David 0:00
Are you looking to grow your sales on Amazon? Chances are if you’re not selling on Amazon’s international marketplaces, you are leaving some serious money on the table. What keeps a lot of people from selling internationally are all the confusing hoops you have to jump through to get started. That is why we worked with Kevin Sanderson from maximizing ecommerce on our international expansion. Kevin and his team take care of the details and guide you through the process of expanding so that you can grow your sales and reach new customers. If you’d like to find out if working with Kevin and his team is right for you head over to https://maximizingecommerce.com/fire, once again, that is https://maximizingecommerce.com/fire.
Ken 0:46
Get the end of the day the emotion pieces there like you know we wanted to crush somebody but you know, we had to we had to peel that away and, and professionally what was best for the company and for and for the you know, the entire team in the company. And I think we made the right decision there. And that was a pretty crazy experience.
David 1:05
On the other side of that transaction, you’ve got customer, you’ve got a human, you’ve got somebody that you are providing value to. And that’s something that I think we’re you know, through email marketing through asking our customers, what do you want through engaging you know, in our private Facebook groups, and really asking our customers what they want, and then trying to deliver that I think is going to be really helpful and really fulfilling.
- Zigler, Dr. Travis (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 127 Pages - 03/07/2021 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)
Intro 1:30
Welcome everyone to the Firing the Man podcast a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you were capable of more than join us, this show will help you build a business and grow your passive income stream in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David shoma and Ken Wilson.
David 1:54
Welcome everyone to the Firing the Man podcast on today’s episode, Ken and I review 2022 In regards to the performance of our E commerce businesses, this year was full of big wins and huge losses, both of which we will be addressing throughout the episode. Ken, what’s going on man?
Ken 2:12
David, how you doing? Man? I’m excited to be in a podcast studio and share with everyone 2022 results that we had our goal, did we not? Yeah, it’s been a couple of months since we’ve been in the studio taping. So just excited to share everything with the listeners today.
David 2:26
Definitely, definitely. So I would say a couple of things at a high level, we are going to dive into some detail. But here’s what I’ll say Amazon businesses are doing well, in this post COVID era, we had a lot of people that never had an Amazon Prime subscription that now do. And I think ecommerce is just becoming more of a a way of life is ordering things online. And I think COVID kind of helped with that. And so we have seen like an overall pickup in terms of volume and shoppers, which I think it has been good. So that’s just kind of a high level observation. I have about 2022 What about you? Yeah,
Ken 3:05
same, you know, the shopping the trend, there’s still a lot of road in terms of like E commerce, retail to e commerce, there’s a lot of road left for to make gains. And it was kind of a, it was a weird year in terms of you know, post COVID Everything is kind of settling down, you know, you had a freight going down, but you’ve got a lot of conflict, a lot more competition. So yeah, we’ve we’ve we it was a it was an interesting year, for sure.
David 3:31
Absolutely. Now, at the beginning of year, we started off by asking ourselves the question, how do we grow these companies, and there’s kind of two avenues that we identified. One was, let’s launch more products, or the other option was let’s expand internationally, let’s go to international marketplaces. And we opted for for that second option. And so this year, we expanded into Canada, UK, Germany, as well as Walmart. And boy, is that been an adventure, I would say things I’ve taken, it has been a longer process than I thought it would be. However, now that we’re kind of on the other side of this international expansion, I’m happy that we have but still definitely a lot to learn as we do businesses in these other countries. So what are your thoughts there?
Ken 4:15
Yeah, so, you know, like David mentioned, we laid the groundwork and expanded into international marketplaces and Walmart. And that was it was a it was a challenge. But now that it’s done, you know, we can as we launch products, we can plug them directly into many more sales channels than just one. And so it was although it took a lot of time, effort as well as capital to fund all the inventory for these marketplaces. It expands our sales channels going into 2023 and beyond is that as we launch more products, we can plug him right in and you know, it adds a lot more diversity to if you’re just adding more products into one sales channel. You’re not as diversified as if you have five sales channels that you’re you know you’re plugging products into So, I’m excited we did it and, you know, looking at a 23, it’ll be exciting to kind of ramp those up and really mature those sales channels.
