Podcast appearances and mentions of michael jackness

Wanna hear tips on how to use your SEO prowess to grow a multi-million dollar eCommerce business? Michael Jackness joins the Niche Pursuits podcast today to tell host Jared everything he did to buy, grow, and sell an Amazon FBA and Shopify store in 3 years.  They dive into a ton of awesome points that are crucial for success in this endeavor.  And to illustrate the effectiveness of SEO in growing the store, Michael shares his personal experience.  He transformed a 100% Amazon business with a minimal website presence into a successful e-commerce brand across organic search and Shopify. With the Shopify store reaching 20% of the business, significantly increasing the overall enterprise value when it came time to sell. His strategy involved thorough keyword research, focusing on terms with decent search volume, low keyword difficulty, and strong buyer intent (he shares some awesome tips you don't want to miss). Of course, creating high-quality content is key to turning this plan into a reality, though.  And luckily, he doesn't give a vague explanation of what that means.  He highlights the importance of hiring writers and a graphics person to produce original and engaging content for the website - including discussing how powerful Midjourney has become. The use of AI in content creation and social media marketing is also mentioned. And he discusses how AI can assist in generating content ideas, optimizing content for search engines, and automating social media marketing tasks.  However, he expresses concerns about increasing competition and the potential impact of AI on the e-commerce industry.  As more businesses adopt SEO strategies, the competition for top rankings becomes fiercer. And, of course, the rise of AI may disrupt traditional SEO practices, requiring businesses to adapt and stay ahead of the curve. Overall this is an important discussion with tips to help a business of any kind improve its SEO and enjoy the profits that come along with it.  Be sure to get more content like this in the Niche Pursuits Newsletter Right Here: https://www.nichepursuits.com/newsletter Want a Faster and Easier Way to Build Internal Links? Get $15 off Link Whisper with Discount Code "Podcast" on the Checkout Screen: https://www.nichepursuits.com/linkwhisper

Michael Jackness started his eCommerce business journey in 2012 with the purchase of Treadmill.com. In the decade since, he's bought, grown, and sold several other websites. As part of EcomCrew, Michael shares his insight on how to start an eCommerce business on their monthly blog and podcast, and now he's in the UpFlip studio to give that advice directly to our listeners. With his IT background, Michael is particularly adept on the software side of running an eCommerce business. He talks about the tools they use at EcomCrew and how to utilize strategies like SEO, email marketing, and other tech tools to boost eCommerce revenue. He'll also get into the nitty-gritty of how to start an eCommerce business, from choosing the right niche and store platform to which marketing and advertising will give you the best return on your investment. If you're thinking about starting an eCommerce business, this is a podcast you don't want to miss! Michael has leveraged his experience and tech knowledge to build a $ 750,000-a-month revenue with 8-12% profit margins, and the tips he's sharing in this interview can help you to follow in his footsteps. ResourcesEcomCrew - Learn more from EcomCrew on their monthly blog and podcastKlaviyo - Email and SMS marketing automation platformHelium 10 - Useful software for Amazon FBA and Walmart sellers Jungle Scout - Resources and data for Amazon sellersQuickBooks - Financial management software for all types of small businessesShopify - Leading eCommerce platformWordPress - Free website building and hosting platform ideal for eCommerce businessesUpFlip YouTube channel - Hear more interviews with business owners on our YouTube channel

On today's lunch with Norm, we look at how to launch on Amazon WITHOUT rebates & giveaways with Michael Jackness. In this episode, learn how to set up a product launch in 2022 and how much time & money is required. Also learn what common mistakes people make when launching their products. Mike Jackness is a serial entrepreneur who quit his day job in 2004 to do content and affiliate marketing. Mike jumped into eCommerce in 2012 when he purchased treadmill.com as a parked domain and developed it into a 7-figure eCommerce property. Since then Mike has purchased or started 4 new eCommerce brands and sold 2 of them for 7-figures each. He blogs and podcasts about the entire journey at EcomCrew along the way. This episode is brought to you by Startup Club Startup Club is the largest club on Clubhouse supporting the Startup ecosystem. Startup Club offers an exciting sense of belonging to established and aspiring entrepreneurs, startup businesses, and companies wanting to Learn, Connect, and Grow. Join us for conversations with founders, entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists, subject matter experts, and more.For More information visit https://Startup.club This episode is also brought to you by Sellerise. Take a deep dive into your business processes to make data-driven decisions and outperform the competition in an innovative way. Sellerise is a comprehensive solution for your everyday business needs with innovative tools like the PPC Dashboard, Smart Alerts, Review Requester, and Keyword Tracker. Everything you need to grow and scale your business is just one click away. Stand out from the crowd and conduct business whenever, wherever. Innovate your effort and work smarter, not harder. The difference is amazing. Sellerise is for professionals at every level of the business journey. Simply select the capabilities that best fit your needs. Visit https://www.sellerise.com This episode is brought to you by Zee Are you a private label seller looking to expand into larger markets internationally or need an experienced  import partner to keep growing? Zee makes selling your Amazon products abroad easy with excellent import knowledge, door-to-door solutions, customer service and scalability. Streamline your import process with Zee today to increase profit margins and continue to scale. Ready to expand your eComm empire and take your Amazon FBA Business global? Visit https://zee.co to learn more! In this episode, host of EcomCrew Michael Jackness is here to discuss how to launch on Amazon WITHOUT rebates & giveaways. In this episode, learn what common mistakes people make when launching their products, and how much time & money is required. This episode is brought to you by Startup Club, Sellerise and Zee 

Content is king, and one piece of incredible content can change the trajectory of your business.In this episode, President and CEO of Terran LLC, Michael Jackness, talks about creating organic traffic through written content and how to leverage it for your business.Listen up and create valuable content.KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODEThe more involved you are in a niche, the more ideas you're going to have.You can make articles comparing your product to competitors and ranking them objectively.Look for articles searched for by people that have high search volume and low competition.Put e-mail captures with unique offers on every page.Today's Guest:Michael Jackness is the President and CEO of Terran LLC.Terran LLC is a leading eCommerce conglomerate with the following brands: Ice Wraps, WildBaby, Tactical, and more. They pride themselves in creating the highest quality products and delivering a customer experience that is second to none. They are a market leader in technology, including Shopify, Klaviyo, Facebook ads, landing pages, and more.Connect and learn more about Michael Jackness and Terran LLC here:Website:https://www.terran.comhttps://www.ecomcrew.comLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikejackness/We love our podcast community and listeners so much that we have decided to offer a free eCommerce Growth Plan for your brand! To learn more and how we can help, click here:https://mindfulmarketing.co/growthplan-applyIf you've been paying attention and your brand is ready to GROW, apply now to be the one new brand we take on this month!https://mindfulmarketing.co/apply

In this Prime Talk Podcast Video Sponsored by GETIDA – Michael Jackness - Co-Founder of EcomCrew - where e-commerce business owners turn for proven e-commerce advice, shares his personal journey into eCommerce. About Mike Jackness - https://www.ecomcrew.com Mike Jackness is a serial entrepreneur who quit his day job in 2004 to do content and affiliate marketing. Mike jumped into eCommerce in 2012 when he purchased treadmill.com as a parked domain and developed it into a 7-figure eCommerce property. Since then Mike has purchased or started 4 new eCommerce brands and sold 2 of them for 7-figures each. He blogs and podcasts about the entire journey at EcomCrew along the way. Find out more about GETIDA: https://getida.com/​​​ Please subscribe to our channel and share your thoughts and comments below. Stay safe and healthy in the meantime! #ecomcrew #mikejackness #michaeljackness

Michael is a lifelong entrepreneur who has been emersed in eCommerce for the past 7 years, who documents his entire journey along the way via the EcomCrew blog and podcast. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. The bad thing about affiliate sites via e-commerce is that you don’t own anything except for the content in your site. 2. Differentiate a little bit. If you do what everyone else is doing exactly, there’s going to be 15 other people doing the exact same thing. If you can make small improvements, it could go a long way because now you have something that’s differentiated. 3. Dig deep and realize that entrepreneurship is such a long road. Explore FREE video courses below to master everything from building the perfect Amazon Listing to Importing from China - Free Video Courses Sponsors: LaunchMyBiz: With complete end- to- end training & support LaunchMyBiz guarantees your success and revenue! Apply today at LaunchMyBiz.com! MDHearingAid: If you’re experiencing hearing loss, or know someone who is, visit MDHearingAid.com and use promo code FIRE to get their Buy 1 / Get 1 $299 each offer!

Michael is a lifelong entrepreneur who has been emersed in eCommerce for the past 7 years, who documents his entire journey along the way via the EcomCrew blog and podcast. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. The bad thing about affiliate sites via e-commerce is that you don't own anything except for the content in your site. 2. Differentiate a little bit. If you do what everyone else is doing exactly, there's going to be 15 other people doing the exact same thing. If you can make small improvements, it could go a long way because now you have something that's differentiated. 3. Dig deep and realize that entrepreneurship is such a long road. Explore FREE video courses below to master everything from building the perfect Amazon Listing to Importing from China - Free Video Courses Sponsors: LaunchMyBiz: With complete end- to- end training & support LaunchMyBiz guarantees your success and revenue! Apply today at LaunchMyBiz.com! MDHearingAid: If you're experiencing hearing loss, or know someone who is, visit MDHearingAid.com and use promo code FIRE to get their Buy 1 / Get 1 $299 each offer!

Closing on a deal can feel incredibly intimidating and scary. How do you know if this is the right fit for your company? What is the paperwork involved? Today my friends and colleagues, Bill D'Alessandro of ElementsBrands.com and Michael Jackness of EcomCrew.com, join the show to help me explain how the team at ECF Capital finally ended up choosing a deal to close on and the work that went into it. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/2Msxjyd  Interested in our Private Community for 7-Figure Store Owners?  Learn more here.   Want to hear about new episodes and eCommerce news round-ups?  Subscribe via email.

Michael Jackness is the President and CEO of Terran, an e-commerce conglomerate that owns and operates seven-figure brands and content sites. Through Terran, Michael also runs a blog, podcast, and training site called EcomCrew, which specializes in helping entrepreneurs grow e-commerce businesses. Michael has worked for tech companies since he was 18 years old, when he started his own tech business, Discount Computer Consultants. His specialties include search engine marketing, relationship building, and adopting change. In this episode… After juggling all of the personal and professional challenges of 2020, the prospect of starting anew in 2021 is refreshing, to say the least. The new year can hold many things: hope, health, and—fingers crossed—a great deal of growth prospects for your business. So, how can you effectively implement strategies that will help your business boom in 2021? Many e-commerce sellers consider outside traffic to be one of the primary avenues of growth for their Amazon businesses. When used tactfully, external traffic can help you optimize SEO, weaken competitors, and boost revenue and rankings for your Amazon store. However, like any great marketing strategy, mastering outside traffic takes time, effort, and skill. Luckily, Michael Jackness has the e-commerce expertise you need to effectively expand your business and its growth prospects in the new year. In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Michael Jackness, the President and CEO of Terran, to discuss how to master the art of using external traffic to grow your Amazon store. Listen in as Michael shares his long-term SEO strategies for content sites, the best platforms for e-commerce businesses, and how to boost Amazon revenue and ratings through outside traffic. Stay tuned for more!

Michael of Ecom Crew has built content sites that rank for organic keywords and pushes traffic into Amazon. Writing great content, because content is king, and push sustainable traffic into Amazon.I like that "I control the dial. At any point I can switch it to another store or platform."Book reference: Who Moved My CheeseHardest part is writing content. The 2nd hardest part is to keep going.Use SEO tools like AHREF0 or MOZ or SEM Rush. Go for long tail keywords first.Build a long term plan. Mistake made a long the way: Wrote about too broadly, vs what tracked.Michael buys and does real reviews about the products and write real good content. Then develop the product later.Amazon favors external earned media traffic. Which can not be gamed. Link building still works.Build top 1% content.Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/myamazonguy)

Today on the show I'm joined by good friends Drew Sanocki and Michael Jackness who open up about how COVID has impacted their lives and businesses, where we see areas of opportunity and more. We discuss: How badly our businesses have been hit Thoughts on how COVID will permanently change eCommerce Where we're seeing opportunities, both now and in the intermediate future

Today’s guest has built, bought, and sold several 7- and 8-figure online businesses during his 15-year-long career. And he’s sharing what he’s learned along the way with us today! Michael Jackness from EcomCrew.com was an early adopter who got started in the online poker world way back in 2004. From there, he moved to affiliate marketing before making the leap to physical products with his first ecommerce store. Since then, he’s learned a ton about how to successfully make money online, and today, he’s bringing his wealth of knowledge and candid insights to the show. In this episode, you’ll learn: His lessons learned from growing and selling multiple 7- and 8-figure online businesses over his career The importance of profit margins, supply chain management, and keeping customers happy His advice for other entrepreneurs who want to grow and sell an online business ...and a whole lot more! You can find all of the links and resources that I mention in today’s episode at MonicaLouie.com/43.

Michael Jackness is the President & CEO of Terran.com - owner of multiple commerce brands including tactical.com, wildbaby.com, icewraps.com, color it and more.  He's also the host of the EcomCrew podcast and is a fantastic trainer and speaker.  I got to hang out with Mike recently at an event and I was reminded of why so many people in the eComm space look up to him.  He's a brilliant marketer and eComm store owner. In this podcast, we dive into some of the most powerful growth levers available to commence merchants today and how to best use them. What are Mike's tips and advice online extension?  How important is it, and how and when should store owners consider it? Mike's favorite tips for cross-selling & upselling because “you win or lose by what you do on the backend.”   The most under-leveraged assets Mike sees in his students' businesses? Favorite growth levers to pull when tasked with growing an eComm biz. Some of your favorite recent marketing wins from Mike's many eCommerce companies Underutilized growth tips for Amazon.  How important is User Generated Content (UGC) and how to get it.  

Launching and then growing an ecommerce business can be both exciting and stressful. Many entrepreneurs hope to someday sell their companies. For this installment in my series on building an ecommerce business, I spoke with Michael Jackness. He is the owner of Terran, a multi-brand ecommerce company. Jackness has sold several ecommerce sites. In this conversation, we discussed the latest sale, and why he made that decision.

