry norm is that the value is in the number of contracts you sign, a certain percentage of those work, and that is how the brokerage makes money. Mark felt that the broker and seller interests were not aligned. Mark wanted to help business owners understand what drove the value. It makes the decision making cleaner. Mark's experience selling his business Mark was just given a number for the value of $350K. Then the 1st offer was junk $75K. The second offer eventually went ahead at a slightly higher valuation, but still, way lower than Mark had been lead to expect. The aim is to be a real advisor - what is the value of the asset I'm holding? Should I sell or hold? It's a critical decision and you don't get two chances. So you want to be well informed as a business seller. Why bother selling a business if it's a successful one?  Mark suggests you shouldn't aim to sell a good business if… It generates cash flow Not too much time Happy to do it It's usually harder to create a new business than you think. Partly because luck comes in, so in this case, do not put your Amazon FBA Business up for sale. Creating twin values You have 2 values in building your business Cashflow (like stock dividend) You're creating an asset (like the value of the stock) in your overall portfolio There does come a point in time when selling makes sense. That's when you realize the asset value. Why sell? Especially with the physical product business, most of the value you'll get is when you sell. The economics of e-commerce business -or even SaaS - is such that you have to reinvest most cash. The right time to sell a business There comes an inflection point in your life. Eg: A client acquired a business 5 years before for $30-40K It grew to about 400-500K per year in Profits (about $2M revenue) “Why not continue to sell the business?” Asked Mark On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I keep the inventory in the second garage. To grow this, we would have to get an office, staff, etc. Other life inflexions Getting married

Putting you Amazon FBA business up for sale can sometimes bring about mixed feelings. Learn if you are in a position to sell your Amazon business. Who Quiet Light Brokerage work with Quiet Light Brokerage help online entrepreneurs to plan and execute successful exits.  They work with both Amazon and E-commerce, plus SaaS. They work with a lot of “bootstrappers”. Most clients have a business around for 2-3 years or more. At the moment, one business around 25 years (ancient for internet business!). Business sales About $75M in enterprise value in 2019. In 2020, expecting $100M. Last year,  80% of Transactions were E-commerce businesses. Around 55% of those were based around Amazon:  - 46% was strictly Amazon 10% mixed platform - including Amazon  A lot of businesses have an off Amazon element. But to qualify as a “mixed platform” business, it needs to have about a 50/50 split between on- and off-Amazon revenue. Mark Daoust’s  Background Been doing online stuff for going on 20 years.  15 years ago had a content website. He was newly married.  Thought it would be fun to sell this. Hired an advisor (broker) and was very unimpressed.  Marked looked at the broker’s work and thought, “He gets 10% off the sale value - how hard could it really be?”. This presented itself. Mark sold the business.  Mark worked in some fledgeling businesses for a year - a good friend decided to sell a company. He knew Mark would help him with it. Mark did indeed get the business sold.  The first 2 years was about honing processes two achieve two main aims:  Making the transactions safe and secure in the M & A industry. How to really prepare a business for sale.  How Mark felt like a business seller There were the usual exclusive contract and long agreement.  But the broker didn’t seem to do much! For the business brokerage, the industry norm is that the value is in the number of contracts you sign, a certain percentage of those work, and that is how the brokerage makes money.  Mark felt that the broker and seller interests were not aligned.  Mark wanted to help business owners understand what drove the value.  It makes the decision making cleaner.  Mark’s experience selling his business Mark was just given a number for the value of $350K. Then the 1st offer was junk $75K. The second offer eventually went ahead at a slightly higher valuation, but still, way lower than Mark had been lead to expect.  The aim is to be a real advisor - what is the value of the asset I’m holding? Should I sell or hold? It’s a critical decision and you don’t get two chances. So you want to be well informed as a business seller.  Why bother selling a business if it’s a successful one?  Mark suggests you shouldn’t aim to sell a good business if… It generates cash flow Not too much time Happy to do it It’s usually harder to create a new business than you think. Partly because luck comes in, so in this case, do not put your Amazon FBA Business up for sale. Creating twin values You have 2 values in building your business Cashflow (like stock dividend) You’re creating an asset (like the value of the stock) in your overall portfolio There does come a point in time when selling makes sense. That’s when you realise the asset value.  Why sell? Especially with physical product business, most of the value you’ll get is when you sell.  The economics of e-commerce business -or even SaaS - is such that you have to reinvest most cash. The right time to sell a business There comes an inflexion point in your life.  Eg: A client acquired a business 5 years before for $30-40K It grew to about 400-500K per year in Profits (about $2M revenue) “Why not continue to sell the business?” Asked Mark On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I keep the inventory in the second garage.  To grow this, we would have to get an office, staff, etc.  Other life inflexions

When a business is started, the focus is generally on the growth and success of the company, and understandably so. There can be a laser focus by management on the achievement of this goal, which can last for months or years.  Should the leadership in that company find success, there may come a day when that business could become ripe for acquisition. But when is the time right? What are the best ways to go about selling your hard-earned business while still getting a good value? This week's guest on the podcast has all the answers to these questions and more.  Mark Daoust is the Founder and CEO of Quiet Light Brokerage, which helps entrepreneurs in the online and internet business sectors to sell their businesses for the maximum value that they can get. Mark and Quiet Light Brokerage have worked with hundreds of brands that utilize the Amazon platform. In this episode, host James Thomson is joined by Mark Daoust to talk about what kinds of companies can benefit from a brokerage, learning from mistakes, and what makes a business attractive for potential acquisition.

Getting control of your business is the key to navigating towards a profitable future. The most common obstacles for successful eCommerce businesses are inventory and cash flow. Today's guest is an expert in providing forecasting tools to help skirt those obstacles to grow your business and prep for a successful exit. Scott Deetz was one of the advisers whose input was crucial to a successful overseas deal we discussed on a previous episode. In this episode, we explore the ways Scott's forecasting techniques have fact-based evidence to support predicted ROI for potential buyers. Scott is the founder and CEO of the Northbound group, a company that helps eCommerce businesses uncover the value in their businesses and prepare a successful exit. With a background in corporate transactions, Scott got into the amazon selling space in 2013. He soon realized his interest remained where it had started, in mergers and strategic advising. He now spends all his time assisting eCommerce businesses on how to maximize the value of their company for either keeping or selling. Episode Highlights: Whether forecasting is based on a wish and a prayer or if there is science and methodology involved. The importance of forecasting as a regular part of any growing business. How Scott's tools can help establish the supplier as a partner and diminish cash flow problems. How the forecasting can change the discussion on strategy. The value of the planning and structuring a deal around the forecasting. The buyer's effective multiple and what it means for their purchase process. The importance of speaking the buyer's language. Scott reveals the levels of building from forecasting. How hard data coupled with owner wisdom can the best formula for forecasting as well provide a roadmap for a successful exit. Transcription: Joe: Mark, one of the things or a dozen of the things that I always see happen with entrepreneurs that we speak with is that everyone runs out of inventory, everyone has cash flow problems, in fact I was just on a call prior to recording this podcast with someone that does an amazing job with their business to the point where it's growing 150% year over year which causes what? Cash flow problems, inventory problems. I did a webinar yesterday and one of the questions was have you ever run a stock? Yes, no, or I'm so amazing I never run out of stock. Oddly enough no one checks the third option which is really good. But a lot of people run out of stock. It seems to be the status quo. I understand that you had our friend Scott Deetz on the podcast talking about forecasting, talking about cash flow management; what it does for your peace of mind number one but inventory management and how you can use all of these forecasting tools to renegotiate with your suppliers to build a more valuable business and to grow it with more confidence. How did the call go? Mark: Yeah. So, Joe, I know the podcast episodes that you do are so well packaged that you have an amazing podcast, right? I just want to start out with that. You have an amazing podcast and you package these together so well with their incredible exits series that you've been doing and actually, in all honesty, it is a really good series that you've been doing where you're interviewing some sellers. With my less desirable or appealing package, I've been doing essentially the same thing with the UK deal. We really had Joseph Harwood on. That episode aired I believe in August and we talked about Joseph's exit as a UK company. And one of the things that we brought up on that call was how many advisors helped us through that process. Well, Scott was one of these advisors and I'm going to also have another podcast with one of the other advisors on that that helped us through that. One of the crucial aspects for shows of sale, one of the things that really made it run was the forecasting that Joseph and Scott did with the business now forecasts. A lot of us see them and think they're just kind of a wing and a prayer and they're kind of hoping and hey, if my rosy assumptions work out this business, is going to have a hockey stick amount of growth. And so they get discounted quite a bit. I remember I spoke to somebody else about this; Andy Jones from Private Equity Info and we asked him about forecasts and he said look you look at forecasts they are all hockey sticks. I guarantee the buyer is going to do their own forecasts. Well, Scott has a different approach to forecasts. They're very very conservative. He ends up doing scenario analysis to see Scenario A, Scenario B, Scenario C; one's very pessimistic, ones very optimistic, one is what they actually expect to happen and there's actually a methodology here. Now we spent the first half of this call going over why is this important. He explained how he uses this to negotiate supplier terms that don't pinch the supplier but actually help a partnership with that supplier. He talks about how it was crucial for Joseph having the ability to order a really sizable amount of inventory as we're going into a busy season so that he didn't run out. And then finally we talked about how it has an impact on the actual selling process. And he brought up a point; super simple, you and I talk about this all the time, when you're talking to a buyer for an online business you need to be able to speak to the return on investment they're going to get. And their buyer is constantly doing that sort of analysis. Well, Scott was able to go through an analysis that was based on reason and logic and numbers and it had been refined if we could take a look historically to see here's what we were forecasting, here's how close we were, right? We were off and so we've modified our assumptions. So about half of it is on why the second half is on how and kind of giving people a little bit of a jump start on how to actually do forecasting. And it's something that I would highly recommend. We had Ben Murray on from the SaaS CFO and he talked about the importance of forecasting in a SaaS business. So this is a really important thing for any online business and frankly any business to start doing. Joe: And these guys are all connected with running multi-million dollar businesses that will have a multi-million dollar exit. And that's they've; I want to say grown up into forecasting. A lot of people bootstrap things and sort of do the best they can. Those that hold on long enough or mature enough to get to the forecasting part. I think it makes a huge difference. The folks that I just had on the call prior to this they've got an incredible business and they've grown up into that as well. I think that this podcast will help them tremendously. I know Scott personally he's a great guy, very smart, very very good at numbers so let's jump into it. Mark: But before we get there, I just want to throw out there to the listeners in case you didn't catch it. Mark Doust is an expert at very subtle wise assery; here's why, I told him I was going to read this quote, quote-unquote this is from a listener, a guy named Chris Rock is his last name. Thank you, Chris. I just want you to know you are my favorite listener at this point. Quote, I've been impressed by several podcasts with Joe Valley; no space there for Mark Daoust, no mention of Mark Daoust at all, Joe Valley and we'd like to set up a call this week to discuss the process and valuation. Thank you, Chris. You are my favorite without a doubt. Let's go to the podcast. Joe: I was being sold. I just want to make it clear. Mark: Alright here we go. Scott Deetz, here we go folks. Mark: Alright I'm really excited this week to have Scott Deetz on. Scott you and I worked together for a long time and frankly it's been way way too long for this to even happen. I should've had you on the podcast probably a year ago or so but I don't know if you've listened to the podcast at all. We have a tradition of guests introducing themselves mainly because we don't do show prep so I'll hand it over to you. Why don't you introduce yourself to the audience? Scott: Sure, perfect. Yeah, I'm excited to do this Mark. So my name is Scott Deetz. I'm with Northbound Group which is a company that I founded. I was an Amazon seller starting in 2013. I was ASM3 for folks that may know what that is and I got into the Amazon selling side of things but my background has been in more corporate transactions, mergers, and acquisitions. And once I got into the industry for a little bit, I realized that I liked helping people and looked at the industry and thought I could help people in a series of ways with strategic finance and with corporate development work and with being, in essence, a strategic advisor to people that may want to consider exit strategies as well. So I started Northbound Group about three years ago and now that's what I do full time; it's just assist Amazon and other e-commerce businesses on how to maximize the value of their company for whether they want to hold it or whether they want to sell it. Mark: Yeah. And you worked on; actually, we worked together on Joseph Harwood's deal. We had him on the podcast a few weeks ago talking about how to sell a UK based business and that was a complex transaction. We talked a lot about that on that podcast about how complex it was at least compared to what we typically see in the spaces as to how these transactions go. The topic that you and I are going to discuss today is forecasting. And I really think with Joseph's business and the way that we presented that business to potential buyers there was so much that it hinged on the forecasting that your group did to be able to say what are we looking at for sales coming from the future. Now this is a bit of a touchy subject because within Quiet Light we don't rely on forecasts all that much, right? We would never sell or trade necessarily on a forecast on its own. However, your forecasts were a bit different than what we've typically seen in the past. If I could just kind of put it bluntly most forecasts that we see are kind of a wish and a prayer. If someone is saying hey here's what I like to do over the next twelve months or it's even more simplistic than that; well this is what I did the first three months of the year, a straight-line projection shows that it's going to be this so that's going to be my forecast. And it's just very unreliable and that's why we've never used it. Yours tended to have quite a bit more specificity and we really put a lot into that forecast including structuring the deal around the forecast as well which meant that our client, in this case, Joseph really believed the numbers that were coming out because he was riding a lot on that. So I wanted to talk about forecasting and I want to start out with just kind of a basic question, is it just a wish and a prayer to say this is what we're going to be doing in the future? And again this is a softball question. I'm leading you into the answer pretty easily here. Or is there actual science and actual methodology here where we can use these forecasts with some level of reliability? Scott: Yeah. So to me, that case study really showcased the power of how forecasting can ultimately affect the amount that you receive for your company. But I would say the short answer to your question is if an Amazon seller came to me and said would I rather have a simplistic forecast than no forecast at all I would say yes. But the answer to it really is that I think forecasting is not a one-time event but something you implement. So, in other words, people don't build a forecast and then it collects dust. You implement a forecasting methodology in your business that is continually being updated as new information is coming into the business. And when your self as an owner or when an outside party can see that not only is it a science and it's around a tool but it is also an ingrained methodology for the business, I think that's really when the power of forecasting takes hold. And particularly in Joseph's case, for example, the first forecast that we built and if he was on the call we would laugh together, it started out like you would expect. I have no idea. Let's put some numbers on a board. Let's start looking at it. Then we started implementing it on a regular basis and we would get it down to the point to where we could update a complete forecast for the business in under 60 minutes. And every time that we realized we were either short of our forecast or over our forecast we started tweaking it and we got more and more and more accurate so that by the time that we, for example, got in front of a potential buyer for the business the buyer could sense our confidence in the forecast and obviously then that in turn gave them their confidence in the forecast and ultimately helped facilitate the transaction. Mark: And I want to get into methodology here in a little bit but I want to start at a maybe a little bit of an earlier point because we talk a lot in Quiet Light about how having a good exit strategy and preparing a business for sale often gives you a really good business to own, right? And this exercise of forecasting is not just for an exit. It's actually really good from a business ownership standpoint. What are some reasons that people should be implementing forecasting as a regular part of their business? Scott: Yeah. The easiest way I can answer that is that I say there is no cash flow planning without forecasting. Mark: For anybody out there by the way it felt like a good rhyme. Scott: It does, doesn't it? Yeah, there is no cash planning without forecasting or something like. But everybody out there that is in this industry struggles with the fact that as you grow because you have to front a lot of your inventory oftentimes or at least a portion of that you have to invest in the business. Everybody is doing this dance between growth and having enough cash to grow. A forecast fundamentally is the link between the two that doesn't look at what your accounting numbers were in the past but looks at what the next six or twelve months forward of your businesses and we'll answer the question for you do I have enough cash to succeed? And the way I look at if you use Xero or Quickbooks or a good accounting program is very simply that gives you a gorgeous picture of what's in the rearview mirror but you don't drive your car based on what's in the rearview mirror, you drive your car based on what's out in front of you. And really what forecasting is that capability. So whether you ever want to sell your business or not if you want to have an accurate cash flow of your business you by definition have to be good at forecasting. The second reason that I think that it's really really critical is because forecasting helps you determine where you're making your money and where you're not making your money. So very often in our forecasting tools that we have built for Amazon sellers, we'll build a forecast for people and it doesn't only forecast the revenue but it forecasts the profitability. And it's not uncommon at all for example to see somebody who's selling a product in the US that's making a great amount of profit and they take that same product and when you add the VAT or other costs in the UK it's not profitable at all. So why put the gas pedal down so to speak and grow an area of your company that's not as profitable? So I think it's really helpful in two things; well three things actually, the first one is cash flow planning, the second one is analyzing your profitability, and then the third one is once you have an accurate forecast we have found it's the single most important thing to help you get better supplier terms. So when we go negotiate with suppliers on behalf of our clients or we give them the tools to do it themselves we are incorporating forecasting to show the suppliers a forecast that they then believe. And if your supplier believes an accurate forecast then what they'll do is they'll say to you, okay wow we're going to grow this much. That is the basis for the conversation of getting payment terms after shipping. And it's also the basis for being able to ask for a better price for your product. So those are really outside of even selling the business; as far as running the business those are the big three. Mark: Yeah. This idea of cash flow planning; I mean the number one problem with Amazon businesses is what it's cash flow, right? I mean people are growing, their business is growing and they're putting all the money back into inventory and I think a lot of Amazon sellers are really just sticking their thumb up in the air and saying okay I think I should order this much. Maybe there's some level of estimation going on there. But the number of people that we see the number of businesses we see where they have inventory shortages or they have a busy season and they end up ordering too much and so they're sitting on just a big pile of inventory that's there for another year waiting for the next busy season. I mean it's kind of a rule; it's not an exception that we see this. Your supplier terms that you mentioned in the third point that plays into this cash flow problem as well. I don't want to get into the details of exactly what Joseph's structure with his business and his supplier terms but suffice it to say he eliminated all of the cash flow issues that you would normally have with an Amazon business because you guys were able to negotiate really good terms with the suppliers. I assume that was based on the forecast that you're able to put together. Scott: Yes absolutely it was and the key part that we were able to do was bring in the supplier in essence in partnership and have them realize, and this is what I'd recommend anybody that's listening to this, this is not about beating up a supplier. This is about being upfront with them and saying if I had no cash flow problem this is what the growth potential would be for the products that I sourced through you. We were able to make that case with this particular supplier. And in essence, it rapidly accelerated the growth of the business prior to then ultimately exiting the business because we eliminated the cash flow problem which also became a competitive advantage against other people that had cash flow problems because when they run out of inventory we get our sales. So it's absolutely critical and the number one reason that a lot of suppliers don't want to give better terms is because like you said they don't trust that either the business will sell that many units. So then if they know the business doesn't sell the units they may be stuck with them. Forecasting helps eliminate that concern and we were able to go to the supplier and say look at all of these trends, look at all of this information if we sell this many units of these many products this is how fast we could grow. But the problem is we don't have the cash to order that many units, can you help us out? And ultimately we are able to come to a very favorable situation for frankly both the supplier and for Joseph. Mark: Yeah. This idea of profitability as well. I mean this is just a common area where we see a lot of waste being spent on ASINs that frankly aren't that profitable. And these are the areas where people are spending time, resources, maybe they're spending money on this and it's really just diluting what their efforts should be as well. So this idea of going back I liken it to something that again we preach over and over at Quiet Light which is it starts with having good books, good data that you can go back and look at. Personally in my personal life like when I review my finances and if you do this at home and you look at your credit card statement, how many times have you looked at your credit card statement and you look at something and say oh my gosh I have this subscription; I didn't even realize I still had this subscription on there, right? Going back over and over again and like you're doing revising assumptions of what the business is doing helps you think about your business more critically in a different way than maybe we would normally think of you know especially with a product-based business you're thinking about product variations, you're thinking about customer service, how can you make that customer experience better but maybe not thinking strategically about your business as you might want to. And I know with Joseph's business looking at his inventory purchasing history he made a couple of purchases in there which I looked at and I just thought oh my goodness this guy is brave. Because he was taking huge chunks of inventory on at the time but he was able to do that because you guys had worked on this and he felt very confident about what was coming up plus he got great supplier terms that came with kind of a safety point there. Scott: We simply would not; two notes on that, one without going to the suppliers for the supplier terms we wouldn't have been able to grow as fast because we wouldn't have wanted to take on the personal risk that comes when you sign a letter of credit at a bank or anything like that. You've got a personal guarantee. So good supplier terms allowed us to have a business partnership that while we had a good-faith guarantee that we were going to pay them for that it's not the same as putting up your house or putting up all of the other assets that you have in the business. And forecasting was sort of a key aspect to that. Here's the other thing and I've seen it go the opposite way as well and I always like to stress this is that if somebody is thinking about eventually selling their business you have to understand that every dollar of profit in the year that you sell costs you three to four times as much. Because when you apply the multiple to your valuation if I am a company that's making $200,000 a year and they go out of stock and that stock going out of stock costs them $10,000 of profit. You not only lose the $10,000 of profit because you went out of stock you lose three times that amount and if your multiple is three and we're not here to discuss multiples. But the point is that just going out of stock we had somebody that we work with that went out of stock during a busy season for only two weeks, it cost them about $30,000 of profit and instantly they lost $100,000 off their sales price by one outage that forecasting could have prevented by knowing that they needed to order more. So I think if you needed a fourth reason out there why this is so critical I always say the most expensive way to finance your business is by running out of stock and not ordering enough not because we've all seen that yo-yo. Forecast at least allows you to see the problem so that you can address it proactively as opposed to all of a sudden boom you're out of stock and you're in a scramble and you're shipping by air which also costs you on your valuation and those things. So for those reasons that's why I think it's just so absolutely critical to running a business successfully particularly on Amazon. Mark: Yeah and I want to comment on that real quick because I was about to say obviously we're going to be Amazon-specific; that's where you really know your stuff extremely well. The forecasting is an exercise that pretty much every business should be doing. I know I had Ben Murray on the SaaS CFO and he talks about the importance of forecasting in a SaaS business. And I know at Quiet Light we just recently implemented some forecasting models as well. And it's super helpful when I can look at; our major expense is conferences, right? So when I can even look out and see what our expense profile in the forecast for that over the next six months is it really helps us understand how to spend our money and gives us a different way of looking at this. Alright; forecasting, we could talk a lot about why we should do it for just running the business. When it comes to selling a business the impact of having a reliable forecast and the impact that it has on a buyer, I'm going to just comment on this real quick because with Joseph's business I was obviously working with buyers directly on that and I can tell you that oftentimes forecast get met with some skepticism. People look at it and they don't really trust them. When people look at your forecasts partly because of the way we structured the deal and there was an earn-out that we were upfront with saying look we expect some pretty big growth in this business so we're not asking for everything upfront. We're willing to do an earn-out type of structure here but also because of the way that the forecasts really seem to have some specificity to them. That became an integral part of that sales process where people wanted to delve in and understand the forecasts. And as we were going through an update in months people were checking the forecasts as well. And when they saw that you guys were right on them or in some cases maybe a little bit wrong but here's why. It changed the discussion dynamically. This was not just kind of an amateur business of somebody who found a product that sold well on Amazon. This was a business that was being run strategically and had a real plan moving forward. And so on the sales process, I think the very simple conclusion is you added a lot of value to Joseph's business by virtue of having the strategic planning and the strategic background that you were working on and then structuring a deal around this as well. Scott: Thank you. Yeah, so I think a couple of points on that; one of them as you transition over to the sales side of things, the first thing I always want to state is that most buyers like you said will say to you we can't buy on future projections. As a general rule, there's a lot of risk in Amazon and all of these reasons for it but I want to make this statement and I state it so boldly when I talk with sellers because I think it's so critical in forecasting such an important part of it. The only multiple that a buyer cares about is not the historical multiple, the only multiple they care about is what I call the buyer's effective multiple which is what is the price I pay divided by the earnings that I get which by definition is something in the future. So while they're not sharing their forecast with you if they don't believe they are building a forecast on their side which is helping them calculate what's called the return on investment in various ways. So the notion I want sellers to understand just as how when you build a listing you need to speak in the language of your customer in order to have your product listing make sense. It's the same thing when you go through a transaction you need to be able to speak in the language of a buyer to have the most credibility for that particular buyer. So the forecast that we built with Joseph is built very very much with that purpose in mind. We think of ourselves as an outsourced CFO to a business with the responsibility of communicating in the language of a buyer. So when I think about sort of forecasting and what I'll call more advanced forecasting what we were able to do was not just to say hey if you give us a bunch of cash we think the business will double what we were able to do is to look at every product on a per unit basis of how many units it's doing right now. We would then apply seasonality to it so that we had all the historical information to apply seasonality. We did that for every current product in every market based on the margin in that market whether it was in dot.com or in Europe or in the US. And then we were able to build in each of all of the product launches of new products that didn't exist today but we're coming out to market. And we were able to be conservative on those but in essence, show that even if we hit conservative numbers of that we're gonna be in a pretty positive situation. So I think the message is when a buyer sees all of that underlying logic in the forecast it's more than just an idea. It's really a strategic communication tool between the buyer and the seller. So they were able to go okay, and you bring up another great point which is that this is absolutely a process through the life of getting the transaction done. If it takes you a few months to sell your business every month you're updating that forecast; you're having that dialogue as to where things are at. So I think what I would encourage people is that when you want to be in front of a buyer the same way that you want to be in front of a customer and think about it from their lens. You want to do the same thing for a buyer and a buyer needs to understand what the potential is of the business in order to pay the highest price for it. And if they don't know the business as well as you do I look at it as we're sort of obligated in our minds to provide them that picture. They can agree or disagree and we can structure a deal accordingly but unless we have a common view of what we think reality is in the future that's really the only effective multiple that they can use to calculate their return on their investment. Mark: Yeah. And the phrase I've always used for that is buyers buy for ROI. And you see it's got that rhyme so it's more memorable. Scott: Yeah, I love it. I love it. Exactly. Mark: No one buys a business to lose money. People buy a business because they want to make money. And speaking in the language of the buyer it really does boil down to that and the more firm that we can make that ROI pitch of here's why you're going to see a return on your investment; the more fun you can make that the more certain a buyer is going to be, the more willing they're going to be to pay a higher price for the business. I feel that we spent a lot of time speaking on why and that's my fault here. I want to get into how to do this because it's one thing to say okay here's what my historical sales were and maybe we're going to assume certain growth; I mean what sort of assumptions would you start with when you're doing some forecasting on an Amazon business? And then I'm going to wrap in multiple questions here and just kind of let you go to town on this, how would you do like a new product launch as well? I'm interested in both of those questions; like existing products in the next year and also new product launches. Scott: I got it. So here's the way I think; I'm going to refer to this as the building blocks of a forecast. So the building blocks of a forecast first is an understanding that there are two types of forecasts that you need. One of them is I'm going to refer to it as a product forecast or a product sales forecast and the second one is one I'm going to refer to as a P&L forecast or an overall profit and loss or income statement forecast and here's how they relate together. The first thing that you need to build is you need to build your product forecast which is, in essence, each one of your products. And part of what we've built over the last two or three years is toolsets to do this. But even if you weren't going to use our toolsets and just think about it conceptually every one of your products you need to know what the margin of that product is. You need to understand what the historical sales of that product have been. And then very simply you need to be able to project out; we do it on a per-day basis because that's generally how people think about it and then multiply times 30 but you need to be able to project out how many units per day or per month of each one of my current products am I believing that I'm going to sell. The second thing is most of the time when we build a per product forecast for people and they say that they want to double the size of their business or that they could, the first thing that they realize when they look at all their existing products is that that's not going to get them where they want to go. And that's where new product forecasting comes in. And the way that we do new product forecasting is exactly the same way but we build in what we call a launch budget and then a launch ramp up for each one of those new products. So we'll build in an upfront cost of let's say $5,000 to do giveaways or ads or review gathering; those types of things. And then we'll build in that if I eventually get to 30 units a day of this particular product then it's going to take me four months to get there so we'll start at 10 units then 15 then 20 and then 30 over each particular month. So visually the way it looks is in the product forecasting all of your current products we have out on the top and then down below that over time you have a bunch of zeros but then you eventually have revenue coming in down below that if you list out all of your new products. And that gives you what I refer to as your product forecast. Mark: So how do you project out with some of these products on a per-day basis? I mean obviously; let's say I'm selling 10 units a day right now and I want to get to 17 units per day, where do you look at to say I think I can get here. You have to be looking at; we have to do X, Y, and Z to get here almost working backwards to be able to say we're going to do X, Y, and Z to get here or are you looking at here's what we're doing and here is just kind of the trajectory and where do you see the limit as well? Because that's more aspect of it where if you're doing 10 years a day you might want to sell a thousand per day but that market just isn't there for that. Scott: Yeah. So the way we think about that is first of all you have to look at what the overall market potential is. So pick whatever tool that you want to use. We use Helium10 for example when we say okay if I was in first spot for this keyword, this keyword, this keyword, and this keyword what is really a realistic assessment of how much I could gain? And then let's look at the product trajectory of where this product is at and if we're rank 15 then we believe that we can get; and we usually say start conservative. Start your product forecast on if I could eventually get to the top half of Page 1 but don't necessarily build a forecast based on I'm going to outtake the competitor. A more advanced forecast what we want people to do is literally situate themselves compared to the competition. So it's pretty obvious sometimes when you go into a market and one of the clients I was speaking with yesterday while we're doing our forecasting work he said yeah for me to get to spot one or two is I'm going to have to have literally 4,000 reviews, I'm gonna have to do massive giveaways, so we said really for this product and this keyword and this niche we're going to keep the forecast is based on being in positions 3 to 6. And then let's look at where you're at now and if you're in position 22 but you're working your way out then you can build your forecast up to that particular level. But you really have to do it that way. And then the other key that we really really focused on a lot is every month has a seasonality factor to it. So you have to understand what is your seasonality factors when you're building your forecast. So in our tools for example we have the ability to set up to 12 different seasonalities because we want to basically allow you to understand when it gets to August how much should I order for the holidays or for a lot of people they have summer seasonality when should I place my orders. So you really have to assess not only the units per day but assess the seasonality side of things. And then the only other thing that we look at in terms of building that sort of bottoms-up forecast is don't always plan that a product is always going to stay level. You have to plan sometimes over a two or three year period based on the product life cycle to start to even put in a slight decline. There might be competition there might be price wars and those types of things and I think that's absolutely critical to forecasting because it encourages you to always innovate. Where sometimes people get a few; and I'm sure you've seen this a ton of times, you get a few hero SKUs that are doing great but then they don't invest in new product and we've talked about this before, you have to keep doing that even if you're thinking about selling your business because you can't count on those products always being the big winners that they might be today. Mark: How many influencing variables do you typically look at in a mature forecasting model and are they working together in a formulaic way or are you really just taking more subjective assessments of these things? And what I mean is let's say that you're looking at I know this is what my keyword volume is for particular products, I know what my [inaudible 00:36:08.1] says so I can kind of back into some projected numbers here from just the paid model and here's the organic models so you can almost approach this formulaically or you could sit back and again have more of this the subjective look at all the different factors. Are you taking more of this variable approach? Scott: Yes. So here's what I would say. I look at formulaic as tools that provide insight but do not provide wisdom. You as the owner of your business need to become what I'd refer to as wise. And my way of thinking about it is you have a bunch of data that eventually leads to information that then information leads to decisions and then decisions over time leads to wisdom. And so the way that I think about that is sort of like a pyramid building up. The tools provide you the data and the information but it's your insight and your time and experience that provides the wisdom. So the way that we think about it is every one of your products with our best clients that we force them through the discipline of looking at all of the data out there but committing to units per day in the future going forward on this particular product and think of it as sort of a manual override. All of the forecasting tools out there are great but every one of them every time; and we built all these tools because I built that originally for my Amazon business and eventually what ended up happening in every conversation we have with owners of businesses they say oh yeah I know that I used to do this the last three months but I've really taken a hit. My review rating went down to 4.2 and I lost 20% of my sales. Oh good, then we better put this one down at 20 units a day down from 30 until we feel more comfortable with it. So once you get the process down, that's what I want to encourage people, as you get the process down to where it's a half-hour a week the one that we do that takes an hour a week they have 75 parent SKUs out there and we can go through that in an hour and just yup, yup, yup, yup, and just continually refining what that particular process is. So I always think of it as tools versus wisdom and you need to apply the owner's wisdom to it. That's the only way we've found; same thing with launches you have to build into a launch what do you realistically think that it's going to take. And then oftentimes that's why this cashflow thing is so important is that we have multiple clients that will list out 15 different products that fit the brand. Then we'll look at the cash flow and we'll say here's the first five, the second five, and the third five, and we're going to roll them out over the next year so that you can then implement them in a way that is cash flow acceptable to the business. Mark: How do you recommend people get started? I know we're getting up against the clock here but starting something like this can be terribly daunting because there are just so many factors to be able to consider. Any recommendations on how somebody can start out maybe with some simple forecasting? Scott: Yeah. So here's what I would say there's four levels to forecasting and if you take nothing else from today implement Level 1 which is look at every one of your products, what it's done historically, and implement what you believe that it can do over the next 12 months. And if you want to do it by using the historical sales via ASIN report or the business report that comes out of Amazon for the last month and then just project what that is in terms of units and then in terms of sales build yourself a very simple spreadsheet in order to do that. That will at least start to give you an idea. And if you commit 30 minutes every week to looking at that sheet that you've built and you build that and just continue to update that I guarantee you you'll learn more about your business. So step one is just do that every week. Pick a time that you're not frustrated and you want to just kind of look down and see what the potential of the business is because frankly, that's a pretty exciting goal for you to then say hey if I want to get here; that's what we always…another action we say is you can't manage what you can't measure. So you have to build it to that. Level 2 then is to apply seasonality and new products. So layer on new products you're thinking about and if you don't know what they are right now still layer in I want to release 4 new products in the next year, I'd like to think that they could be as good as my current one's etcetera, etcetera, and then look at your seasonality trends. The next level beyond that and I want to describe this because you do have a lot of advanced sellers that are thinking about selling on this podcast is transition from a product forecast to then look at the rest of your income statement on what I call a percentage of revenue basis and project out that if the revenue doubles or grows up by 20% does my cost of goods sold go up by what percent. And so each one of your line items I always look at it as product costs are 19% of revenue, Amazon selling fee is 15%, FBA is 21% and get to where you can easily know every one of your; overhead and tools is 4%, paid media is 12%, know every one of your numbers on a percentage basis and you'll now have the product forecast and then the budget forecast and you'll be at what I'll call it an advanced level. And then the expert level what we build for people when we want to take them to market is we apply what we call a scenario analysis which is where we're looking at worst case, middle case, best case so that we can show it to a buyer that hey even if this thing doesn't do everything it's still going to have a positive ROI for you. But if it hits either the middle or the advanced case or the more aggressive cases your ROI is going to go up to 70 or 80% IRR. So the most advanced one then is to take a base forecast and then create scenarios and that probably building a toolset to do that all by yourself unless you really like doing that might not make the most sense. There's folks like ourselves or your accountants or other people out there that you probably want to work with but that is sort of the ultimate level because now and my closing comment of this will be relating it all back to the topic of selling your business. For most people, more than 50% of the money ever put in your own pocket will come when you sell your company not when you run it because you're always having to finance your inventory. And forecasting is the simple thing that tells you when is the right time to sell because it answers the question when does my value reach a level at which I go oh wow if I could get that much for my business now is the right time to sell. So we haven't talked about that at all but the number one question you get is the number one question I get; what is my business worth and when should I sell, and is now the right time to sell? Forecasting is the answer to that particular question and not some answer that Scott gives you or Mark gives you. But my goal for everybody on this podcast would be implement forecasting and give yourself some time to get good at it and you'll be able to answer that question for yourself which is a very powerful enabler for your business. So that's why I'm so passionate about the topic because it ultimately answers the question what should I do with this business and when; should I keep it or should I sell it and if so for how much. Mark: And even on top of that I mean Joe says all the time he says don't decide to sell your business plan to sell your business, right? Don't just wake up one day and be like I'm done because you're leaving money on the table; guaranteed you're leaving money on the table if that's the way that you go about it. If you say my goal is to get here to this number then like you're saying you can work towards that goal, you know how to get there, you have a roadmap to get there as well and you know that you're going to maximize the value of your business at the time of the exit which is frankly what most of us want to do. That's usually the goal. Scott, we could talk a lot on this and really get more in-depth. Thank you so much for coming on. I hopefully can have you on in the future we can spend less time on why and more on the how because it seems like we just started to scratch the surface on this but I really appreciate it. Where can people find out more if they want to ask you questions about forecasting or frankly anything else that Northbound does and I'll just make this quick plug; you guys do great work. I love working with you guys. Where can they find out more about you and your group? Scott: Yeah so I'm always happy to answer questions so people that want to get a hold of me individually ScottDeetz@NorthboundGroup.com or if you want to get in contact with us just in general do Info@NorthboundGroup.com and I'm happy to answer any questions. You're right there's just so much to this but it's to me the most powerful thing that can put you in control of your business. So if there are people that are out there that feel like they're kind of bouncing along and they don't really know where their business is going or what its true potential is, forecasting is the thing that gets you back on the horse where you've got the reins firmly in control and you can see your business as opposed to just feeling like you're reacting to what's in the rearview mirror. So thanks for having me on. I look forward to obviously working with you on [inaudible 00:45:28.5]. Mark: Thanks, Scott.   Links and Resources: Northbound Group Email Scott Email Northbound Group