- Hardcover Book
- Diehl, Gregory V (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
David 5:09
Absolutely. You know, I think a couple of struggles that came from that as inventory, you know, from one particular brand, we loaded up Walmart, because we thought, Walmart is going to be the Wild West, we’re going to be able to crush it here. And 365 days later, we were facing long term storage fees, because those products did not sell similarly, in some of the International marketplaces. For instance, in the UK, where we’re dealing the British pound, we had a huge change in in foreign exchange rates in currency in the US dollar depreciated. And so we had kind of like set our prices, and then left them there for a year and the the US dollar depreciated against the British pound. And we found at the end of the year, we were way overpriced. And so it’s going to take some getting used to dealing and kind of thinking in these different currencies. But overall, I’m glad that we did it. So you know, as we move through this episode, we’re going to talk this is kind of a high level review. But we’re going to talk about some like big initiatives, big things that went on. And so Ken, what would you say the first, like, big thing was that we did this year?
Ken 6:15
Yeah, absolutely. One of the big things that we changed was advertising. And we really heavily focused on tacos, which is a measurement that we used to look at never really took action this year, we took action on and essentially, you know, the tacos is a reflection of your organic sales versus your advertised sales. And what we found was our tacos was too high, which was impacting our profitability. And so we’ve made some adjustments, pulled some levers and decreased our tacos, which in turn decreased our cut our ad spend by about 70%, across the portfolio companies, which is huge. Now, we took some hit on sales on there, but our profitability increase, which at the end of the day, net profit is what we’re after, that’s the goal is what we’re after, we’re not after, you know, hey, we’re, you know, an eight figure company that’s losing money, we don’t want to be that we want to be a company that is solid and resilient, and has has as much net profit at the end of the day as possible. And so that was one of the, I would say one of the major changes this year that we made
David 7:20
absolutely in in, you know, one thing that we did was we brought PPC in house, which was helpful, where we have our dedicated PPC Manager that’s working on all of our accounts. And and so that was a little bit easier in terms of cutting adspend Li, we were working with an agency who were compensated a percentage of our ad spend. And that’s kind of that type of agencies model and found that there’s not necessarily aligned interests. And so it’s good that we’re happy, at least I think, I can speak for myself and say, like, I am glad that we brought it in house. And it’s been nice to put those dollars to work elsewhere in other parts of the business. You know, Amazon’s a pay to play marketplace. But gosh, there are some good keywords there good keywords for your listing that are just too expensive. And it just at the end of the day, that juice isn’t worth the squeeze and those kind of an experiment. And I think it works. So
Ken 8:15
absolutely, yeah, and I am too happy, you know, a couple of other benefits of bringing PPC in house is that, you know, with an agency model, you know, the account managers have, you know, between 10 and 20 accounts, depending on which agency you’re working with. And if they’re working a 40 hour a week, you’re getting not that many hours from them four hours to eight hours of time at most, and now where we have a full time in house manager work getting 40 hours of work on across all of the portfolio companies and all the marketplaces and I think that synergy also goes well in terms of the strategy on on keywords and customers and so yeah, very, very happy. Next one here, we’ll move into so what one thing we added that I’m really excited for, I think it’s going to take it’s going to take a while to ramp up but email marketing and so you know, anybody that’s listening to the podcast for a long time knows that you know, David and I founded several Native Amazon brands meaning when they started on the Amazon sales channel and over the years we’ve matured and expanded into a different sales channels as we as we learn and grow in E commerce and email marketing was a gap we had, you know, we dabbled in it before but we never really focused and put the time and energy and capital into it. Well this year we did and so we’re about six months deep into one of our brands we have a second brand we’re about a month into it and we have a third brand that will be online by the end of the year and we’ve seen tremendous sales velocity coming in from our email marketing efforts and so it’s it’s nice to know that you know, this will pay dividends years down the road as we ramp and scale this with email you can communicate with your customers you can ask them question I mean there’s this endless options that we can we can use the email marketing for as well as it’s an you know those emails you own. That’s an asset that you when you if you if you ever choose to sell your business, that that’s an asset that goes to the table when you’re when you’re when you’re selling your business. So,