In part two of the incredible exit of Mike Jackness's Colorit, we are hearing his first-hand perspective on what the process is like from the side of the seller. Mike honestly and openly goes through the process, from the letter of intent through due diligence, all the way to the handoff and transition. He reveals the humbling moments, the surprises, and things he would do differently. This episode is for anyone thinking about being on the seller or the buyer side of the acquisition process. Ending your involvement in a business can happen more easily and smoothly if you are in a good position and absolutely prepared no matter what. The takeaway to all business owners is put your business in that position from inception in case of an eventual sale. Episode Highlights: Mike's background and how he found himself in the coloríng business. How the due diligence process went and how in many ways it was harder work than running the actual business. The things that came up during the process that were surprising and how to approach number discrepancies in due diligence. The value of using a professional firm for due diligence. Why early preparation is critical. The creation and review of the asset purchase agreement and how it went for Mike. The small things he relayed to the buyer in order to make the transition smoother. Why in-person meetings are very important during the hand-off. The importance of doing everything you can to facilitate while still creating limits to your involvement in the process. What's next for Mike. Transcription:   Mark: Mike Nuñez. Yes, Mike if you're listening to this podcast congratulations for sending in the right answer to the movie quote. And which one was it; that was the Boiler Room, right? Joe: I think so. You expect me to remember. I don't know. We need Chris Moore our content director on here. Come on Chris. Mark: Hey Chris, we need your show notes for before we actually record these. But I do know that Mike you sent in a correct answer. Thank you for doing that. I don't know the prizes although the next time I see you I'll buy you a drink for sending that in and getting the right answer. Joe: For people that don't know, why don't we tell who Mike Nuñez is? Mark: Yeah, Mike Nuñez is an old friend of Quiet Light Brokerage. He is also a buyer with Quiet Light Brokerage and what are we getting out Joe what am I missing? Joe: Doesn't he run AffiliateManager.com? Mark: He does run AffiliateManager.com. Joe: He's huge in the affiliate space so if there's anybody out there with products that are looking for a great affiliate company to connect with look up Mike Nuñez on Linked In and connect with him. He's one of the nicest guys in the country and you'll love working with him and his company. Mark: You know what this movie quote is going to become, right? All of the show vendors, all of the other vendors out there that want us to make a pitch on the podcast are going to start sending in the right answers to us here on out. So those of you listening whatever the movie quote was send us an email and let us know what that's from. We'll give you a shout out on the podcast. But now let's talk a little bit about today's podcast episode. I'm excited about this. I love the actual stories of selling some of his business. Joe, you've been working with Mike Jackness is on ColorIt.com getting his business sold and today we're continuing the story. We already have one podcast on this where we talked about getting the offer, preparing the business for sale, going through all that, and now we're looking at the other side of it. And that is preparing for the close and doing that due diligence and some of that stuff that gets pretty difficult towards the end of a sale. Joe: Yeah the 1st podcast was right up until the letter of intent and now we're talking honestly and openly about the process that we had to go through; that Mike really had to go through with his team from the moment you're under a letter of intent all the way through the due diligence, that financial trusted exam if you will, negotiating the asset purchase agreement, meeting the buyers face to face, working with transitioning your virtual assistants over to them, closing, and training and transition after. We go through all of it. Nothing is left out. Mike is honest and humbled and surprised in some cases. I don't mean to plug people but Centurica did the due diligence and Mike—we'll let people listen to it but Mike made a promise to Bryan at Centurica and he said something about this process and his accounting and how it's going to work out and Bryan said yeah okay we'll see and Mike was a little humbled and surprised in the process. Mark: Well, that's great. Mike is a good guy. We plugged him before. He's been on the podcast now a few times. Let's get over to this because I think anyone that is thinking about selling or even if you're a buyer and you're going through this process, it's so useful to get that perspective of what it's like to go through this process as a seller. Because boy it can be frustrating sometimes, it can be stressful and just getting to the psyche of what's going on there I think is invaluable. Joe: And not to go on too long but one of the most important things you're going to hear is what Mark and I say all the time but you're not going to hear it from us, you're going to hear it from Mike. He's built, he's bought, he sold, and he's gone through this process most recently as a seller. And there are some things if he could turn back time that he would absolutely do and he would have made more money. But he was at a certain emotional state and life state where he wanted to sell and we made that happen. And we achieved his financial goals but if he could turn back time that would have changed things a little bit. So we're hoping that the lesson that you'll get out of this is planning; planning your exit eventually. If you may wake up one day and decide okay today's the day I need to reach out to Joe or Mark or anybody at Quiet Light and begin that process what will you plan well in advance for that? That's part of the mistake that we talked about with Mike. So that's it, let's go to the podcast. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley with Quiet Light Brokerage and we have another great episode of the Quiet Light Podcast here with our good friend Michael Jackness. How are you today Mike? Mike: I'm doing good man. Joe: It's good to have you back. I know that we've been chatting a lot lately because we just closed a transaction together. Mike: We did. It's good to be on the other end of it now. Joe: It is and it's been a process. We're recording this folks on April 18th and we started in mid-December. And we ended up closing the transaction on April 5th. So giving you a little bit of a recap; this is Part 2 of the process of selling Mike's business Color It. Mike those that are just tuning in and didn't hear it the 1st time why don't you give a 60 second background on yourself so they know who you are. Mike: Yeah. So I always joke that this background story gets longer and longer as I get older but the short version is that I have a background in IT. I'm an entrepreneur by heart and was doing affiliate marketing. I quit my day job in 2004 and I've been out on my own doing various things since then. I got into e-commerce in 2012 when we bought Travelo.com and sold that—had an exit to that in 2015 in January. Four e-commerce brands one of which we just sold through you. And we've been blogging and podcasting about that journey since 2015 at EcomCrew. Joe: And you're being a little humble there because you really travel all over the world and speak now. Not just with EcomCrew but also on your email marketing campaigns that you do with Klaviyo. So I'm going to boost you up a little bit. Mike: Thank you. Joe: You're famous man, I'm humbled just having you on the podcast and to call you my friend I think. Mike: Inaudible[00:07:06.7] has this show notes that say famous on Amazon I had one that says famous in my own head. Joe: I'm famous in my house but the least famous according to my family. There you go. Alright, so just a quick recap; again we launched Color It for sale in mid-December against my better judgment but you're influential and you pushed me and we did it anyway. But we try normally to have three to five conference calls in the 1st 30 to 45 days and at least one acceptable offer. We had three or four. We can't remember. We talked about this the other day and I didn't bother looking it up. But we had enough so that we got two offers. We ended up under LOI on Feb 5th, intentionally chose not to close for 60 days so you could move three of the brands out of the seller account into other seller accounts and that was a fun process, right? Mike: Oh yeah. Lovely. Joe: And then we ended up closing on April 5th, roughly 60 days later after going under the LOI. So we talked about the process, getting to LOI in the previous recording. Let's talk about what happened afterwards and talk about due diligence. How was your experience in due diligence; how painful was it, how good was it, how easy, all that good stuff? Mike: It was a lot less enjoyable than receiving the wire. Joe: Is this a yes or a no that you really worked harder getting the business sold than you did actually operating the business? Mike: I'd say absolutely. It was a lot of work. It was stressful just because—I kind of strive for perfection and I wanted everything to be exactly what we had communicated in the preliminary process. But Centurica is really good and they found stuff that I didn't even know about my own business which was really frustrating for me. It was a little bit unnerving. I was worried about how that would be perceived if it would—how it would affect the deal. What I realized I guess eventually was that every one of these deals I think that goes through due diligence stuff comes off and we were kind of within that normal boundaries of acceptable tolerances I guess or whatever they would call it and I probably was making [inaudible 00:09:12.1] but for me at the moment that it was happening I was pretty upset. Joe: Yeah so we had two or three things that came up where the P&L wasn't exactly right; the discretionary earnings wasn't exactly right for the trailing 12 months. And it's funny I had a call this morning, I'm working on launching a listing tomorrow and the owner of that business said well what happens in due diligence if that happens? And he was worried that the whole deal would just fall apart and you start from scratch. That's not normally the case. Normally you just use logic and math and say okay if you're off by $1,000 and your multiple is a 3 time you take $3,000 off the contract price of the business. That's really important when you build that trust that you've built over the last two or three months with the buyers of your business Mike. But in your case we didn't make any adjustment at all even though your numbers were not exactly the same as in discretionary earnings, right? Mike: Yeah and I think a few things kind of happened and number one as we were going to do diligence and working towards closing our January numbers came out and our February numbers came out and eventually we kind of knew what March was looking like and we were up significantly year over year. So I mean it was getting to be to a point where in some respects I was kind of hoping the deal will fall apart just like be realistic for money. Joe: Yeah. Mike: Obviously, that wasn't what I wanted to happen because I didn't want it to go through [inaudible 00:10:37.3] but that certainly probably helps. And I think a little of the trust kind of was established like you said that they knew that there was nothing the fairest going on there or at least they hope that that's what they were thinking. I'm sure that's what they were thinking obviously. And I also think that just based on talking to Bryan over at Centurica like after the whole thing was done it was basically like when a report comes out it's always going to be—there's always something that's kind of found and I just—it's kind of like a home inspection. When you go buy a home there's going to be a home inspection and there's always going to be stuff that that guy finds. Some of the stuff you can try and negotiate for to lower the price of the home but a lot of it you just accept. It's just like there are things that you're going to just go okay well I didn't know that when I signed the agreement to buy this house and put it in Escrow but I want to buy the house nonetheless and here I am and I'm going to just go ahead and still do it. So I think all of those things combined and I just I mean legitimately was willing to walk away. I wasn't willing to sell it for less. Because I feel like the number that we picked in my mind was the least I was willing to sell the business for. I was willing—we had talked about willing to—because we had already started separating our companies and making things better that if we waited another year we would have gotten more money for it. But at the same time, I also had set my mind to sell it. So I mean there was a bunch of things going on there but luckily all kind of worked out in the end. Joe: Yeah, you were emotionally ready to sell. There's no question about it. I talked to you three times about waiting; separate them all out, wait another year or so, and you definitely were ready. Mike: It wasn't about the money. I mean it was just a lifestyle adjustment and realizing we had too much going on and leaving some money on the table for this transaction to almost certainly put us in a better situation moving forward. So all and I think we're going to do much better by selling one of these businesses. Joe: Yeah, and you're going to be able to narrow your focus with the sale. So with regards to Centurica; for those that are considering using them or are fearful that you're under LOI and your buyer is hiring Centurica. I've never had a deal go sideways with Centurica. What they do is they find out like Mike said what the issues are with the business and really what it is, it's a little scary but for the buyer of the business it's really things that can be fixed and it's a path towards future growth and making the business stronger. So I like it when somebody else steps in on a buyer's behalf and really digs into those numbers. It helps the process and instills confidence in everybody that it is a good investment and that nothing's going to come back to you Mike in this situation after the sale if you closed and the buyer found something after the fact. It's better that they find it during due diligence like we did here. Mike: I think the only reason you really need to be fearful is if you are hiding something and you know it. And these guys will find it. I promise you—I mean they're incredible. And if I ever go buy a business I will absolutely hire them. They are incredible. I almost want to hire them just to tell them to come do an audit on our existing businesses to make sure we'd get things fixed before we go sell it—another piece of it a year or two from now. They're really good. Joe: It's not a crazy idea preparing in advance for the sale of a business 12 to 18 months out. You know now that that is critical. We've talked about it recently. You got a good value for Color It but I think realistically if the brands had all been separated out and you had clean tax returns, a staff that was delegated just towards Color It, it's possible you would have gotten a higher multiple. And with your January, February growth numbers and December was just killer, there's no doubt that the buyer of your business is really excited and didn't even think about making an adjustment because some of the numbers were off by a little bit. Because the numbers were so high for January and February he knew that he was getting a great business. And he told me personally that he thought that this one is probably the best of the three Amazon FBA businesses that he's bought for me in the last eight months. So we got through due diligence, it was a little painful, a little tough. Centurica helped. We had some trust built early on so we didn't make any adjustments and mostly because of that trust and because of you keeping your foot on the gas in terms of the numbers and the growth of the business. The worst thing you can do folks is once you're under LOI have a bad month or two during due diligence. It scares the buyer. They're making a lifetime investment putting their life savings on the line and they want to see positive numbers, not negative numbers. So we got through it and the next phase sort of when we got most of the way through it was to end up drafting, editing, and signing a 30 to 45 page asset purchase agreement. And that can be kind of scary and overwhelming in itself but the situation was pretty smooth, don't you think Mike? Mike: Yeah. I mean it was incredible. I expected it to go one way. This is actually funny, I expected due diligence to go one way and it kind of went a different way because I was building to Centurica when I had did the kickoff call that this will be the most accurate—I forgot exactly how I said but I really hear myself on that [inaudible 00:15:57.3] accurate company that have ever gone through diligence with you, you're not going to find anything off here by a penny. He was like yeah we'll see about that. That went one way and then the legal actions in my career and the ones where the other party drops the agreements are usually just an awful experience of their lawyer is dropping the agreement on behalf of their clients and all the things that they would want in a perfect world for their client with complete disregard to what the other party would want to see in that agreement knowing exactly what they want. They already know what the 3rd party is going to want but they don't care about that. They hope that of a hundred things that are in there you only asked to change 50 or something and the other 50 stays in the other party's best interest. So what I got was an agreement and—so I'm not a lawyer and I've been through these a million times and I don't really get emotional about this. I just send it immediately off to my attorney I was like let me know and I was expecting pages of stuff that were going to be really difficult to go back and forth on. And I really hate this part of the negotiation process because you've already signed a deal and now you're negotiating over a bunch of other points that you weren't expecting to have to fight over and there was none of that. Like she just like make sure you fill in the blank for this number and they haven't created this LLC that they're talking about in the agreement and make sure that that's done so it's actually a legal entity before you sign. I mean there was little pebbly stuff like that, there was a couple of small things that had some substance but it made me so happy not to have to go through a tough process. It kept our legal fees down only spending 2,500 bucks reviewing and editing the APA which I was expecting 10 or 20k just from previous experience of having to go back and forth. And it was such a great experience. I actually emailed the buyer afterwards and I was like dude I just want to let you know that I really appreciate this because somebody along the way from your team said do not send an agreement off to Jackness and Terran that's just lopsided. Like, make this a middle of the road agreement from day one. Like that was clearly someone communicated that because otherwise, I think it would have been the other way. Joe: Yeah. This is the 4th transaction I've done with Matt and his attorneys; the 1st one years ago and the last three within the last eight months. And every one of those contracts had been fair and balanced and turned around very quickly. And we actually have an attorney referral list now where we just want people to have good attorneys because we've had situations where people have awful attorneys. So we started gathering a list and we put this firm Jones and [inaudible 00:18:35.7]. if anybody is working on an asset purchase agreement and doing it directly with another buyer or seller and you want a referral to an attorney, shoot me an email at joe@quietlightbrokerage and I'll be happy to send it off to you; I'm happy to do that. So that's good, we got through that APA and we actually signed it. It's interesting because we signed it on the 14th of March and normally when we sign it money goes into Escrow and then we're right off to closing. But in this case, we waited almost another three weeks. So it could have been even longer. Mike: It did [inaudible 00:19:16.7] Escrow. You might not recall but there was like a $25,000 deposit. Joe: Yeah because of the request—actually it was necessary because you moving things out of the seller account. It was a nonrefundable $25,000 earnest money that was put in Escrow after signing the asset purchase agreement. I think it was nonrefundable. But that went to the attorney Escrow agreement and then the balance was sent in just prior to closing. It all worked out very well. We ended up closing on March 5th. But prior to that, we had to have some calls and some meetings and doing some planning but there were times when you were a little nervous because there wasn't a whole lot of planning and a whole lot of conversations going on. Mike: Yeah, and it was from my point of view like I wasn't worried about me because like I knew the money was going to be there. But I'm the kind of guy as you know that I'm looking out for the other guy. They just spent a lot of money, I want to make sure it's a good experience for them. And I was just like guys you're buying this business in a couple of days and we haven't talked about changing passwords and billing and things are going to just start breaking if you aren't paying attention to them and the team needs kind of a handoff to know exactly where to look for things etcetera. So it was a little bit weird to me that it didn't seem to be—like they were the kind of guys like everything was like T's crossed I's dotted, really highly motivated and passionate about everything that they're doing but that didn't seem to be as big of a concern. And I think we were talking a little bit—I think it was a combination of they just purchased another business like right before that. Joe: Yeah. Mike: I was also coming to visit them for two days like a couple of days after closing to be with them two, four days in person which I think probably they were just mostly waiting for that to happen. And I think the last part is that they just basically trusted me by that point that I was a good guy and wasn't going to rake them over the coals. But there were definitely some moments where I just like I—if I wanted to like really screw these guys [inaudible 00:21:09.4] kind of I was like thinking that and more just from the perspective of I think they probably should just be more careful because not everyone is a good person and I've seen scribbly stuff happen. Joe: And remember you didn't read every line of the purchase agreement. I'm sure whatever the potential screwing was or could have been was covered there. Mike: There's probably, I did not read the agreement. My lawyer read it but yeah I'm sure there was some legal stuff on there that had I screwed them—I mean again that wasn't even like—I was [inaudible 00:21:39.9] that I was just more—I'm worried for them. Joe: Yeah. Mike: The biggest was that if a wire did come in and we still had that lump in the Amazon accounts and—who knows someone could just like catch a fly out of the country and really see it later and it was a little bit scary for me on their behalf. I just worry about stuff like that. Joe: Yeah. Well, I think that the last minute stuff was due to they had just closed one so they were busy with that and they also knew what was coming. And they are so busy they have so little capacity for anything about what's in front of them that they were like we'll get to that when it's necessary and it's necessary just after closing; after the money is wired. The other thing you mention was that you went to meet with them in person. You happened to be going on a road trip and going to be in their neighborhood just after closing. So that worked out perfectly. Mike: Yeah. Joe: I always recommend to people, to buyers in particular regardless of the size of the transaction that if you can; if there's any possible way, you get in a car, you get on a plane and you go visit your seller during due diligence. Once you're under a letter of intent get in front of them; have lunch with them, have dinner, get a tour. You don't want to let the staff know that the business is forsold, the large part until the APA is signed. But you could go in as a consultant or at the very least meet them so that you can gain that level of trust because it makes a huge difference. The worst situation I've ever had—I actually had a guy from San Diego where you're from. Early on when I 1st started back in 2012, he bought a business from me that was $35,000 and there was about $40,000 worth of inventory. He flew from San Diego in January to Minnesota and he didn't have a winter coat and I was trying to talk to him because I grew up in Min and I'm like you really—you don't know what 10 degrees is and with the wind chill factor of 20 below but it worked out. And he said to me later, he said look if I hadn't met them in person and learned everything I learned in due diligence I would have walked away because due diligence was tough when you've got a business that's $35,000 and there's $40,000 worth of inventory. But he met them in person and that made a difference. He still owns it today. I saw him at the Prosper Show a few years ago. So definitely in person meetings are really, really important. So let's talk now about those two days; in most transactions, there's a transition period, a training period that is part of the purchase price. The standard asset purchase agreement says up to 40 hours over the 1st 90 days after closing. I don't think you're going to use 40 hours or they're going to use 40 hours from you but you put in a couple of very long days right after closing, right? Mike: Yeah. I mean I don't know that it was required and I committed to be there whatever but I'm again that type of guy and I want to see them have success with this business; bottom line. And part of it is just treating others like I like to be treated. And I have been in transactions before when I bought Ice Wraps on the wire hit the guy ghosted me. It was like I literally never heard from him again. Joe: That's why we do hold backs people. Mike: Yeah but I mean it was a $50,000 purchase. It was actually the exact same situation as going—I went to Michigan, it was also in January. I also didn't have a winter coat. And I was also [inaudible 00:25:13.8] I thought you're talking about me for a second. But the employees did help me with the transition. The owner just was gone. And there were a couple of things that I could have used his help on that would have just taken him 30 seconds to answer. So again I just would never want to be that guy. And there is a lot—I mean a lot of things are going on in our business that I probably needed to hand off you realize it is all complicated; they are but it seems so easy to you because you learned them one day at a time. And when you're trying to take five years of something that you learned one day at a time that for me they're like sending orders into Amazon or you have something come from our 3PL or coming from China go to a 3PL and go to Amazon or deal with the customer service issue or do Facebook Ads, I mean all the different pieces of the business it all just seems so 2nd nature to me. It's no different than breathing. But when you try to start explaining to somebody you realize like just how much there is. And so I actually made a list of like 40 items as I just started thinking of them over and above what they were asking for or things that I thought that I needed to explain to them. And I just I wanted to feel like when I left there that I felt good about myself that they had everything from me to make sure that they were going to be successful. Now what they do with things from here on out isn't really—I look at that and that's not my problem. I mean I've done everything I can it's up to them now if they want to end to the ground there's nothing I can really do about that. I'd rather that they'll make a billion dollars with it. I'd be much happier with that result but I want to tell they felt good about me. Like I gave them every tool possible to be successful and I'm still there for them. They still have been in contact with me but they've been really good about it and respectful. And I've been spending 10 to 15 minutes a day maybe since I left there helping them which I think is completely reasonable. And I see the light at the end of the tunnel in that within two to three weeks I'll probably never hear from them again other than to say hi and maybe have a drink some day because they're really awesome guys. I really like them and I'd love to hang out with them just on a personal level next time we're in the same city. But they're obviously not going to take advantage. That's when I would get upset is like if the other parties are taking advantage and like asking you to continue to do stuff and spend eight hours a day helping them and just taking advantage. And they're not doing that and again I just want to make sure that I do the best that I could and I can feel good about myself with the hand off. And that's kind of how things transpired. Joe: Yeah. And that's why as far as the taking advantage that's why it's called transition and training. It's not operating the business. Mike: Yeah. Joe: So we've always got a certain period up to and over, the reality is that even after three months they may send you a note, a Skype message, a text, an email with a quick question that you're going to respond to. It happens. There's just no way that you can pack everything that's in your head inside of a two day training period. Because they're going to come up against something that may not happen for four months and it's new to them and it wasn't covered in training. It's just the nature of all of the pieces and parts. But at the same time, it's not overly complicated. These businesses are fairly easy to transfer and the training is fairly easy. It's just running on its own now and it's the key thing that I always tell people is especially people that are leaving the corporate world and are used to working 60 hours a week and they take over a business like yours that might take 15 hours a week on a high side that just put in 30 but 15 working in 15 observing and training and don't fix anything that's not broken. I see that happen too often. People come from the corporate world and they're just fixers; they want to fix things even if it's not broken so they do break it. So that's the big piece that I try to have them not do which is really important. Okay, so we're doing a video here. Most people listen to audio but you've got the EcomCrew shirt on so I want to talk about that a little bit. I want to know; we've closed, the money is in the bank, you've dropped one of four brands so you've got a little bit more free time. Not a lot, I know you're crazy busy but what's next for Mike Jackness? Mike: Well immediately following as just I have the EcomCrew shirt on is because we're doing an EcomCrew webinar right after this. That's what's immediately next but I think you're talking bigger picture. I'm trying to get—I have some life goals, I do a podcast every year about yearly goals and a couple of big themes are less is more. I think that would be just trying to do too much. We've been successful in spite of ourselves, in spite of running at full scene. I'm concerned about burning out because I've been there before and I can kind of feel that coming to [inaudible 00:30:01.6]. So before running off the rails and feeling like I'm completely burned out, I wanted to make some changes. And one of those things was selling one of those businesses to make sure that the burnout thing doesn't happen. And overall like the thing that I really enjoy doing is the teaching and education part with EcomCrew. It's just been awesome. I talk about how I feel like I have enough in life. I mean it's always nice to make more money. I'm not going to be one of those guys that's like I'm not going to take any money when I have enough to make money but there's different ways to make money. And one of the things that have been really cool is just to help others while doing that. It might be a situation where I might make 10,000 instead of $20,000 but somebody else might make $100,000 so it's like a net win for the role and it's still good for me and it's still in an environment where I get way more enjoyment out of it and it's a lot better than coming to the office every day and just kind of grinding which is not really for me. That was the reason why I left my day job in 2004. So those are kind of some big picture things that we're working on. I also want to get into an e-commerce business I have just a personal interest in. I think that that's really important after just being in e-commerce and business stuff over a long period of time. The things that you are personally interested and passionate about are just way easier. And Color It was an amazing business, amazing brand for a whole bunch of reasons that we don't time to get into here but it's just not something that I'm personally into. And the same thing with Ice Wraps and Tech Miner and Water Baby, those are just things that they make money. I'm an entrepreneur at heart, I think a really good business person at heart like I am very strappy. I will figure out a way to make money doing just about anything but it's not just about that. It's doing something that I actually have an interest in and enjoy which I think will be a lot better. So those are some big picture things for me. Joe: But I think a lot of that estranged and left comes with age and experience; hustled in the past and you did what you had to do and you got ahead and you're giving back. For those that have not listened to EcomCrew, the podcast, I highly advise it. We talk about it often here on the podcast for people that have just purchased businesses or even those that have them and are trying to expand their channels either to Amazon or email marketing or anything like that. You got to tune in and listen to Mike and Dave on EcomCrew. They've got a great series, Under the Hood, we're going to try to do something like that on valuations here at Quiet Light someday but Mike is one of those guys that has been there, done it, and now he's helping. He's not teaching because he had nothing else to do. He's teaching because he's been very, very successful in sharing his experience with others. So I appreciate that. Mike, any last thoughts, any last words in terms of what you'd say to people that are thinking about selling in the future and how to prepare? Mike: Specifically, on thinking about selling and how to prepare, the 1st thing I would say is that everything comes to an end at some point. So even if you're like I'm never going to sell my business that's complete B.S. because everything comes to an end. And what I've learned in life, entrepreneurial life is a lot of times it sneaks up on you. You think you're in a good spotting and you're happy with what you're doing but there's a lot of things that happen in business that are irritating and wear on you. And eventually one day you might just throw your hands up and you'll be like I've had enough of this. And if you're in a better spot to sell and you're prepared to sell all along the way that can happen a lot easier and smoother than if you haven't prepared. And you'll also get way more money for your business if you have prepared. So it's something that you should be thinking about at all times. It will probably make you a better business person and make your existing business better anyway because if you're always thinking about it from the perception of I might need to sell this business any time it will force you to have better procedures in place. It will force you to be looking at your accounting every month and scrutinizing all your expenses. Making sure that your net profit is always as high as possible. There's a lot of [inaudible 00:34:09.9] benefits having that thought process. And even if you “never do sell” it will probably put you in a better position no matter what. So if there are things that I wish I'd—if I could go—if you try and go back and change things and I was thinking a lot about this; our plan was to sell the whole thing as like a big conglomerate originally. But things changed and so I wasn't—I had been marching towards to sell everything as a conglomerate goal, everything was together and I thought one day e when I was done with e-commerce I would just be done with e-commerce. But that's not how it worked out. What ended up happening was we got too big for what I was comfortable with in terms of risk to reward and I want to take some money off the table and I still immensely love e-commerce and I want to be involved in e-commerce. So I could have better prepared ourselves for that by having multiple LLC's for each brand that maybe one LLC owned each one of those and it still would have been that conglomerate thing and structured in a better way. You can't foresee the future all the time but you can definitely plan—put yourself in a better position when the unexpected comes. Joe: I don't know if I could have said it any better than that so we're just going to wrap this up, Mike. Mike: [inaudible 00:35:20.4] Joe: It's about a complete pleasure working with you. I'm glad to have been your broker in helping you achieve these goals and maybe another year or two we'll do it with the next one. Mike: I'm looking forward to it. Joe: Alright, thanks, Mike.   Links and Resources: ColorIt.com MIke's Podcast Email Mike Centurica