You’ve gone from startup to six or seven figures. Your business is healthy and growing. You’re ready to sell. What next? Just like selling a house, you can’t simply throw up a “For Sale” sign. You have to stage the house for showing, the financials should be in order, and you have to ensure that prospective buyers see value.

On the show with me today is Mark Daoust, founder of Quiet Light Brokerage and in today's interview, Mark and I spent about an hour discussing how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light is one of, if not the leading brokerage for online businesses, and Mark and his team have seen it all. Unfortunately, most buyers and sellers haven't, and as a result, they are often very poorly prepared to engage is such an important transaction. If you are thinking of buying a business and want to learn the right way to buy an online business - or you are thinking of selling yours - you are going to love all the knowledge bombs that Mark shares in this episode. The Questions I Asked Mark: Company Overview [04:29] What does your company sell? [08:10] What made you pick the niche you are in and how did you research it? [10:23] Tell me about the landing page you created [11:46] How did you do the targeting on Facebook? [13:00] How many emails did you capture? [14:20] What was your cost per email? [15:15] How many emails do you need to make a sale? [16:13] How did you figure out if the business was going to fly based on this first week long test [18:03] Tell me about how to be successful on crowdfunding [19:04] How did succeeding with crowdfunding affect your company in the early stage [22:31] How did you end up raising $300K on the crowdfund? [24:41] Tell me about the product and what you have done to make it unique and memorable [26:01] What do your gross margins look like? [27:48] How much money did you raise? [28:30] How did you raise the money? [30:53] Why did you shy away from institutional money? Marketing Related [32:02] What is your YOY growth rate? [33:07] Why did you launch the throw blanket [34:50] How did you do the keyword research for search term frequency [35:30] Where are you getting most of your new customers? [37:29] What are you doing to engage in direct dialogue with your customers? [39:55] What is your best marketing activity? [40:20] What other activities do you do? (SEO, Social, influencer marketing, paid traffic, etc...) [42:40] How many people do you have in the marketing department [46:32] What is your CAC? [48:08] Are you profitable on the first sale? [50:21] What is your AOV? Process Related [53:20] How much effort have you put into creating SOPs so far? 5 Quick Facts 1. What is your favorite business book? 2. What is your favorite online tool for growing your business? 3. Hours of work / week? 4. Family situation? Resource Links: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/ https://centurica.com www.ecommercelending.com/ https://amzn.to/2pMyi05 https://ahrefs.com www.marketmuse.com/ Show Notes: https://brightideas.co/mark-daoust-interview/

Mark Daoust’s passion for creating sales agreements that benefit both sides of the table led him to create Quiet Light Brokerage in 2007.

Hey everybody! Welcome back to another exciting episode of eggs. This time we’ve got special guest Mark Daoust. Mark is the founder of Quiet Light Brokerage an organization made of up Mark and a team of advisors who specialize in selling high value online businesses. With over 10 years of experience, Mark and his team have helped hundreds of small business owners and entrepreneurs maximize the value of their e-commerce, SaaS, and content-based businesses as they strategize the most profitable exit possible. Mark is a regular contributor to Entrepreneur, and has been featured in Inc, Forbes, and the Huffington Post, among others however most importantly today you can catch him on Eggs. Join us won't you! Tune in, turn up! Rate, like, share and subscribe! Our Guest: Mark Daoust Founder and CEO Quiet Light Brokerage Website: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/ Podcast: The Quiet Light Podcast Website: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/podcasts/ The Carton: https://medium.com/@eggsshow Feature with Zack Chmeis of Straight Method up now! https://medium.com/@eggsshow/zack-chmeis-35dae817ac28 The Eggs Podcast Spotify playlist: bit.ly/eggstunes The Plugs: The Show eggscast.com @eggshow on twitter and instagram On iTunes: itun.es/i6dX3pC On Stitcher: bit.ly/eggs_on_stitcher Also available on Google Play Music! Mike "DJ Ontic" shows and info djontic.com @djontic on twitter Ryan R2 SLC/BCN r2mg.com ryanroghaar.com @r2mg on twitter @r2mediagroup on instagram

Buying & Selling an Online Business (21:48) with Mark Daoust, the founder and owner of Quiet Light Brokerage. She shares stories from his entrepreneurial journey, and his philosophies on how to run and grow a small business. Then we get into the topic of Buying and Selling an Online Business (starting at 21:48), including what makes for a successful online business and how to make sure it can be sold. Mark introduces the four key drivers of value for an online business, and why buying an existing business may be better than trying to build your own. Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of this episode of The How of Business show – dedicated to helping you start, run and grow your small business. (TheHowOfBusiness.com)

Mark Daoust Mark Daoust is the founder of Quiet Light Brokerage, an online consultancy which helps owners of online businesses plan a financially successful exit from their businesses. He is the father of 7 kids. Between business and family, his life has ample veer and vroom. From Mark's Website "In 2007, a year after having sold his first online business, a friend asked Mark if he would be willing to help him sell his web hosting company. During the previous year, Mark was evaluating whether or not to start a consultancy firm to assist owners of profitable websites who wanted to divest of their websites. With the call from this friend, Quiet Light was officially born. Mark retained his friend’s business, put the listing out to market, and within two months had found a buyer at a price that was higher than average web hosting companies were fetching in the marketplace. Since that first business in 2007, Mark has personally helped dozens of small business owners and entrepreneurs and has also expanded Quiet Light to the team it has today. In building out a team of advisors to help other small business owners, Mark has always emphasized the importance of honesty, working in the client’s best interest (even if that means not working in his own best interest), and thorough preparation of all listings before they are brought to market. Before Quiet Light Brokerage, Mark founded an online publication and grew it’s subscriber base to 220,000 members. Mark has been a presenter at top conferences and seminars as well as a guest author for numerous publications." Mark Daoust Vroom Veer Stories Not your typical entrepreneur kid in high school; he was NOT the kid selling candy out of his locker; fun fact spent 5-years in high school w/o getting held backWanted to study the classics and philosophy in college; his parents steered him toward a business degreeFell into a job in a web-hosting company; was tagged as one of three college students to open a new branch; took the job with the goal of getting firedHis first business started making money right away; until his credit card merchant account provider dropped himStarted a content based business that actually gained some sustainable tractionSold his 2nd business for all the wrong reasons; ego, hubris, boredom--but learned a lot about selling a businessQuietlight was started when one of his former clients and now a friend called him to help him sell his businessRadical/Reckless honestly is about telling the truth to clients even when it means the company won't make money from that truth Mark Daoust Connections Website

Today’s episode is a change of pace. I recently did an interview with the Quiet Light Podcast and I wanted to share it here. The founder of the Quiet Light Brokerage, Mark Daoust speaks to me about my experience with selling our family business and what I learned from the process. Specifically, we talk about strategic sales. I have learned a lot about building a good pitch for a buyer and I share that with Mark. If you aren’t familiar with my story and the path that led to Life After Business and GEXP Collaborative, this episode will answer a lot of your questions. What you will learn: My entrepreneur journey and joining my dad in the family business. The reasons people leave money on the table during a deal and how to avoid it. Why due diligence is so important and will kill any deal if done wrong. Strategic sales vs. marketplace sales How to think like a buyer and present your best pitch to a potential buyer. How to get your financials and value adds in perspective for the buyer. Know your market and be proactive in finding potential partners and buyers. The pros and cons of strategic sales. The circumstances when a strictly financial sale makes more sense. Good growth strategy is good exit strategy. The importance of having a great team of advisors. Takeaway: I really enjoyed my time on the Quiet Light Podcast. Mark and his team are really good at what they do. You can contact them through the Quiet Light Brokerage site which is down in the resources section. You can also reach me through LinkedIn and the resources I gave Mark during our interview. Just check out the resources section below. Links and Resources: GEXP Collaborative Life After Business Podcast Quiet Light Brokerage Quiet Light Podcast Me on LinkedIn (In case you want to feature Quiet Light Brokerage and/or GEXP Collaborative) About GEXP Collaborative: Ryan, Brandon, and Jim met at a National Exit Planning Conference. We hit it off with a shared extreme passion to change the way business owners look at the growth and exit of their company(s). We come from different backgrounds (Entrepreneur, M&A Attorney and Investment Advisor) but hold the same belief that the advice that business owners receive is fragmented and doesn’t align in a comprehensive plan. We created the GEXP Collaborative™ to bring together an ecosystem of different skills and perspectives to ensure that each business owner that we work with achieves the successful growth and exit of their businesses. From experience, we provide our business owner clients with recommendations based upon good judgment to achieve their objectives. About Quiet Light Brokerage: Late in 2006, Mark Daoust, received a call from a good friend and fellow entrepreneur who was considering selling his 8-year-old web hosting website. Just 10 months prior Mark had sold his own profitable website and was looking for a new direction. Quiet Light Brokerage was founded with this phone call. A lot changed since that first phone call in 2006. Today, entrepreneurs recognize Quiet Light Brokerage as a leading voice and authority in the emerging niche of selling and buying profitable websites. Today, over 500 websites have been sold and Quiet Light has over $100,000,000 in total transaction value. Even though they are recognized as one of the most successful website brokers in the marketplace, they still ta

Today’s episode is a change of pace. I recently did an interview with the Quiet Light Podcast and I wanted to share it here. The founder of the Quiet Light Brokerage, Mark Daoust speaks to me about my experience with selling our family business and what I learned from the process. Specifically, we talk about strategic sales. I have learned a lot about building a good pitch for a buyer and I share that with Mark. If you aren’t familiar with my story and the path that led to Life After Business and GEXP Collaborative, this episode will answer a lot of your questions. What you will learn: My entrepreneur journey and joining my dad in the family business. The reasons people leave money on the table during a deal and how to avoid it. Why due diligence is so important and will kill any deal if done wrong. Strategic sales vs. marketplace sales How to think like a buyer and present your best pitch to a potential buyer. How to get your financials and value adds in perspective for the buyer. Know your market and be proactive in finding potential partners and buyers. The pros and cons of strategic sales. The circumstances when a strictly financial sale makes more sense. Good growth strategy is good exit strategy. The importance of having a great team of advisors. Takeaway: I really enjoyed my time on the Quiet Light Podcast. Mark and his team are really good at what they do. You can contact them through the Quiet Light Brokerage site which is down in the resources section. You can also reach me through LinkedIn and the resources I gave Mark during our interview. Just check out the resources section below. Links and Resources: GEXP Collaborative Life After Business Podcast Quiet Light Brokerage Quiet Light Podcast Me on LinkedIn (In case you want to feature Quiet Light Brokerage and/or GEXP Collaborative) About GEXP Collaborative: Ryan, Brandon, and Jim met at a National Exit Planning Conference. We hit it off with a shared extreme passion to change the way business owners look at the growth and exit of their company(s). We come from different backgrounds (Entrepreneur, M&A Attorney and Investment Advisor) but hold the same belief that the advice that business owners receive is fragmented and doesn’t align in a comprehensive plan. We created the GEXP Collaborative™ to bring together an ecosystem of different skills and perspectives to ensure that each business owner that we work with achieves the successful growth and exit of their businesses. From experience, we provide our business owner clients with recommendations based upon good judgment to achieve their objectives. About Quiet Light Brokerage: Late in 2006, Mark Daoust, received a call from a good friend and fellow entrepreneur who was considering selling his 8-year-old web hosting website. Just 10 months prior Mark had sold his own profitable website and was looking for a new direction. Quiet Light Brokerage was founded with this phone call. A lot changed since that first phone call in 2006. Today, entrepreneurs recognize Quiet Light Brokerage as a leading voice and authority in the emerging niche of selling and buying profitable websites. Today, over 500 websites have been sold and Quiet Light has over $100,000,000 in total transaction value. Even though they are recognized as one of the most successful website brokers in the marketplace, they still ta

Intentional effort, going by stopping, and finding the good with Bjork Ostrom. ----- Welcome to episode 183 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, we’re rewinding back to a Bjork solo episode where he talks about how to keep going when you’re not sure you can continue.  How to Keep Going Happy 2019! For today’s podcast episode, we’re rewinding back to a solo Bjork episode called, “How to Keep Going.” This episode was originally published in August 2017, but the strategies, advice, and techniques Bjork shares will help you stay motivated in the new year. It’s tough to keep going, keep doing, and keep creating, especially when you’re trying to balance it with the other aspects of your life. The tips Bjork shares in this episode will help you get up each and every day to do the work. In this episode, Bjork shares: Why someone else’s path might not be the one for you How to find your own path Why time is a key ingredient How The Path differs from The Resistance How temporarily stopping can help you keep going Why deadlines are important and how they have impacted Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro Why gratitude moves you forward Resources: Open for Business Podcast Startup Podcast Smart Passive Income Podcast FE International Website Brokerage Quiet Light Brokerage Episode 032: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light Brokerage Pinch of Yum - Afton posts If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com.