- Ryan, Robert J. (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 137 Pages - 11/02/2019 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)
David 10:09
absolutely one other benefit of email marketing that we found was when we went to launch products, we literally picked a couple of options and asked our audience, what do you like? What do you like more? What would be like the dream setup for this type of product? And we got great responses. And, and I mean, that’s business one on one is give the people what they want. Yeah. And so that was a great way, you know, he send a an email blast out, we’ve probably got 30 to 50 responses on those inquiries. And they were great, like really good responses, good engagement. And, you know, when we go to launch those products, we’ll respond to those people and say, Hey, we took into account your feedback. And here’s what we came up with. And that’s awesome. So I’m really, really excited about that. And I think as we continue to grow those DTC websites that’s going to be crucial is building our audience. So yeah,
Ken 11:03
absolutely. One pro tip there is just to piggyback on what David mentioned, one thing we did, and if you’re doing email marketing, and you have a post, purchase, email flow setup, pop an email in there, you know, two weeks, three weeks down the road, and then ask, ask your customer, what other products that they buy, that your brand doesn’t offer, and that and then set that it’s an automation flow, and you’ll just get a never ending list of product ideas. And once you know, if you log them all one day, you’ll look at that and say, Oh, I’ve got 17 People wanting this. Well, that’s your next product launch, because people are asking for it. So
David 11:37
absolutely. Absolutely. Now one major initiative that we took on this year, switching gears is we’ve opened two manufacturing facilities. One we we started at the well, I guess it was towards the tail end of 2021, but really ramped up production, and are the first manufacturing facilities doing great. So when we first started out, to be totally honest with you, we didn’t know what we were doing. We never do. Yeah, we are we are producing about 1000 units a month. And we had had some machinery breakdown, it was constantly kind of putting out fires. And there’s a lot of points during that where I you know, we talked like, are we doing the right thing. And but we kept moving forward. And Dan, that facility that was doing about 1000 units a month, is now doing about 5000 units, with the same number of people. And we’ve really got our manufacturing processes dialed in, we’ve got backups on machinery, we’ve learned how expensive it is when the line is shut down. And that’s been great. We are manufacturing products in the USA. And it just it overall something I’m really, really proud of. And so with the success of that came manufacturing facility number two, which made its first products about five days ago, and so we’re still relatively new to this one. But I’m really excited about what we’ll be able to do and just kind of the benefits of having that in house.
Ken 13:11
Absolutely. And to kind of expand on what David said, like, we had thought about, you know, what, how can we differentiate ourselves from our competitors. And now whether those competitors are, you know, other DTC brands, or whether they’re Chinese competitors on Amazon, you know, manufacturing your own products, is a is a really, really huge way to differentiate yourself, there’s so many benefits, it’s like we talked about this all the time, if there’s a if there’s a barrier to entry, there’s not going to be many people that get inside, right, they’re not going to go, they’re not going to figure out how to go over the barrier around the barrier. Well, there was a lot of challenges with manufacturing, but a lot of credit to David, David spent a whole lot of time on this, figuring it out, doing all the modeling, and then just taking action. And so you know, we had hurdle after hurdle after hurdle, but we just solved every problem as they came. And now we can go to market with a new product in two weeks. And our competitors cannot do that. And so speed to market is one thing that really is an advantage and when you self manufacture, as well as quality, you can monitor your own, you know, you can monitor the quality your product, we also have a warehouse now that stores our products. And so if we ever have an issue with something, we just go and fix it, we have we have everything in one place. So it’s been really nice. And I’m excited to continue down this path of of ramping up, you know, manufacturing in the US and having a more control over supply chain from from from start to finish or from at least from raw material to to in finished goods. So yeah, that was a that’s a huge win for the portfolio companies this year.