In the second installment of our Incredible Exits series, we welcome Mike Jackness back to the podcast. Mike, one of our favorite guests, is here discussing the recent sale of his online business, ColorIt. Mike is a lifelong entrepreneur and hosts a podcast with a 30k listener following. On his show, he talks all things about e-commerce, email marketing, and Amazon. Mike's decision to sell this particular business was based not on struggling to grow it, but simply on the the need to offload something from his plate. He was well aware of what he'd done to grow it, and the potential for its future growth, he simply knew it was time to hand over the reins. We wanted to have Mike on to tell us firsthand how that process went, the challenges he faced, and how he eventually reached multiple offers. He shares some of the key things he did to get the business sold at 96% of the list price. We discuss how some acquisitions don't go as smoothly as others, even for someone who seems to have a great grip on how to grow and eventually sell an online business. Ths episode chronicles the sale and buying process: what Mike has done right and what he would change if he could. Episode Highlights: We hear about Mike's journey as an entrepreneur and what led him to start the Ecomcrew podcast. The factors that led him to sell one of his e-commerce businesses. Mike talks us through the 10 risk factors to take into account for e-commerce success. How Amazon can be the judge and jury when it comes to keeping your e-commerce business alive. The one thing he would go back and do differently in the transaction. The importance of planning in advance for an easier buyer transition. Why some entrepreneurs get caught up in the squirrel syndrome and often find that as they take on too much they run into trouble. Mike takes us through the launch process and how we got to the multiple with the right buyer. The importance of instilling confidence in the buyer. The inventory issue specific to this brand and how that affected the sale. Why one can't plan the perfect inventory in e-commerce business. How to find middle ground on the inventory excess in the sale and acquiescing when necessary. Why the seller makes all the difference in the sellability of the business. The way a seller should act under any circumstances.   Transcription: Mark: Joe you got to have one of our favorite podcast guests on; Mike Jackness. And Mike actually retained you or hired you to help sell one of his properties. And we get to do another episode … is this part of our Amazing Acquisitions? I don't know … our Amazing Exits I'm sorry. Joe: Incredible Exits, come on Mark get it right. Mark: My goodness, I made it up. It's a good— Joe: I don't even know what it's called. Somebody's going to tell me there's a certain term for things that flow off the tongue very well … incredible. Mark: It's almost as if I'm not paying attention to what you're doing at all. You got to have him on the podcast about selling his business. Joe: Indeed. Mark: I'd like to know about it. Joe: You know he's just an awesome human being and that made selling his business and the person buying it that more excited about it. Look, Mike is an influencer. He has a podcast where he's got 30,000 people listening to him every month and he talks about e-commerce and email marketing and Amazon. We had challenges because people are like well if Mike Jackness isn't killing it with this I don't know if I can do any better. But the reality was Mike was just simply chasing too many rabbits as he says. He had four brands inside of one seller account. He has the podcast and he has other projects going on. So he wasn't giving his full attention to this. So really the reason I wanted to have him on was to have people hear from him some of his … well-known and an influencer much larger audience in his podcast than we have what he was doing wrong. If he could go back and do it all over again how he would have changed things so that it would have been an easier process for him and we would have had … we had multiple offers but would have had a much easier process in reaching those multiple offers. And some of the key differences that he did to seal the deal. He didn't do it to seal the deal, he was just doing it anyway and it is what sealed the deal and got us under LOI at 96% of the list price. Mark: Yeah you know one of the most popular articles that I wrote on our blog back when I was doing all the blogging on Quiet Light Brokerage was the story of my own process of buying a business and in my own estimation failing at it. And frankly, as the founder of Quiet Light, it's kind of humbling to go out there and say yup I made an acquisition I completely failed but here is why. And I got so much good feedback from that saying this is great thank you for sharing these details because it really helps. So hearing from someone like Mike Jackness and his episode that you did with him is probably my favorite episode that we have that I've listened to. I don't listen to my own episodes which is why they aren't like [inaudible 00:03:51.2]. That episode from Mike Jackness in all seriousness he talks about email marketing and how he does email marketing. That's fantastic so if you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to it. It would be interesting to hear what he had as far as his own self-assessment when it comes to selling his business and some of the struggles that he had as well. And I think it might be encouraging for those of us that are out there like how are these guys doing all of it because we only hear about the successes, right? Joe: Yeah. There are challenges in here and I was … my initial plan was to do a two part series but we managed to get it all in. It's a little long folks. It's about 45 minutes or so and then the plan is to do a follow up episode about due diligence, closing, transition, and training. We may even have the buyer on and have all three of us on the podcast. Mark: It's 45 minutes? Joe: Yes. Mark: Well, I should shut up. We should get to it. Joe: Let's go to it. Joe: Hey, folks Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got somebody that's been on before; Michael Jackness from EcomCrew. Welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Mike: Welcome back. Joe: Welcome back is right. You actually inspired this type of episode as I said before we recorded. Folks Mike has … when he was on before he shared his expertise on email marketing and the use of Klaviyo. Today he's actually going to be our first exit entrepreneur or Incredible Exits guest. Mike decided to list his business for sale last December. We talked about it. We got it listed. And now we're under Letter Of Intent. We're recording this on February 12th and we wanted to share Mike's direct experience so that you hear it … hear about the process, and what you should do right, what you've done right and what you do wrong, and hear from somebody other than me. Mike has been through it. He's got an audience of 30,000 that listens on a monthly basis at EcomCrew. If you're not listening to EcomCrew … I know I'm promoting another podcast but it's one of the absolute best out there. Go to EcomCrew.com they're always helping entrepreneurs in the e-commerce space. So Michael Jackness, 30 seconds just tell some folks who you are again for those that didn't listen to the first episode that we did together. Mike: I'm basically a serial entrepreneur. I started my first business when I was a kid. I did have a stint for seven years in corporate life. One of my clients did hire me but for the last 15 years, I've been doing my own thing either in affiliate marketing or e-commerce lest the 5 plus years. And when I got on e-commerce I realized that we were coming at things a little bit differently. We kind of got at it as a tech company rather than a product company. And we realized we had a lot to share. So the entire process pretty much; as you mentioned EcomCrew, even blogging, and podcasting, and telling the world about what we've been doing. But one of the things that make us unique is we also talk about all the negatives not just the positive sunshine blue smoke up your ass crap. In fact we go out of our way to talk about some of the hardships of running a business and specifically e-commerce. So yeah that's a 10,000 foot view. Joe: And in just about 30 seconds; so thanks. Yeah, I get it, I can't emphasize enough. If you are a current e-commerce owner you should listen EcomCrew as well especially the Under the Hood series that I enjoy so much and inspired the Incredible Exit series here at Quiet Light. All right Mike at one point, you came to me. You reached out I think probably around Thanksgiving or so and said you wanted to exit. Did you plan that well in advance or did you just find yourself tired and ready to move on? Mike: Yeah, there were a ton of factors that went into that initial conversation. We had a different plan. I can tell you what. We'll talk a little bit about that but the plan was to do this a little bit longer. But I actually just did a podcast about risk factors in e-commerce and we don't have 30 minutes to go over the entire episode but there were 10 risk factors that I called out. Which basically were like the amount of inventory that you have, tariffs, taxes … just kind of like a risk to reward type of thing, competition, Amazon getting involved in brands, Amazon shutting your account down, getting unbalanced to be more Amazon than not off Amazon things of this nature. And for me what I realized … I started waking up one day realizing that for us this stuff they've kind of gone a little bit out of balance. We're at a point right now as we're doing this podcast because I haven't quite done the exit yet where we have $1.3 million in inventory total company wide as we've been growing. As you know in e-commerce it's hard to get any money out of your business because we are growing it 100% per year and it's a situation where money just keeps on piling back in the business. You have a tax bill every year and without the money to even pay for that because you're plowing everything back in the inventory for growth. And we have been running at that speed for almost four years. And because of some of those other risk factors, the kind of leverage is changing a little bit. I felt like it was time that we needed to take some chips off the table. And combining that with just honestly being a little burned out; running at that speed is definitely exhausting. I found myself either dreaming about Amazon shutting my account down or waking up every morning first thing and checking my inbox and seeing if they had been shut down. Not because we do anything black hat at all but because I see things that happen out there because of EcomCrew and also [inaudible 00:09:05.1]. You hear stories of people that legitimately didn't do anything wrong but it doesn't matter because Amazon can be the judge and jury and executioner all in one. And factoring all these different things in it just … it felt like it was time. And we didn't know it when I had that initial conversation with you. I didn't know exactly what that was going to look like. At one time we had talked about selling everything. I was kind of like just in a bit of bad mood that day and then we kind of start walking through some more realistic and better options to kind of end up [inaudible 00:09:35.9]. Joe: Yeah, let's talk about that the realistic option of selling everything I have things or setup because I really want people to learn from this process and what your goals were and the challenges that we've had and some of the amazing things that you have done throughout the process as well. So the first thing we looked at was selling all four of the brands that you have. You have it under one LLC and two of the brands are doing very, very well. And two of the brands are start up brands where they're really working at a loss because you have a tendency to just focus on organic traffic and brand recognition for a series of months to a year and don't mind operating at a lost. First and foremost Mark had a podcast with somebody from a PE firm that painted this picture. He said the thing about private equity investors is … well, think about it when you were a kid. And he says you get a bag of marbles from and you try to negotiate a deal with your buddy for the bag of marbles. The first thing you want to do is reach into that bag of marbles and take out all the chipped ones. You don't want to buy the chipped marbles. And then you want to focus on the best marbles. And so when looking at your four brands, two of them were really operating at a loss so my advice right away was let's take those out of the picture. Because when you're selling a business let's say at a three time multiple and you have two brands in the bag and they're both operating at let's say negative $10,000 in discretionary earnings; that's $20,000 times three that's $60,000 off the list price of your business if you go with the multiple of discretionary earnings valuation model which is what we do in marketplace valuations. So we had to pull those two out. And then we looked at what at the time was one of the larger brands of the two. We've got ColorIt that we've talked about. We've talked about it openly and you've done presentations all over the world on your email marketing campaigns with Klaviyo and ColorIt. But the other one, different space, and we had a challenge. See one of the things that we talk about all the time are the 4 pillars of sellable businesses; age, documentation, growth, transferability. And the big thing that we had a problem there was the transferability of that particular brand. Two of the SKUs that you had which were not the largest used by any stretch, you were reselling those, right? And you reached out to your vendor to confirm that you could transfer those and what did they say? Mike: They said no. Joe: Simple as that. So that takes away one of the pillars. It makes it more complicated. But again as you said you were in a bad mood that day that we talked. A lot of emotions in selling your business and as you say in the introduction that we did for ColorIt, you've been chasing too many rabbits. When you're doing that you're getting tired, exhausted, and pulled into many different directions and often going nowhere. So we ended up setting that one aside as well and focused only on ColorIt and went with that to launch. Before we get into the initial launch multiple and things that we found that were really amazing about it we found one more challenge or maybe two. You have one LLC with all four brands under one LLC and all four brands in one seller account. What have you done since our initial conversations back in late November early December to rectify that? Mike: Let me kind of set the stage just real quick of why we got there as well because it's interesting in business. There's two phenomena that is existing, first of all, I've been in business for 15 years so I kind of knew some of the hiccups and roadblocks we might get into down the road. But I had run multiple businesses in the past. So whenever you do something and you don't like it you tend to correct for that in another way in a future endeavor whether it's a business or in personal life. And the thought of like having … we actually have more than four things going through this LLC, there are other non e-commerce stuff and some other things as well. And the thought of having six or seven different tax returns and credit cards for each business and trying to figure out how we're going to separate employees or like the lease or back in software like Skubana or you know a UPS count; all these different things like having to have them all segmented out just was not appealing to me in any way shape or form. And I was more concerned about today than tomorrow as far as operating the business. And I also had this thought process of when I'm ready to get out of e-commerce I'm going to get rid of all of it once. I'm a pretty binary kind of guy like I'm either all in or not doing it. And I thought the day that … when it came that we would get out of e-commerce we would just sell that conglomerate. But life happens and business happens and like I said some of these risk factors changed and the reality was that we wanted to pivot and change our philosophy and our business plan pretty quickly. I equate this also to like when you want to pay taxes you want to have your business show the lowest amount of money. You're trying to figure out any expense you can have. That's really good for a tax but when you go to apply for a loan it better be showing lots of income. So it's like … it's a similar kind of phenomenon where like in one part it makes sense to do one thing but in another … on the other side, it makes sense to do another. So we were kind of at that spot where it was obvious that this was going to be a problem because the things that came up in the calls over and over again were really two things. Number one shared resources of employees or other resources which I understand the challenge there. And also the fact that everything's in this one Amazon account. And let me tell you man if there was anything I can go back and do differently it would be having multiple Amazon accounts at a much earlier stage. The challenge is Amazon doesn't make this easy. They won't allow you to just create multiple accounts first of all without getting permission. And in order to get permission, you have to have a separate company. You have to have a separate … either separate ownership structure, separate EIN, separate checking account, separate credit card. All this stuff has to be 100% separated out in order for them to grant you permission to create another Amazon account. So we are going through that now and I mean what a disaster. Like we're having to … we're trying to close within about six weeks of recording this. And to hand over the account at closing we have to have just Brand A which is going to be ColorIt and the Amazon account and Brand C or B, C, D have to be out of the Amazon account and in a new account and it has to happen as seamlessly as possible which is impossible because we're … we only have inventory in Amazon. All of our inventory is on Amazon. So we're having to recall some of it and relabel it, get it into the other account. And we keep a relatively [inaudible 00:16:34.1] amount of stuff in Amazon so it's not … looking on a SKU by SKU basis it isn't that big of a deal but because we're a high seven figure seller total we're recalling truckloads with the goods from Amazon. It's not going to be cheap and when you recall stuff it gets damaged a lot of times. The stuff shows up and looks used by the time that … you're shipping it in and it's getting … someone's handling it and putting it on the shelf and they got to go take it off the shelf put it in another box and crate and when you recall stuff it doesn't come back in the best of shape. So yeah I mean it's kind of a disaster all around but this is what we've had to do to get to where we are. And moving forward they all are all going to be in separate companies. So at any point when the time comes to put Business B up for sale, we'll have it all in one clear concise company; one account and we'll just pull the trigger and be done. Joe: You know I think you had said at one point you knew what to do and you had one plan and it was to sell the entity and all the brands within it at one time. And then we found three stumbling blocks. Two of them were operating at a loss because you are focused on organic traffic and brand building. And one where two of the vendors said: “yeah no, we like you, Mike, we don't know anybody else we're not going to do this deal with anyone else”. So you ran into challenges there. And you also said if you have to make those changes someday you'll do that. And all of a sudden you woke up and someday was here and we had an action that we wanted to take right away whereas the idea of I always say don't decide to sell which is eventually you do decide to sell but plan to sell. So my little slogan there doesn't actually work all that well. But seriously though I think the thing to do is to plan it out in advance as much as possible to make it strangely enough as easy and seamless as possible for the buyer. For that person that is going to put a million dollars of their life savings on the line or two or three or 100,000. The amount doesn't matter. It's a lot of money for the person that stroking the check or sending the wire. So that's the key thing. Mike: Can I just … I want to mention one other thing if you don't mind? [inaudible 00:18:48.4] this thing. Joe: Yeah. Mike: You're asking just kind of like some of the other things that kind went wrong and we could've done better. This is stuff that's often not talked about again in entrepreneurship but the reality is is that it would have been better just to have one brand and focus on it or maybe two rather than trying to do too many things at once which is a trap that a lot of entrepreneurs get caught in. Something I tell myself all the time, I even had it in writing on a blog post like eight years ago like I won't do that again; get into too many things. Entrepreneurs are different … there are different classes of entrepreneurs but the kind of entrepreneur that I am it's the squirrel syndrome. It's always exciting to do something new rather than what you're working on. I get bored really easily. To me, the business aspects are way less about the money than the personal enjoyment and excitement part of it. And oftentimes you end up with this … you chase rabbits both will get away saying that I use all the time. But I give that advice and don't follow it as well as I should. So that's another thing that you could really take away from this if your … the existing business you have is probably the best one that you have, the same type of thing with a car like the cheapest car that you'll ever have is the one that you own right now. You are then going on and buying a new one. Or any of these types of things can be applied to other aspects of your life as well. But if you are focused on one company like you typically have all your T's crossed and I's dotted and that's how I like to run my companies because I am a bit of a perfectionist. But as you spread your resources across multiple businesses things like to fall through the cracks that make things less attractive to a buyer. And the reality is is it's not as easy as it should be to just cookie cutter your business into another one. We had a really great podcast about this a year and a half ago. It was actually something we recorded live at E-commerce Fuel Live last year back in Gohana. So I just want to throw those things out as well as just other things that to be thinking about. As you're planning your exit you should be a lot of times it's … well, I want to get in this other thing or as you're growing it's really exciting and it's infectious and you want to keep on that path because it's fun to tell everybody how fast you're growing. And everyone pats you in the back and society makes things even worse because they're always like yeah man good job and everybody is like oh good job you only grew by 5% last year because that's just how we're all wired. Which the reality is that as Dave my partner always says is that revenues are vanity and profits are sanity. Joe: Yeah. Now I love that again this is … I want people to hear from you more than me. I say his stuff all the time and you're someone that's going through it right now and coaches thousands of people on a regular basis to improve their businesses and Dave as well. The other thing that is separating out the brands and separating out the LLC does for you the seller and the potential buyer is it casts a broader net of potential buyers. And the broader the net the more interest level there is going to be in the business. And the more interest level the more likely you're going to get an offer at or close to list price. And in this case we did not say SBA prequalified, technically you can take a business like yours and go through the process and have your accountant separate all those things out and certify it. It's not a full audit and you could try to go through the process and make it SBA prequalified. But in the time frame that you and I were trying to do this, you wanted to be under Letter Of Intent by January 31st. It didn't happen. We came close but we couldn't have gone through that process because that process would have taken six to eight weeks for your attorney to do it. And given the time of year, it might have taken longer because he's in full on tax preparation now. So that's the other thing that separating out your LLC's by brand will do for you is that when you wake up one day and you want to exit it's clean, it's simple and you can do that with a lot less work. And that work Mike we … it was a lot of work in preparing the listing for sale. In the Profit & Loss statements and then in that client interview everybody's heard about it … I told my wife when I sold my business I felt like I was working harder preparing the business for sale and going through the process of getting it sold than I was actually running it. And when I was running my own I was working about 20 hours a week running the business so that tells you what that workload is like. In terms of what we did, I want to talk a little bit about the launch process and talk about the multiples and some of the things we did but you did it just absolutely right spot on. We did go out a little early the right? We talked in late November early, early December and you had a goal and I wanted to help you achieve that goal. I'm human and I think that what I probably should have done in hindsight is said no, this is probably not the best approach. We went out in I think around the 10th of December, listed the business at a pretty strong multiple. It was at a four time multiple. And went out and said Look December is going to be great. Trust us these numbers will drop to a 3.5 once the December numbers are read. And the ultimate answer we got was cool, I think I'll just wait to see if that's true. So we've got a … I think we had a phone call, maybe we had one buyer seller conference call in the month of December and then you're a man of your word and you like to under promise and over deliver. And when December numbers came in they were up 80% year over year. Mike: Yeah. Joe: I've used this analogy with a lot of folks before and they've heard me say this again you can list something at a four time multiple and if it's growing 25% year over year consistently the buyer earns their money back in 2.7 years. I did not do the math on 80% and I won't but that really got people off the fence a little bit. We updated the P&L's, got the December P&L's and then we're relaunching I think on January 8th, 9th, or 10th, in and around there. And we actually dropped the price by $75,000 too. So the multiple didn't drop to just a 3.5 it dropped to a 3.2 multiple and we relaunched. And I think we had three or four phone calls out of the gate. The goal is to have three to five in the first 30 to 45 days and one acceptable offer. We did have just two offers in this case and one was just not there. We had two or three phone calls with them. One was interesting, right? I was traveling to Dallas so I'm on a conference call with Mike and the buyer and I'm actually going through TSA security on the conference call. And thankfully Mike can talk folks. So he was talking as I put my headset down and went through security. I picked it up on the other end and you were still talking. And you had a terrible cold. Mike: Yeah, that was a pretty embarrassing call. Joe: It was great though and the thing that you do so incredibly well is you instill confidence in the buyers. You're honest. People trust you. And it made them … anybody that had the opportunity to talk with you I think wanted to make an offer if they could pull it together. But we couldn't do an SBA buyer because of that commingling issue so we were focused primarily on cash buyers. Keep in mind though that not all SBA buyers don't have the cash. Many of them do they just prefer to make their money go further with an SBA loan. So I think we were both at ECF, that's E-commerce Fuel, at the event down in New Orleans and I drove you nuts a few times saying I think I may have an offer right? Did I—? Mike: It was so funny, you texted me at the opening party I think I have an offer and then you went to bed. I think like you didn't actually have the offer yet I just think I read the text a little long but … so I was like walking around the entire thing looking like anybody know where Joe Valley is? Like I want to know where Joe Valley is. Joe: Yeah, I think I heard somebody say Joe likes to go to bed early. He doesn't stay up late at these events. He's probably in bed. And that … I felt a little embarrassed there. I'm like okay I'm getting a reputation for going bed by nine. But we ended up not going under LOI— Mike: [inaudible 00:27:07.7] morning than I did. Joe: I think I probably did. I was really hopeful that we could go under LOI while at E-commerce Fuel because that would be a great feather in your cap and mine. We would be able to have a drink there and celebrate. But it didn't quite work. It took an extra … probably four or five days. But we had some challenges with the business. We ended up getting fairly close and I'll do the math as you answer this next question in terms of that asking price; that 3.2 multiple. But we had some challenges and the big challenge was something you talked about earlier. One of these big issues that you've got is you're taking all the profits from the business and putting it back into inventory. And when you have a business that's growing at the rate that yours was that's a lot of inventory. Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of the challenges that we had there? Mike: With inventory specifically in terms with ColorIt? Joe: Yes. Mike: Yeah. And this is something that we have worked really hard on in our business and we're very [inaudible 00:28:06.7] which is that you basically want as little inventory as humanly possible at all times. I mean you don't … there's a lot of reasons for this. If you have too much inventory when something goes wrong like you're stuck with a hot potato. That always sucks but probably more importantly especially when you're in this growth phase is cash flow is the most important thing. There's this saying that's been around forever which is cash is king and there's a reason for this; for every dollar that you have an excess inventory that's a dollar that you don't have in some new product … some new product launch or some other thing that can make you more money. And every inventory business is going to go through this. There is no inventory business I think on earth that … especially when it's newer and growing at this speed that can plan inventory perfectly all the time. Either you're going to err on the side of caution of not having too much inventory and be willing to run out of SKUs because of that. Or you're going to err on the side of caution of having too much inventory and err on the side of caution of never running out of a SKU. And for me, we went with the latter because in the early days of selling on Amazon we realize that when you run out of stuff it can be really detrimental. We had one SKU that we still are trying to recover from. It's a part of this issue here with this business sale we're now we have too much inventory because we could never get it to recover back to the point where it was before. So we try to in our inventory business turn our inventory three to four times a year which means that you should have no more than three to four months of inventory at any one time. And with ColorIt that was definitely not the case. So it was not the case. I mean there's a bunch of different exceptions that put things way further out than that but there was an old legacy book manufacturer that we work with that had very high MOQ's. So if we wanted to even sell the item we had to order a year worth of it at one time. And that was a decision that we made in Q2. We had a newer product that we just started selling and it was selling really well so we've ordered more of it and again at their MOQ so we have more than 4 months of inventory there. And so the bottom line was that of the 300 … actually it was $400,000 in total inventory that we have for ColorIt both from stuff that's in stock and things that we had already placed orders for that haven't shown up yet. There was about 100 … I don't have the numbers in front of me but $100,000-ish I think of inventory that that would take longer than 12 months to sell. And so for me because I've been on both sides of the fence as both a buyer and seller of businesses and I really believe living life like don't ask others or don't do what you want to do yourself, I realize that before we even start talking to the buyer that we probably have to make some sort of concession on the inventory. It just would be unrealistic to just be like no you're going to the inventory and too bad because I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that myself. The other thing that I don't like doing is like having someone pay me with my money. So that one thing I was steadfast about was that we're not going to take financing or delay the purchase price. I want an all cash offer for the for the purchase price but the inventory component I thought the right thing to do was to pretty quickly acquiesce and come into a middle ground with a buyer. So what we had agreed to do was, first of all, there was one SKU that I admit that just doesn't sell well. It was a bad buy on us. We just rid it off 100%. It's about $8,000 dollars. They can either … they were in a trash can if they want to transfer or they can keep it and do whatever they want with. There were a couple of SKUs that I kind of conceded to that were slower movers that I felt like was going to be kind of detrimental to their business to buy at with 24 months with the inventory at face value. So what we agreed to was we'll sell you anything that we think is going take longer than 12 months within that inventory at a 50% haircut. We'll just write off half of it and you can buy it for 50% off. So now you … yes, you carrying more inventory but you're buying it at a price that makes sense to carry it. And then the third group of SKUs were things that were basically like in this 12 to 18 month window, they weren't really that low for stock, and the biggest culprit of that was this new item that we're trending higher on. So I think ultimately and I convinced the buyer ultimately especially once the Christmas season comes they aren't going to have … they aren't going to actually have more than 12 months with the inventory. So we agreed that even though our forecast shows it's going to take more than 12 months to sell it's because we were using like a January sales number for that we weren't including sales growth in that forecast and we also weren't including what I believe that was going to happen in December which is December is about 3X any other month in our business. So ultimately we wrote off $40,000 with the inventory and agree to give them 12 months financing on the inventory at 5% interest which basically I think helps normalize that situation for them. And it's also something that I can tolerate as well. Joe: Yeah, and it happened and then we succeeded with it A. because of you; the likability and trust factor. But you have something that I preach again and that's when you've got an inventory based business you should have inventory aging reports. Sophisticated buyers are going to ask for them and they're going to want to see the inventory by SKU when you bought the inventory and how old it is, how many months you've got. As Mike said you want to turn your inventory every three to four months if you can but in his situation, it was 9, 12, 18 months in some rare instances. And so on that inventory report one of the key things that your buyer Matt said that made a difference for him in sealing the steel and getting it done was the inventory aging report and the notes that you put by each SKU and right there in one of them you said this is all inventory and it's not going to sell so we'll write this off. You just acquiesced on that 8,000. He didn't ask for it. You just put it in there because you knew it was the right thing to do. And then you went line by line on every other SKU and justified the 100% value or where you needed to discount. And let me just say for everybody listening, it is rare to need to take a note on inventory. It's rare to have to discount it. But when you've got that much you've got to do the right thing. What I don't want to happen here is for buyers to go “oh well hey Jackness took a note, I'm always going to ask for a note” because that's really, really the exception rather— Mike: Like I wouldn't do that with IceWraps for instance because there's … if we were to sell that we have four months with inventory. It's really clean and smooth. It's a more established business with fewer SKUs. It doesn't have a lot of the other things that cause us to have extra inventory. And like you said I mean just doing the right thing and being realistic of both sides. I mean this is what happens … like a lot of people when they're sellers they want to be way up here when they're buyers they want to be way now here and they're just like … they have this gap in which I think that just makes them not the best of human beings right? I mean you've got to be like more in the middle and realize the person that's buying and what they're thinking and what their [inaudible 00:35:24.6] is. And conversely when you're in the sell side be thinking about as well. It's not always just about you. There is another side of the coin. And I wish our politicians are covering this a little bit as well but it's just good business it's being a good human being. It's what makes deals get done. It's just doing the right thing and being fair about it; being equitable about it. I could … I just … I would feel like a dirty shyster if I have that guy by that one SKU that I know … like he doesn't know the business as well as I do. I know that one SKU [inaudible 00:36:00.9] it's been around here for two years. No matter how hard we try to sell it, we threw it at a 50% off sale or we even did a 75% off sale around Christmas to try to get rid of some of them. People just don't like that title. It was the one title that we made out of 25, it's a pretty good track record but one title out of 25 that was just this complete failure. I'm like how could you have someone take that? That's just basically like I'm stealing from them or trying to pull the rug over their head. And you know when they discover that later which they probably will in due diligence they're not going to trust you. Joe: Yeah, exactly I was just going to say that. They are going to discover in due diligence. And I'll tell you what for folks listening, we're going to run a little bit long on this episode. I'm going to lock this all up in one episode instead of doing two series here. The due diligence process would reveal anything like that so you need to get ahead of it. You have to be a good human being. This is a transaction that has to end with two satisfied individuals or entities at the closing table; that's the buyer and the seller. It's not winner takes all because the buyer is putting their life savings on the line again and they can walk away at any time. If you fake it, lie, cheat, or steal, it is going to be discovered in due diligence. More and more folks are hiring Centurica, your buyer is. That's Chris Yates' team. Chris owns the company called Centurica. C-E-N-T-U-R-I-C-A, they do due diligence for buyers. And honestly, as a broker, I love it when they join the team because they're working for the buyer. And I have yet to see a deal go sideways on any of the listings that we've put out. What they do more than anything else is they reinstill confidence that the numbers are right, that the seller presented information, and they create a roadmap to growth. They can point out certain things where there are flaws and sometimes it's a little scary but the buyer goes oh okay that's a flaw, I can fix that. I can make this better. And it's a path growth that we aren't able to do on the client interview which is great. One other thing I just want to say that we won't get into in great detail but without a question when you plan to sell instead of decide to sell, one of the things that you should always do, your partner Dave did it, is to take a look at your cost of goods sold. And if there's a possibility that you can renegotiate your cost of goods sold 12 months out in advance and reduce that cost of goods sold, for every $10,000.00 you save you're going to wind up with at least 2 ½ to 3 ½ times that depending upon your business and the trends and whatnot. Mike, you did it but you were able to renegotiate the cost of goods sold on just one of your SKU's and you placed an order for it so was locked in and loaded and the future sales would all be locked in at that lower cost of goods sold. And you sold through all of the other stuff at a higher price. So we were able to increase your seller's discretionary earnings by a total of $43,000 on that overall. And it was just because of that one SKU where you were able to renegotiate the cost of goods sold. In hindsight Mike do you wish you had done it on all of the other SKUs as well? Mike: Yeah I mean I don't think this is necessarily a selling your business thing more than this is just good business at that time. Joe: Yeah. Mike: What I've realized again after four plus years of importing stuff from China is that I wasn't as good of a negotiator as I thought I was. And I've always thought of myself as a really good negotiator in all aspects of anything that I do in business. And we had negotiated down from the original price they gave us but it still wasn't like the Chinese price. And when you get like a really good sourcing agent or you have someone that's more in tune with the local business and customs there they'll probably get a better price. And that's what happened for us. We met somebody … and these contacts are hard to find in business. We were out there doing it all ourselves like going to the Canton Fair, walking the floor finding manufacturers, and we did that because we're never really able to really find a good sourcing agent and didn't really know any other way to go about it. But because … mostly because of EcomCrew which is one of these things where the more you get back in life a lot of times the more you get rewarded. A lot of things we do in EcomCrew we don't get anything direct for our time for what we do. Like most of the stuff is just giving people free information and giving back to the community but what I found that happens in these types of situations is that makes relationships with people and the people you meet they know people that makes relationships with other people and eventually that path led to us finding this amazing sourcing agent that not only is he helping with ColorIt but everything else that we're doing now. And he was in our office here one day and we were actually sourcing something else for our tactical brand. I wasn't even looking to resource price I was looking to source new stuff. We were just chit chatting and we have this display up on our wall of all of our products and he is like what if I try to go source this for you? What do you pay for it if I can do better when you buy it from me? And I was like well man I'm also like not just about money. I'm really about relationships. I really like the factory I work with. We've been working with them for a while. It had to be like one hell of a cost savings for me. Like if it was I'm going to save you know a couple $1,000 here and there it's not worth it for me to blow that up. But he came back and was able to reduce the price of that particular thing from … well, he reduced it by 16% is what it was; which is massive. It's like this ridiculous cost savings. And at the same time the other factory as much as I … it's so funny like I'm really big on relationships and I was really concerned about them they actually copied our product during this process and even used our [inaudible 00:41:30.2] that we had paid for and everything and released our product to someone else. Sold our product to someone else. Which we then have to go spend money on a lawsuit to fight them which we got them to stop but … so between those two things we switched. Now the switch engine is going out and repricing our stuff and that's going to end up benefiting the buyer way more than it is for us on ColorIt which is fine. But I guess the end result is you should always be looking at price. Even when you think you have the best price you probably don't. There was a great … a presentation at ECF about this as well when it came to shipping rates. I don't know if you saw Craig Gentry's presentation on FedEx and UPS when he was just like if you think you have great rates you don't. Like there's … you can still do better because there's still another … they make you feel like you're getting the best deal ever because they're really good at negotiating. And it was similar with our products and we realize that we could be saving quite a bit. I mean 16% percent is a huge difference on COGS … I mean it ends up in your net profit. It's way more than 16% percent increase rate because it's going to be SKUed. It makes you … you could just throw money around the bottom line. So yeah I mean it was massive and the timing was great because we did get some benefit. But yes I wish that we had time to go through and renegotiate all those SKUs for sure. Joe: Yeah and I think you said it best. It's just good business. It makes smart business sense. Not necessarily sorry for the exit planning and the eventual exit and sale of your business. Can you say one more time what Dave always says it's not profit it's—? Mike: Yes. Revenues are vanity and profits are sanity. Joe: Perfect. Mike: I'm sorry I'm going to go off on a tangent; another tangent. [Inaudible 00:43:05.7] I got you and just like people are like counting their chest. Like I'm a seven figure seller and well I'm an eight figure seller and I sold this stuff … no one ever goes around saying well I sold 10 million dollars of stuff last year but I actually lost money. I mean there are plenty of businesses out there that are like that. It's very easy to get in that trap because it's actually pretty easy to sell stuff online. You can just spend way too much money on advertising and you can sell stuff but the profit is what really actually matters. Joe: Absolutely and that's where these marketplace valuations are. It's on the profits so discretionary earnings. All right so look I want to read one more thing and I'm going to wrap it up. I've said that you the seller, in this case, you Mike makes a huge difference in the saleability if that's a word, of your business. How you act prior to selling the business, how you manage your business, and how you represent yourself all throughout makes an enormous difference. And the way that you handled yourself on the client interview, on the recorded interview that we did as part of the package, on the conference calls with buyers, in the inventory challenges that we had, in writing those notes there, and just acquiescing on that $8,000 of inventory that you knew was no good; it all made the difference and it's why we're under Letter Of Intent. I did the math. We're actually under Letter Of Intent at 96% of the list price of the business. Again the inventory we're doing on a note which we don't love but sometimes you have to do that. I want to just read an e-mail that you sent to Matt, your buyer within a couple of hours of when we were under Letter Of Intent to just reemphasize what's important and the way that a buyer should treat their sellers … or seller should treat their buyer. So here we go. I feel like I'm in second grade standing up and reading this— Mike: I was not planning on this being read but it's okay read it. Go on. Joe: It says, Matt … his first name is Matt we're not going to say what his last name is. I just received the signed LOI from you and wanted to take a minute to thank you for putting your faith in me and my love child ColorIt. It's been one heck of a ride but I'm ready to pass off the baton and experience a year or two of not having too much on my plate. Of course, I realize there is still a lot to accomplish to get to the finish line but I wanted to say cheers. With the growth rate of ColorIt along with some of the other fundamentals, I'm convinced this will be your best purchase to date. My goal is to make sure that it becomes a reality for you as we progress through the transition. I look forward to working with you in that regard over the next few months. Mike. Guys, that is the way to transact business. It's just the right thing to do and it feels good. And I can tell you [inaudible 00:45:45.4] 80% year over year growth in December and didn't even mention it 74% year over year growth in January. It made a huge difference and Matt making an offer at 96% of the list price. But this kind of thing, the way Mike handled himself as a professional, as a good human being in this entire process sealed the deal ultimately. So Mike, thank you. I appreciate the way that it's gone so far. I think what we'll do is have a follow up episode to talk about due diligence and the training and transition and how the transaction wound up at the end of the process with this closing that we've got if you wanted to come back on. Mike: Yeah. Can I say one thing about the letter that I wrote? Joe: Of course. Mike: Since you took the time to read it I just … I got to preach because I've been on both sides of these deals. There have been times where I've been the buyer and at that moment that you sign the LOI there's always this anxiety, right? Where you like man I'm about to jump into this thing and you don't necessarily know what you're getting … everything that you're getting yourself into. And I just wanted to let the guy know that first of all I appreciate him again like it was sincere like I appreciate him … this was like now the sales person parts over like I'm not trying to sell him anything. It's always awkward when you're saying stuff in the call part of it. It almost sounds manufactured even though I don't do that but I'm sure to them it comes off as like this guy is probably just saying this to get me to write a check. But it's done. The finish line is there from that perspective I just … and I do want it to be a success story. I want the guy to buy it and look back at these years later and feel like he made the right decision. And yeah that was really all; just kind of being sincere about it. And I think all too often again people are more way about themselves they'd be all high fiving everybody and saying that we got an LOI and celebrating their success more than thinking about what this guy's about to endeavor in. And I think that's important. Joe: I appreciate that and the last thing I'll say is what I said to everyone which is we're under Letter Of Intent. There's no guarantee. Mike: You're right; the money is not in the bank yet for sure. Joe: It's not on the bank yet. So let's have another killer month in February. We'll get through all of this. Due diligence is very detailed but again they've got Centurica doing it for them. We've got to do a lot of work but we know it would be done right. And that emotion will be left out of it as much as possible and it'd be math and logic and we'll get through it. And then we'll have you back on the podcast to maybe high five. And maybe we'll get the buyer Matt on it as well. Mike: Yeah, I think it'll be cool to have him and come join us and talk about both sides. Joe: Alright, I'm looking forward to it Mike. You're a good man I'm glad to do business with you. I look forward to hearing you back on the podcast. Mike: Thanks, Joe.   Links and Resources: ColorIt.com Mike's Podcast Email Mike Call Mike 703-216-3225      