Mark Daoust is the President, CEO, and Founder of Quiet Light Brokerage; a business brokerage that helps with the sale and acquisition of online business, websites, and more. In this episode we’re talking about how Mark built a website to 200,000+ subscribers and then selling it, how to buy and sell business, what makes a […] The post Mark Daoust | Founding & Scaling a Business Brokerage for Online Businesses appeared first on Smart Business Revolution.

One of the mistakes people often make when starting their own e-commerce business is they try to make the business an extension of themselves. They don't build out enough within that extension and therefore don't build a real business. A real business that is going to be attractive to buyers. Some also make attempts to reject Amazon, feeling they can achieve success with Shopify, Walmart, and other E-commerce channels. Today we are talking with a true Amazon veteran and success story, getting to the truth behind building real e-commerce success, working to build a real and viable business, and why it pays to go to China. Kevin King is an e-commerce entrepreneur's advisement expert. He teaches to and works with seven to eight-figure companies and speaks at e-conferences all over the world – attending nearly twenty-six events in at least 10 countries in 2018 alone! He runs his own e-commerce site selling his Amazon products, and has developed and guided hundreds of products from inception to market. He's been in the Amazon Private Label space since 2015. He's here talking about the Amazon opportunity bubble and how he doesn't see it popping anytime soon. Episode Highlights: The skyrocket of the Amazon business model and how that model has changed. Kevin shares his tips for doing business right from the start and increasing chances for success. The different ways to approach the Amazon model. Kevin gives us a definition of Amazon Private Label. The number one crucial skill you need to succeed on Amazon. What you really need financially to start a real business. How to find out where the demand is on Amazon. Why being on top of your inventory is vital to your success and how often you should turn your inventory each year. What it really means to build a brand and if brands mean anything to potential buyers. Why Amazon is a great place to launch a product but not to build a brand. Why product choice is the backbone to business success. What to look at when choosing a product to sell. Selling cheap easy turnover items versus high ticket items. The most important thing to do to improve traffic on Amazon. Unless it garners at least 20% of your revenue, multichannel sales don't increase your chances of finding a buyer. The international factor and branching out to other marketplaces. Kevin's golden rules for moving a product. How many products are the right amount to have in your portfolio? Where the money is really made in the Amazon space and the importance of how and where to source products. Transcription: Mark: Okay Joe I want to start this off with a question for you. Back when you owned Puristat how long did it take before you realized this is going to be able to grow into something and how long did it take before you turn it into kind of like a real business that could be scaled? Joe: That's a great question. I wish I had a really good prepared answer for it. Mark: I got you completely unguarded with that. Joe: Yeah. I'm one of those guys that built a business without knowing I could actually sell it. And as you and a lot of folks that know my history I started out on doing radio and direct response and did a TV infomercial and then eventually took it 100% online. But early on in my entrepreneurial career, I did have a sit down with a good friend … a family friend that slapped me upside the head in terms of accounting and I did have my ducks in a row in that sense. And I always built what was a real business so that if I got hit by a bus one of my head people could take over, my wife could take over things of that nature. But it never actually occurred to me until I was emotionally tired that I could sell the business. And then I reached out to a guy named Mark Daoust back in … gosh, 2010 right? Mark: Way too long ago. I think one of the things … one of the problems I see and I've seen over the past 11 years with entrepreneurs is we make the business an extension of ourselves; an extension of our personality. And because of that sometimes we don't really build the business in a way that can be sold and we don't have intentionality of building something outside of ourselves. And I know you talked to Kevin King who had a lot of suggestions and tips as to how somebody should be building their business for that expansion and again for lack of a better term a real business. Joe: Kevin used the term real business probably 10 times in the first five minutes and he is such an honest straightforward tell it like it is kind of guy that he says you got to build a real business. Grow up build a real business. Don't be a … build a real business. And he just says it in a way that you just have to go okay he's right, I need to stop messing around, grow up, and build a real business that is going to be really attractive to buyers when I'm ready to sell. Kevin is one of the few guys that is out there teaching, helping, coaching entrepreneurs build ecommerce businesses with a focus on an eventual exit. He's got a four year plan in terms of … you know step 1, 2, 3, 4 in terms of year 1, 2, 3, 4 with an exit in mind not that you're going to exit but that you're in a position to exit in 48 months. Part of that is giving it enough time to mature and grow and gain value. And he's a believer as many folks in his position are that a majority of the revenue that an entrepreneur gets to put in their bank account comes upon an exit and that's a simple matter of math. We hear Scott Deetz talk about that a lot and he's an advocate of that as well. But I tell you there are … the gurus are a dime a dozen and Kevin has been around a long time. He walks the walk, he talks the talk, he's a guest podcast on lots of podcasts, AM PM Podcast co-host, and helps out a lot with Helium10. And now he is so sought after. He's being asked to go and present and speak around the country … around the world and he's being paid to do it. You and I have to … we have to say can we sponsor and by the way can we speak and we pay them to let us up on stage these people are actually paying Kevin to get up there and talk because the wisdom that he shares is so valuable. Mark: That's fantastic. I want to get to this, hear what he has to say. I was at a conference a few months ago and there's a speaker who said … and I'm going to keep this PG even though he wasn't PG but he said if you want to have a real business you have to do real business stuff. And it's one of those truisms that is just kind of basic but good to hear once in a while. So I'm interested to hear what Kevin has to say about it and for those listening, I think it would be a good idea to listen to some of the specifics that he gives here and just measure up against what you're doing right now. Are you doing these things? Have you been doing real business stuff within your business to actually build something that's real and external? Joe: Perfect let's go to it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley with the Quiet Light Podcast and I have an amazing guest today. His name is Kevin King. Kevin, how are you today? Kevin: I'm doing good Joe. How are you doing? Joe: I'm good man. You're kind of a legend in this industry now. You're traveling all over the world speaking at events, getting paid to speak at events, helping 6, 7, 8 figure entrepreneurs build their Amazon businesses. That's kind of the intro, why don't you tell us who you are and what you're all about so the people will understand it directly from you? Kevin: Sure no problem. Yeah, I've been doing ecommerce since the 1990. So I go back about 20, 25 years or so since the days before there was even a Google. I've been selling ecommerce to my own websites. I started selling on Amazon on around the year 2000 or so and then I've been doing the FBA model which most people are familiar with now since 2015. I originally started out doing wholesaling, some arbitrage, and some other stuff on Amazon and still do that through another business. And then I'm also involved in a couple of different training things. So I teach advanced level sellers, 6, 7, 8 figure sellers in the Illuminati Mastermind which I'm mostly training. Like a 3 hour training [inaudible 00:05:54.2] these tactics and techniques for sellers and then we do a live event once a year. It's a pretty high level live event and then also I have a course called the Freedom Ticket which trains new people on how to sell on Amazon as well as how to have a 7 figure Amazon Business that I do myself and then I'm partners with a couple of other people and a couple of other Amazon businesses. And then I … like you said I speak at a lot of events all over the world for Amazon sellers and ecommerce. Joe: And why don't you tell us how many you went to so far this year? This is being recorded in late 2018. Kevin: Yeah in 2018 I'm at 26 events so far this year. Joe: And say how many different countries. Kevin: Oh man I haven't added that up. The number of countries would probably be at least 10. Joe: At least 10. Kevin: So I would actually … it's a … China, Hong Kong, let's see … several United States including Hawaii and it's not another country but Hawaii and then several and Germany, so Germany, London, Greece, Romania, Ukraine, man all over … all over the place. Joe: That's incredible. And you're attending and speaking at these as well right? Kevin: That's correct yeah. Some of them I'm just an attendee but over half of them, I'm actually speaking at. Joe: All right well let's help the people that are listening, those that have Amazon businesses and those that don't, those that want to get started. A lot of folks like you and me started off with our own websites and Google AdWords and content development and eventually morphed over to Amazon. I didn't, I sold my business before you were selling in Amazon but before I realized that Amazon was a tool I could sell on. I sold in 2010. I look back and think man I wish I knew a Kevin King back then. Kevin: Yeah the Amazon space is one of those that … it had a hot wave around 2012 or so. The guys over at Amazing.com kind of set this off where they turned it into a business model and started instead of getting rich in real estate let's get rich in selling on Amazon. And so they started doing courses and it took off and since then there's probably about 4 or 500 other people that came out with different courses. And to be frank, most of them suck. The guys at Amazing do a pretty good job and there's three or four others. I'd like to think that mine is one of the better ones but most of them are people that either isn't selling on Amazon or tried it and failed or they're just not very good. So you have to be very very careful out there. It's become a big industry that is … a lot of people realize they can make more money selling the show than they can selling the gold or whatever or that saying is you know. It's teaching people how to do it rather than doing it. But the opportunity … so as a result of that a lot of people say hey is this selling on Amazon saturated? Is it too late? Did I miss the boat? I say absolutely not. I think it's better than ever right now. The difference is it's no longer an easy game where when 2, 3, 4 years ago it's pretty easy to just go to Alibaba.com find a product slap your name and logo on it and sell it on Amazon and those days are pretty much gone. It's a real business now. So if you approach this as a real business and not a get rich quick scheme and not listen to a lot of these course guys that are saying you can quit your job tomorrow and sit on the beach drink margaritas and just check the app and watch the sales come in. But treat it like a real business and keep your job. Don't quit your job maybe for a year as long as you got money … unless you have a lot of money in the bank saved up that you can live on. But if you treat this like a real business that you can reinvest it there's no better business out there that has a better return right now. And Joe you know this, you guys broker a bunch of businesses so you see these numbers and you see the guys that do it wrong and the guys that do it right. And like I always say if you take $5,000 and you put that into the best mutual fund on Wall Street in about 3 years you'll have about 7500 bucks or so roughly on average. If you put $5,000 on an Amazon business and do it right that $5,000 in 3 years can pretty easily turn into about $52,000. So the ROI is tremendous but you got to do it right, you got to treat it like a business. And I always tell people if you're going to start in this business the thing that you need to do is … I say it's like a 4 year plan. Year one you're basically learning and you're earning. Year two … whether that's you taking a course from someone that you paid, you're watching some YouTube videos or whatever you may be doing, you have to be careful though if you're watching YouTube videos because some of that stuff is out of date or incorrect. So you're learning and you're earning. In the 2nd year, you're optimizing. So maybe you're adding additional products and additional variations. The 3rd year you're preparing to sell. You're getting all your ducks in a row. You're getting all your financials correct. Hopefully, you've been doing this all along but you're really optimizing your financials and in the 4th year you sell. The best opportunity in this business is not running the business; it's in selling the business. Because when you sell an Amazon business typically that's where you're going to take in over half of your profits. Sometimes as much as 70 or 80% of what you're going to walk away with from running the business. People would say why the heck would you sell a business if this is such a great opportunity Kevin why the heck would you even sell it? And I say well it's leverage. I mean there's no better … that's how you get ahead. You know in real estate that's how you get ahead and wherever it is leveraged. Even if you're making $200,000 a year off this business if you can walk away in one year with a million bucks let's say in your pocket, you can just turn around, pay off some bills, take a nice vacation, buy the wife a new car, whatever you want to do and then start over again. And I know a lot of people that are on their 3rd Amazon based business right now. I know a guy that sold his first one in a year for half a million. He sold his 2nd one for 7.5 million. Now it's the third one. I know another couple, a really nice husband and wife team that just recently sold one for 4 million, got a multiple of almost 4.2 and their next goal is 2021 to sell it for 10 … the next one for 10 million. So it's a great way to do that. Joe: [inaudible 00:11:38.6] them the skill set. You know the folks that I talk to they build these and then we sell them for them. Once they've got that skill set they can go back to the well. They can go back to the Amazon well and build another brand because they understand it. But let's throw some chips out there. You said you could turn 5,000 into 50 in 4 years. We've seen 5,000 turned into several million in 4 years. How much would you recommend to the newbies that are out there and what I want to do here is give some tips from you the expert. I get so much misinformation out there. I want you to talk about a few tips that newer folks should do so that it increases their success level. And then to those folks that are out there doing it now some of the things that you may be able to call from your travels and your experience that are new that are completely different than they were maybe even just 12 months ago. But how much money do you think somebody at a minimum should start off with and should they be focused on branding, wholesaling, arbitrage … what is your opinion on what they should do to get started and increase their chances of success so that they can have that big exit down the road? Kevin: Well I can say this 11 different ways to skin the Amazon cat. You can make money off affiliate market by doing wholesale, by doing retail, arbitrage, online arbitrage and there are several other ways. The best way, in my opinion, is private label. It has the most opportunity and the best margin. So if you're looking to maximize your return you should really look at the private label side. Joe: Let's define that if you would please? Kevin: Sure. Joe: Just for the new ones starting off. Kevin: The private label is where you're actually basically creating a brand … attempting to create a brand or you're actually taking products that already exist, maybe modifying them slightly and putting your name on it. It's kind of like if you go to the supermarket and you look at that ketchup, there's Heinz ketchup which everybody knows that do all the advertising and right next to it is the local store brand, Safeway, Kroger, whatever it may be brand of ketchup which often comes off the same factory. And it's often the exact same materials they just has a different name on it usually at a slightly lower price. Joe: Right. Kevin: So that's private label. So the idea behind the private label is to go onto Amazon use a lot of these tools, these 3rd party software tools, find the opportunities, and that could be either based on keywords or it could be based on complaints and customer reviews and you can fix the problem and you can come in and compete. The Amazon business itself is the number one most crucial skill you need to have is mass. This business is all about numbers and so if you're not a numbers person you need someone on your team that is a numbers person. It's not something where you get emotional and hey I built a better mousetrap or I've made a new invention. I mean there are opportunities there if you have a new invention or you have a new idea but there has to be the demand. And the beauty about Amazon and selling on Amazon is it's a huge laboratory. I mean with 550 million or so products on there most of them with a review someone with thousands of reviews. It's a great laboratory. I mean companies 10, 15 years ago used to have to do focused group marketing and all kinds of expensive research just to get this kind of feedback and it's publicly freely available right now to anybody that wants it. So you can go in there and if you know how to mine this data you can find major opportunities. And so you want to look … it's all about math. So back on how much should you start with you know that depends. I recommend you have at least 5 to $10,000. I mean you hear stories of people start with 100 bucks or 500 bucks but usually they may have started with 100 bucks but what they don't tell you is that a week later they borrowed 50,000 from their rich uncle. They have these rags to riches story where they get terms from their supplier, there's something else to it. You can't start with it, I mean you could start arbitrage with a 100 bucks if you're going to grow a real business you need money. You can start a business with a thousand or a hundred … hundred to a thousand but it's going to be a really slow build. So the more you have the faster you can go. So what I always say is if you going to start this business how much do you need? You need 2 ½ times your initial inventory investment. So if your first round of products is going to cost you let's say $4,000 to have made. So you're buying 1,000 units of something. That means you can basically spend about $4 per unit landed cost. Landed cost means the cost to manufacture the item whether that's in the United States or in China plus the cost to ship it and if you're importing it all the taxes and shipping cost that's basically landed in the Amazon warehouse. So you need 2 ½ times that. That means you need about $10,000 to start the business. If you don't have $10,000 you need to find a different type of product to sell. If you only have 5,000 good, do the math and you have to find some things you can buy for about $2,000; your initial inventory. Joe: So if you're buying 1000 pieces at 4,000 bucks what's the other 6,000 for? Kevin: The other 6,000 is because in this business it's a very cash intensive business. So if you're successful you're most likely going to have to be buying your 2nd round of inventory before you sold your 1st and probably before you've even paid for your 1st in full. So you're going to need … the worst thing you can do on Amazon is to run out of stocks. If you run out of stocks on Amazon for more than a few days you're basically starting over. That's the death. Now 90% of people that start selling on Amazon fail or they take a course either they don't launch or they fail because they don't do the math right. They don't plan it properly. They don't pick products that are within their budget that they can maintain, that they can sustain. And in the other … you know in this case of the 4,000 so you might need another 4,000 to place your 2nd order and then the other 2,000 is for advertising cost. You might need some software, some other miscellaneous things. That's the bare minimum. In my opinion, it's better to have a better cushion than that but that would be the bare minimum. And then it's all about math. It's all about looking at keyword demand. It's not trying to invent something new, that's kick starter or that's … you know there are other business models for if you have something that's brand new that you want to do. But the best opportunity is to look at the demand on Amazon. Use these keyword tools. See what people are searching for, what they're buying, what they're complaining about, and go in and either make a slightly different product of that or fix the problem that people are complaining about and then come out with something. And so that that's why I say it's all math. It's all about the financial side which most people are not good at and the forecasting and it's all about the keyword and the demand side. And there are some great tools out there … 3rd party tools that have come a long way in the last 3 years that can really help you with it. But most people that even are paying for these tools … you know they're paying 100 bucks for a tool like Helium 10 for example that's one of the better tools out there. A lot of people don't even know how to use the tools. It's kind of like they have a nice race car with all these gizmos and buttons and all these kinds of things that they can do to really race down the track at 200 miles per hour but they're just putting along at 40 miles an hour. So master these tools and learn these tools and you can do really well. Joe: Okay and that's the 1st year really the mastery of those types of tools and things of that nature. Kevin: Correct. Joe: Got you and we say a lot of the same things. I put myself on mute because I'm struggling because we're doing … one of the things I'm always saying is that and I'm actually doing a presentation next week and its, if you want to increase the value of your business in the year before you sell, don't run out of inventory. You know that it's going to kill maybe certain things in terms of momentum on Amazon. I know that when you run out of inventory it reduces your revenue and your profit and that times your multiple is going to be the loss on your business value. I just said a lot. It probably doesn't make sense to most but just don't run out of inventory. Do what you can; beg, borrow, steal, hillock, line of credit, credit cards, whatever it takes if you've got a good solid business. As far as the brand sell or the private label do you recommend and do you prefer seeing people picking a category, let's say they're going to … okay, I'm going to invent a new … I'm not going to invent, I'm going to build a better mousetrap and it's a swimming pool cover and then all of the additional products evolve around swimming pools or do you think you find that great product there and then you do this search for the next great product and it may not be related at all? Kevin: I think there are two different ways to do that. I mean one is if building a brand is difficult, building a brand it's not just sticking your name and your label on something. A lot of people think that's a brand. They think that if I create a logo and stick my name on my pool cover I, therefore, have a brand and I have a bunch of pool and that's not true. Brand is an identity. It's something that people relate to. It's like … you know think of Apple, people are lining up to get the new iPhone. It's a certain cool you know Apple came out with that thing differently you know that it's almost like a … it's hard to build a brand and I don't think Amazon is the place to build a brand in my opinion. I think Amazon is a great launching … if building a brand is your strategy that's awesome and Amazon can be a great place to launch because the marketplace is already there. The view about Amazon is they already have a huge audience and just all these cool tools that you can use to figure out how to reach them. If you go out and you build your own Shopify site or your own ecommerce store you've got to figure out how they bring the traffic there. You've got to start doing Facebook ads, email list, PR, whatever it may be to bring the traffic there versus on Amazon you don't have to do that it's already coming. You'll only use outside traffic … if you have to use outside traffic to drive sales on Amazon you're doing something wrong. In my opinion, the only time you should use outside traffic to drive sales on Amazon is when you're doing a launch. If you're launching a new product and you need it to kind of influence the algorithm, that makes perfect sense and you should do that. But if you're heavily weighted on driving outside traffic from Facebook and you're sending it to Amazon just to make sales on Amazon then you shouldn't be doing it. You should have sent that to your own store because when you send someone from Facebook to Amazon they're not … they don't become your customer. They're not identifying with your brand, they're identifying with the Amazon brand. They're buying because it's Amazon, they get it in a day or two. They trust Amazon. They know that it's easy to return blah blah blah. In most cases, they don't really care about your brand. So if you're trying to build a brand you need to drive it to your own store. But using Amazon as a launch pad because it has a built in traffic and then you could use the data you get from Amazon you