amazon box=”B018GVPV8K”]
David 14:45
Definitely. If you’d like to hear more about this, I’d encourage you to check out episode 124 where we document all the lessons that we learned in our first year of manufacturing. If this is something that you’re thinking about, check out that episode. It’s a good one. So Moving on. Another thing that we did this year was we hired over the course of 2022. We hired 25 employees. And we don’t have 25 active employees, there have been some that have been part time and have since left. But in total, we made 25 hires, and tiny have really built out a team. And in Episode 138, and 139, we go into detail on every single one, if you want to hear about the rogue employee that insisted on bringing his gun into my house, check out that episode. But yeah, a lot hiring odd interviews. What have been your thoughts there?
Ken 15:33
Yeah. So it’s this has been one of the most challenging pieces of this year. Also the most rewarding to me, I think, like, you know, today is Friday, when we’re taping this, we have our we have our end of the week meeting on Fridays, where the whole team, everybody in the company comes on a meeting. And it’s just kind of, you know, talk about how the week went, we discussed wins, how, you know, lots of stuff. And it’s just very rewarding to have everybody in one place. Having fun chatting, talking about goals and seeing a team that’s cohesive, all working together on the same goal. And that was not an easy thing to achieve. It was very difficult. We we got better at hiring, I would say we we sucked at hiring early on. And we’ve made some mistakes there. And we’ve learned and we’ve improved now we have a we have a solid hiring process that’s working well. And so yeah, like David mentioned, we’ve the episodes that 138 139 are some pretty cool stories on those episodes, if you want to go back and listen. But yeah, there’s, at times, it’s been a shit show. And other times, it’s been amazing where things were, you know, David could go on vacation for two weeks, and things are getting done when he’s gone. And when it comes back, things are better than when he left. And that’s kind of our goal is to build a team that can function with or without us and grow the company. And so we’re well on our way of achieving that. And it’s it’s very rewarding. Our team is awesome.
David 16:59
Absolutely. Sorry to interrupt the episode, you may have heard Ken and I talking recently about a new tool that we’re using for Amazon refunds. Now I have used other refund tools like this. However, I can tell you in the first seven days, they scrubbed it, the back end of my Amazon account going back 18 months, and found $5,000 of refunds. And the nice thing about this is, it’s my money, Amazon made a mistake and they are just auditing my account. The other thing I really like about this tool is there is no monthly fee, they only charge a commission if they are successful in getting you your money. Go to github.com GE T ID a and enter promo code FTM for Firing the Man FTM 400 This is an awesome tool. I can’t say enough good things about it. Now back to the episode. Another I said in the intro, we’re gonna cover big wins, and we’re gonna cover huge losses. And this next one, I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a huge loss. But it was definitely a bummer. We got sued. And that was it was scary. Like to be honest with you is scary, is something I personally have never gone through. There’s a lot of emotion involved in something I don’t think people talk a lot about is like it’s emotionally taxing any you’re trying to make rational, logical decisions. But you’re also very frustrated and pissed off. And yeah, it was, you know, we go into great detail on this on episode 145. But Ken, what, what were your thoughts there?
Ken 18:33
Yeah. And so like David, I had never been sued before. I knew I have attorneys in my family. I know, people had been sued. And it was nerve wracking, nerve wracking, lost sleep over it, definitely, it definitely was a distraction from, you know, operating the company. And it was all around a negative experience. But also, at the end of the day, we had that experience now. And so we kind of call that what was I can’t remember who I stole this from, but he essentially said any money, the ease loss or time it’s an education fund, put that in the education fund. And so now, we have that in our education fund where we’ve learned from that it sucked. It was painful, what we learned from that, and we’re going to be better moving forward on on, you know, there was lessons learned there, what to do, what not to do, but the biggest takeaway from that was to and I think we did, I think we did a really good job, we kept our emotions out of it. And we and we put the business first and said, you know, like, at the end of the day, the emotion pieces, they’re like, you know, we wanted to crush somebody, but you know, we had to we had to peel that away and, and professionally what was best for the company and for and for the you know, the entire team in the company. And I think we made the right decision there. And that was a pretty crazy experience.