Hosts can talk faster than they can type. Followers can listen while doing any number of other tasks. A business that comes with a podcast following of 15,000 is more valuable than one that comes with a 35,000-person email list. Podcasts are pretty hard to get wrong. They can diminish the laborious reading and writing aspects of emails and blogs by automatically offering content within the conversations with guests. Today we are talking with podcasting expert Craig Hewitt about ways that adding a podcast to your business can be beneficial both for a recent acquisition and a potential sale. Craig is the owner of Podcast Motor, a company that handles the end to end podcast production process for businesses. He's an entrepreneur in the podcast space, running two service companies and producing 35 podcasts. He believes, and we here at Quiet Light agree, that a good podcast is a great tool for building your business. Episode Highlights: How podcasts differ from blogs. Where podcasters should get started. Whether they need all the “stuff” to get up and running. Why podcasters use external services to create their episodes. Craig's solution for launching a podcast quickly and easily. Challenges hosts face in getting started and putting themselves out there. Why it's important to find the right guests and create relevant conversations for your business. How podcasting can be a fit for different types of businesses. Ways starting a podcast with a newly acquired business can help promote ownership. Why businesses need fewer followers for a podcast than for a blog. How a podcast can create repurposable content. Ways a podcast can benefit a business you are getting ready to sell. Whether podcasts are transferable. The basic technical tools you need to get started. How long you should test for success. Transcription: Joe: So Mark today's episode we're going to talk about why someone should start a podcast. Stutter, stutter, stutter, Chris edit that. Mark: Chris don't edit that just keep that in there. Joe: Yes let's keep it in because folks this is about podcasting and I was going to ask Mark a question … oh, man, did somebody put something in my coffee this morning [inaudible 00:01:34.2] in my coffee … it's a Northern thing. Do you have to be well spoken, intelligent, and an expert on the subject matter to start a podcast? Of course, the key is to have a successful podcast to build an audience and a brand and a reputation but what do you think? Do you have to have all of that to really begin? Mark: No absolutely not. And look at the risk of narrowcasting and just talking about what we're doing here which is running a podcast, I thought it would be interesting to have Craig Hewitt on the podcast here. Craig owns PodcastMotor. They do the editing for all of the Quiet Light Podcast episodes. He also has a podcast hosting service Castos.com which he's recently started. He's an entrepreneur cut of the same cloth that all of us are made of. He likes to start, he likes to buy, he likes to grow businesses and living in France actually. He's an expat living in France so a pretty cool backstory there which unfortunately we didn't have time to get into. But I wanted to talk to him about why anyone who's out there looking to buy or even grow your business and create something really unique and special might want to consider adding podcasting to the mix. And look I get it we're looking a little bit at our own experience here and how beneficial a podcast … the Quiet Light podcast has been at Quiet Light brokerage, but I asked Craig this question. Joe, I'm going to ask you and put you on the spot here again like I do on a third of these intros I try and ask you a question that we didn't prep for. If you're looking at a business for sale and it's got 30,000 e-mail subscribers, okay and that's one option and then there's another business in exact same niche but they have 15,000 podcast downloads per month, where do you put more value in your opinion? Joe: Oh without a doubt on the 15,000 because those people are listening. They're hearing your voice and they feel like they know you already. We've gone to events where people have come up and said hello and they joke and they say I feel like I know yo. I've heard Mike Jackness talk about that as well. But I think the number one thing that this podcast has done for us … and John Corcoran was a guest on the podcast as well where we talked about networking and how important it is to a business. And I think if you're a business owner, if you're launching your own products, if you're a SaaS product owner, you just look to prior examples of huge podcast success like Michael Jackness or Scott Voelker for instance. Scott has got a quarter of a million people that listen to him every month. You network and learn things from the people that you network with to grow your business and grow your brand and I think it's invaluable and it blows away the e-mail. Although the e-mail is something specific and different because you're probably trying to sell a product right then and there, I think on a podcast you're talking about the bigger picture and your brand. If you're a SaaS business owner I think it's a great idea because you can talk about what updates you've got to your product and the market in general. But I love the podcasting and obviously, I'm not very well spoken or eloquent so if we can do it anybody can. Mark: That's right. So this is a bit of an advertisement for starting a podcast and I feel confident in doing this because I know a lot of people out there probably will listen to this and won't start a podcast. You'll think about the technical challenges, you'll think about the fact that your voice has to be out there and Craig and I go over this. There is an element of fear because you're a little bit more intimate with your audience when you have a podcast. There's a third dimension that gets added, right? When you are just writing a blog post it's very two dimensional, you're words are out there, you can go back and edit it whenever you want, people don't hear your tone … your voice, they don't hear you screw up because you get to go and edit it. And of course you can edit a podcast but there's still … it's still you, a little bit more real and raw. So I know a lot of people are going to listen to this and not start podcast but I'm going to make a pitch to just say look if you're trying to build something unique, if you're trying to build something valuable, if you're trying to grow your existing business with the [inaudible 00:05:24.7] towards selling it down the road, there is some value to starting up a podcast which is going to make it different if you are able to grow a good sizable audience. And I think in the 11 years we've done Quiet Light Brokerage I can't think of a single business that we have sold that actually came with a podcast attached to it. Joe: I don't think I've ever had one. And as far as return on investment I would think that the podcast and the cost associated with it, the ROI would be huge and probably not measurable; an invaluable. But one other thing look this is we've got Craig from the podcast company that manages ours but we've talked to lots of people like Taz from the Amazon Entrepreneur. He launched his podcast, does two a week and he does it all himself. So it's possible to do it for very little or nothing at all if that's … if it's a budgetary problem and you still want to get started. Mark: All right let's hear it directly from somebody who's been in the podcasting niche for a long time. He knows all … a ton of what he's talking about, Craig Hewitt. Let's get to it and cover this topic and I'll hopefully inspire maybe one or two of you guys out there to go ahead and start a podcast with your business. Mark: Hello Craig welcome to the Quiet Light podcast. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on. Craig: Hey Mark thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Mark: All right you and I know each other from a ways back at Rhodium; do you remember the … I don't remember when we met each other at Rhodium, do you? Craig: Gosh yeah. Like I'm optimistic with my time projections these days I want to say it's three years but it might be four years ago. It will be four years in April probably yeah. Mark: All right my wife does this thing I call it Megan math where she'll … something would be 2 months away and she'll somehow compress that down to like just two weeks away. Craig: Yeah [inaudible 00:07:06.4] great exactly. Mark: Again full disclosure and I'm sure I probably said this in the intro. We always do the intros after … we record the intros after we record the interviews themselves but I'm sure I will say this just out of full disclosure I do pay you professionally. You have been doing the editing … probably it's your group that has been doing the editing for the Quiet Light podcast so thank you for that. Craig: No it's my pleasure. It's my pleasure, yup. Mark: Awesome, all right so we're going to talk about podcasting today and whether or not somebody should consider adding it to a business. And I obviously with Quiet Light I want to focus a little bit on does it make sense to add on to an acquisition like if you buy a business, does it make sense to add that on? What's involved in starting up a podcast? What are the impacts that you might see? And I also want to … if there's time allowing probably talk about the personalized aspect of podcasts and how that's going to affect the buying and selling of businesses as well. We can all just talk a little bit about SaaS. I know you have some SaaS work as well which could be an interesting thing to get into as well. But let's start off real quick with your background and your history and kind of how you came into doing what you're doing. Craig: Yeah so we know each other through kind of why my first successful online business and really the way I escaped the rat race of the professional kind of corporate world which is called PodcastMotor. So PodcastMotor is a product tied service that does podcast editing and production, really kind of like end to end everything from Mark records an episode, sticks it in Dropbox and an episode shows up in iTunes a week later. We really try to take care of every aspect of that whole process for our customers. And that business has been going since … it just turned four this year so a couple of months ago. So we've been doing it a long time in the podcasting world. And we have about 35 customers that we service on a regular basis. So weekly or every other week that they have a podcast come out. About two years ago I acquired a WordPress plugin also in the podcasting space called seriously simple podcasting. And on top of that, we built a podcast hosting platform that we now call Castos. So I run two different businesses in the podcasting space and it all happened just by chance. To be honest I started a podcast … jeez, four and a half years ago I guess and saw it really quickly like a lot of people that podcasting is really difficult. There's a lot of nuts and bolts and technical stuff and gear and all this junk that you need to start a podcast as opposed to like a blog where you just get a WordPress site and a keyboard or your iPhone and you could start blogging as good as anybody else. Podcasting there's a technique and gear and equipment and all this stuff that you have to have to be decent. And then to be really good is a whole other level. So we started offering the PodcastMotor service based on me seeing that pain I guess. Mark: Yeah and I don't want to scare people right at the gate but let's get into that kind of a scary different world of podcasting because it is a little bit different. Let's start with just the hosting side and you talk about Castos your podcast hosting service. Isn't it enough to just have a regular website? I mean I think one of the things that was confusing to me with podcasting when we got into it before we started the Quiet Light podcast was well why do I need all this stuff? Why do I need Libsyn? Why do I need all these other things? Why are we … why do podcasters use these extra services? And what are some of things that if somebody is thinking about podcasting what do they need to consider from a technological standpoint outside of the equipment just from the webhosting setup, the technical setup? Craig: Yeah so the logic around having a dedicated media hosting platform with you know hear, Libsyn, and SoundCloud, and Castos or whatever, the idea there is so you have a hopefully a very popular podcast and you have thousands of people downloading your podcast every Tuesday morning when it comes out right? Mark: Just like the Quiet Light podcast, thousands and— Craig: Yeah okay so thousands of people listening to your podcast and downloading this 60, 80 megabyte file every Tuesday morning. If you're a business like all of your customers are and a lot of ours the last thing you want is this enormous strain on your web server on Tuesday morning when customers are coming to your site and trying to buy your stuff or schedule a meeting or something like that because both the streaming and download of the podcast will be bad. And your website will at least be very slow if not crash. So you separate the resource strain from podcasting and serving up your website and have a dedicated hosting platform just for those audio files and let your website run on you know WP engine or flywheel or wherever it's running so that the two aren't using the same resource. That's kind of the logic around why you needed a dedicated media hosting platform. It's just like you don't put your video files under use Wistia or something like that. It's the same kind of idea. Mark: All right exactly. Okay so there's this whole other technological world with podcasting and then there's also the equipment side of it. And then there's the editing side of podcasting as well. Craig: Yeah. Mark: And then there's the distribution to the different podcast networks. And we're kind of jumping on the deep end or I guess we'll swim to the shallow end because I'm going to talk about listing the praises of podcasting here in a little bit. And specifically as kind of a leading tease here for anyone listening why I think it's a really, really good idea for any acquisition that you do, any business that you're looking at to potentially acquire to consider adding a podcast and potentially even on the sell side as well. But let's talk about the setup here a little bit as well and the equipment. Now I've got as you can probably see from the video that you can see and we do these podcast over video is just a little more personal. Craig: Yeah. Mark: I got the road podcaster and I got like three other mics back there as well. [inaudible 00:12:52.1] and everything else. And you, you got I see a pop screen of yours, there's pop screens, there's mics, there's the Vulcan power stuff, it's a whole different world, isn't it? Craig: Yeah I mean so it is totally a different world and this is the bad scary thing about podcasting is that there's more opinions and resources out there than are necessary honestly. And there's so much information that so many people get scared and they go and read five or six different articles just about the best podcasting mic and what web … what podcast hosting platform to use and there's everyone has an opinion about that and you know how long should you're episodes be and blah, blah, blah. Do you need a pop filter? Do you need a boom mount? Do you need all this stuff and so actually we created a resource to kind of counteract this and we call it launch in a week. And the idea is we're going to give you like one or two options not like all these million things out there that all these other resources give you is like they create the analysis or paralysis by analysis. So we … so castos.com/launch takes you to launch in a week and we give you like in a week seven day, seven e-mails and videos exactly what you need to launch a podcast to dispel a lot of that over information and misinformation that's out there a little bit. Like microphones I only recommend two microphones you know it's like this one that I'm using Audio Technica ATR2100 and another one is called the Shure SM7B. That's a really really really good mic. This one is $65 that one is about $500. And so it's like kind of whatever you feel like you want or need. We try to do a lot of that like you can do this or this and don't overthink any of it because you can get in way over your head. And the unfortunate thing is a lot of people never get started because they just think so much about all this stuff. Mark: All right let's talk about that point because I think this is the biggest obstacle to podcasting right? With writing a blog you can put it out there and you can get it up and going. Everybody knows how to write something even if it's not very good but there doesn't seem to be as much of a barrier to getting started. Maybe it's because of the technical challenge but I think there's also a mental challenge of getting out there. And I know for a podcast standpoint we toss around the idea forever. I actually had a false start at starting the Quiet Light podcast and I think I recorded three episodes, launched two, and then stopped because I didn't record enough episodes. I think one of the challenges people have is the idea of being out there and trying to get this audio presentation perfect from the get go. But like you said just get out there and start. You have to actually start doing it. Craig: Yeah I mean I think part of it is with writing you can write a blog post and save it come back two days later and edit it and tweak it and you haven't even be published by someone else on your team if you want maybe it's your name it's not associated with it. But like right now you and I are seeing and talking to each other and like covering a lot of the senses all at one time. And when you're podcasting your literally in someone's ear for 45 minutes every week or whatever it is. So I think it's just the senses that you're covering and the emotional connection you crave with somebody which is why it's so great if you can do it and get it right. But it's also why it's so scary to just get started and overcome some of this fear of putting yourself out there. You know I think about … I've done a little bit of video work and it's a lot harder because then you have to get the voice and the physical kind of presentation right the first time and there's no editing. You can't just edit out a flub in a video it looks horrible. And so I think in a way if you're already doing video podcasting is so easy because you can just cut it up a million ways from Sunday and it's no big deal. But it is so much harder than writing. Mark: Yeah and I think one of the other obstacles that we run into is written content can be repurposed in so many ways right? Craig: Yeah. Mark: And there's different focuses that we can really measure written content from an SEO standpoint. So you can definitely say hey I'm going to optimize for this keyword. And I know I'm going to get this keyword density out there and then I can actually turn this into a downloadable white paper. And I can go out and I can maybe use the same sort of topic and write you know 10 different guest posts and get involvings. So there's that other benefit as well but you actually lead into one of the benefits and maybe this way you could [inaudible 00:17:18.0] to segue into that. And probably the number one reason that we started the Quiet Light podcast and the number one benefit that we've received from it is that personal touch that having a podcast creates. I'll tell you a funny story. You'll actually like this because you listen to our podcast by default from doing some editing. Craig: Of course. Mark: And I know you're not doing all the editing yourself but- Craig: No I do listen to the show though, yeah. Mark: Okay well here we go … thank you for that. That makes me feel better. So obviously Joe and I host the podcast and we were at Brand Builder's Summit. And somebody came up to our table at Brand Builder's Summit and said “hey it's Joe here” I'm like “ah no Joe is [inaudible 00:17:54.7] right now” and they go “oh man I really wanted to meet Joe, I absolutely love his podcast” I'm thinking “wow that's great you love Joe's podcast, I'm so glad that you love Joe's podcast” and he goes “yeah I know I was really hoping to meet Joe”. And Walker was staying right next to me and goes “no this is Mark over here he also does the podcast” he goes “ah is Joe going to be back soon?” I'm like “yeah Joe will be back soon”. Craig: That's wonderful, that's wonderful. Mark: But you know one of the things that this podcast has been able to do is it gets us in people's cars. It gets us in people's ears for a certain amount of time and it really breaks down some of that barrier that I think can happen when you're writing. Like you said it's very two dimensional. Craig: Oh yeah. Mark: It's the words on a page, you don't have the voice of the person in your head. This is … it's not as full-on as video but it's a little more personal. And I'm sure you've seen that a ton with what you're doing because I know you work mainly with businesses right? Craig: Oh yeah I mean for PodcastMotor all of our customers are businesses like yourselves. You know like small, medium size business and entrepreneurs, startups. And I think that the medium of podcasting is unique in two ways. One like we're having right now it's a conversation. It's not you on a video and your YouTube channel talking and everyone else is listening. That's not so helpful. And it's not so helpful in a very particular way when it comes to businesses and that is rapport building and networking. And this is like the secret sauce I think when it comes to like B2B podcasting is you have this podcast to reach a broader audience of buyers and sellers … of buyers maybe but really probably to get sellers in the door right? And so like for PodcastMotor we have a podcast. If we're going to go kind of strategically and think about who we're having on the podcast it's thought leaders in the podcasting like B2B podcasting space. So they can say wow you know I had this podcast with Craig last week, we talked for like an hour and he really knows his stuff. Dean my friend over here who runs a coaching business who wants to start a podcast should really talk to Craig because he really knows what he's doing. He can help him be successful. Like that really like micro networking opportunity that you have in interviewing a thought leader in your space on a podcast is not something you can measure by like download statistics or something like that. But for a lot of people should be the reason they do a podcast. It's not your listeners that you do the show for it selfishly a little bit is yourself and the networking ability that the podcasting medium allows for. Mark: Yeah I would agree 100%. And this is one of the main ancillary benefits that we received from the Quiet Light podcast. One of the biggest benefits is that it just keeps us in touch with people in a very personal way. And in some ways it's a little bit weird when people do come up to you and [inaudible 00:20:44.9]. Craig: Yeah. Mark: But I shouldn't listen to my voice that's weird but kind of cool at the same time. But that secondary benefit of that micro networking that you talk about I know we've had this happen actually recently we had Ezra Firestone on the podcast. And sure enough I had opened up my e-mail the other day and there's an e-mail from Ezra promoting his podcast episode with Joe, Joe's podcast. And I mean just think about that, I mean he's just one of the biggest Internet marketers out there right now promoting this one episode. And how many extra people are going to be exposed to the business, to us in general just because of that one episode. So this is definitely a benefit and might not be my number one goal but it's definitely one of those goals of the podcast is to be out there spreading our network for referrals. I think any referral based business that's out there this is a fantastic medium and probably a must that you should do is having some sort of a podcast if for nothing else to be able to bring in that network and grow that small network. Craig: So just to pile on there a little bit for folks who might be a little bit outside of the agency or consulting world so like starting from really high dollar and down to more transactional type businesses the other thing I think that podcasting does is it allows you to showcase publicly your knowledge and expertise. So if somebody sees you on another person's podcast they're going to say “wow Mark really knows what he's talking about when it comes to buying and selling businesses”. It automatically boosts your credibility with that person if they're looking to do this thing down the road. Yeah, I think that's massive. It's kind of like your little online CV that you build along with your social media and YouTube and all this kind of stuff but podcasting should be a part of that for a lot of people. Mark: Well and that actually leads to my next question really well and that is what do you think about podcasting on the more just B2C side as somebody selling baby shoes online. Craig: Yeah. Mark: I mean how can podcasting fit into that fold … with that type of business? Craig: Yeah I mean there's really two … in my mind there's two ways to go and admittedly this is a bit outside of the wheel house of what we do at PodcastMotor but there's really two kind of schools of thought or areas that you would run into there. One is just hobbyists, right? And so like you're a hobbyist you like the Pittsburgh Penguins, you want to have a podcast about that. That's just a hobby and that's great but it also does the thing about like building your social proof in the world. And so you want to go do something with that later on. You have this bank of 200 episodes that you want to do something with. If you're thinking about like a B2C area I think that you can either provide useful content to … you have a show about being a parent, provide useful content to other parents about how to be a good parent, organic parenting and all this kind of stuff. Or you have what's called like sponsored content and this is where a company would pay a creative agency like I believe it's Pacific Media is the real big one in this to create a show like Serial. So Serial is the Gimlet Media podcast from a few years ago. They would create a podcast like that and it would just be you know this podcast is brought to you by Huggies Diapers or something like that. And it's this totally awesome show about parenting and motherhood or whatever but it's just sponsored by this B2C company. And you see more and more sponsored content out there these days where a business is saying look this is a massive branding opportunity for us. We're going to create this piece of content that we know our audience will love. It probably doesn't have a lot of like direct business impact, people are not going to go buy our diapers because of this podcast but they're going to know our name really well because every week the show they love the most has our name all over it. Mark: Yeah that makes complete sense. I also think of the episode we did with Mike Jackness from colorit.com and the show is on email marketing. So it had nothing to do with podcasting but we were talking about how often he was sending emails. They were sending emails to their subscribers every single day but the vast majority of what they're sending is ridiculously useful content that is not selling their clients in any way, their customers in any way. And the result of this is that people end up looking forward to communications from them. So I can imagine that impact as well if you have a B2C company and you're in this hobby, this niche, or you really have a very unified sort of product that you're selling. Or it can even be a type of service as well. You're growing an audience that is kind of a group of raving fans for what you're doing. And you're offering so much value that when you do offer that sale when you do go out there and promote something you have this group out there that's just super excited to hear from you. And that's a nice problem to have, right? Craig: Yup. Mark: Yeah all right let's talk a little bit about this from an acquisition standpoint. Obviously, we should bring this back into this and I want to talk about from an acquisition standpoint and also selling and we'll end with the selling question because I think there is a pretty significant question there. But on the acquisition side the one struggle I can see … I did an acquisition recently my guess and that's almost two years ago now and – Craig: It's not funny, math coming back in there. Mark: Yeah [inaudible 00:25:57.8] absolutely, time flies too. And you and I have actually talked about the starting up a podcast on this acquisition. It's a little bit weird though you know like Quiet Light Brokerage has started … I own, I've kind of grown with it so I feel like I own it. It is a little bit weird to start a podcast with something that you don't own. But I wonder if there is almost a sense of growing ownership if you start building something on top of that like a podcast with an acquisition. Craig: Hmm. Mark: Kind of an open ended thought but I don't know if you've had any experience with that or any thoughts on that. Craig: Yeah I mean I think that … so I had not run into this personally like with some of our customers having acquired businesses that they didn't want to start a podcast around. But having acquired several businesses the one thing that I think is really important and often times really difficult is for an acquirer to really know the business model and the types of people that kind of live and breathe this product or space that you're in. And there is nothing better than to say I want to go interview the 50 best people in Instagram for kids whatever … whatever niche it is you know than a podcast. Mark: Instagram for kids sounds like it should have some predatory laws about it I'm just saying. Craig: Yeah sure whatever it is right … it's underwater basket weaving. I mean you interview the 50 best people on underwater basket weaving. You're going to know basically everything there is to know about the influencers and the things that really matter to people in that business. So for me it's like someone who is always looking to acquire businesses and kind of dabbling as like a serial entrepreneur if I was going to get into a business I didn't know a lot about lot about starting a blog or really continuing a blog would be really daunting because I … there's a lot of opportunity to waste a bunch of time and money there. You can write a bunch of articles about things people don't care about but it's really hard to have a podcast that's bad if you will in a space you don't know a lot about because you just go interview people and ask them interesting questions. And what they have to say is the content it's not what you have to say, it's what the people you have coming on the show. So I'd say for people looking to … who have acquired a business that might be a little out of their wheel house just start a podcast, interview the thought leaders in that space and you have like the nexus of all the really interesting content for your audience. And you as the new owner know exactly what's so important to everybody in that space. Mark: Yeah and I'm going to compare this actually to the blogging world because I went from the blogging world pretty heavily into the podcasting world almost exclusively now. Libby has been writing blog posts on every one of our podcast episodes so we can keep up with some blog content. But in the blogging world, you would have to sit down. You would have to come up with your own idea for a blog topic. You would have to research that topic. And then you would have to write on that topic. And the way blogs are going you have to write more and more and more. I was writing 1,500 to 2,500 word blog posts. I was doing four of those per month plus four outside of Quiet Light blog posts per month. So I was doing eight blog posts on average 2,000 words a piece. And then best practices after you publish that blog post you should go out and you should do outreach. So you should reach out to the influencers and say hey take a look at this and how easy is it for an influencer to ignore your e-mail or give it a cursory look. I'd flip this around for this I'm doing my research right now on this interview with you I'm reaching out to you and you're an influencer on the podcasting world so I already got my influencer locked in as well. We're getting great content at the same time. It kind of brings all of this into one hopefully easily digestible format. So that's a huge benefit I think as well. And when you're looking at getting into a space like you said trying to network and get to know the influencers in a space that you don't know is one of the biggest challenges. And having a podcast I'll tell you what when I ask people to be on the podcast I'd get one of two reactions. One is no I'm super shy I don't want to do it. And two is yeah that sounds great because who doesn't want to be in front of a big audience and get heard. People like to be on podcasts. They'd like to think that they're important enough to be interviewed. Craig: They want to take their Joe Rogan. Mark: Exactly even though … you know I'm not going to tell them that there's like three people that listen to the Quiet Light podcast but they're still excited. Craig: So you brought up two things I really want to touch on quickly. One is three people listening to the Quiet Light podcast, one is not true right? But in a B2B sense and even a B2C sense in your niche, the number of people listening to your show doesn't matter at all. So if you have a hundred people listening to your podcast that is great. Those are a hundred really passionate people about what you have to say. As opposed to a hundred people reading a blog post that has almost no impact whatever. You need tens of thousands of people reading a blog post for it to really be impactful in the in the greater sense. But 100 people in your niche listening about your podcast is fantastic. So they're really high intent people for whatever your business purpose is. The other thing is talking about repurposing content. I think podcasting has the ability to repurpose content really easily right? We're doing audio, we're doing video, it will be created in to show notes for a blog post, you have it transcribed, you can syndicate the video to YouTube. Like you can do all of these things with one … what we're going to talk for 45 minutes today piece of investment and your time and you have a team or someone do all of the extra work to produce all that for you and you have two or three or four pieces of content you can syndicate to everywhere that people consume this media. As opposed to writing a blog post it can ever only ever be in your blog. You can't go create a podcast out of a blog [inaudible 00:31:29.4] could but that's just kind of silly. Mark: Right and you're absolutely right as far as the repurposing content. Again if people haven't checked out in a quick plug in the Quiet Light brokerage blog, I think it was last fall we brought on [inaudible 00:31:41.3] and she listens to every one of these podcasts. Hi, Libby thanks for all the work you're doing. And she's putting together awesome blog posts like I've been reading these myself and she's taking the information that we're picking up in the podcasts and then she's going out and supplementing it with outside research as well by putting together a full on blog post with quotes from the blog post as well but bringing out a slightly different narrative than what we cover in this this conversation. It's a great way to be able to repurpose this content and give it just a little extra layer and a little extra dimension. And so that is one way to repurpose the content. And again I can't emphasize this enough the amount of time it takes to do a podcast significantly less time than it takes to do the blogging side. Let's address the question of a podcast in a business that you hope to sell someday. And I think this is a question that is a little bit more difficult to answer here because we talk a lot … let me ask you this have you seen the Princess Bride? Craig: Yeah of course. I have an eight year old daughter, yup. Mark: Well I always like to say that getting a business prepared to sell is you have to follow the Dread Pirate Roberts rule right? You don't want to be actual Dread Pirate Roberts. It's the name that counts right? That's the quote from the movie; it's the name that counts. The actual Dread Pirate Roberts has been retired and living like a king in Patagonia. That's what we want to be able to do. We want to pass on the name of our business. We don't want to actually have to be tied to the business. Well, we just talked about podcasting, it's being in somebodies ear and being that personality in somebodies ear. And so from a standpoint of selling maybe, it's a little bit of a disadvantage on that when you go to sell. But I don't think it has to be a disadvantage but I'm going to put you in the uncomfortable spot here and see first have you thought about this much and what are your thoughts on it? Craig: Yeah so I guess two things; one, I know that podcast themselves have definitely been bought and sold more and more right? We're recording this in beginning of 2019, you hear more and more about people selling and buying podcast especially in a space. It's like buying and selling a blog in a space. If you're a business and you acquired this blog redirect it and then pour your content into your domain and you already have this audience that's seeing your brand. The same can be said for podcasting so people want to come in and buy a podcast in a space because it has a built in audience. I think it's a really good kind of audience and customer acquisition strategy for a business that already kind of exists and has their own podcast to look at selling the business and transferring the podcast to the new owner. I think that a lot of the standard knowledge and business process transfer things apply there. Like if you have a process around Mark how you identify the guests that you want to have and how you invite them and you send them a [inaudible 00:34:23.3] like an as a zoom thing in it and you have an outline you send them three days before and all this kind of stuff and you have a team behind it to edit and produce the podcast. Then someone buying your business that has a podcast in it is not nearly as daunting as just saying like I wing it every week. And the new owner is saying holy crap I can't imagine doing that. So I think that … I mean the truth is a podcast is not really hard. Like once you do a couple of them it's not really that hard. So giving the buyer of the business that would acquire this asset but kind of responsibility of a podcast, give them the tools to be successful and I think it's definitely a net win. The worst thing I can see though is you have a podcast and you have an audience and people that really enjoy and want to connect with you through the podcast and the acquirer comes in and drops the ball, obviously, a big negative. So if people have podcasts and they're going to be selling their business or business with podcasts I would definitely make sure like the rest of the business like you said with the Dread Pirate Roberts thing it's like make sure that it's totally transferable and that the person's going to be successful. That intimate nature of the podcast I think can transfer from one person to another pretty easily. You know the new person is going to have some level of domain expertise and you'll love a different spin on the podcast and that's cool. Yeah, I think it's definitely a net win as long as the person is set up to be successful. Mark: Yeah and I would agree. And the other thing I would point to is that when talking about an exit strategy when looking at what you need to do to prepare a business for sale there's going to be this push and this pull on various factors of the business. And when you're looking at this, when you're looking at the business holistically it's always going to be better for you to build a strong, loyal, happy, faithful audience right? Craig: Yeah. Mark: That's way, way more valuable than anything else. And is there maybe a little bit of a demerit when it comes to having something like a podcast which may be tied to your voice. Yeah, okay there's … I think just being honest yeah I think there's going to be a little bit of concern about the transferability. But that can be addressed right? That can be addressed pretty easily. You can agree to do the podcast and co-host with the new owner for six months and have a very warm hand off that way. That would be a very natural way to do it. I think the benefits that a podcast adds in building an audience, let's think about this real quick here what is the value of an online business when we actually look at it and when we do all the tax returns and everything else on it we allocate most of the purchase price towards goodwill. The sort of nebulous who knows what it is that makes this business successful. Successful and having a podcast is really a big part of building that good will. So if you take the time and build a lot of good will through a podcast and that's a good source and driving avenue for customer acquisition within your business that's going to be a net plus in the grand scheme of the things. So I think people that are out there thinking about podcasting thinking well I don't want to start that because it's going to hurt the transferability of the business. I wouldn't necessarily say that. I wouldn't necessarily say don't do in fact I'll probably say the opposite especially if you have enough time. If you're looking at a year, two or three years before selling and you're able to build that audience I think it actually makes more sense because it's really hard to replicate that. Craig: Yeah the value you can get in those two years is so much more than the potential drawback of the new owner flubbing it and your audience being upset which is basically the worst thing that could happen right? Mark: You're totally biased in this but I'm going to ask you this question right now. If I could give you a business with 30,000 e-mail subscribers or a business with 15,000 podcast listeners what would you take? Craig: Yeah I mean the podcast listeners are going to engage with your message a lot more. You probably also would get all of them on an email list so you're already halfway there to having both. I mean you're literally … and we say it all the time, you're literally in someone's ear creating like some kind of like different neural connection with those people. I get your e-mail; I read your e-mails fine. I hear you on the podcast; I hear you talking about your kids and the Dread Pirate Roberts and all these kind of stuff that like has a different level of meaning. And it is that personal stuff that in a situation where you're going to be transferring it to a new owner is a little different. But for the time that you have the business or you're looking in acquiring a business that has a podcast it is a huge benefit. Because a lot of people are scared, right? You didn't start the podcast for some period of time probably because you're like … I don't know this is an onerous task I don't know if I'm up for it right? I mean maybe I did sure like I didn't start a podcast because I was like I'm not going to talk into a microphone and then put it out on the Internet for anyone who wants to hear it to hear because I sound like an idiot right? Like a lot of people don't like the sound of their voice and you just have to get over that stuff because the net is such a huge win. Mark: Yeah. Craig: Think about like you're at a conference now and like you know Mark I heard you on the podcast right? Mark: Right well it was that conference question that actually led us to do the podcast because we've been going to so many conferences and conferences are expensive. You have to fly out there for sponsoring and now that the sponsorship fees are ridiculously high and … but the benefit of being there in front of somebody and having those little jokes here and there or just playing… we'll play it a game. Well, we've done golf, we've done jenga, we've done darts … or something like darts it was actually sharp objects that we're throwing out our booth but that'd be dangerous they wouldn't let us do that. But that actual physical presence being there it really relaxed people so much more and allowed us to connect on more of a one on one basis. And that's why we started the podcast and sure enough, I think that happened. Given that choice between e-mail list and podcast, I would take the podcast audience as well. I think you can mobilize a podcast audience much faster. I think they're more engaged. I think they're more likely to quite literally listen to you but be more attentive to what you're saying. I think there's … that's just different [inaudible 00:40:07.3]. Craig: Yeah I would say like that one look at guys like you know Gary Vaynerchuk right or Pat Flynn or whoever that you look up to in the business and marketing world they all have podcasts right? So like that says something I think. The other thing is the volume of information that we are relaying in this episode is massive. Like … you know we transcribe episodes for customers a podcast and a typical you know 45 minute conversation is about 15 pages in a Google doc. Mark: Wow. Craig: So you're like how are you going to relay 15 pages of content to anybody ever? That's impossible, right? No one is ever going to read that blog post or email but they'll listen to that podcast every week. Mark: Yeah absolutely, in fact, I have our director of content marketing now Chris Moore who also listens to the podcast, hey Chris how are you doing? He's been going back through every one of our podcasts and pulling up quotes. And he was telling me just earlier this week about how much volume is there that we put together in what feels like a very short amount of time of doing this podcast. It is a ton of information. Craig: Something … a bit of a carrot I think for both the buy and sell side you know of your audience is you can bet your bottom that Google will be indexing audio very soon. Mark: That's a really nice tease. Craig: Oh you know the SEO impact of podcasting ya-da-da-da-da, you're going to create like show notes that are like 700 words or whatever for an hour long conversation. 100% guarantee that there will be an audio tab in Google whatever soon in the next couple of years. Mark: Yeah all right so let's go to this. We're almost up with our time I want to end up with what does somebody need at a bare minimum if they want to test a podcast for their business? How long … we don't have to get in the details of the equipment like we don't … I mean you want to give a couple of recommendations there and what are the basic things they should think about if they want to get and test it out for say two or three months and how long should they test it? Craig: Yeah so I think that the basics you need a microphone. I mentioned the two microphones before. If you really just want to test use the Apple ear buds they're actually quite good. Mark: They are actually. Yes, I'll second that actually, yeah. Craig: Get in a quiet place; don't have your kids running around or the train going by with the window open or something like that. Do some kind of environmental safety measures for the sound quality. You need something to record and edit the audio with. A tool that does both of those is called Audacity. It's open sourced and free in cross-platform so Windows or Mac. So you can record and edit with Audacity. Something to record with select a microphone or the Apple ear buds perfectly good and then you probably want something to store the files on so like a podcast hosting platform like a Castos or Libsyn, or SoundCloud and then you need to create what's called an RSS feed. And that is the thing that places like iTunes and Stitcher and Spotify read. And then share information about your podcast like as a whole like the title and description and image and all likely stuff and about each episode. That's kind of how podcasting works is you submit this RSS feed to these directories and the directories read the meta information about your show as well as information about each episode as it's published. So that's kind of a 20,000 foot view of podcasting. How many episodes? I think if you can't come up with 20 good guest interview or topics to cover or something like that then you have a couple of problems. But you probably shouldn't get into content generally but you really, really, really need to think about at least having a couple of episodes to launch with. Two, three, four something like that and but you really should have a general idea of what the first 20 episodes is going to look like. Mark: Yeah and I recommend actually recording probably about two months' worth just to start. If you're running a business as well I know like the recent first … my first go with Quiet Light podcast didn't really happen as I recorded three episodes and then I got busy and three weeks goes by really, really fast. And we do this here at Quiet Light we will get like a nice buffer of about two months but next you know we're staring down an empty set again of episodes. So get a nice buffer set up for that first trial and see what happens. It's a great medium and I'm going to do a plug for you just like you don't have to come across self-promotion. Honestly, your service makes this whole thing dead simple. Like I don't think about it at all, I don't think about what I'm doing. The only thing I thought about was what sort of graphic are we going to use for the podcast. Outside of that everything was set up, everything was done, the introduction was done. It makes it really, really simple. And so if you are looking to go this direction don't add a bunch more to your plate. Go out talk to PodcastMotor I recommend your guys service highly enough. Craig: Cool. Thanks so much that's great to hear. Mark: Hey thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. If you guys have questions feel free to reach out to Craig@podcastmotor. We'll put contact information in the show notes and yeah if you have any other questions or suggestions for podcast episodes send me an email mark@quietlightbrokerage.com. Thanks, Craig. Craig: Thanks, Mark. Links and Resources: Podcast Motor Castos Contact Podcast Motor