can refine your product get it fixed get that good feedback and then take that data from Amazon even as a 3rd party seller you can create what's called [inaudible 00:21:36.9] and all kinds of stuff on Facebook and then go out and build a brand that would identify more with you. And I think the best opportunity to build brands using Amazon is on consumables … on people … maybe it's dog treats or supplements or something like that where people will come in over and over and over. But if you're selling pool covers … building a brand is difficult so what I tell people is still trying to really build a brand initially that may come and evolve into that is more build … go after an avatar. So rather than just trying to be the guy doing all the pool supplies, to give yourself the best opportunity on Amazon so you're not stuck in a niche. I mean if you go after the pool supplies and you're doing pool covers and pool chemicals and pool everything else you're kind of stuck there. You're like okay what else can I find in a pool category versus if you go after an avatar and you pick a person … let's say it's a runner. I'm going to go after an athlete, people who love to run outdoors, then you can actually go across multiple categories and you can do something like something in electronics category that's a fitness tracker or a band to hold your iPhone on your arm or whatever and you could do socks and you could do water bottles. You can get across over all these different categories and you open yourself up to more opportunity. Or you can just … you know some people they don't care; it's just the shotgun approach. It's like I just find opportunities I don't care it's just cash flow. Typically if you have a brand it depends on the buyer. Some buyers actually really value that and they'll pay a higher multiple for that if you're planning on selling. Others don't care they just want the cash flow. So it depends and so when you're 1st starting you might just … I don't know that you need to think about that because it's going to evolve. Most people their 1st or 2nd product doesn't succeed, it's more of a learn … some people get lucky and it does but you can ask most big sellers that are doing 7, 8, 9 figures a year and they'll say yeah my 1st one it just I don't sell it anymore it didn't work. So I would get too stuck at that in the beginning. I would just keep going and then it's going to come to you. You're going to start seeing the opportunities and you'll be able to drive off. Joe: I got you, great information. It totally makes sense, the avatar and being able to say okay I'll do a running … people that are running. And it could be men, women, it could be kids. Again the products breath and depth is really really broad and deep as opposed to limiting to grilling products or swimming pool products. Kevin: Not to say you can't do that, I mean you can do that but I think the opportunity is better if you go towards an avatar rather than just a niche. Joe: Yup, got it. I love it. Let's talk about for those that are listening to this podcast Kevin obviously they can tell you know what you're talking about. They probably already know your name and have seen your presentations. What things are you doing and are your 7 and 8 figure friends doing that is new and different and must be done to help take things to the next level? What kind of tidbits can you share there? Kevin: Well the number one thing is to me the thing I've learned in this business is it's not about profit; it's about ROI if you're trying to grow a business. When I 1st started I was looking at products that would have nice profit margins. You hear people sometimes on Facebook say I've got 40, 50, 60% profit margins and those cases do exist rarely but I used to say bullshit on most of those people. The average in a private label business is between about 20 and 30% if you're doing things right. Joe: Let's call that seller's discretionary earnings for everybody listening that's … it's you run a net profit and you run a profit loss in Quick Books you get net profit on the bottom then we're going to add back those owner benefits like your salary like your meals and entertainment like your travel and things that nature that are not business related. So your net income plus your add backs equals your seller's discretionary earnings that's what we're talking about. Kevin: Now once you do your add backs that could go a little bit higher. I'm talking about just on the books you know when you when you are factoring it all your cost is about 20 to 30% on private label. On wholesale, it's closer to the 10 to 15% range. Joe: Right. Kevin: And wholesale businesses are a little bit harder to sell because you don't have really a brand. You're just selling other people's products. You don't have anything proprietary so they're a little bit harder to sell that's why I also said private labels is one of the better ones. So let's say it's in that 20 to 30% that's average, some people are higher than that some people are lower. But if you're in that 20 or 30% net you're doing okay for the most part. But what I used to do is when I was … it's … this business is all about choosing products. The product is the backbone of it. That's where it has a stone in a walk for a lot of people is they're afraid to pull the trigger because they're like I only have 5 grand or 10 grand to start, did I pick the right product. And sometimes they get paralysis by analysis and they just don't move forward. But when you're choosing a product I used to look at the profit margins. I'd find a crate maker for example as one of my old products and you know it had about a 40% margin from what I could buy it from landed and from what I was selling it from and I was like okay this is great but the problem was I was ordering … I ordered 1,000 of them and it took me about 6 months to sell those 1,000. And then I ordered another 1,000 and it took me about 5 months to sell the next thousand. So that's a turnover a little over 2 times per year. So I had a great profit on it but it was tying up my cash tying up my money and so ROI to me is the most important by far number in this business as you want to look at when you're sourcing products is what kind of return on investment. And that's basically how fast can you get your money back. And so I looked for ROI's of at least 150% or greater on everything I do now. And that basically means how many times … if I have and maybe a lower profit margin. Instead of the 40% profit margin, I may have a 25% profit margin. But if I have 150% ROI I'm working and turning that money and that inventory much much faster. And I can grow a lot quicker without having additional outside capital, without having to go into my RA or whatever it may be, or take expensive loans that are out there and you can grow your business faster. So by picking high ROI products, you have a greater chance to success. For example, I recommend you at least turn your inventory 4 times a year in an Amazon business. So it's basically every 3 months you need to be turning your inventory. Ideally 6 to 8. Some people you know a supplements business are at 12 or more. Just by example Walmart stores, their average inventory turnover is 8.3. So 8.3 times per year they're selling through their entire inventory. That's a critical number when choosing products and when choosing things to do in my opinion. So one of the bigger opportunities right now in the space is in the high ticket expensive items because all these courses out there they teach you find something if it fits in a shoe box it's lightweight weighs less, it's cost less than $20, it's easy to source you can buy in for a buck or 2 in China and sell them for 20 bucks on Amazon and the problem is that everybody is there. That's where everybody goes, that's where all the courses … everybody finds the same products, the same weighted blankets, the same barbecue gloves, the same stuff and only a few of those people succeed. And so if you go outside the box and look at the more expensive stuff maybe you don't have to buy a thousand units of them, you only have to buy some things that sell 5 per day but they're selling for $300 versus things that sell 50 per day and they're selling it at $20. You could make a lot more money on these more expensive things. And some people shy away from that because sometimes it's a little bit more of an investment to get into it. But there's great great opportunity there. And the other problem right now is what's happened with all the low end stuff is the Chinese hackers … most of them are Chinese, there are some that are Russian and Eastern European but the vast majority are Chinese and it's crazy what's happening out there. There are leaks inside of Amazon where these guys over in China can get the actual data straight from Amazon, the actual conversion data, the actual … they're doing all kinds of crazy stuff; hardcore competition and its part of their culture to do this. And most people don't … aren't aware of what's happening and your chances of competing on that lower end are getting harder and harder and harder because of all this. Joe: So you recommend to start off that way or you're thinking in terms of larger people … larger account owners to move into that category where its a larger ticket item and a high ROI? Kevin: Both. Joe: Both? Kevin: Yeah, both. Joe: Okay, you mentioned that if you're sending traffic to your Amazon store from Facebook you're doing something wrong on your Amazon … inside your Amazon seller account. What tools can be done what … and maybe it's all basics, Kevin, maybe this isn't anything new but what are the most important things to do to make sure you're improving your traffic on Amazon as much as possible or is it a combination of a number of different things? Kevin: I mean if you're a brand that already exists up there Amazon should just be a channel for you. You already have your own store. You're already selling in retail Amazon is just a channel so that's a little bit different approach. But if Amazon … if you're starting this business and Amazon is your primary focus at the beginning which is what most people are doing now that they're doing FBA business, Amazon is their primary focus in the beginning and that's great and people always say you shouldn't be an Amazon only business. You should be off Amazon and I agree with that but … and you could probably tell me more about this but my experience Joe in the valuations people always say well I don't want to just sell on Amazon. What if Amazon shuts my account down? Amazon likes to shoot 1st and ask questions later and then I'm screwed. I need to be selling on Walmart. I need to be selling on Jet. I need to have my own Shopify site. But most people, the vast majority of people that's a very small percentage of their sales and from my experience, unless it's 20 or 30% between … you know most people say about 30 % maybe you have a better number of your sales it doesn't really add to your valuation. If you got a sale or a buyer coming in if you got 2% of your sales in Walmart or [inaudible 00:30:59.9] if you get shut down on Amazon so what you're still screwed you got to fire everybody. And so most people it's hard to make that adjustment so my advice is if you're going to be starting on Amazon take advantage of the platform. There's never been a better opportunity. It's one of the best business opportunities in the last 100 years of business to start selling on Amazon. And like I said earlier if you're trying to build a brand then use that data and there are ways to do that to then start going off Amazon especially if you're on the consumables side. But I think you're better off taking that same energy that you're trying to put into building a Shopify site or trying to launch on Walmart to go expand to Canada, go expand to Europe, or go expand to Japan. You're much better off. You're going to get a better valuation. Canada is like 5% of my sales compared to the US but that's 2 ½ times what my sales in Walmart are and it's easy. It's same format. I already know how to do it. It's natural and most people are afraid to do that. They're afraid of other countries or they're afraid of other tax systems or they're … whatever. And its ego based. I want to be saying I sold on Walmart or I had my own site … it's bad. Joe: Yeah a lot of the folks that you and I know that are buying up Amazon businesses; one of the 1st things they do is take them international. They buy them and take them overseas. Let's talk about that for a minute- Kevin: But a lot of people don't do that because it's … you're basically doubling your investment. Let's say you want to go to Europe- Joe: They don't have the capital. Kevin: Most people in this business are cash strapped and that's where the opportunity right now is it's like the people that you just said that you know and that I know that are buying these, they're coming in with money and they see the opportunity and they come into play. And at first most of these entrepreneurs they use their life savings or … and then some to try to build this and they're cash strapped so they can't … I mean to go over to Europe you're basically okay now I got to buy all new inventory and float it and they can't do it. Joe: Yeah the people that are buying businesses like this that are coming into the entrepreneurial world for the 1st time say it's great why in the world are they selling? And I always have to ask that question on what they need to understand and what they're learning by going through the process is that most of these businesses whether it's a Shopify store or an Amazon business even those that I've sold in the past that are a combination of both and have a utility patent. It's still bootstrapped and most of the money being made is going back into inventory to keep up with growth. And they're not able to pull a whole lot out and so they're bootstrapping. And they don't expand overseas because they don't have any more places to dip into to pull more money. So somebody coming in from the outside that has that extra working capital and a mindset to take it beyond the 4 hour workweek and run it as you said a dozen times already as a real business and grow it into the different countries and take it beyond a one channel platform and beyond Amazon. You can take it to different countries and it's going to increase your value; it is when you could take it beyond into building that brand off of Amazon into different platform it builds your value even more. But you're got to be challenged. You got to look at that and say okay what … how long am I going to be in this game and how much am I going to invest in terms of time, energy, resources, risk into building a Shopify store and generating traffic to it. If you're going to sell in 6 months for those that are listening and you hear Kevin's advice you know multichannel he's right but every story is different and unique. You don't want to build a Shopify store and start driving traffic to it and investing a lot of money in breaking even or losing for 3 years down the road if you're going to sell in 6 months. My advice is to do what you do and do it really well. Keep selling on Amazon and make that business strong and have some built in path to grow. Kevin: Another one too besides Europe I mean like … or expanding to other market … I mean Amazon's into what 13 marketplaces now? But besides expanding to other marketplaces the other opportunity that's out there is … it goes again back again that gets cash strapped is retail. I mean retail is not dead. I mean there are all these stories about retail is dead and tears is going out of business and Radio Shack went out of business and blah, blah, blah. They didn't adapt. Amazon is going into retail. They've bought whole foods. They're opening retail Amazon Go's. They're opening these 4 star stores out. They're going … retail is not dead. It's still 90% of all sales out there and it's going to probably remain at above 80% for the next several decades. I mean ecommerce is gaining on … it's going to take a bigger share but so going into retail using Amazon as a proven ground is a great way to get into retail too. Joe: How do you make that leap though in Amazon? How do you go okay I'm going to go into retail? Is there a Helium 10 for retail? Kevin: No there's not a Helium 10 for retail, it's a whole different animal. You're just saying about the opportunities outside of Amazon is I agree going to Amazon … other Amazon Marketplace is first should be your top priority if you can. But going into retail I know several people that have started on Amazon and now they're crushing it in retail. But that's … again that's another cash flow thing you know you've got to … it's a whole different animal. There's people that teach … like Karen Waksman stuff that teaches actually people how to go from Amazon to retail and how to get into retail and how to use your Amazon reviews and sales and demographics. And you have this data like look you know I have a lot of people in New York or these areas and you have 27 Target stores right here you know you should be tearing my products. There's a lot you can do there but it's it takes again it's another financial thing. You got to wait 60 days or more to get paid or you got to use factoring to factor invoices and brief purchase orders and so it's a whole different animal but there's great opportunity there too. Joe: But it's also as you're saying it's more cash but it's also math figuring that out and pulling that data out of Amazon. A lot of people have trouble just pulling the data out. Kevin: Yeah they can't that's why I said in the beginning, this is math. If you're not good at math or data analysis you need someone on your team that is. This business is not about … I see so many people go like I improved the product, I made it better, I know my product is good people should just buy it. If the demand is not there, if the data doesn't work, the analyst … there's too much competition you can't … you don't have the margins you've got to bail. To me, people get too emotionally tied to products and then it becomes their little baby and they don't want to abandon their child. Sometimes you've got to kick the kid out of the house. So many people won't do that. I have a rule that after 6 months … I get a product 6 months that I launch. When I launch a new product under my account if within 6 months it's not throwing off at least $2,000 a month in profit, I drop the product because I can deploy that capital in a better way. And so I have … you know some people their business models add, add, add products they got hundreds or thousands of products in their portfolio, mine is not that. I have about 15 to 20 and I do 7 figures so it's manageable. And I kick out once that I replace them with something that can give me a better … it's like stocks you know. I treat products like stocks. And I look at them like stocks, where can I get the best return? And get rid of the low performing ones and replace them, deploy that money into getting something that's higher return. Joe: Let's talk about that just for a minute. We're running a little short on time but I want to touch on new products and staying relevant. And it's going to different for each one. But we're talking now about again the people that are buying the Amazon businesses and one of the great things they can do if they've got capital is to expand to the other countries. What about launching new products is there any methodology to how often you should launch a new product? Or should you just adopt what you've talked about which is it needs to kick off this amount of profit or I get rid of it? And how many can you manage and the folks that you know that are doing … are they doing 10, 15, 20; what are they doing? Kevin: It depends on your … I know people that have 800 products doing 9 figures a year and I know people … typically the people that are doing 9 figures a year have a lot of products. The people that are doing 6 and 7 figures typically … I mean some of them have a lot of products some of them has 50, 60, 70 products. That seems to be kind of a ballpark range. For these guys there in the million dollar figures, they typically are in the probably at least 40, 50 products and then some thousands of products. But as far as launching new products it's all based on the more products you can launch the better you can grow, its cash flow and its opportunities. I see opportunities all the time when I'm doing keyword research and product research and I can't act on it I just don't have the money or I don't have the resources. I'm a small team you know. Some people have 20 people and they could deploy faster. They're sitting in their underwear in their house and it's just them and a couple of VA's. So you're limited by that as well. So it depends on your strategy and your resources how fast you could deploy but as you see opportunities and they still exist out there and there are still new ones coming up every day is taking advantage of those depends on your cash and your team size. And the more of them you can take advantage of the faster you could grow and the more you could sell for. But the money in this business too, one of the important point I want to make is I truly believe that money is made in the sourcing, not on the selling. A lot of people always go what can I sell the product for? It's not what you can sell it for it's what you can source it for. Because you have more price … you're more immune to price competition that way. If everybody is going to Alibaba or global sources or online Google and stuff and just by example you know I just went to China. I went to the Canton fair and there are some socks that a friend of mine sold last year and sold like six … $700,000 for these socks Christmas time and they were paying something like 2 bucks a pair for these socks. Well I found those exact same socks by just going to the Canton fair at 57 cents. You're not going to find that online so most people that are out there doing Amazon they're sourcing online. They're using Alibaba, they're using global sources, my saying is get on a freaking plane and go to China. Because going in face to face you can … it's a big deal in their culture and you could find a lot of stuff that just doesn't exist. I found one supplier of these like Christmas bags that I was like okay great you have a lot of bags I might want to sell these next year as a seasonal item. I said can I go to your website? He said no I don't have a website, oh if you have a catalog … no, I don't have a catalog. I said so how do I order from you? He said take pictures. He had 10,000 different types of bags. Take a picture of what you want here and I'll give you a price, that and the prices were ridiculously low from what I could find on Alibaba. Joe: Sounds like an awful and wonderful- Kevin: So I'm like this is the best opportunity ever because nobody else is going to find this guy. His quality is good, the prices are ridiculous. So that's what I mean the money is made in the sourcing. So if someone else … if I buy a box of socks for example if someone else … you know if I'm buying them at 57 cents and someone else comes in and I'm selling mine say for 10 bucks and all of a sudden someone comes in and starts selling them for 5 bucks. Well, I'm like shoot if I got to go to 4.99 to compete and I'm paying 2 bucks there what my margin maybe I'm going in the hole even after the Amazon fees and everything. Because typically it's about a 3rd a 3rd a 3rd … I mean just as a … if you're doing math, get math, ballpark math Amazon typically takes about a 3rd of the selling price, about a 3rd of the selling price is your cost of goods sold and other expenses, and about 3rd is your profit. So I don't [inaudible 00:41:52.6] 5 bucks there went all my profit but if I'm at 57 cents I can still compete. So that's what I mean the money is in the sourcing and so don't be afraid to get on a plane and go to one of these big fairs in China. Go visit factories that can make a huge difference. And people that are selling, you know the biggest thing that they're already successful the number one thing you can do is if you're sourcing from China especially is get on a plane and go meet your factory. Go eat strange bugs and weird stuff and monkey hearts and whatever the hell else they eat crazy stuff over there and get drunk with the supplier and watch what happens to your pricing. Watch what happens to your terms. All of a sudden 30% down 70% on delivery all of a sudden maybe you get a 60 day terms or you get some other things that can make a huge difference in your business and the pricing is lower. Now you're their buddy you get priority on the production line when it's Christmas time or before Chinese New Year your stuff goes out first. It's amazing what you can do on the sourcing side. Joe: Wow Kevin that's incredible stuff, a lot of tidbits there. Incredible; really, thank you. I understand why you're traveling all over the world speaking and presenting here. If people want to reach out to you and find you how do they go about doing that? Kevin: Yeah sure I mean the probably easiest way is to go to AMZmarketer.com That's A – M – Zed Marketer.com that just redirects to my Facebook page where you can … I don't sell you anything there. It's just where you can listen to all the different podcasts I've been on; a lot of free content. You might get some ideas or learn something. Or if you're already selling at IlluminatiMastermind.com or if you're new to the business and I always recommend this to people … if you're new to the business or even if you've been selling for a while go to FreedomTicket.com there's a webinar there. It's about a two hour webinar it's … you could choose a date on auto replay. It's not live right now but just watch that. You don't have to buy the course if you don't want to but just watch the first hour of that webinar and I think you'll walk away from that. It's not a sales pitch in the first hour. It's a lot of hard core data on how to choose the keywords, how to do things right in this business and just … it's hard core training and just watch that and that might help you understand some stuff. Joe: That sounds great. I hope a lot of people will do that. Those people that are currently running their Amazon businesses and plan to exit someday and the people that are buying we want them to be successful and grow their businesses and come back and sell them someday so that's awesome. Thanks so much, Kevin. I appreciate your time. I look forward to seeing you at the next event. Kevin: Cool, I appreciate it. Thanks. Links and Resources: AMZMarketer.comIlluminatiMastermind.comFreedomTicket.com  