David 19:46
So yeah, absolutely. Now what next what Yeah, other initiatives do we have going on? Absolutely.
Ken 19:51
And so I’ll bounce this. Over to you, David. I’ll speak to a little bit but we focus on profitability, and so 2022 was a lean year in turn Observe, you know, there was we saw some pullback, you know, there was COVID. And then there’s post COVID. And we saw some, you know, everybody’s kind of maybe it maybe some people kind of going back to retail. And so we’ve seen some, some some pullback on sales. And it’s, you know, the longer you’re in this game, more competition, the more everything and so profitability is really we focused a lot on profitability this year. And David, what are what are some things that we drilled into for profitability?
- Gildner, Gil (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 205 Pages - 03/28/2019 (Publication Date) - Baltika Press (Publisher)
David 20:25
Absolutely, we focused a lot on pricing and how we had our products priced, you know, there’s so many things that are out of our control. As Amazon sellers, however, we are in control of price. And this is something that sometimes when you’re launching a product, it’s kind of a finger in the wind, like what price feels right, but we test it, we would move prices around, we do a 30 day look back, we played around with a couple different software’s. We’re right in the middle of testing a new software right now, which it’s too early to tell whether endorse this one wholeheartedly, we’re still learning and still looking forward to doing some look backs on it. But that was something that we did that I think really helped out with, with the profitability. The other thing that we did was, we made it a point once a month to look through all of our expenses. And this is something that’s not exciting, it’s kind of boring. But the number of like software subscriptions, or things that just auto renew, once a year that we caught, allows us to be a lot more lean, and cut out like any wasteful spending. And I think that that’s just good business hygiene. And it was something that I think moving forward, we’re going to continue to do this, it’s easy to let that one slip. But I think if you’re a business owner, it’s your responsibility is to make sure you have a good idea of all the the the expense is running through your business. So, you know, we talked about cutting down ad spend. So I’m not going to go into a ton of detail here. And so and then I think the last thing is, is we’re implementing a process for inventory, and inventory management, specifically retiring products, we’ve talked about kind of killing our babies in that like we launch a product, it doesn’t go well. What do we what do you do with that? Well, we put in a process very recently, we’re doing heavy, heavy discounts on pricing, it’s going to generate cash flow, not necessarily profitable sales, but But it’s going to help us kind of get rid of that inventory, liquidate that inventory, and move on. So we can focus on our high performers. And so that’s something that inventory management is it’s very important in this industry. And it’s something that we’re just we’re trying to strike that balance between never going out of stock and carrying way too much inventory. And that is that’s a delicate balancing act, especially when you have lead times of 120 days out of China makes it tough to react. And so that’s one of the reasons that we like having manufacturing on US soil is that 120 days can be cut down to 10 In some instances, because we have full control over manufacturing. Yeah, so absolutely. Yeah. The next one. And Ken, I’m gonna I’m gonna let you start with this one, we implemented an Entrepreneurial Operating System from the book traction. Let’s talk about that.
Ken 23:18
Yeah, absolutely. And so EOS. So traction, if you haven’t read the book, go grab it and read it. If you’re, you know, if you’re a couple years into your business, and maybe you have a small team, it’s it’d be could be very helpful for you. I think I’m trying to remember off top my head, Gina Whitman, I think wrote a book traction, but inside of it, he describes Eos, which stands for entrepreneur operating system. And at the high level, it’s just a basically an organized system of processes to how an entire business should function together and keep everybody on task, as well as there’s an entire planning and review. And then it’s done weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. And so by implementing all of these, all this structure into your business, it essentially is like the heartbeat of your business. It’s a pulse, and it just continuously repeats and improves that at a high level. Hopefully I give it justice on the description.