Multiple streams of income bring more value to your business. One stream of income people often forget about is email marketing. Today's guest Ken Mahar, founder of Email Broadcast, has been in the sales and email marketing arena for many years. Business owners nowadays are quick to find an expert in other media marketing channels, but when it comes to email marketing, they often implement it unprofessionally, ignoring the potential for campaigns to generate income. Ken's company sets about optimizing your email marketing strategies by carefully preparing them months ahead and sticking with them, therefore nurturing that ongoing relationship with the buyer. Email marketing is the dinosaur of digital marketing tactics, yet remains one of the best. Ken has over 18 years of email marketing experience, going back almost to the dawn of the online space. Ken's experience, along with the expertise of his team, helps clients launch and maintain successful email marketing campaigns. Today he's sharing some of the mistakes people make and valuable ways to avoid those mistakes. Episode Highlights: Common mistakes people often commit with their email marketing strategies. What content planning takes place between the firm and a client before starting a campaign. How Ken helps clients bring a lead through the funnel. How often he refines the client's automation processes and tracks the campaign's performance. The importance of segmenting your audience. How personalization is important – to a degree. Tips for learning how to implement the technical side of an email campaign. Why outsourcing the email marketing side of your business can pay off. The importance of grabbing that email address! Why business should always offer something that people want (and not something they don't). Transcription: Joe: Multiple streams of income bring more value, right Mark? Mark: Absolutely. Joe: All right. One stream of income so many people forget about because it's hard, you have to learn things and it seems so old school is email marketing. But I understand you just had Ken from Email Broadcast on the podcast and he talked a lot about the benefits of email marketing. Mark: Yeah. One of the things he started out with in the call which I find to be just really poignant to so many entrepreneurs is we are really quick to hire people that are specialists in Facebook marketing or AdWords or different paid media but when it comes to email marketing a lot of us just say I'll take care of it. And then we make it like this after thought, right? It's kind of out there or is like okay we're going to send out a couple of broadcasts e-mails. In fact, the number of people I talked to that own businesses and we talk about their different marketing mix they tell me oh yeah you know if we would be using our email list that would be a huge opportunity for growth but we just haven't really done that yet. It's staggering the number of people that are doing this. And I think the reason why we are not necessarily using our email lists the way we should is because it's actually kind of tough to do. It's easy to send out a broadcast to our list of potential clients or customers that are signed up for email notifications. But it's really hard to actually sit down and say okay I'm going to segment that list. I'm going to set up automation sequences. I'm going to set up follow up sequences to these people. And I'm actually going to be intelligent about how I'm emailing my list. And so much of us just kind of give it this kind of head nod of like okay we're doing something with our email but it's not really optimized. And Ken from EmailBroadcast.com, that's what his group does entirely. They help people set up an email automation sequence, email broadcast like editorial calendar months in advance so that you're intelligently talking to your customers and your newsletter subscribers in a way that could actually nurture those relationships. One of the tidbits that he gave me which I absolutely loved was this idea of going to a conference. How many of us collect just dozens of contact cards at conferences and then what would we do with those? Maybe we send out an email after … maybe; most of us don't,  saying it was nice to meet you but what Ken does is he takes all of those and he drops them into a sequence with his email system. And so we talked a lot about these ways that we can look at email marketing in probably a more sophisticated way than most of us are doing. And if nothing else this is a pitch to saying you have an email list but you probably aren't using it the right way. And so I thought it'd be good to have him on since this is all his firm does to talk about some of the mistakes that they see in how entrepreneurs are running their email lists and what we can do to start to actually implement a few changes today and actually start utilizing that email list more appropriately. Joe: Yeah, I think people that are running their own internet businesses or buying one and wanting to grow it should seriously look at this. You know I've probably done a thousand valuations over the last six years and there are only a few … a tiny little handful, a fraction of a percent of people that focus on that and it makes a difference. Michael Jackness is one of them and he now travels around the country, actually sometimes the world giving presentations on his email marketing campaign that he does for one of his coloring books. It really is something that you can and should do and the customers actually when it's done right they appreciate it. When it's done wrong it's a problem. We are imperfect ourselves in this regard Mark. I think you've sent out some emails in the last few weeks where I get it and it says that it's … it's to me, to joe@quietlightbrokerage and still says it's dangerous, right? So doing it on your own even though it's coming from Quiet Light to a Quiet Light email address stuff like that can still happen so I think doing it on your own is … it's a gamble. So hiring somebody like Ken unless you've got the resources to really study it up and do it is a pretty smart idea. Mark: Yeah I mean just to bring it up into different sections; you have the technical side which is what we were running into. I had to setup the SPF and the DKIM records- Joe: What? Mark: Yeah right. Joe: I'm so glad you do that and not me. Mark: Exactly. So we had to go there but then you look at okay you have an email list but you don't just treat it as one big blob of people that you're talking to. You need to actually set up and start to segment that list. And then how are you actually interacting with these people. These things multiply. So if you segment your list into four segments which isn't that much. And then you would consider okay these four segments are going to get distinct emails and there's going to be an eight email sequence between this four segments. Now you have to write 32 emails in order to get all of these sequences in place. And then you have to measure and go back and do these and continually improve. It's a lot of work and honestly the fact that we're doing a lot of this on our own as entrepreneurs, is it a good idea? Maybe … maybe not; maybe it's the time to hire somebody out but I think if nothing else think about it. Think about what you're doing and how you're using your email list. Are you treating this audience as one big blob of people and sending them all the same message? If so you're leaving a lot of money on the table. Joe: I agree. If you can get a 2 or 3% lift in your discretionary earnings because of email marketing as long as it's a profitable lift; it's important. That adds a lot of value to your company. Jackness I believe you a little 50% of his revenue for his website comes from his email marketing campaign so that's something serious to consider for people that have the right type of product. So let's go to it, let's see what Ken has to say. Mark: Sounds great. Mark: All right Ken thanks so much for having me. This is Ken Mahar. Did I pronounce that right Ken? Ken: Yup. Mark: Awesome. Thanks for joining me. You come from EmailBroadcast.com so this is going to be an episode really focusing on email habits, some of the mistakes people make with email marketing, and we'll also wrap into this episode hopefully things that maybe what you should do from sell side to be able to prepare for selling your business and making sure that that part of the business has good opportunity and is well set up. But let's start out real quick, Ken, if you can provide everyone just a background or a bio on you. Ken: How much time do we have? I'll try to keep it short I guess. I'm Ken Mahar. I'm the founder and CEO of Email Broadcast. I've been running this company for 18 years so back before email marketing was really even a thing was when I got started. I actually have a sales background and I used email marketing for my own sales efforts. I found it to be tremendously helpful and successful. Itched it to some other businesses that I had worked for before, I'm saying you should guys really do this and then they're like we don't know how to do it so I started serving them. So yeah my background in sales is everything from retail to business to business. And then I got into inside sales for a high tech firm, I took over a territory. It was 11 states. We sold direct and through the channel. So I've kind of done everything there is in the sales arena. And the reason that I am still running Email Broadcast is because I found that email marketing is one of the best channels to impact sales. And so I kind of combined my expertise in the sales arena along with delivering email marketing from my entire team. We have the technical aspect; the writer's, the operations and all that stuff and then I do my part on the sales and the strategy part. So I guess that's a quick background on me. Mark: You've had the company for 18 years? Ken: Yeah. Mark: Holy cow man that's ancient in the world of internet businesses. You've seen a lot. Ken: Yeah. In fact I thought about naming my business Constant Contact or they ever existed and I just thought that sounds a little too aggressive so I didn't do that. But Email Broadcast is a pretty good name. Mark: Constant Contact aka we're always going to be in your inbox is really really what we're saying. Ken: Exactly. Mark: All right; pretty cool. You've seen a lot, 18 years is a long time. I've been online for about 20 years myself … actually, 2018; 20 years. I've been online for 20 years. I started my first site back in 1998 so that's a really long time; cool. All right, email marketing; there is a lot that goes on with email marketing and I want to get from you some of the common mistakes that you see people do with email marketing. Everybody knows that you should be doing it. I know here at Quiet Light we recommend pretty heavily that people establish a good list and use this as a channel to acquire more customers. Primarily because out of all the things, all the customer acquisition channels that are available out there email is one of the only ones that you actually own and have the ability to control. Google you can't control. AdWords you can't control. Facebook you can't control. Amazon you definitely can't control. Email you can, so let's sort out some of the common mistakes that you see people make with their email marketing strategies. Ken: Sure. Yeah, I think strategy is a good place to start. I think the big picture that I see people make mistakes around is thinking that email is about them. And what I mean by that is they look at email as just another channel for them to promote and to use their sales messages. When in my mind email is more of a relationship builder and a two way communication channel. And so I see a lot of people these people do a lot of mistakes made … in a strategy where people say okay let's talk about what we want to do in our next sale and our next promotion and us, us, us, us, us, and it just becomes a channel for commercials. And if you think about it email is a media channel. And in media channels you should have content that people are interested and excited to hear; whether it's educational or inspirational or whatever. And then you might have a commercial message every now and then. But if you are only commercials how long would you listen to that radio station? And people treat their email like that. They just promote, promote, promote, and they don't add any value to their audience's lives. So one of the big paradigm shifts that our clients go through is to realize this isn't about you, this is about your audience. What do they want to learn? What are they into? What inspires them and to get them to think in that perspective. So I think that's a pretty big mistake. What else? I think the second biggest strategy mistake I see is that people think that copy writing is email marketing. And they say oh yeah we need to get an email out, we haven't had one for a while. Let's get one out today and let's make it really good. And that's just a terrible, terrible strategy because the chances you'd be coming up with a great idea, creating great, well written, well researched content; actually having something so valuable to your audience that they're willing to forward it to someone … you know one of their friends, getting your … making sure that every single link works, making sure that it's grammatically perfect all like in 24 hours is just a recipe for disaster. So we look at it and go you should be planning this stuff out weeks or months ahead. My team is already done with November and we're scheduling December messages right now. And we've been working on the November stuff for a while already. So planning ahead and having like an overarching strategy is a big mistake that people make. Mark: Let me go back actually to your first point. Mark: Yeah. Mark: We had Mike Jackness on the podcast several episodes ago and he talked a little bit about their email marketing that they do. They see crazy open rates of 30% plus on their stuff and they're emailing their members almost every single day. So it's a pretty heavy and intense email marketing strategy but really the key behind what he's doing really isn't a surprise. And he's trying to offer ridiculous value with every single email so that people look forward to it. And your point about making it all about you, there's a great BuzzSumo article where they analyzed 100 million headlines to see what got shared the most. I love this blog post. I actually go to it once every few months just to revisit some of the concepts in this. But one of the big things that they do there and I found that these headlines is that headlines that get shared, the headlines they get opened, the emails that get opened are the ones that promise something to the user. Who is the person that's actually opening this? Is there a promise in that headline? And when you decide with this headline I'm going to promise something to the user that's a much better reason to open it up. Nobody really cares about your big news for the day all that much but they do care about what they're going to get if they're going to open that email. Ken: Yeah, it's funny when people put on their email marketing hat they're like … they disconnect from their own mind about what do I want in my own inbox, right? Mark: Right. Ken: It's something that I would really appreciate in value and go wow that was really good. And in fact, that's kind of our litmus test where we ask ourselves is this so good that you would forward it to a friend? And if that's a yes then you're probably on the right track. Mark: Right, so you got to start with that value prop, make it into something about the other person and let your subscriber know what are you going to get from this is email. If you take the time to open it if you're going to take the time to click it if there's a link in there you've got to get something in return and you got to make that promise up front. I'm sorry to step all over what you're saying. Ken: No, it's okay, and I think … and this is a really important point. So it's you take a page out of Gary Vaynerchuk's book right? Jab, jab, jab, right hook. Of course you're doing email because you have a strategy in mind and the strategy is you want a return on your investment right? But you need to think about the ratio, and 3:1 is a good ratio. Do you give, give, give between each ask or are you ask, ask, ask, ask, ask and maybe give once in a while, right? Mark: Right. Let's talk about that strategy of you guys just finished November and for a reference, for people that … because this probably won't actually air until maybe first day of November, it's October 25th today. So we're not even done with October. You guys have finished out your planning for your clients all the way through November. When you're planning that out are you looking at sort of like this rhythm to the emails as far as … like you said give, give, give, sell, give, give, give, ask, or is it also kind of moving along with holidays? What sort of planning are you doing on behalf of your customers to plan that far out in advance? Ken: Right. Yeah, so that actually opens up another great strategy idea that I think people blow it on. One of the first things we do when we onboard a client is we come up with … in fact I got a meeting in about an hour on this where we come up with 50 to 100 different content ideas before we even get this campaign started. So we have this giant treasure trove of content ideas. Once we learned about the audience we think we know who they are. We think about what would be important to them. And we come up with a lot of ideas. Some of them are just plain nuts but we document everything; we put it in a document. And so as we work with our clients, the November emails aren't just planned, they're actually planned, executed and already scheduled. So they're in the can just waiting for the days to tick by until they get released. So we actually started working in November last month. So yeah probably another big mistake that people make beyond if like not thinking of content ideas ahead is not planning for email work. And it is weird people will just kind of go oh dude I tried to sneak it in between something else because that is blocking out real time and saying this is an important part of my business, it's a huge channel for me. I've got to schedule time for this and they continuously under estimate how long it takes to write brilliant copy, have a copy edited, come up with great images, get it scheduled, think about how they can enhance it. And it's one of those things that if you put it aside for a second and then you come back to it you have fresh new ideas, a fresh perspective and you can always make it a little bit better. So scheduling that time, getting on a rhythm, and doing it ahead of time is big paradigm shift for a lot of people. Mark: Yeah let me ask you, I don't want to divert too much from kind of the thread we have going here but in the world of email marketing, we have a couple of different concepts as far as when people receive emails. Well if you start off at the very first contact with somebody who just joins your email list they might automatically be put into a campaign where they're going to get different emails at certain times versus your … maybe your entire block of subscribers where you might just be sending out broadcast to those subscribers on a regular basis. I want to ask you a little bit about that. How much emphasis do you like to put on one versus the other? In other words if I come to EmailBroadcast.com and you have a lead magnet there and downloadable resource or something else, how long are you going to put me in a pre-defined process where you're going to lead me through an arc and trying I guess funnel marketing right here but bringing you down that funnel to a certain point versus taking me out of that campaign where I've got this ready written emails that everybody else has received earlier and now I'm in your general kind of flow into your general broadcasts. Ken: Yeah well, I'll speak to exactly what's happening right now on our campaign. So we have a year-long champion going on right now that is a story format. We have some brilliant writers … in fact actual published and award winning authors and so we've tapped that and we've written out a fictional story about a guy who owns an RV lot and has a huge competitor move into town and is trying to figure out how to handle it with his marketing. And so right now when you sign up on our email list we kind of thought of it as kind of a Netflix situation where you binge on episodes until you get caught up. So right now when you sign up you get an email from us once a week until you're caught up and then we do a monthly broadcast. So I'm not sure that completely answers your question but it still kind of depends on when you join but I think we're in episode eight or nine right now. So for seven weeks in a row, you would get the next chapter of the story and then once you're caught up it comes out monthly. Mark: Yeah, that makes sense. So it sounds like again when you're planning out your broadcast schedule here for November and December as you go get into those months you really need to think about the fact the person that's been with you now through that time they've already been through that. In this case a year-long journey, that's pretty significant and they've already had that exposure to your company. And so you're going to write and create that general broadcast strategy with that in mind that these are not people completely new to who you are. Ken: Right and then what we've done is we did have an interruption in the story, like a commercial interruption like the old school radio shows or something. But we had a message on like July that was like hey here are a couple of things you might think about and there were something promotional. There was a blog post. There was a different value ad but it was just kind of a little interruption in the normal sequence. So if you think about it we actually planned … the emails that are going out on November and December we planned last year; last fall when we outlined our storyline and figured out what chapters were going to go when. And so right now we're working on our 2019 campaign which is going to be all different. We've been working on it for a month and a half or so and we're kind of finalizing our strategy around that and so we hit the ground running in January. Mark: Yeah so much of marketing and I don't think really matters what the format is whether it's AdWords or Amazon Ads or email marketing, so much marketing seems to be this idea of measuring, refining, repeating. So you're going back and you're taking a look at what worked, what didn't work, you're testing things against each other. How often is your team if you have a client on board and you've drafted this this kind of initial sequence that people are going to get when they enter into one of the many different funnels that you have set up. How often are you going back and refining that for them? Ken: Well, we look at it monthly. It's part of our process where … it's on our checklist to go and review the automation for instance. So if we've built an onboarding series or a welcome series for a client we look at it monthly and we kind of track the numbers and we start and we look at it. If it's not performing to our expectations then we'll think about tweaking it. And so we'll dig in in the messages and think okay what are people on the activity that we are getting what are people most interested in? Which of these has the best open rate? What clicks are … what things are people clicking on and maybe we should refine the message a little bit. So we look at it once a month. There's a danger at looking at it too much. It's like looking at your stocks every single two hour period, things go up and down and so you want to avoid the small sample bias and look at it over time but we look at it monthly. Mark: Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the mistakes people make. I'm going to throw one in and then you tell me if I'm spot on or if I'm off base here. I would say one mistake that I see is people taking a one size fits all approach to their email list. So everybody gets the exact same emails regardless where they came from. Ken: Yeah and a good example of that is we are on boarding a new client in the cosmetic medicine practice which serves 90% females but we are … and so part of our strategy is that we're going to ask people to identify their gender when they sign up for our email list. And if they do say that they're male we're going to have a completely different first message for them making them feel very welcomed as a man in what is otherwise a woman dominated consumer market. And we think that's going to be a big deal. It's going to grow their practice through male audience without much effort at all. So yeah not segmenting your audiences is … you're right it's another big mistake. People think oh I'm just going to broadcast to everybody. Okay well, there are certain messages that are good for that and that maybe most of the time but really you should be thinking about your email lists thinking about what segments can I target. For instance, another example we have a large furniture retailer in Louisiana, Arkansas in Texas and we came up with this idea that we should target the people who have their private label credit card. And we also identified another sub market of people who are on their … so private label credit card is for people with pretty good credit and then they also have a kind of a buy here pay here market. So we get a different message to each of those segments. It turned out combined they were only 7.8% of the list but in one message to each of them we ended up driving $430,000 in new sales for the weekend for just that one segment. So by targeting a message just specifically to them with a specific offer that was really relevant; that we had huge response. Mark: That personalization is a huge issue right now. I saw one thing that was really cool. It was somebody who is qualifying their email subscribers before they signed up through a quiz. And the quiz was kind of fun and it was actually in the cosmetics field. So it was what's the shape of your face? And it just had cartoon characters. It wasn't offensive or anything like that. What's the shape of your face? What's the tone of your skin? And they went through probably about six, seven questions but then you were able to break out into this really cool like super segmented this is a female with this skin tone with this shape of face with this size of eyes this sort of thing and you can really cater the messaging. And this was more than … they were doing email marketing but also some other recommendations that is super super cool. Ken: Yeah, the danger around that … well, not the danger but the recommendation is don't ask for anything you're not actually going to use. So a couple of things around like I see a blast for last name in their email sign up forms and I think that's like one step too far of getting a little too personal a little too quickly off the bat. And unless you'd actually have a use for somebody's last name why are you asking for it? Even … but also people take that in the wrong direction as they say here sign up for our email list and all they ask for is the email address. Okay well, that's not enough, right? It's like at least get their first name because if you don't you're giving up on a huge personalization opportunity with putting peoples name in the subject line and addressing them by name and actually creating a relationship. When you're saying give me your email address what you're really saying is I'm going to blast you like I do everybody else on my list and I don't really care who you are or anything about you. So there's a check for your listeners if you're only collecting email address you're doing it wrong. Mark: Yeah and I'm going to make a plea here as well, this is turning into my great show here but one of the things I can't stand with email marketers when they're … when I get on a list is the hey buddy buddy sort of approach that comes without me even knowing who you are. Like there's a point where you got one of the so corporate and stiff to the point where it just feels stale and separate. But if you come in and pretend like we went to college together that's equally off putting to me. I want to have somewhere in the middle where I can get to know you a little bit and again kind of test out to see do you have value to offer. But I guess that's where that copywriter comes in, having a copywriter who's done thousands of these emails before. Ken: Yeah, and I would actually say that I would rather somebody do that if that's really their authentic voice and that's really who they are where they want to be buddies with you and if you're not ready for that then fine get the hell off my list. I think that's a better approach than trying to please everybody. You know I'd dig into authenticity around email marketing, it's one of the things that we really drive home with our clients is to say I want people to know who you really are not who you're pretending to be. So if you've only got six people on your team let's celebrate that. You're feisty and small and responsive and adaptive versus trying to pretend like you're some mega-corporation. But yeah everybody's different and you have to realize that. So really you should concentrate on attracting the people that you want to attract. Mark: Yeah. Ken: So if that's important to somebody that they'd be buddies with you and you didn't like that then maybe they did themselves a favor by not winning your business; who knows. Mark: Yeah, absolutely the authenticity is definite. I see sometimes with these people also lack of authenticity trying to win me over by being a little hokey. But if it is authentic to me then well so be it. The rest of the people buy me dinner first. So I want to shift gears really heavily here because I want to get to this before our time is up and I want to talk about the technical side of this. Ken: Yeah. Mark: This is just the hairy issue. There's a lot of systems out there. We use drip marketing at Quiet Light Brokerage. I like the system but we also have an external CRM which means we need to get these two things to talk to each other. What tips would you have for people on that technical side? I know that's really an open ended question but I'm going to have to throw it in your part as far as just the tips of working with the technical side. How much effort should people be putting into that sort of that technical side setup? Ken: Yeah, this will tie back into the strategy question too. One of the most under-utilized aspects of email marketing is the use of automation. When you can define what your sales process is and know where people are falling out of your funnel or use an automation series to take people from not step A to step B but from step D to step E. You know there are all kinds of opportunities to use email to kind of leverage your time. Basically having the platform do what you would do if you had a million hours in the day and all you did was write emails all day. Setting up the platform to do that is important. But you're right that does take some technical integration stuff. So my tips, I would say work with the bigger players in the market is probably a good tip because they've been around for a while. They likely have the integrations for some of the bigger … so if you're trying to choose an email marking platform and a CRM go … I wouldn't go with a guy that's brand new yesterday because he probably doesn't have a very well developed API and it's not a plug and play situation. So if you're trying to save yourself some headaches go with bigger players in the market that have been established that have an API that already potentially connect. Look at the integration possibilities. But I'd also say that it's generally worth it, right? There may be some pain involved in trying to figure it out but don't give up. Get help, hire somebody and figure out how to get those things integrated because it can really make a big difference for you. You mentioned the CRM right? So we've got ours dialed in so I can fill out a single form and it populates both my email marketing to start a drip series but it also sends that exact same data to my CRM to save me from double entry. So yeah integration is the key. There is a lot to integrate; getting your sign up forms cracked on your website, getting the email thing dialed in, connecting your CRM. We're going to be connecting in a medical records system for this latest client that we did and getting an API expert on that and we have that in house so we do not have that problem but it's important. Mark: Yeah, so when we get into the actual set up of these things … I have another company that I own, I know those folks that listen regularly probably know about it but we use a lot of automation on our email side there. And even with that I mean you talked about the multiplying effect here, right? Let's say that what you are going to segment your audience into just three different segments and then you're going to set up automation sequences with a series of 10 emails in each. Well now you're writing out 30 different emails with different email copy and on top of that you have your broadcast emails that are going to go out. And on top that may be some other campaigns and you have to try to make sure that these things don't duplicate where people are receiving multiple emails because they're accidentally subscribed to two different campaigns within our system and then figuring out how to make all the technology work together. So this is the part where I'm going to just make this quick pitch for the stuff that you guys do over at EmailBroadcast.com which is you guys do all of this. You are the full service sort of provider for this email automation of marketing right? Ken: Yeah, I have a team of people and I think that's the key thing because each of my team members is a specialist. So I have an engineer that thinks in bits and bytes. I have copywriters. I have a sales strategist which is me. I have an operations manager to help keep things on track and then an account coordinator. We designated an account coordinator for each account so they truly understand who our client is, what their business is, what their goals are, what they're trying to accomplish, and can really feel like a member of their team. So in effect, we are an email marketing department. Imagine a Fortune500 firm that had an entire department to handle email marketing. Well, we are that but for much smaller businesses who can get us for the cost of a part time employee. So yeah we handle everything from strategy to the copy writing, to the design, to the engineering, the mobile optimization, integrating it with the CRM, integrating it with medical record systems, setting up all the automation. Making sure things aren't overlapping and you have people getting multiple stuff and somebody looking at it; somebody thinking about your campaign a month in advance. Thinking about the seasonal stuff like Q4 for us is heavy so we've been thinking about Q4 since July about how we're going to get ready, which of our clients are going to want to do extra messages. That's the value we add. We're the people that you wish you had an entire department … and I think this is a different … I think this is an important point because some people go okay great this email something I'm going to outsource and I'm going to look for that one guy. Well, I've been doing this for 18 years and I'm not even that one guy. I'm not … I can't be the best copywriter, the greatest sales strategist, the engineer to integrate everything, the operations manager to get it all done. I mean maybe that person is out there but you're certainly not going to get them for a song. And so I think dividing the labor … you know divide and conquer and having each person in a team that's used to working together is a great solution. And a lot of people don't realize that this kind of solution is out there. They think that email marketing is something they have to do on their own even though they struggle. They've written the messages a bit inconsistent, the branding is not where they like it, they're doing stuff last minute, they know they're abusing their audience's trust, they have low engagement, they're like hell and they know there weren't any other options. So we are out there. Mark: Yeah, fantastic. Regardless of whether or not somebody is going to use an outsource solution like what you guys offer which would be like an outsourced email department as you said it is something that I think people need to really pay attention to that aspect of the business. And you're right, I look at a lot of businesses … I look at the health of a lot of businesses and see where they're putting their time and efforts. And sometimes I see this really just beautifully built out Facebook campaigns, this really beautifully optimized Ad-words accounts, but it's only been on a rare occasion where I see that applied in the email world. And when I do see it applied though it tends to be sort of a cash machine, right? All these other customer acquisition strategies are able to just funnel in there. And once they funnel in there those people are in because the systems are set up and ready to go. It does take time to plan. It does take time to refine. It does take time to go back there but this can be one of the biggest customer acquisition channels for pretty much any business that's out there. So I think the work that you guys are doing is awesome. I love some of the tips that you had in there. I know that there are a lot more tips that we didn't cover. I mean on one of our conversations you talked about hey what are you doing with the conference cards that you get? Do you actually follow up with them and is it just kind of one quick follow up or do you drop them into a sequence of some sort where they end up getting a series of emails; that's brilliant. There you go, look at that you- Ken: I just attended a conference so I'm holding up a fan of contacts that I have and I … you know we walk or talk. I put these people into a segment in our email list and we've already emailed them twice which is more than anybody else who went to that conference has done. We have a third message already scheduled so yeah that and we advise people about their offline activities. Like we have customers … I had this customer one time, he literally interrupted my … our phone call to take a call. I only heard his part of the conversation. He sat there for five minutes helping this person out, they sell this rooftop tent deals and I'm like how many conversations like that do you have a day and he's like I don't know 15, 20. I go how many people are you getting emails from? Zero. I'm like wow okay huge opportunity for you. Ask for their email address after you just spent five minutes helping somebody. They're going to give it to you. Put them on your list and now you've got a chance to market to them and then they'll buy a tent. So yeah there's a lot to email marketing and I hope your audience takes it to heart and really goes after it and figures out how can I add value? How can I make this amazing? And don't worry about the immediate payoff. Trust me it'll it will pay off in the end. What can I offer people that come to my website to actually get on my email list? If you're saying sign up for my email okay you need to rethink that. What value is there? People don't know what your email is. They probably haven't defined how often it goes out. They don't know what they're going to get in return and so sign up for our newsletter you know who wants to do that? But if you can give me the top five tips in selling my business in the next year oh okay yeah that's why I came to your website, that's what I want to know about. So that's the kind of thing you need to offer. Mark: Awesome so if people have questions about this or just want to bounce ideas off with you how can they reach you? Ken: Yeah, ken@emailbroadcast.com the phone number is 805-316-3201. And if you want a little branding tip or just have some fun call that number just to listen to our auto-responder. It's pretty funny that we put together. You could go to our website at EmailBroadcast.com and on there there's a pretty easy to find that you can schedule a 20 minute call with me free of charge just to be asked about your email. I can give you a couple of ideas, find out if … work out something that might be right for you but kind of get your head in the right direction. So hopefully that helps. Mark: Yeah absolutely. I'm actually going to call that number because that's a pretty good tease to get them to call the number. Well put links to that on the show notes page so feel free to go to the show notes page and you'll be able to see those links as well as contact information for you Ken. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Ken: Thank you, Mark, it's been a pleasure and I hope everybody here is reinvigorated to do great email marketing. That's why I exist in the world, to get people to up their game around email marketing. Good luck. Links and Resources: Email Ken Mahar Email Broadcast Website Call Email broadcast @ 805.316.3201  

