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
And also, it doesn’t hurt to try. You know that’s the other thing too is like, you can’t be afraid to try something new. Give it six months. And then if it doesn’t work, pivot back over and try something else. And so don’t ever feel like you’re locked in.
David 0:59
At least for me, it didn’t really sink in until I messed it up for a couple months. And I was like, Oh no, I way overspent here I overbid here, or this campaign shut off. Just going through that I think is part of like developing into a professional ecommerce entrepreneur.
- Zigler, Dr. Travis (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 127 Pages - 03/07/2021 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)
Intro 1:18
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 streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David Schomer and Ken Wilson.
David 1:41
Welcome everyone to the firing the man podcast on today’s episode, we dive deep into the world of PPC. Specifically the advantages of self managing PPC, versus hiring a PPC agency versus hiring an in house employee. Over the past few years, Ken and I have employed all three of these strategies, and learned a lot from our experiences, which we hope to share with you today. Be sure to stay tuned for a strategy on how to find talented PPC managers. Ken, what’s going on man?
Ken 2:10
David, how are you? I’m excited to be on the podcast today. We’re batch taping this as another remote episode, not in the studio, unfortunately. But yeah, we’re here to deliver a lot of value and share with the listeners our experience many years of running PPC and hiring for PPC. And you know what’s good, what’s the bad and kind of break it all down and share with everyone and hopefully learn a lot. And so yeah, David, let’s kick it off.
- Hardcover Book
- Diehl, Gregory V. (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
David 2:34
Absolutely. So to kind of set the stage, what is PPC Pay Per Click advertising, it is a very important part and component of selling on Amazon. And so there’s a typical path that I’ve observed with myself with you, Ken, and a lot of our friends that are in this community as it relates to PPC and that everyone starts off self managing. And they’ll do this for a certain period of time. And then they’ll kind of realize, oh, my gosh, PPC is a mile deep and a mile wide. And I don’t understand all of this, what do I do? A natural second step is to hire an agency, which we’ve done, and we’re going to get into this and some people stop there at hiring a PPC agency. However, some people as their team grows, they may bring a PPC Manager in house. And so today we’re going to go through all three of these strategies, share our experiences with them. And you know, just share some positive positives and negatives that we’ve experienced. So can I laid out that path self managing PPC agency in house? Is that how Tell me about your PPC story?
Ken 3:46
Yeah, sure. So I would say that’s probably accurate, or you know, I mean, we’re generalizing here. But yeah, it’s a pretty accurate, you know, as you start out, and we’re kind of like referring to like, if you’re starting out as an Amazon FBA entrepreneur, right, you start there first, and then kind of build on that. And as your company grows, you know, as you’re an entrepreneur, you wear 10 different hats, right? You’re the marketing person, you’re the finance person, you’re the PPC person, you’re everything. And as the company grows, you find your time, where you know, you don’t have there’s no time lapse in the bucket. And so you have to start hiring out or partnering with agencies to take that off your plate. One of those probably one of the first moves is PPC, it’s probably one of the most important things unless you’re really good at it, right? Like most entrepreneurs are like that. I know that they’re really good at like one or two things, maybe three, not and then they’re average at a bunch of other stuff. They can make it happen and you know, unless PVC unless you’re a rock star and PVC and you really enjoy spending your time in there. You should offload that whether it’s an agency or whatever is good fit for you my personal journey. So back I started selling on Amazon back in 2017. And I self managed PPC for I would say the first six months and then and you know at the time I Nothing about PPC, you know, my background was in engineering network engineering, which is nothing about pay per click advertising or media buying. And so it was kind of a new space for me. I thought it was cool. I liked the concept of it, but I really knew nothing about it. So I had to learn, and kind of figure it out on my own. And then as I learned and figured out on my own, you know, I’m like, all of these other things I’m trying to learn as well. And I’m like, PVC, it was not something at the time, it was kind of like, download the spreadsheets, you know, do all and I’m David Gnosis. I’m not a spreadsheet guy, I’m not. And so like my spreadsheet on a one to 10. I’m about a two on spreadsheets. And so like, I’m like, Oh, this is not good. And I had found an agency, and partner with an agency about six months into my selling experience. And actually, before I partner with an agency, I tried to software, and I think it was Selux at the time. And so I tried Selex for about three months, went in and got all the rules set off, got all the campaign set up, and it was running and functioning, but I didn’t feel comfortable. I’m like, what, you know, like, I don’t know, what’s happening here, am I making money? Am I losing money? And so, and the cost of that software was pretty expensive at the time. And so I found this agency, you know, I was talking with some other, you know, some other entrepreneurs in the space. And I found this agency, and