David 24:15
Yeah, no, I would agree with you. And you know, one thing that we did, when we started this, we decided that we were going to follow the book to a tee, we were going to go through every step, we were going to fill out every worksheet. And once we had done all of that, we could kind of stop and see what we think is relevant or what we would want to do in future years. And one of the things that the books suggested was when you’re planning out your next year, is to have at least a two day off site planning session. And I honestly when I read that I’m like I don’t forget to do that. Like why don’t we work from home we work remotely why don’t we just do it that way, but we decided to Stick to the book. And we did, we got a conference room at a hotel. And we dedicated we shifted all of our meetings in for two days, we were solely focused on mapping out 2023. And that was awesome. And at night, we ate like kings. And like, it was fun. It was a fun thing to do. It was exciting. And, you know, I’m really glad that we did that. One thing that I’m really glad that we did was we had hired an operations manager to help with this. And this is an area where I think, admittedly, you and I know we’re weak in in terms of like, structure. And like this long term planning in our operations manager is awesome. In his department, he complements our skill sets. And so he helped facilitate this implementation. And I don’t think we would be as far as we are with.
Ken 25:52
Absolutely, I totally agree. Now, they’re no passive, that’s something that you know, you need in your business, something like that, there’s a couple of different ways to implement it, you can hire like an implementer. And they’ll come in and do that it’s a very costly option. And so we opted, we opted to self implement. And I think the only reason we were successful in doing that is because our operations manager had previous experience with us. And he essentially carried us to be honest, like, and spoon fed everything. And so I would say like, from start to finish, it was probably a six month process, we essentially read every chapter in that book and had like book studies, and we documented it was only once we were completely through that book is when we started. And then we started slowly, methodically, we found it to a tee. And, you know, we’re, I think, three, four months into having fully implemented and we’re already starting to see the benefits of that. And so I would say, that’s one of the highlights of this year, in terms of the entire portfolio companies of making making progress. It was was implementing EOS. So it’s really, really awesome. David, as we’re as we’re kind of looking out into 2023, what are what are some stuff? What are some things in the roadmap we can share? Yeah, absolutely.
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Clarke, Adam (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
David 27:05
So I think that, you know, fully implementing this EOS is going to be you know, we kind of started in mid year, and so 2023 is going to be our first full year. And I am really excited about that, you know, one thing that we realized is that our employees like it as well, they know what is expected of them, they know what they need to focus on over the next quarter. And from that standpoint, that’s been great. And so I think that’s going to be an area of focus definitely for the next year.
Ken 27:35
Yeah, absolutely. Next thing here, I think David alluded to earlier, but we’re, we’re in the process of building what we’re calling product launch machine. And essentially, you know, we spent the last year focusing on expanding into new sales channels, and we haven’t launched a ton of products, we’ve launched some smart products here and there, but we didn’t have a huge focus on it. And so 23 is going to be a year where we focus a lot on launching products. And we’re building a really, really extensive process, we’re excited to kind of share with everybody when we’re done, but we’re calling it product launch machine. And it’s from it’s an A to Z, just an all inclusive process of taken, you know, of launching products into your into your E commerce business. And so I’m really, really excited about that. It’s, it’s really going to be the engine for the
David 28:24
Deaf, definitely, I would say one of the last things that we’re going to focus on in 2023, is increased engagement with our customers. And I think on Amazon, it’s easy to get caught up in keyword ranking and indexing and PPC. But in reality, on the other side of that transaction, you’ve got a customer, you’ve got a human, you’ve got somebody that you are providing value to. And that’s something that I think we’re, you know, through email marketing, through asking our customers, what do you want through engaging, you know, in our private Facebook groups, and really asking our customers what they want, and then trying to deliver that, I think is going to be really helpful and really fulfilling. And so I think everybody likes a company that listens to their customers. And that’s something that I think we’ve done an okay job of, but I think we’re going to do an even better job of it and 2023