It’s not often that you get the chance to learn from a room full of talented and thoughtful ecommerce leaders. This is your opportunity! On this episode of The Amazing Seller, you’ll hear from Scott as he welcomes his friends, Greg Mercer, Steve Chou, and Michael Jackness to the podcast. In their conversation, the guys talk about their experience with the 5 Minute Pitch project, why they love helping ecommerce sellers, the value of launching your brand on Amazon, and much more. You don’t want to miss a minute of this fun and exciting episode!  Yes, there is still a chance for success. Time and time again, Scott gets asked if there is any room for success in the ecommerce sector. While the challenges and hurdles constantly evolve, Scott and other ecommerce leaders remained convinced that if you put in the time and effort, you’ll see a good ROI. Don’t buy the negative hype! Make your plan to build a brand and carve out a niche. If you want more details about how you can get your business started, make sure to listen to this helpful episode of The Amazing Seller! Why you should launch your brand on Amazon. As prospective ecommerce sellers get ready to start their own small business, they often wonder if Amazon is the best channel to pour their time and energy into or if they should build their brand's website first. On this episode of The Amazing Seller, Scott and his guests explain why starting on Amazon is the best way to get things off the ground. One of the huge reasons to begin with Amazon is because it is so much easier than creating and drawing traffic to your website. You can also gage the marketplace on Amazon more effectively to validate which products you should start selling. Make sure to listen to this episode as the guys expand on this critical topic and much more! Make sure you execute on your great idea! Too often you hear the line that the right idea will lead to instant success. That couldn’t be further from the truth! Tons of businesses fail each day not because their idea wasn’t good but because their execution was lacking. If you want your business to stand the test of time, you’ve got to be focused on the right principles. Right out of the gate, it’s a good idea to have your plan laid out so you can track your progress and stay on task. Learn from Scott’s expert perspective and why it’s helpful to focus on follow through by listening to this engaging episode of The Amazing Seller! It is not about the money. Have you ever had that moment when you finally realized what you want to commit the rest of your life to accomplish? How did that moment feel for you? Are you working toward that goal right now? On this episode of The Amazing Seller, you’ll hear from Scott and his friends as they explain why they love helping ecommerce leaders like you. For these guys, it’s not all about the money and the fame; they enjoy showing others what it takes to build a business they can rely on for the future. To hear more about their passion for helping others, make sure to listen to this intriguing episode! OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER [0:35] Scott’s introduction to this episode of the podcast! [3:20] Greg Mercer, Steve Chou, and Michael Jackness join the podcast. [5:00] Is it still possible to bootstrap a business successfully? [12:00] Why are entrepreneurs so confident? [17:30] An idea is worthless without execution. [19:15] Why it’s helpful to start your brand on Amazon. [26:00] Is it better to double down or diversify your brand? [33:00] Making an impact in the lives of others. [40:45] The guys share their takeaways from participating in the 5 Minute Pitch. [47:20] Closing thoughts from Scott. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE 5 Minute Pitch Sellers Summit Adthrive www.tasinnercircle.com Support[at]theamazingseller.com

Michael Jackness sits down with Kalika Yap on this two-part episode. Michael is a well-established online entrepreneur who first saw success in becoming a power seller on eBay, eventually turned to SEO and affiliate marketing before moving to e-commerce. He shares his journey from starting his first business at 18 years old to the very interesting turn of events about treadmill.com. He also talks about some best practices on how to be better at e-commerce, from changing your perspective on how to sell to finding the product that will practically sell itself. Tune in now!