they’re like, Yeah, you know, this agency, like, you need an agency, they’re, they’re experts, and they can take that off your plate and run with that you just pay them, you know, fix them out. They’re gonna scale your company. And I was like, Okay, let’s give this a shot. So hired this agency. And they did, they came in, they evaluated at the time, I had two companies, they evaluated both companies. And they came in and I would say, within six months, I had doubled sales from just as PPC agency. So I really given them a ton of credit for coming in and like, and seeing opportunity and scaling rapidly, which also put me in bind, because now I’ve got to buy more inventory to ship more and do all that. But that created some other issues. But in terms of you know that and so I stayed with this agency for I think over two years, maybe two and a half years. They were you know, really good. The account manager that I had was awesome. Like, like, this guy was so cool. And I think I just got lucky. I landed like their most talented account manager, right. And so this guy was a Rockstar. And the whole time, I kind of got this sense of like, he’s not spending a ton of time on my account, but he’s doing enough to make it work. And to go, well, there was always these like, things I would say, Hey, can you do this next time? Or can you do this next time, it was about 5050, if he would accomplish it or not. And so I kind of got to say, I’m gonna add, he’s working on all these other accounts. But you know, I’m doing so many other things. I didn’t have time. I’m like, It’s good enough, right, that 8020 rule. And so it got, but it got to a point where it was like, it was happening more and more. And I’m like, You know what, this account manager is getting more and more put on his plate in his time, it’s getting spread thin, he’s making errors, he’s missing things. And so, and the account actually slipped a little bit and I’m like, Whoa, wait a second. Like, I talked to the owner, I’m like, Hey, like, and it fix it for a little bit. But then like, a few months later, it went back. And I’m like, this is definitely a problem. And so I parted ways with that, after probably two, two and a half years. And then I went back to self managing, which was a step backwards, right. And so I can’t, I think I was, I think I went to, at the time, Helium 10, had just launched their like PVC software, and it was essentially free to use, and I’m like, I’m just gonna save some money, throw this all in there and let you know, and then manage it myself. And actually, at that time, I had started building a small team. So I had a couple of people that were working with me. And so I kind of offloaded that onto their plate. And so it was in house with free software. And we did that for about six months. And it did not turn out well. So I don’t know if it was, if that’s on me if the software what but it didn’t go well. It wasn’t going as well. And I think I was very spoiled from when I hired that first agency and the sales like doubled. And like six months out, I was like, Man, I just want to I want to continue to do this. And I don’t think there’s this reality that you face. I think all products and everything have a peak, you know, and I think I peaked there and I got spoiled. So after about six months of kind of in house with helium 10, I think I blamed the software. So then I switched. You know, at the time, all the buzz was, hey, everybody’s kind of switching to this AI software. And so then I switched over to, you know, at the time, David, you and I were going through a loss of we were interviewing lots of we were testing out lots of different software. So I boiled it down and picked. So then we rolled everything onto Perpetua and we ran that for, I think, three to six months. And it was going okay, but I just I didn’t trust the AI there was lots of things that it was doing behind the scenes that that it’s very, like it’s very graphical, and it’s not like nuts and bolts. You can’t dig in real deep and you have to like set special rules. If you want certain things to happen. It’s very hands off. They want the AI engine to do all the heavy lifting and they want you to have very minimal interaction, which I think that software is likely great for or ad agencies to use right for all their account managers, but not what wasn’t for us. And so we scaled up a little bit, and then went back to, at the time, our companies were growing rapidly, right? We’re adding new businesses we’re growing, we’re like, we can’t do this in house, let’s get an agency, let’s take this to the next level, hired another agency and use them for, I think, six months, and then it was the same, it was the same deal, you know, the, the account manager was excellent, came out of the gate doing really well. And then, you know, it just started slipping. And he was missing things, he wasn’t accomplishing things, you know, share with us, Hey, I’ve got, you know, 17, other accounts or 12, other whatever it was a lot. And at this point, it was like, worse, at this point, I think we had three accounts, under management with this agency, and it was like, we’re paying this person, three times the amount to manage these accounts. And so, and we’re getting one time, the tough one, you know, we’re only getting one accounts worth of time. And so that was that was very frustrating. We dealt with that for a while, and then made the decision, hey, well, you know, this was a numbers game of, hey, let’s move forward with this or bring this in house. And so at the time, we decided to bring it in house. And we’ll cover that a little bit later. So that was kind of my, I don’t know, sorry, seven year journey, or six year journey through PPC, all in one all in a five minute span. So I’ll kick it over to you, David, and you can share your kind of your journey.