We speak with Mark Daoust, a serial entrepreneur who shares his expert knowledge on digital business. Two of his most recent and well-known ventures are Quiet Light Brokerage, a website brokerage firm, and Catholic Singles, a fast growing dating site. Before Quiet Light Brokerage, Mark founded an online publication and grew its subscriber base to 220,000 members. Mark has been a presenter at top conferences and seminars as well as a guest author for numerous publications.   Show Notes: Mark Daoust’s podcast: Quiet Light Podcast Send Mark an email: mark@quietlightbrokerage.com 33:55 – Quick fire questions THIS WEEK: Go online to learn how to bullet journal. Make bullet journaling a habit. For 10-15 minutes each day, set down all electronics and get away from outside noise. Take some time to think.

Once upon a time I (Joe) had an AdWords PPC budget that hit $45,000 a month. Over 5 years I learned AdWords on my own, had no training, a half dozen campaigns and a handful of ad groups. I thought I was pretty savvy and successful. This was about 10 years ago and to be frank, I'm older, wiser, more seasoned and would tell my 10-year younger self that I was a novice and wasting a TON of money. Don't be like me. Since 2010 I have heard dozens of entrepreneurs tell me they outsourced their paid advertising unsuccessfully. So when Jason Yelowitz introduced me to Strike Social Founder I was a little skeptical. But success and growth speak for themselves. Patrick McKenna boot strapped Strike Social from his kitchen table in a rented home in LA about 5 years ago. In 2016 Strike Social was named on the Inc. 500 List for the fastest growing companies. Their rank? Number 17! Strike Social helps brands improve their paid advertising campaigns, dramatically. One example Patrick gives is an ecommerce company that had their CPA go from $80 dollars to $16. This created great problems for the client. The first was rapid growth and much better margins. The second was access (or lack thereof) to monies for inventory. As you likely know – running out of inventory is an issue. Rapidly growing brands lack access to capital, run out of inventory and lose ground on the path to growth. Strike Social does a free analysis of a client's paid ad campaigns, a free test, and when the client comes on board and grows so fast they don't have funds for enough inventory, Strike will provide working capital for inventory. If it weren't for the rank of number 17 on the Inc. 500 list and the fact that you don't get there without proving yourself, I'd say it all seems too good to be true. After chatting with Patrick on today's Podcast, I say try them out get a free review. At the very least you'll learn what you are doing right and wrong in your own paid advertising campaigns. Episode Highlights: Instagram's paid advertising platform is the next Facebook. It's working. In Google AdWords you should have 1,000+ campaigns, not 6. Facebook is content driven and ads need constant testing. Video ads in Facebook can be as short as 3-4 seconds. YouTube is great, but not for direct conversations and CPAs. Strike Social developed technology recognized by Techcrunch.com that helped propel them to #17 on the Inc. 500 list. Strike Social will provide working capital to clients so they can ramp up inventory to match growth. Transcription: Mark: So one of the things that I find most difficult and frustrating about running a business in today's internet world is this idea of having these coordinated campaigns across multiple channels and multiple platforms, and the degree to sophistication which you need to run each campaign across each platform. For example with Facebook and Google, it's not so much to do just [inaudible 00:01:25.5] a couple of key words and hoping everything works for Facebook bring up a couple of ads and hoping it works. You really have to delve in and get super detailed. I understand Joe that you talked to somebody today that's doing this for a living. And they started a company and not only have they just started and are doing well but they're ranked really high in the Inc. 500 list specializing in running these cross-platform campaigns that are really highly refined. Joe: Yeah. It's Patrick McKenna from Strike Social and about five years ago he bootstrapped a company, he was literally working from the kitchen table in a rented house in Los Angeles. And he developed software that would analyze paid advertising campaigns and then go way beyond what you normally do in an excel file and so on and so forth. Standard stuff right? Well, that's what I thought when he was introduced to me by our very own Jason Yellowitz, they're neighbors. Patrick's company Strike Social in 2016 was ranked number 16 … no number 17 on the Inc. 500 list. And I think you and I have talked about this that that's impressive, number 17 on Inc. 500 list, you don't get there by accident. You don't get there without being really really good at what you do. Over the years, the last six years that I've been doing what I'm doing I talked to dozens and dozens and I might want to say hundreds that [inaudible 00:02:49.9] of people that started their own Google Ad Account and developed it as their business grew and managed it themselves and then got to a point where they said you know what I should outsource this. And they found somebody online and they outsourced it and what happened? It failed. That cost for acquisition went up, the budget went up and they had to bring it back in-house. Dozens of times I talked to these folks. So when I first connected with Patrick I was skeptical but then we talked, went into detail and he gave me some success stories that are really truly just incredible Mark to the point where I need you to listen to this podcast and consider talking with him about Quiet Light Advertising. They do testing for free. They do an analysis with their software and they'll do a test for free as well. And then they prove themselves and then like every other agency they get paid on a percentage of spend. But here's the kicker they've taken some clients and grown their businesses so dramatically that clients run out of inventory. That's the number one thing we tell folks is don't run out of inventory. It seems so simple but when people bootstrap the company and they grow they don't have enough working capital. And I've listened to other podcast, you know the EcommCrew Mike Jackness podcast where they talk about trying to find sources of working capital for inventory. Well, Strike Social will be that source for their very own clients. Because they've run into it so many times where it was so successful the client ran out of funds to buy more inventory. So they became that working capital source. So really impressive story, I would encourage everyone to listen all the way through to the 31 minute mark where he starts to talk about the working capital aspect of it. But there's a lot of good stuff here. He talks about some basic things that everyone should do. A quick story and then I'll stop talking. But when I ran my own Google AdWords campaign for the company that you brokered for me back in 2010, the most I ever spent was $45,000 in one month on paid advertising. I worked my way up that, up up from that in 2005 to 2010. Of course, after the crash, it was much lower but at the max … at the peak, I had a total of 10 campaigns set up in Google AdWords. And I had it all done with my keywords and I used all the software at the time to find those keywords and develop them; 10 campaigns. So in talking with Patrick, he talks about that their clients have an average of 1,000 to 6,000 campaigns and that's for one product, Mark. And that just makes me think about … again, yet again how much money I lost in two ways, really on wasted advertising spending and on not making it so good that my cost for acquisition came down dramatically. And I just want to encourage everyone that's listening to think about it and listen to what they're saying and have a conversation with them because odds are you're not doing it as well as you could be if you're doing it yourself. Just like what we talked about with book keeping, Excel is not accounting software. The basic pieces that you pull together for managing your campaigns across multiple platforms is not as good as what these guys have either. And it's worth to listen to him, worth a test I think in my opinion and experience. Mark: Yeah and I really have to agree with the fact that if you're doing it in-house and look I'm running some campaigns in-house right now for both companies that I own. That for a variety of reasons … but you have to understand if you're going to run it in-house, if you're not going to have a specialist, chances are you're not going to be doing it as well as it could be done. Because AdWords is an environment that really takes specialization. Facebook is an environment that really takes specialization. Frankly, I'm saying up a good automation sequence falls in the same category as well. So I'll be interested to listen to this. I definitely will be listening to this. I'm always looking to pick up on some information. Joe: Yeah and look Instagram is also in there as well. It's something we talked about. You know when AdWords was it that was the player Facebook came along and started to become the second option. Well, Instagram is now that option to Facebook and it's really starting to work. So those that have not expanded to those channels, listen, take a look, learn. And the other thing look this wasn't a pitch for this guy's services. This was helping people understand what they may or may not be doing right or wrong in their campaigns. And he talks about three things that you can do and focus on. And at the end Mark, I didn't ask him for a contact information like at all. It's in the show notes of course but for those that only listen the company is Strike Social. It's strikesocial.com and you can email them at hello@strikesocial.com that's hello@strikesocial.com it's a … we didn't talk about it at the end so I want to throw it in now. Mark: Awesome well let's get to it. Joe: Hey folks its Joe Valley of Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got Patrick McKenna with us from Strike Social. How are you, Patrick? Patrick: I'm good. How are you, Joe? Joe: I'm fantastic. Folks, anybody that knows Jason Yellowitz here at Quiet Light, you should, he's been around for I think longer than everybody except for Mark Daoust the founder of Quiet Light. Jason was my broker when I sold back in 2010 and he happens to live across the street from you right? Patrick: That's right we live in Reno, he's right across the street. Kids are always running in my house. Joe: Jason is a good man and I wouldn't mind having him as a neighbor. I often poke fun at Jason and his Bathrobe Millionaire book but it's a heck of a success story and I still don't have a piece of the bathrobe. Have you ever seen it laying around his house? Did he save it? Seriously is it like behind like a glass case hanging on the wall? Patrick: It's on the mantle sitting up there. He's very proud of that. Joe: Next time you're in I want you to take a selfie in front of it and send it to me okay? Patrick: [inaudible 00:08:47.7] Joe: Look in all seriousness Jason is top notch. He's my mentor. He's mentored to many. He's a terrific guy. And he introduced you to us. And as I mentioned before we started recording we do not do fancy introductions here at Quiet Light on the Quiet Light Podcast so I know it's going to be hard for you but I want you to brag about yourself a little bit because you have a heck of a success story. Tell us about Strike Social and what you do, what the background is and all that good stuff for us. Patrick: Sure, yeah we … you know Jason and I are sort of kindred spirits. We've been through the battle, it sounds like you have too … I mean a business is incredibly challenging. We did it like anyone else does it. We take the plunge, you bootstrap on a kitchen table out of our rental house in LA. And we started that process in March of 2013 and then we launched some technology and we got recognized in TechCrunch for this advertising technology, this analytics platform. By November after that article came out we're selling like crazy and that was some different challenges. You think initially that wow this is great and that my products rate and the market loves it. And then you start to realize that you're putting yourself out of business because you're trying to fund invoices and all those types of things that come up when you're running a business. So we went through all that stuff, raised a little money in 2014, raised a little bit more in 2015 and it's standed globally and by 2016 we're recognized in Forbes Fast 500 fastest growing companies in the US. Joe: What number were you? Patrick: Number 17. Joe: 17 out of 500? Patrick: Yeah. Joe: That's incredible. Patrick: Pretty amazing. That was up 2016 revenue numbers and we're excited to see where we land this year for Fortune List. It will be the 2018 release that will be 2017 numbers so- Joe: Got you. Patrick: It's that it so. Joe: It sounds exciting and painful all the same time. You've literally started on a kitchen table at a rental in LA. and then grew the business, bootstrapped it from there. Probably like many of the listeners who are you know the listeners that are sellers and entrepreneurs and listeners that are hoping to step into the entrepreneurial role that you're playing now. That's pretty incredible. Tell us about what Strike Social does and who your typical customers are. Patrick: Right. So initially we went out to the largest agencies in the world and we sold execution services around advertising. So initially we started with YouTube now we're across all the social platforms and search as well. But we would basically like take on and execute buys for their largest customers. So our customers will be X-box in PNG and pick any Fortune 100 brand, the big guys. And then we started doing that here in the US then we went to Asia and then went to Europe and I don't know if you know who the holding companies are but you know WPP [inaudible 00:12:17.3], the big guys that I mostly don't talk to a smaller company. So it was really nice to have that reign for us to go sell in to and it was a really profitable situation for us. And we kept building technology and investing in technology and people and locations. We have a location here in Chicago where we're headquartered. And then we have a location in Poland and a location in Manila. We've got about a hundred people here now and we've got boots on the ground from Japan, and Korea, and Australia, obviously the US, Singapore, Europe. So it's been a really really fun ride and yes you go through all of the emotional ups and downs of running a business when you're buying one. Joe: Yeah. Good problems with that kind of growth, really good problems. Talk to me about the technology that you developed that originally got you recognized in I think you said TechCrunch and you said analytics platform. Can you talk about the actual service and why someone would use … like why these B2B advertising agencies would use yours versus having an expert in-house do it. What does it do and what's different about it that made you the 17th fastest growing company in 2016? Patrick: Yeah I think when video first came out I think it was really challenging for companies to understand, it is kind of a new medium, how do I be successful here? So our analytics platform so they showed them how to be successful. But what we did is we executed the media guys. So we look like a typical agency, we don't really like that word because we built software solution to help us with that. And then overtime what we've done is we built this incredible artificial intelligence box that allows us to go across platform, plan and execute strategies. And so it's all … it's a human and technology solution combined. And like I talked about advertising now it's a complicated orchestra. And what you need at the end of that is execution so … and we can talk about that more but it's very challenging to stay up to date on these platforms and you need a partner and a technology solution to really execute and do well. Joe: Okay. And you started out with YouTube, so at that time there were not a lot of experts in the field of buying advertising, buying that advertising space on YouTube. Patrick: That's right. Joe: You know when I … when Jason sold my business back in 2010 I was spending a boatload of money on Google AdWords and I learned it from the ground up. I did it myself starting in 2005 and I … at one point I never had any training so I can't imagine how much money I wasted over the years. I mean it was a point where I topped out at spending $45,000 a month. I mean Jason loves to tell the story of how I got mad at American Express because I went above my average so I cut my advertising in half and it's the stupidest thing I've ever done. But I did it because I got mad. It is a ton of money; I blew a ton of money by not being the expert. But you guys learned that expertise in terms of buying ad space on YouTube and then you expanded to the other social media platforms. So are you now doing paid ads on Google AdWords, on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, things of that nature? Patrick: Absolutely DBM, Amazon, all the ones- Joe: What would DBM mean? You got me right there. Patrick: Sorry … Doubleclick Bid Manager is Google's DSP solution to get the rest of the web that's not … that you can't do in AdWords. Joe: And what's DSP stand for? Patrick: Digital Supply-side Platform, so that's how Google goes and buys display advertising on say the [inaudible 00:16:36.9] within New York Times. Joe: Okay. Patrick: Yeah. So it's another Google product. It's part of their Google Suite and actually it's interesting that you bring that up that's … that they had a tagging solution there that … and we find this a lot in companies that are running small businesses on just AdWords that you can get really good multi variant testing on that platform rebuilt technology to allow you to expand that. I don't know how extensive you got with your test. But one campaign maybe you have 40 different variables, maybe you're really good and you get up to a hundred. We'll do like 6,000 with their technology. Joe: Wow. Patrick: So yeah we're testing age, demo, interest, topic, keywords- Joe: Let's get really down to it. People that are listening, their ears might be perking up and this is why we're talking because you don't get to be number 17 on the Forbes fastest growing companies by screwing up. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Because you wouldn't have the clients that would be referring and helping you grow your business further. Patrick: That's right. Joe: So my initial thought as I said on our first call was more often than not I do valuations and exe-planning for people and see that they were doing fine on their own advertising. Managing it themselves and then outsourced it and it totally blew it up as in bang and their cost for acquisition went up. And usually, in my experience, it's not a great thing. Your success in having people use your services changes my mind. So let's talk about specifically we've got folks that are … was their physical product owners and of course there's content as well but I think you said you don't really do a whole lot of content stuff. Correct me if I'm wrong but let's say we've got physical product owners that are mostly because of the crazy growth on Amazon doing Amazon sponsored ads our advice is always go well beyond Amazon grow your business so it's not one revenue channel. Your value is going to be higher but they are challenged with how to do that. So do you do an analysis on a business and you're looking at Facebook advertising for that physical products, do you take over the Amazon, sponsored ads, do you do Instagram all of these things? Patrick: Yes, all of them. And you know what before we start with any business we start with an audit to get to a genuine conversation. You'd say okay here in the platforms you're on tell us about your objectives, lets pull your data into a dashboard that you'll own and take possession of. And more so you … where we see some quick wins and easy gaps and then we'll go take you know what if you like what we're saying we'll go run a test for free to see if we can improve what you're doing. Joe: How much is the cost of the audit that you do? Patrick: It doesn't cost anything. Joe: Okay the audit is free and the test is free. Patrick: The audit is free, the test is free. That's right and we just rolled out this … the reason I'm talking to you and I'm just talking to Jason about this is you know we just rolled out this Strike Marketing Partnership. You know we have a very large e-commerce company under our belt right now and we are able to take that business and improve their cost per lead from $80 to $16 and it really grow their business. They were able to- Joe: Were they profitable at $80? Patrick: Yes. Yeah, they were. Joe: Okay. Patrick: Dramatically improved their numbers and now they're on a path to being a billion dollar company. Joe: And so you took it from $80 cost per lead … was it cost for lead or cost for acquisition or both? I guess it doesn't matter but you took it from 80 to 16 and then where they able to use the same budget or I mean- Patrick: They were able to increase it. Yeah you see that's the key and I think the one point I want to make Joe is that we are entrepreneurs here and we're in the advertising marketing space and like one of the guys that's on our staff started panatea until he started the March Air Movement and sold it to a very large Japanese company because he doesn't need to work. But he's passionate about entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship and he's an expert in building that brand. And when you said content you know content is critical in … when you start talking about AdWords and multi variant testing you can't apply that same learning over to Facebook. It's a completely different platform. Everything is grouped together. You have to be a little bit patient and let Facebook find that first customer for you. And then it starts to learn who your customer is and it's started in and it's off to the races. But if you're open at that platform and if you're doing it the same way you're doing it on AdWords whether it's YouTube or just AdWords so you're not going to perform there, you're just … you're not doing it right. Joe: Okay. Patrick: So- Joe: What are in that Amazon Seller account? Do you guys handle the sponsor ads as well? Patrick: That's right yeah and we have a seat on Amazon so we have a partnership with them. Seat means that we get a seat. Joe: You know I was going to ask that. Patrick: Yeah sorry. I can see it on your face, what's a seat? Joe: Okay. Patrick: And seat that means that we're in their partner program and we can log into their technology and buy inventory at stale. Joe: Sure. Patrick: So … yeah and that means we also have a rep, and that's the other thing to is that these platforms change all the time. And one of the recent ones was GDPR it's made a … GDPR oh. Joe: Come on now GDPR what's that? This is going to be the acronym show. What is it? Patrick: Yeah the acronym … I'm sorry, I spend a lot of time in advertising so you know neither all … there are all things … GDPR is a … it's a European Union situation where the user is in control of their own data. Joe: Okay. Patrick: And the platforms, you have to basically ask permission or I think you've probably seen on sites you go to now. They're saying a. so do you like content, you need to accept my cookie. And if you're in someone's database right now and you have a European client in your database you needed to e-mail them and say hey by the way I need you to okay the fact that you're in my database. Initially, don't do that, I mean don't be that; you can get fined significantly. Joe: Most of our … the people in the audience, the people that are listening I shouldn't say most I mean it's anywhere from somebody doing a hundred thousand a year in revenue to you know 40 to 50 million in revenue. So it's all over the map there a little bit. Let's give some stuff away for free here that I don't want this to be obviously you do the evaluation and you do the test for free. And then let me just answer that; let's answer the quick question because people are going to say well what happens after that? Do you get paid on a commission basis part of the advertising how does it … part of the advertise you spent? Patrick: Yeah I think that's why we fall in that advertising agent bucket because we get a percentage of the media. Joe: I did the same back in my Media Mind days when I used to buy time on radio; percentage of what you're spending. Patrick: There you go. Joe: And about the job you do on that cost for acquisition the more you're able to spend because the budget goes up. So it is the right- Patrick: Portion. Joe: Way to do it. Yeah. All right so let's talk about that aside do you have any sort of hot tips? What can someone do just on their own looking at their own advertising budget in whatever platform you want to talk about? Patrick: Sure. Joe: Give away some tips or what can somebody do that's using … let's start with Google AdWords. What's the biggest mistake people make and how can they fix it? Patrick: Yeah I think that one of the biggest mistakes, I mean you can kind of take this across all platforms is trying to figure out the audience and the actual attribution and then finding the adjacent audience. So I'll give you an example, and our artificial intelligence does this. The idea is that you need to expand your audience. So you find an audience that gives you a high lifetime value and you recognize that in keywords or interest in Google AdWords. For example, you might be targeting 18 to 54 year olds in AdWords. You need to break each one of those segments up and realize that 18 to 24 year olds aren't interested in the same thing as a 45 and through 54 right? So if you're trying … if you're targeting people who are interested in the NFL, the 18 year olds that also have that same interest are interested in the UFC. And so you have to find those adjacent audiences to lower your cost of acquisition. Does that make sense? Joe: Yeah. Patrick: You expand the reach of the audience size and that's something that our technology does and our big people are doing that. Joe: Okay so it's finding out their like audiences. I always hear something on the Facebook algorithm in the paid advertising part of that similar audience or look alike audience, is that what we're talking about? Patrick: Kind of, on Facebook it's different. So AdWords is a multi-variant test platform. You're basically setting up … hopefully, you're setting up somewhere between 10 and 150 different campaigns. We're going to set up about 1,000 to 6,000. Joe: I think I had five or six and I had multiple things underneath there. So you're talking about 1,000 to 6,000 campaigns? Patrick: What was what was your target audience age range? Joe: From the women 25, 54 but I honestly can't recall if I even know. No, not much. I don't want to talk about that because I lost a whole lot of money the more we talk about it. Patrick: Oh my gosh. Joe: Wasted money. But you're doing a thousand campaigns inside of Google Ad Words? Patrick: You can [inaudible 00:17:10.1]. That's the only way, get out to get that. No, no, no, that's my product. That's the only way to get down to how am I going to expand this audience? What does this audience …. what is this audience also interested in? So it … what you basically said, what you told the platform was I want women 18 to 54 is that what you said, 18 to 54? Joe: 25, 54 but- Patrick: 25 and 54 and you basically said they all have the same interest and they don't. Joe: No they don't. Patrick: And they're not even on the same device. So you've got to break it out by device; tablet, mobile, desktop. And you've got to break it out by each age group. You've got to break it out by each interest. And you got to break it out by each keyword. Because if you don't get that data in there you're science is [inaudible 00:28:04.6] value is. Joe: Okay so someone doing this on their own in an Excel spreadsheet doing … think they're doing fairly well odds are that they could be doing a whole lot better. Patrick: Basically. Joe: Right. Another … okay so the tip there was I keep, I want to call it look alike audiences but it's not. Patrick: Just call it multi-variant testing. In AdWords, you've got to multi-variant test, and you've got to get as granular as possible to get the learnings out of that, out of that platform. Joe: Multi-variant testing, okay. Patrick: Yes. Joe: Second so the tip, the next thing you'll sit down and tell somebody to look at? Patrick: So on Facebook, it's completely different. You can't, you have to bucket everyone together and then as soon as Facebook finds you that acquisition and that's you know obviously Facebook and Instagram then it starts to learn okay now I know who you're looking for and it starts to find all the people that look alike. That's where the look alike part comes in. Facebook's AdWord is working in the background to figure that out. When we first set out it might be looking at your return and saying oh my gosh I'm doing way better on AdWords. You have to stick with it. And one of the things that we see as well is that you have a longer sign up or click to buy solution in your platform. What you'll see is people will start that buy on Facebook and they'll get to your form and realize that they don't have enough time for this and they need to go sign up on the desktop. And they'll go to Google search, look up your brand and you have to be able to do that. And that's where that DCM code comes in to play; from double click. Joe: Okay. Patrick: It actually digi up and see the assist on Facebook to AdWords, give the credit to Facebook that was the person who … that's where they saw the ad. They'll just go in to the desktop to finish filling it out Joe: Okay. Patrick: That makes sense? Joe: I did evaluation maybe three weeks ago for someone that back in the first quarter they reduced tremendous volume in their business by Facebook advertising. And then the algorithm update hit in I think April, you know by May. And they went from let's say a half a million a month in revenue to 40,000 a month in revenue. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Incredibly painful. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: They then jumped to Google AdWords and made adjustments on Facebook. But that type of algorithm update how do you and how does your agency … [inaudible 00:30:34.3] agency, how does your service address that, fix that, take care of that, and make sure that your clients are not going to be suffering from that major algorithm update that Facebook seems to be doing on a regular basis? Patrick: Yeah, it's a good point Joe I mean we're all sort of at the mercy of the changes that happen. That update may have been Facebook's response to Cambridge Analytics which was kind of like on the back end of that GDPR stuff I was talking about. So they have made changes and all these platforms change all the time. What we had is like when I was talking about Amazon with the seat, we're in Facebook's Ad Manager; we have a Facebook rep so we … those changes come to us before. Hey look here's how you're going to have to set these campaigns up in the future to be successful. Be prepared for this, this is going to be our algorithmic change and they'll never tell you what's in the science behind it. But you bring up a valid point about Facebook; it is a very content rich platform. You have to be testing instead of multi variant testing, different light items of campaigns. What you're really doing there is your multi-variant testing creative. So you have to look at an audience and you have to understand is the audience tired of my ad? They're seeing the same ad over and over again. Are they tired of that ad or is the audience exhausted with my product? They don't want it anymore and I have to go somewhere else. But typically what we're doing in Facebook is a lot of creatives popping. So well create a slot, 15 different pieces of creative image a week period [inaudible 00:32:19.0]. Joe: So with AdWords the campaigns you could have a thousand plus potentially. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Maybe at least 6,000 with Facebook it's more about the creative and fifteen different creatives over a two week period. Patrick: Yeah that's right. Joe: And then you'll continue to test that and swap it out to just continually monitoring the click rate and conversion rate. Patrick: That's right. Joe: What about video on Facebook is that something you're doing and recommend? Patrick: Yeah you know [inaudible 00:32:46.1] there are working really well, there's video component in there. But yeah we're seeing great conversion off of short video. And you know you … on that creative side you have to have high quality images and the videos don't have to be very long; two, three … three to six seconds perfectly in there. Joe: I think the quality I think the audience gets because that's the number one thing in terms of their own website and the Amazon seller accounts is top quality photos that should be the first thing. All right so we talked about Google AdWords, we talked about Facebook, any other thoughts in terms of you sitting down with somebody having a drink and what they should look at if they're running an e-commerce paid advertising campaign? Patrick: Yeah I mean actually on the paid advertising side I … you just have to keep exploring the platform's interest, is that really good … if you know how to use that platform it's becoming a very good conversion platform. And it's interesting when you start to see these new platforms come out typically because they're new there's not a lot of complex decision there so if you can … it's kind of a land grab. It's kind of like what Facebook did to Google. Facebook was a new platform, they finally got their Ads Manager to work properly and Power Editor is what they call it. And people have done really really well. Same thing is happening with Pinterest now. They've got their advertising technology and algorithm is starting to do really well in the backend of collecting data and saying oh this person who bought this is also buying this and they look alike kind of thing. Pinterest is becoming a CPA platform. Joe: Okay, so AdWords, Facebook, Pinterest … and when we say AdWords when we say that we are talking about Google content searches plus I assume were talking about YouTube looped in there as well. Patrick: Yeah YouTube is very tough in terms of direct conversing. What you have to do on YouTube is you use YouTube as a mid-funnel driver to your branded keyboard search. So I know that that sounds challenging but your creating an awareness campaign but you're looking at how that's driving cheap CPA in AdWords because it's your brand and that costs less than say some generic term that like clubs or something like that; whatever you're selling. Joe: Okay. So when you work with a client do you work on … obviously, you've got a budget that you work on, goal setting with either cost per lead or cost per acquisition things of that nature. People … my point is that I know that when I was in the audience is just listening thinking about hiring someone that I was worried that they're going to blow up my budget on it. Patrick: Oh yeah. Joe: Do you work with them on all those goals as well? Patrick: Oh absolutely and everybody is logged in. We're typically buying on your account so nothing's getting taken out of there. And again like everything starts with that audit. But back to your point about I think what entrepreneurs do is they need that margin or store ad to be really high to afford the inventory. And what we go about with Dave and some of the other entrepreneurs here is we want to help you with that. So we'll [inaudible 00:36:19.8] with you so that you can take a little bit more risk on the advertising side. And we talked about this a little bit before the show and it's what I talked to Jason about- Joe: Yeah let me just jump in and get to the point so people understand. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Part of the biggest problem that a bootstrapped physical products company has is amazing growth and lack of capital to buy more inventory; they're growing at 100% month over month, year over year. And they're taking all of that working capital and putting it right back in inventory and just trying to keep up. And what I do or anybody at Quiet Light does evaluation for that business we talk about planning. One of the simplest things to be more profitable is just don't run out of inventory. But it's kind of hard because they run out of money and can't keep up with that growth. So what you're talking about is as an agency, as a firm, as a partner- Patrick: As a partner. Joe: You're willing to work with them and lend them money to buy that inventory. Patrick: That's right. When we went from $80 to $16 CPL, we broke our partner's logistics. That … I can sum up what you're talking about in just amazing growth; we have the same problem. So you don't have enough capital, no bank is going to give you a decent loan, your business is too young in the first three years and so we recognize that. We're able to look at your advertising and we'll tell you what we can do on the execution side. But we have to make sure that you have the logistics down in the inventory to go take those risks. And we want to take those risks with you. So overall it's to grow your business as big as you possibly can. So that's the goal. That's how we make money. Joe: It's [inaudible 00:38:11.9] it's not all that different from Quiet Light, we're here to help. We have that … sometimes that stigma of oh you're a broker and that was the hardest thing for me going from entrepreneur owning my own business to entrepreneur that's a broker advisor is that those entrepreneurs they say you know I never want to sell my business. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want you to talk me into something. But we are here to help and help you grow your business and build that relationship so that when you plan to sell you'll exit and you'll exit well. Patrick: That's right. Joe: And what you're doing is the same thing is you're helping more than anything else. Of course, you're a business trying to make a living too and obviously doing it very well. But you're going to do the audit for free, you're going to do the test for free. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: And then you're going to dramatically reduce that cost for acquisition or cost for lead whatever the case might be in what the parameters are that you set with the client. Patrick: That's right. Joe: And they're going to have a problem which is dramatic growth and they're not going to be able to keep up with the inventory. They probably already can't keep up with the inventory purchasing and you're going to be there to help fund the inventory purchases and keep this growing which allows you to spend more money on their behalf and a great cost really a great cost for acquisition and make more money for yourself along the way as well. Patrick: Yeah. When we started our company we did it on American Express and Google AdWords buy in YouTube. It [inaudible 00:39:37.5] credit card every $700, so you know I feel your pain that you were feeling and we get it and it's real. Growth is tough to manage; very tough to manage. So for me, I like to consider myself sort of a scaling expert whether that embodies locations and sales. I'm good at that. I mean there are people here that will just do that … building a brand from scratch and selling it for hundreds of millions of dollars. Joe: That's amazing that you get that kind of talent that is choosing to work with you. It's kind of a great working environment for these folks. Patrick: Yeah. Joe: Ok look I never have to work again for the rest of my life but you're making it fun and we're changing people's lives so let's go ahead. Patrick: Yeah and think about Joe, I meant it's exciting. I mean you're in this business because you get to meet really interesting other entrepreneurs. And they all bring something interesting to the table. When they take a nap on we've all been in that battle together and this is a new sort of idea like why are you doing this so- Joe: It's great. Patrick: Yeah it's got to be a part where we're really excited about it and happy to bring it to the market. Joe: Yeah listen, I want to end it here simply because people should be reaching out to you. It's a very least they're going to learn something in the review process. They're going to learn at the very least what they're screwing up on, what they're doing wrong, and what they can do. Choose to do it themselves or- Patrick: Anything works, that's right. Joe: Have you test it and prove that you can do it better than they can. And then they can free themselves up for other things as well like additional product development and clean documentation on their financials. So I say that in every podcast episode hire a good [inaudible 00:41:23.0]. Patrick: That's right. Joe: And one priest, they've heard me preach before. Patrick listen thanks for being on the show. Thanks for taking time out of your day I know you're very busy. We'll go ahead and get this produced get it out to folks and share it with you as well so you can share it with your team. Patrick: Joe thanks for having me. Joe: It's great man, thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Patrick: All right man, take care. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast for more resources from this episode head over to quietlightbrokerage.com. If you're enjoying the show please leave a rating and review on iTunes. This helps share the messages from the show with more business owners like you.   Links: Free review and test: hello@strikesocial.com Inc. 500 Ranking Strike Social