Do you have your strategy for getting your product in front of as many people as possible locked down? Could you use some helpful tips to make sure you are going in the right direction? If so, you’ve come to the right place! On this episode of The Amazing Seller, you’ll hear from Scott as he gives an update on the 5 Minute Pitch, goes through his five-step process for ranking a product quickly, and much more. You don’t want to miss a minute of this helpful and engaging episode!  5 Minute Pitch Update.  Exciting news! Scott recently finished up filming of the “5 Minute Pitch” with Greg Mercer, Steve Chou, and Michael Jackness. From the sound of it, the whole process was an excellent experience for all involved, and they are even considering creating a second season. If you haven’t heard about this exciting side project, make sure to check out the link in the resources section below. To hear more about Scott’s time in San Deigo with the guys, listen to this episode of The Amazing Seller! Find low competition products. Before you pull the trigger and run with a product, it’s important to make sure you’ve validated it to the best of your abilities. Don’t give in to the impulse to just wing it! On this episode of The Amazing Seller, Scott explains what sellers like you need to look for as you prepare to move forward with a potential product. The depth of a product is a significant factor to explore. While you might be tempted to go for a product with more sales per day, Scott explains that the least competitive products are the ones you should focus on. To get the full breakdown, make sure to listen to this informative episode!  Optimize your listing.  One of the most important things that you have to do from the start is to optimize your product listing for keywords. This includes your title and your bullet points. If you are selling a garlic press, you need to make sure you have that keyword phrase in the title of your product listing. On this episode of The Amazing Seller, you’ll hear from Scott as he explains the importance of optimizing your product listing for keywords and how that effort will help you as you seek to rank for keywords on Amazon. If you want to make sure your product is in the best position to succeed, you don’t want to miss this critical episode! Discount your product to drive sales! Let’s face it; everyone wants to get a good deal when they go shopping, especially during this holiday season! What steps can you take as an ecommerce seller to make the most of this environment? Are you gun shy when it comes to offering deals on your product? Don’t be! Scott encourages sellers like you to press your advantage and drive sales by discounting your product. To hear how this strategy has worked out well for him and his business, make sure to listen to this exciting episode of The Amazing Seller! OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER [0:03] Scott’s introduction to this episode of the podcast! [1:20] Scott gives an update about his recent trip to San Diego. [7:40] Step #1: Find low competition products. [13:00] Step #2: Optimize your listing. [16:30] Step #3: Chose five to ten keywords to target. [18:40] Step #4: Run PPC (Pay Per Click) targeting your keywords. [21:45] Step #5: Give discounts on your product to drive sales. [23:30] Scott recaps all five steps to get your product listing to rank fast. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE www.5minutepitch.com www.theamazingseller.com/training www.theamazingseller.com/590 www.theamazingseller.com/js

If you’re involved in the ecommerce space, you’ve surely noticed that it’s becoming harder and harder to stay 100% compliant when it comes to sales tax. Between the recent Supreme Court case and Amazon tax issues, quite honestly, it’s getting to be a real pain. So today I have Michael Jackness of EcomCrew.com here to share how a new organization he helped launch called the Online Merchants Guild is fighting against these sales tax hurdles. Listen in to learn what they’re doing, as well as how you can get involved to help make sure our online selling environment doesn’t become a nightmare from a compliance standpoint. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: http://bit.ly/2AVxzgr 

Michael Jackness sits down with Kalika Yap on this 2-part episode. Michael is a well-established online entrepreneur who first saw success in becoming a power seller on eBay, eventually turned to SEO and affiliate marketing before moving to e-commerce. He shares his journey from starting his first business at 18 years old to the very interesting turn of events about treadmill.com. He also talks about some best practices on how to be better at e-commerce, from changing your perspective on how to sell to finding the product that will practically self itself. Tune in now!

This 3 Day Online Summit Has Been Created For Shopify Store OwnersTodays guests are Michael Jackness of Ecomm Crew, Mike of Glambassdor, Christy the legal expert and David Duncan or Brandsnob.www.winningwithshopify.comHIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:Learn the $17k pre-launch strategy from one of our speakers who nailed itHoliday season! How to get influencers to promote your productsAre your products right for influencers?How one Shopify merchant gets 1 MILLION sales a year using Social Media InfluencersHow to spend nothing using the gifting strategyWhy using Micro Influencers is now the #1 strategy for merchantsHow to get you offer inside your potential customers Apple wallet BEFORE they even buy!How to work with influencers for freeHow to choose the best influencers for your brandThe TRUTH on the results eCom stores get from influencer promotions (what others won’t tell you)A list of influencers you can work with immediatelyAND MUCH MORE!Support the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinningWithShopify/)

If you are still not sure what to sell or not sure if you're selling the right products, Michael takes you through how he has chosen his last 3 niches, based on 2 existing businesses he has. **Get the full transcript and show notes at: https://justaskparker.com/podcast ** Michael teaches you how with a little bit of effort, the simple way to take it to the next level and how this can make a huge difference to your sales. This is not rocket science, but it all about having a stragety, a plan to build a business. Show notes: Catch Michael on his podcast Ecom Crew His brands: wildbaby.com, tactial.com, icewraps.com & colorit.com Mike's Recommended Apps Rewind - Backups | One Click Upsell | Zipify Pages https://www.shopifyinfluencermarketingsummit.com Support the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinningWithShopify/)

Facebook is one of the biggest traffic channels out there right now, and I’m sure plenty of you listening are running ads on that platform, or at least thinking about it. Admittedly, I’ve only gotten into Facebook ads in the last few months, and it turns out I made some pretty big mistakes along the way. Thankfully, I had Michael Jackness of Terran.com and Miracle Wanzo of HipUndies.com take a peek at what I was doing and give me some pointers, which I'm going to share with you today. If you’re brand new to Facebook ads, or even if you’re already running some, take a listen and learn from the blunders I made so you can optimize your ads and increase your ROI—without learning the hard way like I did. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: http://bit.ly/2wsKB1C 

Hello everyone! It's Dave again bringing you what is perhaps our most special episode yet. Today we have Michael Jackness on the other end of the microphone. In these podcasts, we often hear Mike talk about his real-life experiences in running an ecommerce business. What many don't know is that he got his start in digital marketing as an online poker affiliate business back in the early 2000s. On this particular podcast, Mike shares what it was like to start this kind of business and scale it to become a highly profitable company. Aside from the highs, he'll also delve into the lows of being in this industry and reveal the reason why he finally decided to retire. Mike had a personal interest in poker from an early age. His grandfather and uncles gambled and he grew to enjoy it as well. Gambling. He got started as an affiliate in early January 2004. While playing on an online poker tournament one night, he was also surfing online poker websites. While browsing within the site's terms and conditions, he stumbled on the affiliate page. Essentially, the website was offering  $50 per person for people who can bring in 1-9 players in a month and $70 per person for those who can bring in more than 10 people. Mike thought he didn't know enough people personally to make money out of this venture so he gave away a book through a penny auction on Ebay. Around this time he reached out to PartyPoker and struck a deal that he would be paid $200 per person if he could have 200 people sign up on a monthly basis. This was how PokerSource was born. The company Mike founded with his cousin a friend would reach profits in the seven-figure range. The trio would move operations to Costa Rica in 2006 but would suffer a setback shortly after due to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. He would retire from the industry at the end of 2010, which is great timing as the infamous Black Friday would take place on April 15, 2011. Other Useful Resources: EcomCrew Premium Thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

For those of you that don't already know Mike Jackness, he runs an ecommerce business approaching 10m a year in revenue, and is the co-host of the EcomCrew Podcast. On the Podcast Mike shares his direct experience with listeners to help them grow their ecommerce businesses. If you've tuned in to our Podcast regularly, you've heard Mark and I talk about how multiple revenue streams increase the overall value of your business (by de-risking it). So…if you want a more valuable business why not expand it to include email? But email marketing is dead right? All junk mail and spam. If that's true why does Mike get an open rate of 30% on his emails…and generate over 52% of his revenue for ColorIt from email? Because it works…and he does it in a “helpful”, customer friendly way. On today's Quiet Light Podcast Mike shares his process with email marketing using Klaviyo, and talks about how their Facebook synchronization feature enhances his customer reach and overall return on investment. The Facebook ads produce a whopping 1500% return on investment! You can learn about Klaviyo through their online training feature, and listen in to the EcomCrew Podcast and pick up additional tips and strategies. Mike and Dave also offer specific training such as importing from China, Launching on Amazon and finding your product niche. Episode Highlights: Using Klaviyo email marketing software to produce over 50% of revenues Add on the Facebook Synchronization piece and boost your ROI (1500% in Mike's case) Email marketing should be “helpful”. Treat the customers the way you want to be treated. The “trifecta” as a marketer includes an email address, a facebook messenger list and have the customer pixel'd. Google, Yahoo, AOL etc. look for a high open rate. Remove customers who don't open emails after 13 weeks. There are no “secret 10 step plans” that work for every model. Know your business variables and apply them to increase your success. EcomCrew Podcast has produced over 150 Podcasts. And yes..the best episode is #88. Knowing the value of your business and planning for an exit – is the smart thing to do. Transcription: Mark: Oh welcome back from Italy. Joe: Thanks man, it's good to be back. Mark: Ah is it really? Joe: Yeah that's a good question, I don't know. Mark: Well welcome back all the same. I'm sure everybody's glad to hear you instead of me for a change. Joe: I'm a little tanner and a little fuzzy. I haven't shaved in a couple weeks. Mark: Yeah. Joe: Haven't trimmed it a couple of weeks I should say. Mark: Haven't trimmed … are you missing the espresso and the- Joe: Oh man café, ginseng, the views of the ocean. We were at the coast for most of the times as you now we're in Rome as well but up in the north and coast of Italy is absolutely gorgeous. Mark: Hey I got a business idea for you. I think you and I need to start a podcast about traveling to Italy and of course, you would have to go onsite for that. Joe: I think it's a great idea. Let's do it. Mark: All right you guys we're going to shut down Quiet Light Brokerage and move on to a new business, new venture; a podcast about Italy but stay tuned for that. But in the meantime, we do actually have something related to Quiet Light Brokerage and that is … and to buying and selling online businesses; you talked to a mutual friend of ours, somebody who's been a friend of Quiet Light Brokerage for a while Michael Jackness. Joe: Mr. Mike Jackness from EcomCrew. Mike and I go back to him at e-commerce shield presentation he did on email marketing and a Klaviyo on what he does within his ColorIt Company, the adult coloring book company. And you would think email marketing is dead but this guy generates 52% of his revenue from email marketing. Has like a 30% open rate and just nails it, hammers it down and produces a ton of revenue that way and does Facebook synchronization. He talks about it all, on his Facebook synchronization that's part of Klaviyo, don't want to get too technical but he gets a 1500% return on investment. You and I have talked about this all the time, diversification of revenue streams does what to a business other than add more revenue; it's more valuable, right? Mark: It absolutely reduces the risk, increases stability, yeah. Joe: That's right. So we talked about that. We talked about the ability to expand beyond your typical just one source of revenue e-commerce business whether it be your Shopify store or your Amazon FBA site using tools like Klaviyo and Facebook Messenger, things of that nature. And then we talked a little bit about EcomCrew what they do there. EcomCrew is yes a podcast Mike and Dave have been doing it for almost three years now and they just simply help people. They've got a … my favorite subject is the under the hood section where they actually talk to an e-commerce owner about the problems within their business and try to help them right there right on the podcast sharing a lot of detailed information for people to help themselves. Mark: That is pretty cool. He has a ton of knowledge absolutely. The podcast they have is fantastic. I think the topic itself is really fantastic especially as people are trying to build up more integrated marketing systems. You know this idea of having their email coincide with a live Facebook audience and the marketing that you're doing there. Really really kind of advanced stuff but really good stuff and those numbers are staggering; 1500% ROI on Facebook. Joe: Yeah, huge. Mark: Incredible. Joe: Huge and he started small. He started testing little things just like everyone else. It's not like he had all this knowledge, he figured it out along the way. And just to put some numbers behind Mike and his expertise he's hoping that 2018 will be the year when his business overall hits the 10 million dollar revenue mark. So he's not a small player, he's doing a great job. Somebody that is now traveling around the world doing presentations and speaking on E-commerce Group Podcast subject and on email marketing and e-commerce in general, so definitely somebody worth listening to. Mark: You know one thing I do want to say before we jump into the episode, when people are listening to these numbers and hearing things like 1500% ROI, 10 million dollars breaking this year, I think it can be really intimidating for some people that are maybe at the beginning stages to hear this and to see all the opportunity and see so many advanced stuff these people are doing. We did an episode with Dan from Science of Skill who pulled about two million dollars of revenue from an email list of about 11 or 12,000 people. We've talked to Bjork Ostrom from Food Blogger Pro who is completely dominating that world. And I think the one thing just to keep in mind if you're hearing these episodes and seeing what some of these people are doing don't be overwhelmed by it and understand something that you alluded to Joe; he's done this over time. Focus on this continual improvement every day, small little group improvements and you can work yourself up. These guys didn't jump up to this in one month they did this over time. Joe: Yeah and on the podcast EcomCrew, he'll talk to and work with people that are doing 50,000 dollars a year in revenue and that's what they do under the hood and they help that. He'll also do it for folks that are doing half a million in revenue or five million in revenue but you know at all stages there's different tools and resources that can be used to help people grow their business. And bottom line is Mike's just a really nice guy. He's an expert in the arena. He's sharing the information. He's not afraid of competition. He says if I share information about my business and competition comes up and bites me in the heels it's because I didn't do a good enough job in promoting my own products. Mark: That's awesome. All right let's get to it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got Mike Jackness on the line with me. Hey Mike how's it going? Mike: Good man, it's good to be here. It's good to see you, I wish it was in person but it's … at least we're actually … we're in the same room. Joe: I agree. Good to see you as well and I know you've been traveling the world, good to be back in San Diego I hear right? Mike: It is man, like I can live anywhere in the world I want. At least we could at the time when we moved here I was like we had a virtual business but it's we're kind of anchored down here now but I want to be here and I feel sad whenever I had to go somewhere because it's San Diego, it's a pretty awesome spot. Joe: Well you got good problems. You're kind of a big shot now; you're travelling the world [crosstalk 00:06:51.0] all over the place. For those folks listening that don't know you why don't you, as you know we don't do formal introductions here at Quiet Light. Why don't you share a little bit of background on yourself? So what your history is, what you're doing now so that they understand who we're talking to today. Mike: Yeah no problem it's always [inaudible 00:07:07.3] to talk about yourself but I'll give it a shot. I've been doing this online marketing stuff for … this dates me for about 15 years. I actually quit my job back in 2004 and I've been doing this stuff ever since. Like some I retired in between a couple businesses that we were doing for a couple years and RVed around the country and got bored of being retired so we got sucked back into the business again and it was an e-commerce this time and we started doing that a few years ago. It's been almost five years now and are on the road to build an eight figure business this year. We'll get to crack eight figures this year or next year and along the way we've been documenting all that on EcomCrew. So it's been a much different environment than what I was doing before which was affiliate marketing where everybody was really guarded; you never talked about anything you did because everyone was kind of a competitor and going after the same traffic. But in e-commerce, it's like this multi-trillion dollar industry and you're never going to be the one selling all the things in your niche. And one of the things that we do is coloring for adults and I always say like I'm never going to select all the gel pens in the world. So talking about what we do and being open about it I think has been cool and yeah it might create some competitors but if they can catch me I feel like it's my fault. It's kind of been my philosophy plus I'm just more secure about everything I do now that I'm a little bit older. And I look at the things that come out of it positively, which is getting to meet people like you which would never happen if it wasn't for EcomCrew and speaking and all these things. So and for the most part like 99% of what we do; helping other people doesn't adversely affect us and for the one [inaudible 00:08:41.9] that does you know so be it whatever. Joe: Well you just touched on it what you do believe and I'm … for people listening EcomCrew is just that. It's what we do at Quiet Light, it's helping other people. Help them first then things come back to you. And I've seen you do presentations on the adult coloring books and the email marketing behind it. I've listened to the EcomCrew podcast; I worked with Dave as you know as well. So I want to talk about both but let's just answer the simple question first about email marketing; you know I'm an old school direct marketer, I've been self-employed since 1997 believe it or not. Mike: Nice. Joe: It was radio direct marketing back then and then the next evolution at that point was email right? As old isn't email marketing dead, are you making any money with it? Mike: Yeah and it's a trick question right, or it's a blue question, it's a softball question. You know when I first got into doing email marketing for e-commerce I felt the same way and I had drug my feet forever and it's probably one of my bigger regrets in this business for a couple reasons. Number one, I think its human nature to approach stuff in life and in business the way that you think about it yourself. So for me, I flipping hate email. It's my biggest nemesis. I cannot get to Inbox 0 no matter how hard I try. It … I'm unsubscribing for more things than I'm subscribing to just to try to get email under control and I just viscerally have this negative hatred in reaction towards email. So you know I didn't want to get into emailing people because I … you know how I am I like to treat others like I like to be treated. So for me, that was the conflict more than anything. It's like I'm going to start emailing people and I wouldn't want to even receive these emails myself. So that was the basis for the whole thing to start with so I was slow at doing it. But listening to other people talk and going to other you know a lot of these conferences and you still hear email as a prevalent thing and it's important; you should be doing email etcetera etcetera. So eventually I started dipping my toes into it and what I realize now many years later first of all email is 52% of our revenue. I was just looking before doing this podcast; it's 52% of our revenue for ColorIt. So it's a massive amount of our business. But our open rates- Joe: That's 52% of nearly an eight figure business. Mike: So just to … yeah [inaudible 00:11:07.1] that's just on ColorIt.com so we also sell on Amazon and Amazon is two thirds of our business so … but it's two thirds of a million dollar business because ColorIt.com does about a million dollars a year. And as a business overall ColorIt is bigger than that because you add in the Amazon component. But yeah what we do on ColorIt.com like when it's our own website and we control all of our own destiny; email marketing is a mass sort of part of that and it has a massive halo effect that you can't directly determine. But it has a massive halo effect on our Amazon business as well. Because people are reading these emails and they eventually go buy on Amazon. We have a lot of data on this but you can't … it's not empirical, you can't tell definitively like exactly what's going on there. But I mean totally you can look at the numbers and say okay by doing these things over here that it's affecting the stuff over here. So it definitely makes a big difference. Joe: Yeah for sure and then we're going to talk about open rates there in the email before I interrupt. Mike: Yeah. So our open rates are close to 30% so they hover somewhere 28 to 32% depending on what stage we are on scrubbing or list. So one of the things that we work really hard on is email deliverability; making sure things end up in the primary inbox, not in spam; that we are providing value to people so they want to open our emails. So that's been a really big angle for us so we kind of use the 80-20 rule here where at least 80% of our emails are helpful and they're not hitchy in any way of what we're trying to sell you something. And it's really more like 90-10. The vast majority of what we send out is helpful tips and tricks or things you want to know. So for instance in the coloring space; how to blend your shade with colored pencils, how to blend with markers or something like that, how to sharpen your pencils. Here's a time lapse video of how to draw this particular drawing and here's a free copy of it. Here's some stuff from our community other people submitted you might want to like it out as well. We're doing a giveaway this month or fan of the month contest. All these types of things that add value and every now and then once every six weeks or so or eight weeks we're releasing a new product and that will be a part of the sequence. Or maybe there's a Mother's Day sale or the month it's going to be come up soon it'd be a 4th of July sale. But very few of our emails are in that realm and most of them are in here are some helpful tips and tricks. So let's apply that to something besides coloring let's like it like tactical.com, your emails will be 10 things to bring on your next hiking adventure, how to prepare for an emergency, things to put in your bug out bag, what to do when the lights go out; whatever the types of things that we're doing in tactical world. Things that are like truly helpful for people especially I mean right now we're getting into hurricane season so we're going to be releasing a lot of content about that. And you know the fact of the matter is that most people just aren't prepared. Like a hurricane comes or an earthquake, a tornado comes whatever and you have no food and water or a flashlight that are is or all dead whatever it might be. It's actually quite helpful to people to bring us the forefront of their mind even if you just think about it for a second you can actually help save someone's life in this case. So these are the types of things we'll provide and every now in that cycle he check out on your products this might help you as well. So the vast majority we do is trying to train people to want to open our emails, to kind of like … you know and humans are very habit forming creatures. It only takes a few times of doing something to make it a habit. So we try to make this a habit for them and that's our approach. Joe: Yeah it seems to have worked with your open rate which is pretty phenomenal. Let's back up a step, what email software are you using; what do you prefer? Mike: So we're using Klaviyo for almost everything at least in the e-commerce space. You know Klaviyo is just heads and tails above everything else when it comes to e-commerce. It has a direct integration with Shopify, you can build segments within Klaviyo, people that have done particular things and then generate emails based off of that. And probably the feature that it has that's most valuable is the ability to then take those segments and synchronize those segments with a Facebook audience and then you can … it can currently run Facebook Ads to that group of people which is highly effective. And the thing that really got me going with this was actually a really funny story because I had just got done presenting at E-commerce Fuel; I think you might have actually been there. I was talking about email marketing and I was like- Joe: That was Savannah? Mike: Yeah. I think it was in Savannah. And I was like gloating about email marketing and all these cool things that we're doing and at the time that I was really … all I really focused on was mostly email marketing. And what I had said there was at the time our open rates where between 20 and 25% which is still double industry average and we've since improved that. But I was really proud of that fact and someone came up to me after the show. A good friend of mine, Kevin Stucco and he was like well what about the 75% of people that aren't opening your email? And I was just like … it was an instant like aha moment. It kind of knocked me down a peg because I was like all … kind of like in that gloating mindset but it was actually a really good point. Even … you know I was looking at it from one perspective of we're double or more than double the industry average on open rates on email. But what he made me think about was what about all these people that aren't opening email. And one of the things that Klaviyo at the same time was coming out with was that synchronization feature. So we started getting really heavy into Facebook Ads. And what you can do is if for instance there's like someone … let's say your average order frequency is 80 days so what we do as a win back sequence at 90 days we offer them a coupon; the comeback as an email. Well, why not run an ad to them, a Facebook Ad at the same time and Klaviyo makes that really easy. So yeah there's going to be basically three things that can happen; either they're going to open your email, they're going to see your Facebook Ad, or they'll do both. Some people going to see both of your email and your Facebook Ad. But either way, throwing the Facebook stuff into it is a much more effective approach. So it's been really successful for us and now we have these Facebook Ads that run 100 or 1500 to 2000% return on Ad Spend. Joe: Wow. Mike: But the most effective ads that we run are- Joe: It's incredible. Mike: Yeah. Because if you think about it I mean it's a super small audience, we're putting a really small budget together and these are like highly primed people. These are someone that's already bought from us. They kind of maybe forgot about us, you send and ad to them 10% off of course they're much more likely to convert than someone that's called traffic. It's way … this is what people forget about in e-commerce; it's way easier to sell someone something the second time than the first time. But the problem is that we all get our high off of getting new customers so that's what we always focus on is those angles. But what really brings the profitability to e-commerce is nurturing the existing customer. Joe: Lifetime value of a customer. Mike: Yeah. Joe: Repeat customer acquisition all that good stuff. So Klaviyo is the software of choice. Your emails separate yourself out from the mass emails that we get just by being as helpful as possible. So you don't wind up in the unsubscribe section and then combine and sync with Facebook which is great to go back out to those folks. On the emails themselves, how many are you sending on a day or week or things of that nature, and do you have any concerns about people opting out and do you make it easy enough for them to unsubscribe? Mike: Yeah. So we were sending millions of emails a month now literally; the number is actually crazy. We were just looking at our Klaviyo account the other day and it shows you the number of emails you've sent out. And in this particular account we're looking at it was actually just yesterday and it was 200,000 emails we had sent out and we were just like four days into the billing cycle. And I was like uh-oh like oh excuse me something might be wrong with … I think they were sending like … maybe people are getting two emails of the same thing or something. We kind of dug into it for a few minutes and realized just like the actual frequency, the number of emails we're sending is like in the millions a month now and it's actually accurate. And that's what we want to be happening it's just that we didn't quite have our … even have our heads around it. Joe: At the millions a month, how many is one individual getting? Mike: It really depends. It depends on how they came in to our system and what part of the sequences that they're in. There are some situations where someone might get an email from us literally every single day. So if they are coming in to one of this new lead magnet flows that we have which is basically I call this this the trifecta; this might be like a little bit of a version of what we're talking about today because we're talking about email but just as a real quick side note the trifecta to me as a marketer is getting them on a Facebook Messenger list, getting them Pixeled so I can also have their Pixel data, and getting their email address. So to me like- Joe: What's the Pixel part? Mike: So the Pixel part is just it when someone visits your website that's a piece of code that you have on your website that the Facebook Pixel or the Google Pixel and by having this script on your website you now know that someone has visited you and you know that they visit a particular pages or that they took particular actions. You don't know individually who they are like I don't know that Joe Valley visited my website today but I … you are in a bucket that I can say like I want to know all the people that did X, Y, and Z and you'll be in the bucket and I can then advertise to you in a particular way by being in that bucket. So what we do for Facebook campaigns or most of our campaigns is this whole … again the provide value first angle. So we'll offer people something for free whether it's free downloadable content, free drawings, a lead magnet whatever might be or offer them a free plus shipping off or maybe … so we start with these really compelling low friction offers and then send them to a Facebook Messenger flow. Which is basically are you definitely interested in this; yes or no. If they say yes we give them a link to a page and when they get to that page they're now Pixeled. So we have them on our Facebook Messenger list I can market to them that way. I have them Pixeled so I can remarket to them that way. And then that landing page will have a spot to give us their email address and I can market to them that way. And when they come through one of these flows for free downloads let's say we don't just give them all the free downloads in one day. We give them an email every single day for 30 to 45 days. It's actually a very long sequence where … so it's a 20 free download program or promotion I would say. And so we're giving them a download every other day and in between that we're giving them some other value. So and we tell them we're going to send you 20 free downloads, you're going to get one every other day. We don't tell them they are going to get another email every other day in between but they still open those as well. Joe: Yeah. Mike: And those other emails are still value, it's the how to blend or shade kind of emails or things like that, here are some stuff from our community and in it dispersed within there is here's a coupon for the book that you were just downloading these drawings from and things like that. So in that circumstance, their getting emailed incredibly frequently but the baseline minimum that people are getting email from our company is six times a month. That's the absolute minimum, someone, what would get. Joe: And that's fine. I've seen people … I've seen your presentation and I've heard people say man that's a lot of emails but if they don't want then they opt out. Mike: Yeah so- Joe: And your open rates- Mike: Exactly let me let me hit on that just real quick because it's a really important point. Again treating people like I'd like to be treated; I don't … if I don't want the email like I want to be able to number one at least [inaudible 00:22:39.8] easily unsubscribe so we make that easy for people. And I want them to be able to easily unsubscribe. What people … the shady email marketers don't get is you're actually hurting yourself more by trying to jam it down their throat because you want the open rates to be high. And Google and Hotmail and Yahoo all the different email platforms look at your stats of your open rates just like Google is looking at click to rates in inorganic search. And if your open rates are high, way higher than average; they're gonna say though this is content that people probably want we're going to put this in the main inbox. If you dip below a certain point you'll end up in the in the promotions tab, if you dip below even a certain point from that you'll end up in spam. And there's like no way to get yourself out of there. So we want to keep our open rates as high as possible probably for our own best interest right? So it's- Joe: Yeah. Mike: We make it easy to unsubscribe and if you don't open one of our emails for 13 weeks we unsubscribe you for yourself. So we figure after 13 weeks you know which is going to be probably something that range of 20 emails that we've sent out if you haven't opened one of those emails in that longer a time period you're probably just done with us and we'll just stop emailing you. And in that way … that's one of the reasons why our open rates continue to be as high as they are and we keep on adding our net gain every month is way higher than our unsubscribes or people we're removing. We've got something like 60,000 active emails on ColorIt where you know some people might look at that list and they would say it's 200,000 or something because we're not constantly scrubbing it. Our emails are active; these are 60,000 people that are actively open … we have 60,000 people that have opened at least one of our emails in the last quarter which is a much better stat in my mind than looking at the total number of people we've ever signed up. Joe: I totally agree. We're constantly asking that question in our client interviews and trying to drill down into the relative usefulness of those total emails. Yeah for those that are listening can you touch on, I mean it's probably overwhelming for both buyers and sellers that are listening in terms of if they've never done email marketing if they don't know how to do any Facebook marketing. I want to ask a question; let me first touch on the fact that for those that are not doing these now, for those that are getting revenue from one channel your business is going to be 20 to 30% less valuable than one from multiple channels and you also … and that's because of the risk. You're at a greater risk of a catastrophe if you're 100% Amazon business or 100% email marketing business, or 100% Facebook. You want to spread out and do all of them and have more sort of legs on the stool to balance out the business. Buyers will love that. They'll pay more for it. Mike: Yeah. Joe: And figure how to do it so what kind of training would you recommend for anybody looking to learn Klaviyo, anybody learning Facebook marketing? Mike: I mean we obviously do ourselves some I mean that's a kind of a loaded question but- Joe: It's funny, wasn't actually for people listening it wasn't a loaded question because I didn't know that. I know that you're doing … I know I've listened to EcomCrew you know I know Dave well, I know you well know and I love your Under the Hood sessions and I didn't really hear that you're actually doing the training sessions on Klaviyo and email marketing so let's … on Facebook so let's move to that. Let's talk- Mike: So we have a new thing called the EcomCrew Premium and what we were doing is like releasing a course every couple of months and charging 500 to 1,000 dollars per course depending on what the course was on. We did one on importing from China. Then we did another one on how to launch products on Amazon the white hat way without doing any black hat tactics. And as we kept on releasing courses we were getting emails of people just like this is getting expensive. It's like our core fans are like they're just buying everything we do, it was getting expensive and I also felt like starting to feel like a kind of a used car salesman in some respect because you're just constantly trying to sell them something different every couple of months. So we just said you know what like … because you know how Dave and I are like and we just we're not like that so- Joe: [inaudible 00:26:36.0] Mike: Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Joe: [inaudible 00:26:38.4] Mike: Okay well that makes more sense though he is Canadian so like by default he's just like already 40% nicer. Joe: It's it. Mike: Yes so we came up with this subscription model which is you just pay once a month, then you get access to everything that we've already done; everything that we're going to do in the future. And it includes webinars twice a month and the training we're about to release depending on this podcast will be released. The next one we're doing is on Facebook Messenger and we actually have a webinar later today as recording this on that topic as well. So we give those webinars to our EcomCrew Premium members as well. So we're constantly talking about this stuff and whatever's going on more current. The Klaviyo we don't actually have a course on yet I mean that was something that I learned on my own. I'm not really sure if there's one out there. We are going to be doing one on that but as a part of our subscription model, you also get access to us to ask questions so you can just email questions if you're having a hard time with Klaviyo as if for instance we would just help you with that as well. It's any type of e-commerce stuff we would help with. But Klaviyo is simple and it's complicated at the same time. Like I can understand why it would be overwhelming. I'm kind of a tech guy so I naturally kind of gravitate towards the stuff and figure it out. When I realize when it's complicated is when we hire a new employee and I had to explain to them how to do it and I see their eyes kind of glaze over. It's like I'm trying to explain the difference between a segment and a list or a flow and a campaign or how to synchronize something to Facebook and they're just like … you've been kind of giving that look and I … and then I understand that some things come harder to certain people. It'd be the same look I would give somebody if you asked me to do rock climbing or something. I'd be like yeah that's not going to happen. I'm not going to be able to do that. So yeah I don't know besides just Klaviyo's own website for that like what the best way to go about that is. Joe: So yeah you sell a very visual product you know with ColorIt and the tactical gear stuff you know common sense makes sense, between your connections with the EcomCrew and the Under the Hood Segments what's the strangest … I don't want to say, I don't want to call somebody's product or service strange but the thing that you would think would not necessarily work via email marketing that or Facebook that they get a shot and actually made a difference in their business. Mike: Yeah I mean let me start by saying give you like a whole another kind of answer to this real quick. What I always say when I when I speak at events or do these podcasts, whenever wherever I'm talking about and this comes up, one of the things that drives me crazy I mean you're in the same industry I'm in there is a lot of people out there that are like follow my secret 10 step plan, do these exact things and sprinkle this special dust in your business and you'll be a millionaire overnight. Those ads are on our Facebook feed like nonstop. We also go to events where some of these people speak and it drives me nuts. So I'm always cautious and tell people look like you have to use … you know your business better than anyone else and there's like all these variables that kind of go into it. You have a different margin than I might have or maybe there's a Facebook audience site that directly matches up with what you're doing. Maybe you have the ability to get user generated content really easily or you can make a lead magnet or a free plus shipping offer. If you have a lot of repeat business opportunity maybe you don't like I mean … so I try to talk about all these different types of businesses that we've been involved in and how we've approached it. And the thing that's cool about us now is we have four brands. We're doing things in coloring and hot and cold therapy we have a baby brand and we have a tactical brand. I'm gonna start talking a lot more about like our different approach for each brand but what your … the question you're asking is and I think that the answer to it really is that every business is unique. You have to follow maybe a basic outline of what people … like I'm doing with email marketing, here is like the different approaches we've taken with our different niches but you know it's hard to just say like do these exact 10 things. I mean there's a couple of things you want to do by default with email. You want to definitely have like an abandoned card sequence; that applies to everybody. You want to have a win back campaign; that applies to everybody. But what doesn't apply to everybody is 20 free downloadable coloring pages. That doesn't make sense for anybody else except for us. Joe: Right. Mike: Or like here's how to prepare for an emergency that probably doesn't apply to most businesses. You have to think out of the box and more importantly than anything is try a bunch of different concepts and don't be afraid to fail. This is where I think people get hung up like the human nature which I'm different in this regard for whatever reason. I'm wired differently. I just don't care about embarrassing myself or doing something that doesn't work. So you know I'll try 10 or 20 different things until I find the one that resonates and gives some traction where you know somebody else might try something once or twice and just give up. You have to keep on trying different concepts until you find the one that really seems to resonate and then with something in the world of Facebook when you find the thing that resonates or in email marketing it really seems to work. You'll get stats that are completely different than what you've done to that point. I mean 10 times better, 20 times better and you'll kind of hit that thing that kind of … that really works and I'm hoping that kind of answers the question. I mean I'm always reluctant to talk about other people's business specifically that we've run into at EcomCrew because I'm always pretty protective of the things that they're doing. Joe: Yeah. Mike: I never want to break anyone's confidence but I think that that is probably the best approach. And one last thing that I'll mention is when we got started in e-commerce with treadmill.com and I always talk about this. So it's like that's the most different thing that we've done compared to the other things that we're doing now. The approach there would be way different than selling something like a coloring book because you're only going to sell someone one treadmill. You've got no chance at a second sale. In fact, you just hope that they don't return it because it turns out to be like the most expensive clothes rack they ever bought right? Joe: Exactly. That's right. Mike: So I mean you have to take a different approach with that. And it's a much longer term sale cycle that you're not going to spontaneously sell somebody a 2,000 dollar treadmill. This is sort of like well long thought out, multi-year struggle with weight or whatever it might be that drives them to buying this treadmill, much different way to approach it so you've got to take a different approach there than selling somebody a sort of coloring pens or something. Because like yeah you can put an ad up, they're 30 bucks. Someone won't think twice about buying that and it can be a very spontaneous purchase versus the other way around. So you got the like … it's kind of like what you do, I mean people … like it's a very long sell cycle when you are trying to get someone to sell their business or purchase a business. That doesn't spontaneously just happen. So you're having to take a different approach with your email and your marketing than someone else that's actually selling widgets that are something that people just want to buy like that so- Joe: And it's interesting; it's the exact same approach you take in email marketing which is help as many people as you can. Be [inaudible 00:33:45.2] as you can and it generally is it's the right way to do it number one. But it generally works. You build relationships with either customers or clients like you sell from whatnot that they come around and work well. Mike: [inaudible 00:33:57.3] that works pretty well in life too by the way. Joe: That is [inaudible 00:34:00.6] life lessons from Mike Jackness. Mike: Yeah. Joe: We're running short on time but I want to talk about just EcomCrew briefly. I want people to now how to listen in because if you're in the e-commerce world you got to listen to Mike and Dave on EcomCrew because all they do is help people. Talk about that for just a minute; when did you start it, how do they download, listen to it, that kind of thing. Mike: We started it I guess it's been three years ago, three or four years ago. It's kind of hard to … I lose track of time. And we're out at Episode 150 something on the podcast as of recording this. My favorite episode we ever did was Episode 88 though, which was the Joe Valley EcomCrew podcast so- Joe: [inaudible 00:34:37.6] we talked today. Mike: I did. I just I was just looking on this great. But it's been a weekly podcast and we've now gone to twice a week. So twice a week we are talking about e-commerce stuff because between Dave and I we have plenty of things to talk about. We might even go to three times a week I just don't know if I have the time to do it. But as you're growing a business with the speed that we are there's plenty of talk about and I love talking about it because it produces a lot of cool stuff. I mean like I said it helps me meet people like you know but it also … it's really embarrassing to have to get on a podcast and start like you were … because I talk about my goals and the things that we're like looking to do. When you have to get on the podcast and say like I didn't get this done it's like there's nothing better than peer review and peer pressure. So I keep on pushing it till I get stuff done. So it's been very helpful for me as well. So yeah there's the podcast component so on iTunes E-C-O-M-C-R-E-W but we also have a blog which Dave does almost all of that content, EcomCrew.com all of that stuff is free. We even have actually a free … three free courses under the My Ecom Career Area none of that requires giving us a penny. It's just kind of us giving back. And you know I hope our long term strategy just like you is if we help people in they get an affinity towards the things that we're telling them and teaching that eventually they would want to become a premium member. But even if they don't like you were pretty financially secure and happy with what we're doing and all the other stuff is free. So definitely come check us out. Joe: It's awesome. Thanks Mike. I appreciate it. Anybody listening I would highly highly recommend you go to EcomCrew and check it out, download, listen to the podcast; definitely Episode number 88. Mike: Best episode ever. Joe: Ever. Mike: It actually was one of our best or highly rated episodes. And people are always interested in buying and selling their business. I mean it's something you should always be thinking about it's just I think people often wait too long to be thinking about these things and- Joe: Nine times out of 10. Mike: Yeah. Joe: Planning in advance should be probably number five. Mark doesn't like it but plan in advance you're going to understand the valuations and you do things like we talked about today which is [inaudible 00:36:41.1] email marketing and you'll [inaudible 00:36:43.6] business and get high value profit so [inaudible 00:36:46.6]. I appreciate your time today Mike I know you're a busy guy. Mike: No problem, thanks. Links: Ecomcrew.com EcomCrew Premium Episode 88 Klaviyo.com Klaviyo Facebook Snyc