David 11:25
Absolutely. So in a lot of ways my experiences overlapped with you early on, I think I was saying, you know, before we even went into business together, I was thinking, Who are you using for PPC and I ended up hiring the same manager that you did. And I also use Selex. I think that probably was before we had met in one quick story about this. I have, you may have heard me say on this podcast before that no software will be your Savior. And that has that my first experience with this was Selex. It was kind of toted as set it and forget it. And I did I set up rules, and I didn’t look at my PVC all summer. And I got my books back and I’m like, Oh, my gosh, this has gone crazy. This is not a set it and forget it. Perhaps these rules are helpful in adjusting bids. But like I it was, at that point in time, it was not good. set it and forget it. So that is when I went to agency number one a lot of the same experiences that you covered, you know, with our most recent, or I guess our last agency this is it’s a funny story now, but it wasn’t funny at the time. So we had a what seems to happen a lot of times on PPC is you’ll be at breakeven, it’s the free markets at work, right, the keywords cost a certain amount. And, you know, there’s only so many keywords that are used to describe a product. And you find yourself a lot of times breaking even which, again, I’m in the business of making net income. And so at least that’s what I believe my goal is. So anyway, we had a very firm talk with our manager. And, you know, growing up in my family, whenever somebody had a very serious stern conversation, it was referred to as a come to Jesus talk. I don’t know why we call it that was just what it was called. And so when we had this very firm conversation, I referred to it as our come to Jesus conversation, our account manager was Muslim. And Ken pointed this out to me. And I felt horrible. I didn’t mean to be offensive at all. But that was conversation. Number one, I am unhappy with how account management is going. We need to make a change. As time went on. We weren’t seeing the results that we wanted. And we ended up getting on a conference call with our manager and the owner of this agency. And, you know, for probably a half hour we stated our issues and in some of the things that we weren’t happy with, thinking that these things would be addressed. 20 minutes after that meeting, we get an email saying, We no longer want you as a customer, you’re essentially fired as a customer, we’ve all heard the 8020 principle. And what goes along with that is 20% of your customers are going to take up 80% of your time. And in this instance, we were one of those customers that was a pain to deal with. And so I have no gripes with this particular agency. They made a business decision, and that was to get rid of us as clients. And so, you know, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And we decided to do something different go away from the agency route, which we’re going to get into in a little bit. So So anyway, that was my abbreviated journey through PPC. 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 the backend 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 ft m 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. Let’s talk about just a quick discussion on self management. Because you may be hearing this and say, Well, why would I ever self manage? Why won’t I just skip to the front of the line and go with an agency? And So Ken, what are your thoughts here?
- Ryan, Robert J. (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 137 Pages - 11/02/2019 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)
Ken 15:52
Yeah, so I think it’s this, this is kind of a business case on and it’s specific tip to every business. And so And like we talked about earlier, if you are good with PPC, if you have a background, and like maybe Excel sheets, or you know, media buying or whatever, and you’re good at this, then you might choose a different decision, then someone else who, you know, say they’re coming in from a different career field that they have no idea what this is, you really have to take this with your experience, and then figure out what’s kind of the best for you. And also it doesn’t hurt to try, you know, that’s the other thing too is like, you can’t be afraid to try something new, give it six months. And then if it doesn’t work, pivot back over and try something else. And so don’t ever feel like you’re locked in. Most agencies don’t have a long term contract, you can test them and then stop and then go in house. But I would say like, if you’re specifically on the self management piece, if you’re going to choose to take an in house with self management, then you really have to have a good understanding of PPC and a foundation, whether it’s take a course whether it’s experience, learn on your own, but you need to know like some of the terms a COAs tacos row as you need to know these you need to know, kind of mid level PVC, like what kind of ad types are out there. Where’s the placements? What’s cheap right now? what’s working, what’s not, you just have to. So you need to take more time and have more experience. And the other piece is also it depends what kind of business you have. You know, David, some of our businesses have, you know, 10 skews, some of them have 500. And so that also plays factors into whether you’re going to offload something, or do it in house, you know, if it’s, and also an agency, there’s agencies that charge more for more skews and things like that. And so it’s there’s a lot going on there. But I would also I would just say sit down, do pros and cons and list out everything for your business. And then you know, figure out if that’s enough to pro or con, you want to keep it in house, do you want to do you want to, you know, farm it out? So what are your thoughts, David?