Ways to pursue business growth and differentiating your income with Mark Daoust. ----- Welcome to episode 159 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork chats with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light Brokerage about testing new income streams and spending money to make money. Different Ways to Create an Income Online As an influencer, you have access to a ton of different ways to monetize your blog. And possibly some ways you haven’t even considered. Mark is here to chat about those ways and to give you a better understanding of how online businesses can differentiate themselves. Between understanding how valuable your company truly is to figuring out the right ways to sell your products to finding out what your readers are craving, Mark’s tips will help you create an established, sustainable business online. In this episode, Mark shares: What it was like starting his own podcast How to understand how much your business is worth What SaaS businesses are What ecommerce sites are and how to monetize them Ways you can spend money to make money What FBA stands for How to add an additional income stream to your business Resources: 1Password LastPass The Quiet Light Podcast 032: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light Brokerage Nutrifox Etsy Shopify How Micro-Goals Built a Food Blogging Empire Neil Patel More about Neil Patel’s $100k challenge Quiet Light Brokerage (get a free valuation here!) Sites for sale If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Thanks to our Reviewer of the Week, Sara from Real Balanced! If you’d like to be featured, leave a review for us on iTunes and include your name and blog name in the review. We’d like to thank our sponsors, WP Tasty! Check out wptasty.com to learn more about their handcrafted WordPress plugins specifically made for food bloggers.

Similar to outsourcing fulfillment, today's podcast guest says for many entrepreneurs, it may be best to outsource the collection, management and disbursement of sales taxes with the new Economic Nexus ruling by the Supreme Court. In this podcast, first we cover what the decision means to online entrepreneurs, and how it will impact the average business. For some no action needs to be taken. For others a lot of action must be taken. And ignoring the details is not really an option. Sometimes the least interesting subjects and work as an entrepreneur bring the most value. Well-managed financials are one such thing. Held within the broad “financials” umbrella is now sales taxes. While the answer to the questions, “should I collect” used to be grey. Everything is fairly black and white now. And the subject is never going away. Episode Highlights: Don't geek out on Sales Taxes. Outsource it. See SALT experts below. If you have Nexus it means you have an obligation to potentially register and collect sales taxes or income taxes in a given state. Physical Nexus is where you are, where your business is, where you are storing inventory or where Amazon is storing it. Economic Nexus is the change with the Supreme Court decision. The states could define other ways to define Nexus. For instance either $100,000 in sales or 200 transaction in the last 12 months – and you could be required to collect sales taxes on those revenues that occured within their state…regardless of Physical Nexus. Economic Nexus takes effect immediately for the 24 states that already have them on the books. (Links below will lead to finding the 24 states) Notice and Reporting are other ways to determine Nexus. It's really confusing! You MUST register to collect sales taxes. If you collect and do not remit, it is CRIMINAL. Hire an expert to register to collect sales taxes. There are 45 states that require it. Only register where you have to if you are a small seller. But if you are doing 10-20 million in revenue, “suck it up” and register everywhere. SALT experts can handle almost everything for you. See notes and links below. SALT is an acronym for Sales and Local Tax Experts Use www.WhereStock.com to determine where Amazon is holding your inventory. Seel link below. Taxjar is a good option if you wish to take on managing this yourself. Scott & his outsourced accounting team at Catching Clouds use Taxify (but recommend both options) The Supreme Court Decision may not increase a buyer's liability in an asset sale. Transcription: Joe: So Mark Jason got an e-mail this week and he had a question and it was “What makes Quiet Light different?” And Jason gave it an interesting answer and I want your feedback on it. It says “Well the formal answer is that we're all entrepreneurs but that's not really it. The difference is that Mark … you Mark Daoust is one of the best human beings on earth and that permeates everything we do. As a result, he attracts good people that are always doing good work with the best interest of others even if it's painful for the broker we ignore our own incentive to do what's right.” Did you pay him to say that? Mark: Yeah … well, I'm not going to say exactly how much but he got paid for that. I think it's a little over the top. I mean really. Joe: But he didn't write that down. He said it to someone and someone wrote it down and shared it with me. And I … look I shared this to put you on the spot. You look by the way very much like an internet entrepreneur today. You've got a t-shirt with some ducks on it, a little duck, duck going on there. Mark: Duck, duck, gray duck. I'm from Minnesota and I [inaudible 00:01:53.2] I'm going to put this out there, it's a more sophisticated game. All you parents out there stop this duck, duck, goose crap. It's all duck, duck, gray duck; that's what we're doing here. Joe: Don't know if we have time to go into what the heck you're talking about with duck, duck, gray duck. Well just … I thought you were going into hockey or something like that. I wanted to touch on one more thing you know Jason talks about that and you and the environment that you've created here and the caliber of entrepreneurs and advisors that you brought on. I listened to a podcast last night with Chuck Mullets and for those that are the buyers in the audience today, if you have not listened to the 27 tools for due diligence I think it was, listen to it. Because some of the tools in there were just amazing and I've been doing this for a long time and I haven't heard of any of them. I have to take my hat off to Chuck and give him some compliments for the job that he did there. I was really really impressed. He's a … I'll say it, he's a lot smarter than I thought he was. Mark: Ah, you know the bar was pretty low, to begin with. Joe: But I want to just raise myself up a little bit and show you something. Mark: What's that? Joe: I have on- Mark: Oh you have on Chuck's shirt that he made for you. Joe: I have my Quiet Light logo shirt on. So there you go. Mark: While I'm wearing ducks. Joe: Oh I didn't shade you there. Okay, listen this podcast is about something that's really important. It's about the Supreme Court decision to change the way that sales taxes are to be collected. Let's not get into details, let me just tell you that we had Scott Scharf on again. We specifically talked about the problem and the solution. What does this mean to e-commerce entrepreneurs and how do you solve it? I can tell you right now when you get three quarters of the way through the solution is … if you are up for it just like you outsource your fulfillment to a 3PL you can outsource your sales tax collection and distribution and management. And if it were me that would be my recommendation but it's absolutely there and you don't have to deal with all that little detail and there's a lot of it. Mark: Yeah and I like to say a word to people that share a person holiday with me, and when I read and hear about some of these red tape sort of restrictions that are coming down, I have a tendency to plug my years and go la-la-la-la I don't want to hear it. Joe: Right. Mark: I like the days of the free open web when it was just easy to do things. But the fact of the matter remains this is the direction we're going. Joe: Right. Mark: Restrictions, regulations are going to come into play more and more frequently and these aren't necessarily bad things we just needed to understand how to navigate them. And so an episode like this is timely, I'm glad that you got Scott on the line to do this episode because this is the [inaudible 00:04:34.0] time the episode given that this decision just came down a few weeks ago. Joe: Yeah some of the things that we talk about here on the Quiet Light Podcast are painful as entrepreneurs. Particularly those that don't love this detail, they love the excitement of driving revenue and the marketing aspect of it. These painful things when you pay attention to them will make your business more valuable if and when you ever decide to sell. So again listen to the whole thing. Get through it, he talks about it in detail point by point. But I try to keep him on track so it's not … he doesn't geek out too much. Scott loves this stuff. Mark: Scott? Never. Joe: He calls it geeking out himself. So we try to get on track to … okay how do … how does a guy like me, how does a guy like Mark, like an entrepreneur listening, how do they overcome this giant massive ball of red tape? And really, I think the answer is, outsource it. And we're going to give all of the ability to do that down there in the show notes. Mark: Sounds great. Joe: Let's go to it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got Scott Scharf on the line with me from Catching Clouds. And we're going to talk about the Supreme Court decision that's come down regards to sales taxes, define what the problem is, and then give you a solution to it in the second half of the podcast. Scott welcome … welcome back actually right? Scott: Yeah it's great to be back. Joe: All right so you know we don't do fancy introductions. Tell these folks who you are and what you do at Catching Clouds so they understand what level of expert you are here. Scott: Yeah at Catching Clouds we're e-commerce accountants who are really experts in the accounting e-commerce businesses and of course sales tax management; which is why we can talk about this topic. We've been doing this for the last seven years and we love solving problems for e-commerce, sellers, anybody that we interact with it. And this Quill decision is definitely one of those things. Joe: Quill decision, that it that's the name of it? Q-U-I-L-L. Scott: Well, yeah so Quill was a decision from what 26 years ago that the Supreme Court overturned their own finding that really delimited what states could do to go collect sales tax from small businesses that are selling across state lines. Joe: Good. Okay, so they overturned it. So, folks, you heard Scott say that they're e-commerce accountants and I just want to reiterate … and you know my little soapbox here. E-commerce accounting, accounting, good financials, clean documentations, it's one of the four pillars to get maximum value for your business. So if you're using anything other than Xero or QuickBooks seriously consider talking to Scott if you want to get maximum value for your business. Because Excel spreadsheets for a 20 million dollar company or if you're doing a half a million in revenue doesn't matter, you're going to lose value in the sale of your business if and when some day you decide to sell. So there's my little pitch, definitely- Scott: [inaudible 00:07:24.7] Joe: these services. Okay so if I understand this correctly this is no longer physical nexus which I think everybody that's listening knows the definition of it; what it means. Is economic nexus, can you tell us what the heck that means for these folks? Scott: Yeah so actually physical nexus still applies so it's not that they got rid of physical nexus it's just not the only consideration deciding if you have [inaudible 00:07:52.0] of fancy. Joe: So let's say what physical nexus is anyway then, go ahead. Scott: Okay. Well, physical nexus … well, first nexus is if you cross a threshold and you have nexus based on some parameters means you have an obligation to potentially register and collect sales tax or income tax or other things in a given state. So if you don't have nexus you don't have to do these things. Okay, that's the first part. So there are different types of nexus, the first one is physical. It's been around for quite a while. It's where you are, your business is, your business is founded, you have employees, you have property. Okay for an e-commerce business, it's wherever you're storing your inventory. If it's at a 3PL on either coast you have a nexus where you're storing your inventory. If you're an Amazon FBA seller, when you send inventory to three or five warehouses they'll move it to up to 26 states that's your inventory and it creates nexus. There are a few other ones out there but from a physical perspective … I've been around for a while, there's like affiliates and other things. But the main thing it's where you are and your property is. Joe: Physical nexus, okay. And now we've got economic nexus, what is that? Scott: So economic nexus what states have determined and the brakes were taken off with the Supreme Court decision that they could define other ways to determine nexus to basically either require your business to do reporting and other function or register and collect sales tax in those states. So what they've done is said hey if you're doing over typically in the standard is based on the Supreme Court decision $100,000 in sales or actually more importantly 200 transactions either in the last calendar year or in the prior 12 months and that would mean that they're expecting you if you're a larger business to register and collect sales tax from there … of any consumers buying products you're shipping to into that state. Joe: How many transactions do you say? It was 200? Scott: 200. Joe: So if it's a $20 sale it's only what 1,000? Scott: $1,000. So $100,000 people see the $100,000 and think that oh God there's no way I didn't know you'd do $100,000 in any states last year, but it's totally based on your average. So if you take your average sale price and multiply it times 200, if you've done more than that revenue in any states that have these laws you're over that threshold. Joe: Okay so economic nexus passed by the Supreme Court, when does it take effect is it immediate or is there-? Scott: It's immediate for the roughly 23, 24 states that already had these laws on the books. And the only thing that was holding them back were these court cases that were just … was decided a week and a half ago. Joe: Okay so there's 24 states, not all 45 that collects sales taxes but that is 24 of them. And for folks listening, we will add a list of those 24 states but there'll be a lot of resources in the show notes that we'll give you that through their software as well. Scott: Well and it's not just economic nexus, you have to remember there's now notice in reporting states that aren't doing economic nexuses but have set thresholds for doing notice and reporting. They're basically two different new ways of determining nexus and they're both in effect now and there are other states that have them starting later this year and more. So it's multiple ways of nexus that might impact your business. Joe: Okay so I'm just going to say a few years ago I did a presentation at Rhodium Weekend all about e-commerce selling and part of it was sales tax collection accounting. So I wanted to say to Yana if you're listening I was right. She came after me after that now that's never going to happen. It's right. So really just don't even worry about the 24 states I think physical nexus, economic … basically get prepared to collect and remit sales taxes everywhere and use a special service that can allow you to do that. First though … and we'll get to that but first do you have to register to collect sales taxes? Scott: Yes. You have to if you are not registered you don't have a license and a number from the state, it's criminal to collect sales tax and not remit it and not have a license. It's also criminal to collect sales … have a license to collect sales tax and not give it to those state. Those two things have additional penalties and they'll come after the business owner's criminally. So you need to have a license before you start collecting sales tax and then once you start collecting sales tax you have to give it back to the state either monthly, quarterly or annually; whatever they say. Joe: Okay just to clarify, you used the word criminally three times. That's a little scary. Scott: Well it's … but unfortunately both Amazon and Shopify and these other sites, I mean literally there's a button in Shopify that you can click that says collect sales tax in all states. And it's easy to start collecting sales tax in the 45 states that have sales tax. So technically it's very easy to hit these buttons and not realize and you just want to be careful. And in difference between criminal is there's additional by jail. Everything else related to sales tax is expense and cost which is more likely to happen but maybe not as painful but can be pretty painful based on penalties and interest and other things. Joe: Right. Okay, so first and foremost let's just define and answer this simple basic question that some folks have been asking, does this mean … and I know the answer to this thus do you, does this mean quote unquote I have to start collecting sales taxes? The answer is yes. The answer is you should have been collecting them before, you had to before. Correctly? Scott: Well correct, if you have physical nexus that goes back in time. Okay, most of these economic nexus laws are new. And the way they're currently written is if you pass the threshold then the expectation is you register and start collecting sales tax going forward. So there's going to be nuances and changes but in general, if you exceed most of these thresholds for economic nexus or notice in reporting basically the expectation is you go out, you register now, and you start collecting forward. And there's no … depending on the state but for most states, there's no real risk of you owing money or have not done whatever in the past, you can go forward. But when you have physical nexus because of Amazon FBA or a 3PL then you need to consider if you register and collect going forward where you still have a risk of any previous outstanding liability which I know within a sale you're very aware of to make sure you know both the seller and the buyer are aware of any business liabilities or do you go back in time and pay anything that you didn't collect in the past; which isn't fun. Collecting sales tax or paying in sales tax you didn't collect from the consumer on each individual sale. Joe: Yeah because that's directly coming out of your profits now instead of collecting and just passing it through. Scott: Yup. Joe: Okay, so let's jump to making this easy for people that are listening. The bottom line is that they need to start collecting sales taxes and remitting them. Obviously, get registered to collect sales taxes. There're software out there that does this right? Because you're talking about you need to do this, you need to do that, and for me as a former physical products e-commerce seller, my eyes would roll into the back of my head, I would [inaudible 00:15:15.0] more and I'd never wake up again. Can't … Can I just pay somebody to do this for me and if yes what are the options and how much would it cost me annually or monthly? Scott: Well the first part, so you don't pull out your own hair, is there are multiple services out there that will help you with the registrations and register you in multiple states because it will drive you crazy. Every state is a little bit different. On average I'll pay about $100 per registration plus $20 to $50 in registration fee for some states, that's the first piece. So if you've decided to register in two, five, ten, whatever number of states you need to get registered first and I suggest … it'll just drive you crazy, is would be to get registered and there are a number of services out there that can do that for you. Joe: Okay and we'll put those in the show notes but why Scott only five or ten whatever you decide to get registered? And why wouldn't you register for every state that requires you to collect sales taxes? I guess maybe because you never sell any … somebody in the state of- Scott: So one it's just that overhead in the cost of doing business. So the first thing there are 45 states that have a sales tax and we are all heading sometime … I would have said three to five plus years that we're going to collect sales tax on every e-commerce sale, it's now probably two to four years or two to three years. It's going to happen a lot faster but there is a cost even on the low cost tool or outsourcing it … and I'll talk about some of those numbers in a minute, but you really only at this point want to register for sales tax where you have to. You shouldn't have to if … now if you're already a 20 or 30 million dollars e-commerce business just suck it up and go to all 45. Joe: Right. Scott: Anybody else below there, you're paying more money for compliance and tools and registrations. And in some of these states when you register for sales tax nexus you are in some ways volunteering to pay income tax. Potentially depending on the state and the situation; minimum franchise tax like in California which is $800 a year, and then additional fees, and not only the sales tax cost but paying a CPA to file and deal with franchise tax returns and income tax returns. So you want to as a small business or even a medium sized business minimize that overhead and only do this in the states you need to but you definitely want to start the big states where the population are. California, Florida, Texas, and those other bigger ones is the basics to get that going but you would want an easier way in. So figure it out for the first batch that you're doing and then do another batch and another batch. So you just can't stop your whole business to do sales tax and you just have to balance those things out. But at the same time, you don't want to show this huge [inaudible 00:17:52.3] selling and talking to Quiet Light. This huge compliance overhead and its overkill and it's going impact your own profitability and the money you're taking out of the business. So just want to find a balanced approach as you get there. Joe: How do you determine that? Is there a tool or process inside of Shopify or if you're an Amazon Seller that tells you that you know what sales you have by state? Scott: Yeah so there are two … for sales price there's a couple of ways to do it. So the first if you're an Amazon FBA seller there's a great tool called wherestock.com you pay him $30 and they'll log in … we'll get you the link, and they'll connect your Amazon site and they'll … it'll take them about a day and they'll give you a report showing you all the warehouses where you have inventory and when it started. How far back in time if you had inventory in the Michigan warehouse and if you go through that list and you don't see North Carolina or some states because of the type of your products it'll tell you, you might have had or five of these main states that you've never had inventory in and you don't have nexus there; which is great news. The next piece is really a matter of downloading all of your orders out of Shopify for the previous 12 months or the last year and then just pivoting the data or doing a total if you know how in Excel to show you your sales; both the number of sales in each state and the total dollar volume in each state. So you want to know your own numbers and any that you're over $100,000 in sales or unfortunately $10,000 in Washington State, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma starting on Sunday I think. I think it just started Sunday. I think it was July first and it's happened right before it. Those are $10,000 in sales which is really low, everybody else is 100,000. So that'll … you'll go through those states and add up the ones that you have, look at the ones that you have the most amount of sales and income in and start with those. You want to know your own numbers and work through your own list. The other option is and I can provide a link to our tax calculator that we have in there … bunch of other people putting them out there that basically take your average sale amount enter it and it will total all those things up. But those are the two things; one, all of your income across all of your sales and then this Amazon wherestock report to let you know what's going on in FBA and that'll be in your information and then you just build a list and you work your way through your own priorities on how many you want to do; all at once or a few at a time. Joe: Okay so just to dumb it down a little bit. If you're doing 20, 30 million dollars just suck it up and do all 45 states. But if you're doing maybe just a million dollars in revenue, which is fantastic, do this report because you don't want to have to register in 23 states that instead of all 45 if you don't have to. Scott: Right. Joe: Someone else talked about it in this way. I mean that registration alone is going to cost you $100 to $150 so maybe $3,000 or so for 23 states that you don't have to register in. But if you're only doing $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 in revenue in the state of Montana it doesn't make any sense to register because a. you're not going to hit that threshold and b. realistically Scott is if someone in the state of Montana that works in- Scott: Montana is a bad example they're not on sales tax. Joe: Okay. Scott: So pick one of the few states that doesn't have one but Nevada or however else- Joe: How about Maine? Scott: So it's always a risk man, your question is so should you or not you … are you going to, can you fly under the radar- Joe: Yeah. Scott: Are they going to find you tomorrow and what's going on? So it's a risk management decision between the cost of compliance to your business versus the overhead and the cost of compliance and then the chance of being caught. There are four million Amazon sellers, there's between five and ten million businesses doing e-commerce these days. The states just had their handcuffs taken off and they're all going to go woohoo let's go get this money from out of state sellers. It's going to take them a while to ramp up and the chances of getting caught are very very low and they have been low and they're still very very low okay? But there isn't really no ambiguity now; there's no more well, maybe, or there's this court case, or whatever else. Joe: Right. Scott: So until now and whenever possibly the Congress does something or more lawsuits happen which take time this is the way things are today and you just have to make that decision of a risk management. So you never want to mess around with the IRS when it comes to payroll taxes or W-9s and contractors but for sales tax, you're going to have to balance those out. But the chance of being audited or being notified by the state is significantly higher than it's ever been in the past. Joe: Okay let's talk about the services that are out there; as in the software or services that you recommend for listeners just … you can do your download calculator that I'm going to provide in the show notes to determine the revenue by state and things of that nature to decide where they want to register. But what softwares or service programs do you recommend that folks check out that you have seen people use consistently that make this a whole lot easier? Scott: Yeah for people doing it themselves I would start with TaxJar it's by far the easiest to use most straightforward they … not only do they pull in all the data but they process the filing for sales tax and the payments in all 50 states. It's both the easiest and I, from what I've seen the lowest cost. They're a great tool. They have a great blog and a ton of information and support and it's the best way to do it yourself. The next one that's a little more powerful- Joe: Hold on a second. Scott: Yeah? Joe: In terms of a TaxJar thorough cost ballpark if someone's to put in all the states what would the overall cost be to … and do they do registration or just compliance? Scott: Okay so TaxJar does not do registrations. Joe: Okay. Scott: It's only the sales tax data aggregation to pull it all together from channels. Pull everything together. One note is if you have sales that are outside of Amazon, Shopify, or BigCommerce you have to import that data into TaxJar so that you have the complete thing. From all the sales so your filings are accurate. But in general, you're going to pay a monthly fee between I think 29 and up to 500 depending on the number of sales. Whether it's a thousand per month, 5,000 you know … in larger apps you're going to pay a base monthly fee no matter what; totally reasonable wherever your SaaS thing. And then you're going to pay a per-filing transaction. So if you're paying filing quarterly you're going to pay four times somewhere between $21 and $30 per filing. I don't have their pricing memorized. Joe: Sure. Scott: So if you're filing quarterly your costs are going to be lower. If you're filing annually it's going to be these monthly fees. So if you're a smaller seller the pricing can work out to be fairly affordable. They also have kind of an unlimited filing piece so if you get over a certain level … and I haven't done the math whether it's 20 states or 30 states but there's a certain point where you can pay it for kind of an unlimited plan and get to a max price. I think that's in the 4 to $6,000 for the year kind of total. But you can using that tool max that out and really lock that compliance cost in. Not counting your time making sure it's being done right. Importing data, dealing with notices, and just making … keeping an eye on it, it's not a set and forget process. Joe: So, on the high side it sounds like maybe $500 a month and your maxing out the services there, on the low side $29 a month so it all depends upon the size of the seller and how much you do. Okay, you are about to mention another- Scott: So the next one I would say is Taxify and that's what we use because we're doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of returns every month. It's a little more powerful in certain ways. They have integrations. It can handle a wider range of different businesses and there's … it's just they're really kind of head to head but for DIY most people go with TaxJar just because it's easier to use. TaxJar is more powerful if you have a more complex business. You might want to consider it or compare the two. Pricing is pretty similar between those two and- Joe: Those using TaxJar you said TaxJar, not Taxify. Scott: No we're using Taxify. We are using Taxify. Our accounting practice for us to file we use Taxify but I've known the TaxJar guys for six years now and they really do have a great solution. And any of our stuff we talk about those two is really the primary ones to consider third one is- Joe: Hold on I want to just interrupt again sorry. On this option, you're saying you already use it which means that with your accounting services for sellers of a certain size I assume, the collection, the management, and remittance of the sales taxes are part of your services as well. Scott: Correct. Joe: So I don't have to learn the software, I can hire you guys to do it. Scott: Correct. Joe: Okay. Scott: Well and I'll talk about some other … outsourcing is absolutely a viable, just like you outsource fulfillment to a 3PL or to Amazon FBA, sales tax is something you don't want to geek out on. I've done it for the last six years, it drives me crazy but I geek out on it. It just … it will distract you from listing products and buying products and designing new products and all the front end stuff to generate more income. That is absolutely something you want to … you might like that we look at here's how you do it yourself and you should understand anything you outsource but we do that. We offer the service but we also do notice management. The states send all kinds of notices. Even if you pay on time they'll send you a notice but if you don't respond to the notice they'll fine you for not responding to the notice. So there's more to it than just a set and forget tools. These tools are phenomenal as they deal with the complexity. Because every return is different, they have 50 different fields. They really aggregate the data and reduce the complexity of filing and paying which is awesome which is why we use automation. But then there's there is more to it. Joe: Okay, you're about to mention a third option for folks. Scott: Yeah third option is Avalara TrustFile. Now if you really are already a 20 or 30 … so Avalara has two products, they have a smaller and a lower end one which I don't think is as powerful as TaxJar or Taxify called TrustFile which you can use. They've cleaned up their pricing but it's still a little confusing but they're a viable tool. If you're already let's say five or really 10 million and you're doing more than just e-commerce you can consider Avalara AvaTax which is their higher end tool which will give you more control automated. If you have an accounting department it is definitely a tool you would consider. Quite a few CPA's and accountants use AvaTax as well to do more complex larger sales tax across multiple businesses. So those are really the key players, there are other smaller players out there but those are really the key players that are really focused and understand what's going on out there. Joe: Okay. I was listening to your better half Patti on your YouTube channel. She does a great job, by the way, great Q and A's there. I think she mentioned SALT experts and what they do and what not. Can you define what a SALT expert is and why someone listening might want to consult with one of them? Scott: Absolutely so a SALT; Sales And Local Tax expert, these are people that will do one, they can do a nexus study which tells you where you have nexus and it'll tell you whether your products are taxable or not, are they a food, are they a candy, do they have flour in them, are they clothing or … they can go look at all that. You can all interpret what the states say but these are people that do it all the time and will contact the state anonymously or you. The next thing they will do is what's called a voluntary disclosure agreement. If you owe a state tens of thousands of dollars of back tax and you want to come clean because you want to clear out your liability to sell your business and just make sure everything's done right, they'll go to the states anonymously and say I have this seller and they'll represent you. And in some cases get penalties, sometimes interests, and can potentially get a payment plan if you're cleaning up historical sales tax. And you want that person representing you a SALT expert, not your CPA. Unless they've done it multiple times in their own state you really want to talk to someone that's an expert. They're the people you want to call if you're audited to represent you and help you get through an audit. So those are the unique things we haven't talked about but the main thing is you can outsource your sales tax compliance to them. They will do the registrations and most in almost every case they will set things up. Most of them are very technical … in our case we at Catching Clouds we're really great at setting up Shopify to collect sales tax right and Amazon and eBay and in the more technical configurations. So we're very technical accountancy but they will help advise you on those things. They're all over it. They talk to me about the technical stuff, we're really good friends. It's a great community. I'll try to just solve this for sellers but then you can pay them a monthly fee or a per-state fee to take care of the data collection which you have to give them. The filing, the payments, notices, and kind of provide a complete service to outsource your sales tax. You can go to one person, pay them to take care all of your sales tax that's going on and advise you and then they're the ones that are keeping tabs on all the changes that happen every week; every month if that's the route you want to go. Which is a good way to go, in general, I'll give you a safe number, you really want to budget at least $50 per state per month. So you're looking at between $600 and $1,000 per year for this to not be an issue to worry about but you need to budget the right amount. Plus you want to have that same space because everyone's … Arizona's awful that they'll come back the second year and hit you with hundreds of dollars additional fees per county and everything else that you didn't count on and you can't get around and they'll deal with these random issues. Joe: Okay, great. I have a list of those from your website for those listening again in the show notes SALT experts will be available. Sounds like a one stop shopping place to go and just outsource all of this. Of course, some people that want to do the work themselves will have those calculators that you talked about there as well Scott and the links to the Taxify and TaxJar and Avalara. A couple of quick questions before we wrap this up, and maybe they're not quick questions but historically when someone sells their website … their physical e-commerce business in this case, the question of liability for past sales taxes that should have collected is really really gray, right? Scott: Yeah it is. Joe: And only once for those listening how do you solve that problem as a buyer? In most cases, most buyers don't worry about it. They really never have and these are people that are a lot smarter than you and I combined. They don't worry about it; pretty high level folks. In one case I had and think about this as a seller, I had someone that it was … the business sale total value was around $758,000 but they did the math and they said look in the 24 months that you've been around you should have collected X amount of sales taxes and let's call it $50,000 in that purchase price, in that $750,000 in the asset purchase agreement $50,000 was set aside in Escrow for potential sales tax liability purposes. And when the buyer went out to register to get their sales tax in the state of California, Texas, whatever if that state said yes, of course, we'll register you but we know that you owe us from this brand, you didn't own the company but from this brand you owe us $17,000 then that money would have come out of that 50,000. For the record, the buyer was able to register in all the states that he wanted to register and not a single state said okay great but you owe us money hence all 50,000 was released. How does this Supreme Court decision in economic nexus change that liability moving forward for the buyers of these businesses? Scott: I don't think it … I think it only increases the chance of the state contacting you and having to either answer the questions or go through an audit and all of these things are moot until you're actually audited. And you're at that point where you're dealing with an auditor and then then they ask for historical records and financials and everything else. Up until then, it's not really an issue. Unfortunately, though it's the decision of that state; are they going to hold the new business and whoever bought that Amazon seller account? They want to attach the liability to the Amazon account where it was being sold that you buy a continuing Amazon account which is what most people do or is it tied to the prior business and the business owner? The people selling you need to be concerned when you get that big chat to set some of this money aside if the states come after you historically because if you've spent it all, it really … in most cases tends to tie to the original business owner of the business. So I would say that there's … it's really if you're buying [inaudible 00:34:44.4] sale you have to be worried about it more than anything else. If it's an asset sale you're buying this asset, starting a new business, you've got to register fresh and move forward. There's a small risk but only after you've been audited. So it's just a couple of nuances there. Joe: So very very small risk and only after you're audited and the odds of being audited again, incredibly small. Scott: Correct. Joe: Okay. Let's talk about those out there that are wholesaling. They're buying products and wholesaling them, they don't have to collect these sales taxes is that correct? Scott: They don't but you have to follow the rules. The first is and what really does this finding really change is instead of collecting tax exemptions certificates; so for every B2B sale you have to get a tax exemption certificate and it's not just a picture of the sales tax license on the wall of someone's cell phone. You have to have something that has your business name on the top that other companies who you sold it to their tax licenses whether it's one state or multiple states. And it doesn't matter which states they are and an owner or a business manager an approved person of that company signing at the bottom saying they're responsible for the sales tax. Okay? Joe: Is it on a form? Is it an official form that they would fill out? Scott: There's a form per state and there's a great multi-state form. I can get you all of the links and if you want to have a process that you have them and keep in mind that they pretty … a lot of them expire every year. So you want to have all of these forms from your five or 10 or 50 or 500 B2B customers on file. And if you get audited by any given state then you need … then you have these to say hey I didn't have to collect sales tax but if you don't have the forms or they're expired or you're missing them that … then they can say all of that was taxable and you owe the sales tax. Even if the other company sold it and collected sales tax they can double dip and come after the information. What this decision really changed was two things related to B2B sellers. But first, as most people tend to collect tax exemption certificates for their own states where they're filing where they would expect their own business to get audited. Now that it's kind of every state can look at all this information, B2B sellers should start collecting tax exemption certificates on every sale. And if you have your top five or ten B2B customers, go back and get them from those ones and … to make sure you've got this filed. And then just set it aside in case you're audited. The second big impact of this for B2B sellers is now your B2B sales, number of transactions, and dollars volume count towards these economic nexus thresholds. It's all of your sales. It's your B2C sales and B2B. And even if you're 100% B2B and you have no tax you're still going to cross this threshold. And the states are still going to expect you to file a return. And it is going to cost you the same amount in compliance for you as it does. Even if you give them no money like every number is zero. Joe: That's really important for people that are doing both B2C and B2B. I was thinking just wholesale B2B but we have a lot of clients that they'll sell to let's say for instance chewy.com they're selling their own website but they wholesale to Chewy. They need to pay attention to this stuff as well. That's great information. Scott: It's all of their sales. It combines both and it's looking at all of your sales. Because what the really the states are doing and all these laws are meant to do is to get to the point where every transaction is taxed and they get a sales tax from every sale. That's what they're trying to do so pretty much most of the pain goes away if you register and collect in a state. You don't have to worry about different fines and fees or other unknowns, you can start defining your cost of compliance but that's really where we're going. Joe: Okay. Do you think this Supreme Court decision is good or bad? Overall for the individual states that are going to be applied this collect and collect is what I'm saying. Scott: I think it's bad for e-commerce sellers. I really do. The compliance costs just went from an unknown maybe I can avoid them to … and we're heading that way so I think it's bad for e-commerce sellers. Of course, it is great for the state bureaucracies that are going to go out and collect a bunch of money from other states until something else changes to back it down. I think it's going to increase the risk for smaller sellers and even mid-range sellers of having more unknown's that could impact your business. From us, as consumers, we're really getting to the point as a company … a country since we're so consumer based, it's all about products and services and things along those lines that we're really heading to the point where we're going to pay a sales tax on everything. It's just that the cost and the complexity and potential risks to all small businesses, not just e-commerce businesses, anybody that has a product and ships it out of state or does anything else now has to be concerned about that much more in running a business that you know e-commerce businesses are 24/7, running really fast, the rules are constantly changing, you just didn't need this additional in my opinion large overhead of cost of doing business to really impact them. Joe: Right at the end of the day hopefully it would be great for states and the roads and highways and schools in the state in which you live. But for now, it's a major complexity that you as an e-commerce owner have to deal with. Scott, as always you're fantastic. These details are great … for me personally they're overwhelming many times but that's the point of the show notes and simplifying it and really … perhaps hiring that SALT expert to do the vast majority of this work for those listening that choose to go that route. Scott before we depart any last thoughts or recommendations for people that are listening; both buyers and sellers? Scott: Yeah. Just take a deep breath plan out time once a month or a quarter to focus in on this. Add up your numbers, decide your risk tolerance, and then move on. And then don't worry about it for that month or quarter. And then when you decide to do it, think about what it is you're doing and make a decision and move on. You don't have to stop all your business or sales or everything else. Just take a practical approach. This is one more thing that has to be on your regular process; like checking your insurance or other things that you're validating. And just keep moving; keep selling and growing. Balance the risk and then just move on. Joe: That's great thanks, Scott. As always appreciate it look forward to seeing you at the next event and hopefully lots of folks will reach out to you here. And be at peace of mind here with what you've shared. Thanks so much, Scott. Scott: Well, thank you. Links: Catching Clouds eCommerce Accounting Patti's Q&A about Sales Taxes and the new SCOTUS Ruling Catching Clouds Academy Fox News Supreme Court sales tax ruling: The winners and losers MSNBC Supreme Court Rules States Can Require Shoppers To Pay Online Sales Tax Internet Sales Tax | What Online Retailers Need to Know Sales Tax Nexus Threshold Calculator Sales Tax Permitting with SalesPermitted.com Get your FBA stock locations summarized and delivered to your inbox. Sales and Local Tax (SALT) Experts – Outsource Everything Cathie Stanton and Lauren Stinson, Cherry Bekaert ► http://cherrybekaertsalestax.com/ Michael Fleming ► www.salestaxandmore.com ► https://www.salestaxandmore.com/chart… Diane Yetter ► www.salestaxinstitute.com ► https://www.salestaxinstitute.com/res… SaaS Sales Tax Apps: TaxJar ► https://www.taxjar.com/ Taxify ► https://taxify.co/ Avalara ► https://www.avalara.com/us/en/index.html