Michael Jackness is an entrepreneur, speaker, Host of The EcomCrew Podcast, and the current CEO of Terran; which owns and operates several ecommerce businesses. Michael’s been in the online marketing space for over 10 years and has owned several successful online businesses; some of which we’ll be diving into today. In this episode, we also […] The post Michael Jackness | How to Scale Up an Ecommerce Business appeared first on Smart Business Revolution.

In the last couple of years, I’ve really been noticing more and more that people are feeling the pinch of wanting to hire a Director of eCommerce/COO for their businesses. And it makes sense, given the relief that can come from handing off the small details and logistics of running an ecommerce business so you can focus on high-level tasks. So today I have my good friend Michael Jackness of EcomCrew.com back for another episode to share the details of his recent experience hiring a Director/COO and how it changed his business for the better. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: http://bit.ly/2GQfzc5 

Building an audience can be tough, especially when you’re starting from scratch. So today, I thought it’d be fun to share the mic with Michael Jackness of EcomCrew so we can both give our perspectives on the subject, including what worked for us and what mistakes we made along the way. Michael has done such an incredible job building up EcomCrew.com over the last couple years, and today you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look into exactly how he did it. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: http://bit.ly/2GO35k5 

Greg Mercer and Michael Jackness discuss the pitches they've heard from The Mason Jar Handle and Sleepy Stroll and pick the weekly winner.

In today's episode, I'm joined by Mike Jackness of eComCrew. Michael Jackness is a serial entrepreneur, who has been working in the eCommerce space for the past 4 years. He's launched multiple 7-figure eCommerce brands and is on target to do 8-figures in 2018 with his eCommerce conglomerate. He also runs a blog and podcast exclusively about eCommerce at EcomCrew.com. During our discussion, which is one of the very best I've ever had on the topic of eCommerce, we talked about the strategies that Mike has used for niche selection, product testing, advertising, lead generation, sourcing, and launching products on Amazon.

Michael Jackness is the co-founder of colorit.com, creators of top-quality coloring books for adults. He is also the CEO of terrain.com which focuses on domain investing, ecommerce, SEO, PPC, and affiliate marketing. He is also the co-host of a popular podcast called Ecomcrew Podcast.   Michael has been involved in the online marketing world for over 10 years. Since running one of the largest poker affiliate networks in the world with over 60 employees, he now runs a network of ecommerce websites generating over $7 Million in revenue annually.  Period in full-time business  He started in business for himself when he was 18. He was graduating high school and he didn't have much to look forward to because he wasn't going to go to college due to his poor grades and lack of attention in school. So he got a box of business cards and a pager then started computer consulting because he was very good with computers. He would go into people's homes and help them with their computer needs for $20 an hour. That was back in 1998  Core revenue streams  He says that over the last 4 years, they have been immensely focused on e-commerce. In 2017, their projected revenue is $7 Million and in 2018 he projects $15 Million in revenue. They have been growing at 200% to 300% per year and the only thing that slows their growth is lack of enough cash.  They currently have 4 brands. The first one was http://www.treadmill.com/ (www.treadmill.com). He has been investing in domains for a long time and says they are like real estate. He ended up starting an e-commerce business with http://www.treadmill.com/ (www.treadmill.com) and then sold it at the beginning of 2015 after which he purchased another site called http://www.icewraps.com/ (www.icewraps.com) which offers hot/cold packs for different parts of the body.   From there, he developed http://www.colorit.com/ (www.colorit.com) which offers a brand of colouring books geared towards adults. They also have http://www.tactical.com/ (www.tactical.com) which offers information on gear, camping, hiking, hunting, DIY, food, and more. They have a new brand called “Wild Baby” which they recently launched exclusively on Amazon and are currently developing its website.   They also have the https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ecom-crew-podcast/id1056042180?mt=2 (Ecom Crew) which consists of a blog and podcast about e-commerce. His background before e-commerce was affiliate marketing and from his e-commerce experience he learnt that he would need to talk about e-commerce through developing different valuable content. They have been looking into monetizing the blog and podcast.  Tip: There are a lot of ups and downs in business, everything you start isn't going to be successful but it's all about identifying those that can become successful  Domain investing  Michael does speaking engagements on e-commerce and business in general. He says that domain investing comes down to being at the right place, at the right time, and knowing that domain names are illiquid assets and that they cannot be sold on a moment's notice. He never really chooses to pick a particular domain name because he mostly gets opportunities to buy them from different people. He may sometimes resell the domain names or choose to develop them like he did with http://www.treadmill.com/ (www.treadmill.com) and http://www.tactical.com/ (www.tactical.com).  Tip: You have to be prepared for the fact there is only a couple of people in the world that can purchase these mid-6-figure or high-5-figure domain names  Affiliate marketing  He got into online poker affiliate marketing in 2004 and that's where he made a lot of his money. That was during the growth of online poker and being an early adopter of that, he had affiliate sites that were not just about content because he did several unique affiliate marketing-based things. When he got out of that in early 2011, he started doing the keyword domain investing with his...

Get ready to hear Michael Jackness from Ecommerce Crew tell the story about how he went from one success to another: from affiliate marketing online poker, to buying and selling domains, to running an e-commerce business.

Get ready to hear Michael Jackness from Ecommerce Crew tell the story about how he went from one success to another: from affiliate marketing online poker, to buying and selling domains, to running an e-commerce business.

Today, I’m thrilled to have Michael Jackness on the show. Mike is someone who I met on a recent ecommerce mastermind trip and after hearing about his successes, I knew that I had to have him on the show. Mike runs a bunch of ecommerce websites which include Icewraps.com, CuttingBoard.com, ColorIt.com. And he also runs his own business blog at EcomCrew.com Anyway Mike is a gold mine of information and what I like about him is that he’s constantly trying new strategies to boost sales. For example, his most recent store ColorIt.com is only 4 months old and is on […] The post 119: How To Create A 7 Figure Ecommerce Store In Just 4 Months Selling Coloring Books Online appeared first on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

How Colorit.com 's Michael Jackness grew a Million Dollar eCommerce business in 1 year using niche selection and Facebook marketing through ads. EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the transcribe from this episode. . Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher You know, usually there is a fair amount of luck involved when someone achieves extreme growth. They stumbled into the right niche or made the right strategy partnership. Highlights How the death of affiliate marketing led Michael to build 4 eCommerce stores The importance of reviews and how quality products can sell themselves Testing your products on eCommerce MVP’s How viral contesting can work in a tight-knit online community Facebook Marketing – Using Facebook insights for detailed audience data Micheal’s SEO Strategy for success How eCommerece is an 8 cylinder engine Micheal's TWO pro tips for rapid growth Links / Resources The (sign up to unlock freebies) Colorit.com Treadmill.com Cuttingboard.com Icewraps.com Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also for later. → Read the Transcript Drew:  Hey everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is Drew Sanocki and now we are talking with Michael Jackness, who's one of my favorite e-commerce entrepreneurs. Micheal, welcome to the show. Michael: Thank you and now I have a lot to live up to. Want to save this transcribe to read later? download it as a PDF. Drew: Well, I'm just sort of fascinated by you because you've got, I mean your skills run the gamut. You've got a millions irons on the fire, you're flipping domains, you're starting e-commerce businesses, Amazon businesses, you're going to China, you run a podcast. Did I miss anything? Michael:  I'm a husband. Drew: You're a sumo wrestler. Michael:  Yeah, as far as business goes that pretty much covers it but, yeah and I guess you could even argue that maybe I have too many irons in the fire. It's something I've been working on a lot over the last two years. I think there's that saying, if you chase two rabbits both will get away. Drew:  Right. Michael: We've really been focusing on e-commerce lately and really just doubling down on that and I've been basically living life with blinders on when it comes to e-commerce. Whether it's running stores or running an e-commerce podcast and blog or going to events. Everything that I think about and dream about these days is in e-commerce world. Drew: Dream about. Michael: I've had dreams about it, nightmares I guess which actually came true here with one of our products, but, yeah I think when you're so immersed in it, yeah, you can even have dreams about e-commerce, which is pretty sad. Drew:  Yeah, I had a nice Shopify dream last night, it was great. The series I'm working on here is I'm talking to a lot of entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped companies up to seven figures in revenue. I say seven figures in a year but it doesn't really matter, you've achieved some sort of rapid growth with an e-commerce store and I think that is really interesting. It appeals to a lot of people and it represents another alternative to all the venture backed companies we hear about all the time. That's why you're here as my guest and I would love to talk about Color It, but before we do, it's nice to hear a little bit more about how you got here and maybe a little bit about your history in e-commerce, maybe you can talk about that for a sec. Michael: Sure, so before we got into e-commerce, the story kind of starts there really because we were affiliate marketers and basically that means that you put links in your site and if someone clicks through them and buys or signs up or whatever the action they're taking, you get a commission and you're pretty much hands off once they click that link. It was a wonderful world to live in for eight ...

Finding the right domain for your business can be a long process and one that you should create a strategy for. Should you find an exact match domain? If that domain is already claimed, should you try and buy it? What is the best method to search for and purchase a domain? Is there a difference between spammy domain names and exact match domain names? You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: http://bit.ly/1EZ7nsz