David 17:56
So here’s my plug for self managing, at least early on. And I’m gonna use a baseball analogy. If someone were to say, I want to go to the major leagues, what do I need to do, my response would be, you need to know how to throw, you need to know how to catch, you need to know how to hit like, those are the core functions of baseball player, you need to know how to do those. I would say in this business, if you are viewing it more than a side hustle like this is something you want to be a professional at, you want to fire the man and be a professional at this. In this business, I would say to go along with this analogy. You need to know PPC, you need to know product development. And you need to know teambuilding those would be my three, four, catch, hit and throw. And so I think while my performance early on was not great, I learned a lot you kind of learn through the school of hard knocks. And when we made that transition to an agency, I knew what types of questions to ask. I knew what a coach should be. I knew what tacos should be. And I just didn’t quite know how to get there. And so there’s some fundamental concepts that you can listen to podcasts about but you really it doesn’t. At least for me, it didn’t really sink in until I messed it up for a couple of months. And I was like, Oh no, I Oh, way overspent here i overbid here for this campaign shut off. Just going through that I think is part of like developing into a professional e commerce entrepreneur. So yeah, I would also want one last thing I want to add on to this is that self management plus a software may be a great option. And I would say that is kind of the intermediate step in between self like purely self managing and going to an agent. Yeah, for
Ken 19:44
sure. Yeah, one other one other thing there too is to add on to the self management pieces. I think you’d mentioned it earlier. As you’re growing and scaling. PPC can turn into a full time if especially if you have a like a native Amazon FBA business, it can kind of get overwhelming and turn into a full time job. And so that is also something to like, consider as you’re, you know, especially if you’re, you know, if you deep dive into something if you don’t understand something like me, and David, if we don’t understand something, we’re gonna like, spend our time and learn it. And so it can distract you from other parts of your business, as well. Cool. So, David, moving on, let’s talk a little bit about agencies, pros, cons, what to think about
David 20:24
there? Absolutely. So if you go from self managing, to turning it over to an agency, that first week is awesome. At least that was my experience, you know, I was probably spending 10 to 15 hours a week, only on PPC. And when that was taken off my plate, it felt great. And so I would say, initially, I was very happy with it. And, you know, it wasn’t until later in our experiences with agencies that we thought to ask, how many accounts is each manager overseeing? And this is simple math, right? If they’re managing between 10 and 20, accounts, you know, they’re only going to be able to spend two to four hours on your account every week. And for some accounts, that may be plenty, that may be plenty of time. Also, they may be able to do in two hours, what took you 10 hours, you know, your you should be hiring a professional, so hopefully, they’re going to do a better job than you. And so, you know, early on, that didn’t bother me, where it started to bother me it is when we would say the out of stock on something and say, Hey, we want to turn these campaigns off, or, Hey, we’re approaching busy season, we want to make these modifications for the next couple of weeks, I think they were great at getting the infrastructure set up. But in terms of like the daily or weekly tasks, they just didn’t have time for it. And that is really not a criticism of our manager. It’s a criticism of that business model is that if you have 20 accounts, you only have some, there’s only so much time in the day. And so anyway, and then I would say one thing that, and this has been a gripe from one of my gripes with agencies from from the get go is misaligned interests on how they charge you. So just to give a range, I have for an agency, I’ve paid as little as $600 per month, and if paid as much as 1500. And on top of that, there’s always a percentage of ad spend, it may be 5% ad spend, or 10% of ad spend. But it essentially incentivizes like, your account becomes more profitable to that agency, the more you spend, now, me as a business owner, I’m not always interested in spending more. In fact, a lot of times, I’m interested in spending less on the PPC side of things, and putting those dollars to work elsewhere. And so that was something that, you know, when we were interviewing agencies, I would often say, is there any way you would do a percentage of net income, or tacos, or some other metric that deals with profitability and not ad spend? Because not only are we misaligned, we’re pointing in opposite directions in a lot of instances. And so I had this dream of our PPC Manager compensated based on some sort of profitability metric. And we weren’t able to get to that with an agency. But we did move in house. And Ken, I’m gonna kick it over to you to talk about this big pivot that we’ve made in the last year in how that’s impacted our business.