Evaluating your current reality, examining your past work, and becoming an effective leader with Kevin Waldron. ----- Welcome to episode 153 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork chat with Kevin Waldron about being an effective business owner and achieving the life you want. Playing the Game of Business Kevin isn’t just a business coach, he’s Bjork’s business coach! He’s in the business of helping people evaluate their current business situation and giving them actionable ways to get to where they want to be. In this episode, Kevin talks about how you can play the game of business to get what you want. You’ll learn how to evaluate what you should be doing more of and, more importantly, what you shouldn’t be doing as you grow into an effective leader and business owner. Let’s dive in! In this episode, Kevin shares: How he knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur The moment he became an entrepreneur How he approaches selling a business Why you might want to infuse your personality into your business What it’s like to no longer own your business How he found his sweet spot How he describes what he does to other people The most common things he addresses as a business coach Resources: The E Myth 032: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light Brokerage Waldron Leadership Subscribe for Kevin’s Ready for Monday email series If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Thanks to our Reviewer of the Week, Oriana from Mommy’s Home Cooking! If you’d like to be featured, leave a review for us on iTunes and include your name and blog name in the review.

On this episode, I talk with Mark Daoust from Quietlight Brokerage. Mark started his first website site-reference.com in 2004 as an SEO play as a resource for website owners and online marketers to share information and publish blog posts. It soon turned into an email play leveraging a second site to build a list of over 200k subs (with almost 1k new subs a day) monetized through ads in the newsletter. He sold it in 2005 through an online broker. Show notes >> https://richardpatey.com/quietlight-brokerage/

In 2007, a year after having sold his first online business, a friend asked Mark if he would be willing to help him sell his web hosting company. During the previous year, Mark was evaluating whether or not to start a consultancy firm to assist owners of profitable websites who wanted to divest of their websites. With the call from this friend, Quiet Light was officially born. Mark retained his friend's business, put the listing out to market, and within two months had found a buyer at a price that was higher than average web hosting companies were fetching in the marketplace. Since that first business in 2007, Mark has personally helped dozens of small business owners and entrepreneurs and has also expanded Quiet Light to the team it has today. In building out a team of advisors to help other small business owners, Mark has always emphasized the importance of honesty, working in the client's best interest (even if that means not working in his own best interest), and thorough preparation of all listings before they are brought to market. Before Quiet Light Brokerage, Mark founded an online publication and grew it's subscriber base to 220,000 members. Mark has been a presenter at top conferences and seminars as well as a guest author for numerous publications.

Mark Daoust founded Quiet Light Brokerage in 2007, they help entrepreneurs with an online business sell their website for maximum value. He started Quiet Light after selling an online publication that he built to over 220,000 subscribers and since has helped thousands of entrepreneurs sell their business. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [1:05] Jeremy introduces his guest, Mark Daoust. [2:10] Mark talks about his experience selling his first business. [9:30] Lessons Mark learned from selling his business and helping his friend sell his. [12:00] What Mark did after he sold his first business. [15:00] A business acquisition horror story. [19:00] Avoiding bad business acquisition deals. [22:00] Questions sellers need to answer before going forward with a deal. [28:00] What has been the trend with ecommerce businesses? [32:00] The wisdom in paring back business efforts in order to grow. [33:30] A positive businesses acquisition story. [36:30] Tools and software that Mark and his team use. [39:00] Reasons why people seller their businesses. [42:00] Mark talks about valuations and businesses for sale on his website. [49:30] How do buyers finance the purchase of a business? [59:00] Why you shouldn’t wait too long to get a valuation. In this episode… What insights can be learned from buying and selling businesses? How can you, as a business leader come away with lessons that you can apply to how you run your organization? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from entrepreneur and innovator, Mark Daoust. Mark shares helpful stories and tips from his unique vantage point as a broker between buyers and sellers of various sized businesses. Learn from stories about good and bad acquisitions and even tips that’ll help you avoid mistakes others have made. You don’t want to miss this episode and the important advice Mark has for leaders like you! Can you imagine being in the middle of a terrible business situation? What can leaders like you learn from such a frustrating and disastrous scenario? On this episode of Inspired Insider Mark Daoust shares the story of a really nightmarish situation that ended up teaching him some valuable lessons. The primary takeaway that Mark came away with in this situation is to really dive deep and make sure you verify the information provided in a business acquisition. Even then, some of the best brokers out there can get fooled by forged documentation. To hear Mark go into detail about this story and the lessons he learned, make sure to catch this episode! Wouldn’t it be great to have someone take a look at your business operation and give you an objective and balanced evaluation? Even if you aren’t thinking of selling your business, it might be a great idea for you to consider getting a valuation. On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from entrepreneur and business leader Mark Daoust. Mark explains how he has helped leaders like you walk through the valuation process to discover where there strong and weak points of their business are located. Based on this information, the leaders were better equipped to plan for the future and make informed decisions. Get more helpful insights like this one from Mark by listening to this episode! Have you ever wondered what is going on with all the businesses popping up in the ecommerce marketplace? Is it a good sector to start investing in, even possibly buying ecommerce businesses that are for sale? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from guest expert Mark Daoust as he shares his insight as a business leader and broker. With the rise of Amazon and all the effort surrounding a big push in the ecommerce industry, there is a great opportunity for leaders like you to get started with your own small business or to purchase one that is ready to go. If you’d like to hear more about Mark’s analysis of the ecommerce marketplace and other helpful observations, make sure to listen to this episode! What is your business worth? Seriously, do you know how much your business is worth in the marketplace today? There are many reasons why a business leader needs to have a good idea what their company is worth. On this episode of Inspired Insider, Mark Daoust explains why leaders like you should keep tabs on how much your company is worth and the steps you can take to increase its value. Many leaders are scared or they simply put off getting a valuation. Learn all about the process the good parts and the difficult parts, from Mark and his year of experience guiding leaders through this process. You don’t want to miss this interesting episode! Resources Mentioned on this episode www.quietlightbrokerage.com www.quietlightbrokerage.com/resources www.twitter.com/markdaoust LastPass To Do List Slack Lucid Charts Google Apps Shopify Big Commerce Sponsor for this episode Rise25 is where entrepreneurs of 6,7, and 8 figure businesses come together live and in person every few months to solve their biggest business challenges through this high-level Mastermind group. Each member leaves each week with lifelong friendships and actionable steps to take their business to the next level. Check out Rise25.com - a group run by myself and cofounder John Corcoran. Rise 25 is application only.