Ken 29:14
Yeah, absolutely. And one other thing, too, is something that to share with the audiences, it’s oftentimes we don’t spend enough time reflecting on our wins. And so if you haven’t done that in a while, you know, this is a grueling, you know, job, like, you know, it’s a grinding job. And so it’s really, really important myself, I don’t do enough of it. I’m glad we have it, we kind of have it baked into our weekly schedule now to talk about wins in progress. And so if you don’t do that, I would highly recommend finding time in your schedule to sit back and reflect on wins in the progress that you’ve made, because oftentimes, it gets overlooked. And it can really like brighten your day and your spirits and you’re like oh yeah, you know, I accomplished that and we we did this and so it It’ll help you give you momentum to to accomplish more. Yeah. And the last piece that I have is, you know, make sure you’re having fun while you’re working. And while you’re doing what you’re doing, because you’re doing it for yourself, if you’re an E commerce and you’re building a business, you know, build in some fun building some things that you like, uh, you enjoy, craft your schedule to where, you know, your life is enhanced by it not degraded. And so sometimes it’s, we overlook this stuff. And, you know, David and I made an effort this year to kind of bake some of that stuff into our schedule, modify it, and just to have fun and enjoy the time.
David 30:37
Absolutely. I’ll in terms of like having fun. We had a partner’s retreat, which was a fishing trip down in Arkansas, which is super fun. Yeah. And I remember, during that you said, Hey, would you ever be interested in staying in a yurt? And I’m like, hell yeah, that sounds. That sounds friggin awesome. And so yeah, I mean, we could jump on a zoom call, or we could go hang out in the woods in a yurt in and or go on a fishing trip or whatever. And so I’m glad that we’ve done that. I’m glad that we’re continuing to carve off time for that. And yeah, it’s easy to get stuck in the grind stuck in your office. And and what I think what we both found is a lot of our best ideas come and we’re outside the office. And so it’s puzzling why you spent so much freaking time in the
Ken 31:19
sea. Yeah, I totally agree. Like the creative juices come out when you’re relaxed. I think when you’re in the office and all tensed up and focus, for me, at least, but like fishing or hanging out, and then ideas start flowing. And so yeah, that is crucial. Yeah. But yeah, we’ll have to we’ll have to share next next year what our what our retreat was, and so but yeah, if you’ve listened this long, thank you. And if you know, you want to share some of your your wins for the year, you know, hit us up on social media, you can hit us up on email, David at Firing the Man or candidate firingtheman.com. Shoot us over share some of your wins, you know, and maybe we’ll we’ll share them on a future episode or something soon to come. We’re going to be sharing our goals for 23 here in a few weeks, so stay tuned.
David 32:00
Absolutely. All right. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. And we’ll see you next week. Thank you everyone for tuning into today’s Firing the Man podcast. If you liked this episode, head on over to firingtheman.com. And check out our resource library for exclusive Firing the Man discounts on popular ecommerce subscription services that is firingtheman.com/resource, you can also find a comprehensive library of over 50 books that Ken and I have read in the last few years that have made a meaningful impact on our business, or that head on over to www.firingtheman.com/library. Lastly, check us out on social media at firing the man in on YouTube at Firing the Man for exclusive content. This is David Schomer and Ken Wilson. We’re out
before you go fun fact for all you Amazon sellers out there when you start selling in international marketplaces, all of your reviews come with you. At the beginning of this year, Ken and I sat down and talked of ways that we could double our businesses in size and landed on international expansion as our number one initiative this year. We partnered up with Kevin Sanderson from maximizing ecommerce and he has made the process an absolute breeze walking us step by step through the process. If you want to grow your revenue and reach new customers head on over to https://maximizingecommerce.com/fire and connect with Kevin Sanderson today. Now back to the show.