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Brooke, E. (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
Ken 23:40
Yeah, absolutely. So before we pivot into the in house piece, I want to speak on the agency side a little bit, which if you’re in this space, for a long enough time, you’ll kind of notice a trend. And it’s so you know, I’m talking to space, Amazon FBA. And so what I’ve noticed was, and this was through when we before we made this last pivot, actually, before we heard the, I think, second or third, I literally interviewed 25 agencies, I spent, I think it was better part of a month, interviewing all of these agencies. And I and David and I had a series of like, seven questions I asked every single agency, I’m talking, I interviewed the largest agencies to two of the three largest agencies, for Amazon FBA, PPC, all the way down to a kid that had two clients. And so and everybody in between, and we compiled this massive list of data. And so, you know, what I’m gonna share with you is it’s all from interviews and factual data. And so what I what we found out was and at the high level, I was trying to think of like, get in someone else’s mind. And so we know David and I know several owners of these agencies now and so what you see as a trend, someone sells on Amazon, and then they find out that Oh shit, you know, this is really hard, and then they’re like, and Masterminds or other entrepreneurs circle wasn’t and they’re seeing other people that are other entrepreneurs that are maturing through their journey. And they’re starting service based businesses to serve clients in the Amazon FBA space. And so this is kind of this trend you’ll see. And if you take a step back and think about it, you’re like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. You know, you make a name for yourself, you have YouTube channel, you know, you do whatever you do these promotions, have a podcast, whatever. And then you start, you start this agency, and then an agency at the end of the day is a business. It’s a sellable asset, right. And so in the way to scale an agency is to get more clients. And so that, so if you think of it in that case, like this agency owner, is interested in, in scaling their business with clients, so they have a sellable asset at the end of the day. And whether it’s easier than selling on FBA, I don’t know I’ve never owned and scaled an agency, I don’t know. Maybe it is because there’s a lot of people doing it, maybe it’s not. But if you think of it in that mindset of hey, there’s, that’s their number one goal is to get as many clients as possible, because that makes their company worth more money, right. And so that’s kind of how I looked at this, after we interviewed all of these businesses on it was, the picture was painted very clear to me like, oh, wow, this is kind of how this is kind of how this works. And so a lot of the stuff that David mentioned, you know, the pricing and ad spend, it really was clear to us after we’ve dug in real deep that this is a scaling model of PPC agencies, and it didn’t align with our business. And so that was the number one point where we were like, no matter what agency we interviewed, they wanted a flat fee and a percentage of adspend. And that was pretty common across all the companies. And it was a significant fee, especially if you own multiple companies, at the end of the day in we cannot get any of them to align their services with our profit. And we thought like that’s a red flag, like Who wouldn’t like, then that means you’re not our partner, if you’re, if your only interest is collecting a fee every month and a percentage of our ad spend, you’re not concert, you’re not concerned about our company. And so they’re using other metrics to keep you on a client, that which what I would call, barely satisfying. So they tell her account manager like, Hey, make sure you’re barely satisfying. So they come back every month. That’s a joke, by the way. And so that’s kind of my, my, my take on PVC agencies. And so and that’s really where David and I decided to pivot of like, okay, in order for us to scale properly, we need a good value for our money. And we also need a good impact to our business from the time spent on the PPC. And so and at that point, our businesses were fairly matured and to where there’s two or three levers to pull on PPC, there’s not much more and Pete and those levers, we’ve realized after, you know, operating these businesses for years that once you get to that point, this couple levers to pull, and there’s not many more, it’s the 8020 rule, you can spend your lifetime in PVC, and trying to do little things, but you’re gonna make most of the impact with 20%. And so anyway, that was a long story. So pivoting into, we decided, hey, after all this research, and all this experience, we’re gonna move to in house PVC. And so we started our search. And we knew kind of what we wanted. We wanted someone in house full time, and to manage all of our accounts. And we wanted that person to be to have three to five years experience whether preferably with an agency or somewhere else coming directly to us being able to add immediate value, and run with everything that was kind of already going. And so we interviewed, I don’t know, probably 10 People whittled it down, we wound up finding a rock star. And so this person came in, and we kind of aligned their interests with the performance of PVC, which we wanted to do with an agency which we could never find an agency to do that with. And so without getting into the nitty gritty, we that was kind of that’s kind of how we operate now is aligning this person’s interest with our with the performance of the company. David, you want to add anything on that?