The more I spoke with Mark, the more I realized selling an ecommerce business is really complicated. Consider where you are selling, what you are selling, how long you have been selling. how much you have been selling, your standing on the site, your feedback, your vendors, your gross profit, your net profit and even more. The real question is your ecommerce business worth anything today and even more tomorrow? Seems waiting and getting your house in order is the smart move and Mark’s advice can help you get the most value. ps.. And YES, I ask the sales tax question. Mentioned: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/listings (Quietlightbrokerage.com) Mark’s email contact Sponsors: https://amazingfreedom.clickfunnels.com/webinar-join?affiliate_id=470572 (Gaye's Million Dollar Arbitrage List) http://ecommercemomentum.karenlocker.zaxaa.com/o/7525960235600/1 (Solutions4ecommerce) http://sellerlabs.com/momentum (Scope from Sellerlabs) http://trygodaddy.com/click.track?CID=344983&AFID=419630&godaddy.com=momentum (GoDaddy) http://trygrasshopper.com/click.track?CID=336231&AFID=419630&grasshopper.com=momentum (Grasshopper) Transcript: (note- this is a new tool I am trying out so it is not perfect) Stephen:                             [00:00:00]               It just want to jump in and mention my sponsors doing them all in the front. So I hope people appreciate that that’s kind of a new thing that’s been going out in the podcast world and this episode is such a great episode. I’m so excited and I really am. Gail is BS. Interview I hope you listen to that number to 38 and it just blew me away because she is the real deal that arbitraged group she’s running is just rocking it. I’m in it and I’m watching just people just knocking it dead. And you know for$149 for you to be able to get in there. There is a free week that she’s giving if you go through my link and I have a link on this episode. But I mean to me that’s how you can build up this Q4 and if you even can’t get it get on the waiting list because she’s going to pull from there when somebody drops for whatever reason. Stephen:                             [00:00:45]               So get in there. Gail is BS. Million dollar arbitrage I have a link. And you’re also going to get that seven day free trial silver lab scope I can’t talk enough about it. I just got another note from somebody saying hey what I was able to do was go up and blah blah blah. That is so cool to me hearing those successes and hearing that you heard it through my show just makes me tingle because it’s like getting exposed to that stuff is how you figure it out right. Somebody else has somebody else smarter than me has figured it out. I’m just bringing you the information it’s so neat to see and so scope’s going to let you really work on your private label wholesale and help you get the keywords right. Stephen:                             [00:01:23]               Ultimately that’s how you get the buybacks. You got to know what people were searching for. You put that in there you get that adjusted to know exactly what they’re searching for and boom you get found right being found on that page one. How do you do it by knowing the right keywords. How do you do that. Look at your competitors and use their keywords. That’s how you do it. And sculp allows you to do that. It’s just a powerful thing. Solutions for e-commerce. Karen Lochore you’ve heard me talk a lot about her if you haven’t met her. You should. Smart lady who knows what she’s doing. For example today had four items where I forgot what they called it were flagged for quality. Stephen:                             [00:02:00]               They were quality alerts. That’s what it was and turns out there’s an image issue and she’s like well yeah...

In 2006, a year after selling his first successful internet business, Mark Daoust was on the verge of going broke. No savings, no rainy day funds, nothing for retirement. Since successfully exiting his first venture, a content-based website called Site Reference, his next projects had not been working out and was hemorrhaging money. It was at this point, on the brink of pennilessness, that the sale of his friend’s web hosting business was closed - a deal he had brokered after the experience of selling his own company the previous year. With the commission he made from the sale, Mark went on to start Quiet Light Brokerage, Inc., a marketplace for buyers and sellers of internet businesses, which has conducted over $100million in business transactions over the last 10 years. Mark discusses the returns available to buyers of existing internet businesses, as well as the risk that comes with buying them. He also shares some very important guidelines for both buyers and sellers of online companies. Listen in for Marks’ stories and advice after his 10 years in the business. They include a lawsuit and some of his favorite deals that Quiet Light Brokerage has put together. Lessons learned in the early days When selling online businesses, finding buyers is the easy part, says Mark. Investors are always looking for new opportunities, so building up that side of Quiet Light Brokerage was less of a challenge. The more difficult part in the early days was preparing a business for sale. It’s an area that business owners looking to exit often don’t get right. This was one of the most important things Mark learned early on - understanding what motivates buyers to buy and what information they need to make an acquisition. Sellers are often very proud of the products and systems they have built and focus on these areas during the sale. However, buyers are interested in making a return on their investment and so the information sellers present needs to be shown through that lens. So Mark and his team set to work making more compelling cases for their clients. That meant showing more than a simple P&L statement. It meant monthly reports going back three years, dissecting the accounting and financial sides of the business. It also meant highlighting the growth potential and analyzing the threats that the company faced. And finally, it was about communicating what the asset was and why it was worth investing in. Online businesses are all cash flow based -- there is no physical asset that you can sell if the business fails --  and so presenting it correctly is vital. They also learned pretty quickly the processes needed for keeping clients’ information safe while providing proper access to potential buyers. Preparing to sell Mark breaks down the process of preparing a business for sale into four categories: Get into the buyer mindset -- buyers buy for ROI. This return comes in two parts: The financial return. Online businesses typically sell for multiples of 2.5-3.5 times earnings so buyers are looking at around a 33% annual return. The lifestyle associated with owning an internet-based business. Being able to work from home with a very light team is a big draw for investors. So when buyers are evaluating the ROI, what do they want to see? Firstly, they want to see that it is not a risky investment. Online businesses are inherently risky and buyers need to be aware of that, but from the seller’s perspective, it is about clearly identifying and mitigating areas of risk. What are the areas of risk? Are there any factors of dependency in terms of a technology or platform, e.g. is the business dependant on Google rankings or is it entirely based on Amazon? Changes to these platforms could have huge implications on the profitability of a company that is dependant upon them. Once these risks and dependencies are identified, the seller must come up with systems to mitigate those risks. Growth Buyers want growing businesses, not declining ones, so is it growing currently? Outside of that, what areas of future growth have not yet been explored? Using tangible, tested experiments and examples is much better than hypotheticals here. Transition How easy is it for the business to transition to a new owner? This often comes down to ‘key man’ dependencies -- if the success of the business is tied to a personal brand or a key partnership between the owner and a supplier, then that complicates the process of purchasing a business. Documentation Clean financial records and documentation of the business is the easiest area to control, and often the lowest hanging fruit for sellers to look at to increase the value of their business. What are you getting when you buy an online business? Most of what you’re buying is good will, says Mark. Often buyers will ask, ‘should I build this instead of buying it?’ In some cases, it does make more sense to build, but by purchasing an existing business, you are buying the brand, the reputation, the relationships and partnerships that come with it. You’re also buying all the decisions that went into getting it to where it is today. What worked and didn’t work along the way. And the systems and automation that has been built to run a lean online business. Generally the more staff a company has and the more systems and procedures that are in place, the higher the value is likely to be. It’s worth noting that the more staff members there are, the more friction is created in the transfer of ownership. And the more processes that are in place and well documented, the more attractive an acquisition is. What online business a good fit for you? Outside of the risks within the business you’re buying, is there anything you should know about yourself to identify what sort of business you should purchase? Firstly, it’s important to understand if you want to buy a big or a small online business. After his first exit, Mark bought two businesses for low five-figure sums and it became clear that the work he needed to put into them was not worth it for the money they were returning. So it’s important to match the scale of the acquisition with what is worth your time and effort. Secondly, know what your strengths are and invest in something where those strengths are an asset. For example, if you’re great at negotiating deals with vendors, look for an e-commerce company where that skill is valuable. Don’t enter the world of a software as a service company where you’ll have to become good at working with developers creating new product features, which may not be a skill you already have. Online businesses as passive income sources It’s true that many online business owners have created companies that create mid-six figure bottom lines that take just 10 hours of work per week to maintain. In Mark’s case, for instance, he was able to take his entire family out to Europe for a month while working remotely from his phone without impacting his businesses at all. Mark does stress that it takes a lot of work to get to that passive level, with a lot of automation, good people, and strong processes in place to allow it to run seamlessly. A buyer shouldn’t expect to be able to walk into an acquisition that is immediately passive and low maintenance, some ground work is always necessary. But it is possible to get there relatively quickly -- and doing that is all about systems and procedures. You can reach Mark and his team at www.quietlightbrokerage.com

Mark Daoust leveraged his knowledge of SEO, marketing, and technology and started Quiet Light Brokerage as a conduit for entrepreneurs seeking to market, buy, and sell internet businesses. Mark's firm has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs maximize the value of their e-commerce, saas, and content-based businesses and successfully exit. Marks speaks with us about how your personality dictates whether you "buy and hold" or flip your web properties, how to avoid a website with a single point of failure, and what you can do to make your online journey as profitable as possible. Resources Quiet Light Brokerage (Website) Mark Daoust (LinkedIn) Mark Daoust (Twitter)

Mark Daoust founded Quiet Light Brokerage in 2007, they help entrepreneurs with an online business sell their website for maximum value. He started Quiet Light after selling an online publication that he built to over 220,000 subscribers and since has helped thousands of entrepreneurs sell their business. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [1:05] Jeremy introduces his guest, Mark Daoust. [3:00] Mark talks about how he evaluates ecommerce websites to sell. [10:00] How do buyers secure finances to purchase a business for sale? [15:30] Creative financing plans Mark has seen. [19:30] Don’t wait too long to get your company a valuation. In this episode… What is the process like to get a business appraisal? Is it worth your time to go through an appraisal even if you aren’t ready to sell? What benefit does it serve to get your business appraised? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from business leader and entrepreneur Mark Daoust. Mark started Quiet Light Brokerage to help small business leaders get a proper business appraisal and start the process to sell their company to a vetted and financed purchase. Mark opens up about how he appraises companies, what the process involves, how buyers put together the finances needed for a purchase, and why business should get an appraisal even if they aren’t ready to sell. You don’t want to miss this helpful episode! Which ecommerce businesses end up being more desirable and profitable when being sold? How can business leaders position their company to bring the most value in the marketplace? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from business leader Mark Daoust. Mark explains how businesses usually fare on the open market. In particular, Mark goes over an example from the Quiet Light Brokerage website of an ecommerce business that is listed but has a lower valuation because of its age. Mark shares a few other factors that he looks at when he does a business appraisal and how business owners can make the most of their companies assets to get the most value. To hear more on this subject, make sure to catch this episode! Does the prospect of buying and selling businesses intrigue you? Have you ever wondered, not only what the process was like as a seller but also as a buyer? What does it take to gather the finances to purchase an already operational business? How do you proceed with the business appraisal and how do you secure the financing? On this episode of Inspired Insider, you’ll hear from entrepreneur Mark Daoust. Mark walks through what the process looks like for someone who is interesting in purchasing a business like the ones his company acts as a broker for. You’ll hear all about the different financing options and even some creative financing stories that Mark has to share. Don’t miss this interesting episode! Getting a business appraisal is only for business owners who are interested in selling, right? Think again! What you learn on this episode of Inspired Insider will change your mind. You’ll hear from business leader Mark Daoust as he goes over the reasons why business leaders like you should consider getting an appraisal. You have nothing to lose and some very helpful information to gain. Through the process, you’ll get great insight on what outside eyes view as your most valuable and your least valuable assets and efforts. This information can really help you take an honest look at where you are focusing your resources and why. To hear more about Mark and the service his company provides, make sure to catch this episode! Resources Mentioned on this episode www.quietlightbrokerage.com www.quietlightbrokerage.com/resources www.twitter.com/markdaoust Sponsor for this episode This is part of the Prosper Show Ecommerce Mastery Series where top Sellers and Experts teach you what really works to boost your ecommerce business. They have an amazing conference with some of the top Amazon sellers and industry leaders. *************** Rise25 is where entrepreneurs of 6,7, and 8 figure businesses come together live and in person every few months to solve their biggest business challenges through this high-level Mastermind group. Each member leaves each week with lifelong friendships and actionable steps to take their business to the next level. Check out Rise25.com - a group run by myself and cofounder John Corcoran. Rise 25 is application only.

Our listeners' favorite FBP podcast episodes, what they've learned, how how they've applied what they've learned to their blogs ----- Welcome to episode 100 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, we’re celebrating our 100th episode with a special community episode! How FBP Listeners Have Used the Podcast to Grow their Blogs and Businesses There have been 99 Food Blogger Pro Podcast episodes before this one, and we’ve heard from a lot of amazing people. From full-time bloggers to SEO experts to social media pros, this podcast has seen no shortage of inspirational interviewees! We’re really excited about this episode because we’re hearing from you. We asked our listeners what their favorite Food Blogger Pro Podcast episode was, and we’re so excited about the response. It’s so exciting to hear which episodes came to you at a specific point in your blogging career and how the podcast helped you overcome obstacles, become more confident, and grow your business. We hope that this episode will help you find an episode you might have missed or remind you of an episode that you’d like to go back and listen to again. Thanks so much for a great 100 episodes! These are our listeners’ favorite Food Blogger Pro Podcast episodes: 038: 7 Strategies to Build Traffic 035: How to 10x Your Facebook Following in One Year with Stephanie from Spaceships & Laser Beams 097: How to Create a Full-Time Income from Blogging Using The Egg Carton Method with Bjork Ostrom 013: An interview with Molly Yeh, the author behind Saveur’s 2015 Blog of the Year 083: The 1% Infinity Improvement Plan with Marly McMillen from the Chopped Podcast 094: How to Keep Going with Bjork Ostrom 019: How to Master Pinterest for your Food Blog with Susan Wenner Jackson from Ahalogy 001: Lindsay Ostrom from Pinch of Yum on Life as a Career Blogger 089: How to Build a Plane with Alexa, Jasmine & Raquel from Food Blogger Pro 058: 5 Tips for Overcoming the Resistance 024: How to Find Balance in Blogging with Ali Ebright from Gimme Some Oven 039: 12 Ways to Overcome Online Jealousy with Lindsay Ostrom from Pinch of Yum 093: How Finding a Niche Transformed a Business with Meggan Hill from Culinary Hill 040: How to Monetize a Podcast from Day 1 with Allison & Suzy from the Food Heals Podcast 055: Generating Income through Self-Publishing a Cookbook with Jason Logsdon 028: How to Boost Your Blog’s SEO with Casey Markee from Media Wyse 065: Michelle Tam from Nom Nom Paleo on Building a Brand, Launching an App and Publishing a Cookbook 092: How to Make $40K in the First Year of Blogging with Chelsea Lords from Chelsea’s Messy Apron 052: How to Sell 4,000 Cookbooks Before You Even Publish with Megan Gilmore from Detoxinista 032: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light Brokerage 008: Simplifying Ad Optimization with Andy Marzka from AdThrive 073: How to Publish Consistent and Quality Content with Jessica Merchant from How Sweet It Is 090: How a Legislative Assistant Created Her Own Path to Working for Herself with Brita Britnell 084: New Year’s Motivation: 1% Infinity Resources: The Anthony Kitchen Balanced Bites Tiny Kitchen, Big Food Brown Sugar & Vanilla The Spiced Kitchen A Day in the Kitchen Seasoned Vegetable Will Write for Food Blogtastic Food Dash of Wisdom Roots and Radishes Hostess at Heart Stress Baking Veggies Don’t Bite The Mighty Mrs. The Food Charlatan The 365 Days Podcast Johlene Orton The Bewitchin Kitchen Wander Spice The Little Plantation Craft Industry Alliance Little Bits of Real Food 40 Aprons Champagne and Paper Planes Isabel Eats Rhian’s Recipes Homegrown Provisions Real Simple Good Beneficial Bento The Mediterranean Dish If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Be sure to review us on iTunes!

How finding the right path for you can help you keep going with your blog.  ----- Welcome to episode 94 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! In this episode, Bjork talks about how to keep going when you're not sure you can continue.   Whether you’ve been blogging for a few months or a few years, you’ve no doubt had the thought at some point or another: How do I keep going? Blogging can be tough. You might be fitting it in after your regular full-time job hours. You might be running your blog as a business with not enough hours in the day. You might be juggling it on the side while trying to raise a family. Whatever your situation, you’ve likely found out that blogging isn’t easy, and on some days it’s tough to imagine how you’ll keep it up. Today, Bjork talks about some techniques that he and Lindsay have used in their businesses to help them get up in the morning and do The Work. In this episode, Bjork discusses: Why someone else’s path might not be the one for you How to find your own path Why time is a key ingredient How The Path differs from The Resistance How temporarily stopping can help you keep going Why deadlines are important and how they have impacted Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro Why gratitude moves you forward Resources: Open for Business Podcast Startup Podcast Smart Passive Income Podcast FE International Website Brokerage Quiet Light Brokerage Episode 032: Buying & Selling Websites with Mark Daoust from Quiet Light Brokerage Pinch of Yum - Afton posts If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Be sure to review us on iTunes!  

After selling his online publication with over 220,000 subscribers, Mark Daoust was approached by a friend also wanting to sell his business. This was the start of what would become Mark's next adventure, Quiet Light Brokerage, has currently sold over $100M in online companies. If you listen, you will learn: What it means to be an online company The different types of online businesses How online businesses are valued How to increase the transferable value of your company The power of analytics online How a traditional business can leverage the internet Where It All Began Mark Daoust didn't start out in the online business brokerage world. He first worked for an internet company in Maryland and made it through an extreme downsizing where he was then tasked with taking care of hundreds of clients. Through this experience, he learned a lot about working with online businesses and eventually started an online publication called Site Reference. Site Reference generated revenue through sponsorships of the newsletter as well as direct mailings to their list of contacts. [clickToTweet tweet=”“In the online world, if you have eyeballs..if you have an audience, you can make money.” ” quote=”“In the online world, if you have eyeballs..if you have an audience, you can make money.” ” theme=”style2″] Mark was admittedly a little naïve and sold Site Reference for less than what the company should have been worth if he would have made slight changes. It is hard to put a price on a company where he was the sole contributor to the business and all he had was a list of followers. Admittedly, his business lacked transferability. Making Your Business More Transferable & Valuable Mark now owns Quiet Light Brokerage which is in the emerging niche of selling and buying websites. He helps his clients with what he lacked in his previous business – how to make a business more transferable. In this podcast, Mark discusses four main things that will impact the value of a company. Risk Growth Transferability Documentation. Check out Mark's Ultimate Guide to Website Value here: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/resource/website-value Marriage of Traditional and Online Business Quiet Light Brokerage works with different types of online companies including eCommerce, service based businesses, software as a service companies, content sites, subscriptions sites, and lead generation sites. Online companies are not just websites. Traditional brick and mortar businesses that have a company website are not online companies. According to Mark, traditional companies have the opportunity to grow their business in a way they haven't before with leveraging the internet. “No one wants to talk to a salesperson. People don't want to be sold. They want to make up their mind on their own.” The marriage of online and offline worlds is happening. Mark gives examples and elaborates on this point in the podcast. Business owners do not have to get rid of what they have developed offline but they will need to apply it to the online world to continue to be successful. There is only a ton of upside for their business. Contact Information and Bio for Mark: Email: mark@quietlightbrokerage.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markdaoust/ Twitter: @markdaoust Company Website: https://www.quietl

After selling his online publication with over 220,000 subscribers, Mark Daoust was approached by a friend also wanting to sell his business. This was the start of what would become Mark’s next adventure, Quiet Light Brokerage, has currently sold over $100M in online companies. If you listen, you will learn: What it means to be an online company The different types of online businesses How online businesses are valued How to increase the transferable value of your company The power of analytics online How a traditional business can leverage the internet Where It All Began Mark Daoust didn’t start out in the online business brokerage world. He first worked for an internet company in Maryland and made it through an extreme downsizing where he was then tasked with taking care of hundreds of clients. Through this experience, he learned a lot about working with online businesses and eventually started an online publication called Site Reference. Site Reference generated revenue through sponsorships of the newsletter as well as direct mailings to their list of contacts. [clickToTweet tweet=”“In the online world, if you have eyeballs..if you have an audience, you can make money.” ” quote=”“In the online world, if you have eyeballs..if you have an audience, you can make money.” ” theme=”style2″] Mark was admittedly a little naïve and sold Site Reference for less than what the company should have been worth if he would have made slight changes. It is hard to put a price on a company where he was the sole contributor to the business and all he had was a list of followers. Admittedly, his business lacked transferability. Making Your Business More Transferable & Valuable Mark now owns Quiet Light Brokerage which is in the emerging niche of selling and buying websites. He helps his clients with what he lacked in his previous business – how to make a business more transferable. In this podcast, Mark discusses four main things that will impact the value of a company. Risk Growth Transferability Documentation. Check out Mark’s Ultimate Guide to Website Value here: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/resource/website-value Marriage of Traditional and Online Business Quiet Light Brokerage works with different types of online companies including eCommerce, service based businesses, software as a service companies, content sites, subscriptions sites, and lead generation sites. Online companies are not just websites. Traditional brick and mortar businesses that have a company website are not online companies. According to Mark, traditional companies have the opportunity to grow their business in a way they haven’t before with leveraging the internet. “No one wants to talk to a salesperson. People don’t want to be sold. They want to make up their mind on their own.” The marriage of online and offline worlds is happening. Mark gives examples and elaborates on this point in the podcast. Business owners do not have to get rid of what they have developed offline but they will need to apply it to the online world to continue to be successful. There is only a ton of upside for their business. Contact Information and Bio for Mark: Email: mark@quietlightbrokerage.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markdaoust/ Twitter: @markdaoust Company Website: https://www.quietl

This is episode 47. Today we are joined by Mark Daoust, founder of Quiet Light Brokerage, which specializes in helping entrepreneurs get the highest value from the sale of their online businesses. Today’s podcast is a recorded presentation by Mark from last year’s Rhodium Weekend – he explains the early mistakes he made in buying and selling websites […] The post Rhodium Talk: Selling Your Business – How NOT To Leave Money on the Table. Episode 047 with Mark Daoust appeared first on RhodiumWeekend.com | Buying And Selling Websites Event.

Welcome to episode 32 of the Food Blogger Pro podcast! This week, Bjork talks with Mark Doust about buying and selling established websites. Most of you probably aren't thinking of selling your website right now. But even if you aren't, knowing what makes a website "sellable" can really help you in the future if that day ever does come. Mark Daoust has made his living by helping people buy and sell websites since 2007, and he's become a go-to expert in the field. Lucky for us, he decided to come on the podcast today and tell us everything he knows - well, as much as he can in an hour! In this really educational interview, Mark shares: The difference between selling profitable vs. non-profitable websites Why having a "personal" approach to your website can limit sellability How you can transition from a "personal" website to a more general one when it comes time to sell The 4 factors that contribute to a sellable business How diversifying income and traffic sources can lower your website's risk The simplest & most important part of owning your business The most important factors that contribute to your business value Listen to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast below or check it out on iTunes: [[podcast episode embedded here]] Resources: Quiet Light Brokerage QuickBooks Online Google Analytics BareMetrics Cyfe.com The Princess Bride (purchase on Amazon!) If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to podcast@foodbloggerpro.com. Be sure to review us on iTunes!

In this episode of Marketing Nerds, Mark Daoust of Quite Light Brokerage talks about what you need to know about the art of buying and selling websites.The post New #MarketingNerds Podcast: The Art of Buying and Selling Websites appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Welcome to episode 14 of the Rhodium Podcast with Mark Daoust of Quiet Light Brokerage. Mark’s company advises entrepreneurs on buying and selling premium websites and online businesses. His company has brokered and sold over $70M in online businesses with approximately $20M happening this year alone. Mark has a ton of experience in this space […] The post From Nearly Broke to $70 Million+ in Brokered Websites With Mark Daoust (Podcast 014) appeared first on RhodiumWeekend.com | Buying And Selling Websites Event.

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or niche marketer, every internet marketing how-to will tell you that one of the most important keys to internet success is keyword research. One of the affiliate marketing sites I frequent is Mark Daoust’s Affiliate Knowledgebase. Affiliate Knowledgebase was able to get permission from author Brian Edmundson to publish an [...]Click here to play