David 28:59
Yeah, without going way deep on this compensation model, I want to explain it just a little bit. So what we have, so this is a full time employee, and they are paid a base hourly rate. So regardless of performance, they have a base rate. And for each brand in each marketplace, we have a taco score. And that is the one metric that we are looking at, and we have a separate taco score for each brand. And each marketplace. If they hit that there’s an opportunity to increase their hourly rate. So we’re doing this one month in arrears, but there’s an opportunity to increase their pay by a factor of about 40 to 50%. So I mean in in if we’re hitting those tacos, numbers, I it’s profitable to the company and so after asking all 25 of those agencies, hey, can we change the your structure of billing and getting told no, this was we were going to put this into play As we brought it in house, and I would say, so far, so good. I think anytime you can align interests, that’s a good thing. And, you know, obviously, if our PPC Manager is doing an awesome job and hitting those monthly targets, we want to reward that. And the opposite is true. If they’re not, we, you know, we don’t want to be paying a flat fee for subpar work. So that’s a little bit of how we have that setup. Now, you know, another thing. Another advantage of this is, we have a listing optimization team. And we have PPC, and up until very recently, these operated separately, it shouldn’t be that way. Because they’re both dealing with keywords. And so what we’ve done by bringing this resource in house, is we have them sync up with the listing optimization team. And when we’re updating listings, or modifying titles or doing split testing, we’re looking at what keywords are performing really well on the PPC side of things. And we’re folding that into our decisions on the listing optimization side of things. And that was something that didn’t exist before we did that. So. So anyway, can anything else you want to comment on as we talk about moving this in house?
Ken 31:12
Yeah, absolutely. A couple more things that come to mind. One, don’t ever be afraid to pivot in your business. I think pivoting you know, you learn a lot whether it could be a good pivot, it could be a bad pivot, but making changes and always being open to ideas and pivoting is I think it’s a crucial piece of business. And so don’t be afraid to do that. It’s a tough decision. But list out pros and cons go with your gut and stand behind that. And the other piece is I think what we did really well in the last agency that we use, super talented agencies have great account managers, and they’re very they worked with us. So when we exited, we had a, we worked with our PPC Manager, David and I and our PPC Manager, we came up with a really solid like implementation plan. Because PPC is kind of if you’ve got a native Amazon FBA business, PPC is kind of at the core of your business. And so you don’t want any drastic change anybody that that knows a lot about PVC, you don’t want drastic changes, you want very gradual, small changes. And so we had a solid implementation plan that covered like a 90 day window. And so and we work methodically to do that, and so I was gonna say if you’re if you plan on doing, you know, if you’re with an agency now and you want to go in house, or if you’re in house, want to go with an agency, I would just say, you know, make sure you have what some kind of an implementation plan. So there’s no like just swings, it’ll, you’ll you’ll be rewarded on the other side of this that if you spend some time planning.
David 32:35
Absolutely. Well, this sums up canonize experiences with PPC over the last five or six years, and we certainly have made a lot of pivots. And hopefully, as we share our story about the moves that we made, you are able to take some of this information and make a decision that is best for your business. If you have any questions about this episode, or want to discuss this more, go to firingtheman.com and hit the microphone. And we’d love to hear from the audience. Thanks, everyone for tuning in. And we’ll see you now. Thank you everyone for tuning in to 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 demand discounts on popular e commerce 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 firingtheman 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.