Bill is a young charismatic business owner that has successfully lead multiple companies and teams to victory. He started selling products at 12 years old and has spent the last 20 years obsessed with learning and mastering business. He now owns multiple businesses and does consulting to share his wisdom, knowledge, and resources with other small businesses.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn…. 

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Bill Teter, a successful entrepreneur and consultant. Bill shares his journey with Redirect, a brand known for its magnetic eyeglass holder that gained traction after appearing on Shark Tank. Initially, Redirect had no revenue from Amazon, but it eventually shifted to where Amazon accounted for 95% of their sales. Bill provides insights into navigating the Amazon marketplace, the importance of effective marketing strategies, and critical decision-making processes. He emphasizes innovation, choosing the right partners, and exploring new market segments to scale a business successfully.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

1. Understand and Monitor Your Business Metrics: 

   - Conduct a Financial Audit: Regularly review financial statements to ensure you have a clear understanding of your business’s financial health.

   - Set Clear KPIs: Establish and track key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and return on ad spend (ROAS) to align with your business goals.

   - Use Analytics Tools: Leverage platforms like Google Analytics and Amazon Seller Central to monitor and analyze your business performance effectively.

2. Adapt to Market Changes by Diversifying:

   - Market Research: Continuously conduct market research to stay updated on trends and competitor strategies.

   - Product Diversification**: Explore and introduce new, unique products to your lineup to mitigate risks and enhance your market position.

   - Cost Management: Implement strategies to optimize your supply chain and reduce costs to counteract margin compression and improve profitability.

3. Explore Omnichannel Strategies Beyond Amazon:

   - Wholesale Partnerships: Identify and build relationships with wholesale partners to expand your distribution network and improve margins.

   - Diversify Sales Channels: Explore additional marketplaces such as Shopify, Walmart, and TikTok Shop to reach a broader audience.

   - Integrated Marketing: Develop marketing campaigns that leverage multiple channels to boost brand awareness and drive sales across different platforms.

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures. 

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I'm your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Guests include Kevin King, Aaron Cordova's Michael E Gerber, author of the E-myth. And today I am speaking with Bill Teeter of Guided Operations, LLC. And we're going to be talking about the common issues that business owners face as they scale their organization, how to successfully exit an Amazon based brand, and all the insights and predictions to grow and to scale on Amazon in the next five years. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure companies to eight figures and beyond. If you're an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a partner who can help take your business to the next level, my team and I bring that hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for an investment partner, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough dot com.

Josh Hadley 00:00:45  That's e-comm with two M's and let's turn your dreams into reality. But today I am super excited to introduce you all to Bill Teeter. Bill is a young, charismatic business owner that has successfully led multiple companies and teams to victory. He started selling products at 12 years old and has spent the last 20 years Obsessed with learning and mastering business, he now owns multiple businesses and does consulting to share his wisdom, knowledge and resources with other small business owners. And I know he didn't put this into his bio, but he had a very successful exit back in 2021 with his Amazon FBA brand. He's still in the game, has an Amazon seller account right now. So Bill, super excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

Bill Teter 00:01:20  Great. Thanks, Josh. Happy to be here.

Josh Hadley 00:01:22  So, Bill, I think the most intriguing aspect here is the brand that you guys were able to build, scale and exit. And, you know, it started primarily, I guess. Well, it was a Shark Tank brand, but you started with $0 in revenue on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:01:37  And you know, as the brand grew, it then shifted to 95% of the revenue. I think that's a fascinating statistic. So I'm interested. Why don't you give us the background, tell us about the brand that you exited and give us all the details.

Bill Teter 00:01:48  So the brand is called redirect. It was it is a magnetic eyeglass holder. So it's a clip that hangs on your shirt and attaches by magnet. And you put your reading glasses in there. So when you lean over they don't fall out. And any avid Shark Tank fan can either. Either remembers Rick Hopper from season three very early on, where he came in and intentionally tripped and did a somersault, and the sharks actually were like, thought he fell, walking into the tank. but he obviously it was a stunt to get their attention. And it was very kind of brilliant marketing. And the point was to show that the product stays in the holder. So instead of putting it in your shirt here where they fall out or on your head.

Bill Teter 00:02:19  so it was a genius idea. Simple product. And sometimes those are the best. And so in 2012, it aired on Shark Tank. And at that time Amazon was, a growing business, but it didn't have the reputation it does now. back then, it was kind of the Wild West. And so, you know, people were like, oh, can I get it on Amazon? We're like, sure, we'll list our products on Amazon, but we didn't really take it too seriously. even in 2012, which was, you know, pretty, pretty well into the Amazon, success. And then as they perfected it over the decade and continued to offer, you know, better, a better customer, their audience grew their customer base. And so we couldn't ignore it. We had to say, okay this Amazon thing is really taken off and we got to give it attention. So when we started doing the products, it was a traditional business where we had distributors and wholesalers, large accounts, your chain stores.

Bill Teter 00:03:08  After the airing on Shark Tank, we got calls from the Ace Hardware's of the world and all the hardware chains. Bed Bath and Beyond, Walmart. So all your big box stores and navigating those is probably a whole separate podcast as far as the contracts and, you know, navigating large contracts and purchase orders and everything. and so back then, that was the core business, and at the time, we had 0% of our sales on Amazon. And then year over year, the percentage grew. And so it just became more undeniable about just how serious we had to take Amazon. we actually went through multiple marketing companies and agencies that, you know, there's, finding a marketing agency or finding a partner agency is probably one of the most important things you could do. they're not one size fits all. So, you know, they may be great for some and not for others. So there's probably some more we could talk about that. But as we grew and navigated Amazon, we you know, our sales grew and it balanced out the customer concentration.

Bill Teter 00:03:58  And Rick, the founder and owner of redress and myself, had ongoing discussions. One of the things that I always made the argument for was that even though, yes, Amazon has a line item is one customer, it's millions of customers. And so even some of the M&A guys that we talked to, they said, you got to diversify your customer base. You can't have 90% of our revenue on Amazon. And I said, you know, it's millions of customers. It's not it's not one person. And they said, yeah, but you can get your account shut down. I said, yes, and there's ways to remedy that. You know, if you make an error when you're selling products, they usually give you a notice, you know, warning, corrective action. And you can, you know, continue, you know, selling your business without a major threat. And even if in the worst case, you got your account shut down, you could pivot and create a new account and, you know, reactivate.

Bill Teter 00:04:38  And there's a way to succeed to where it's not really one person sitting there. And I actually made the argument that even a Walmart buyer has so much power because if they decide it doesn't fit their metrics, they're actually making a decision. Whereas Amazon's almost more autonomous. There's not someone sitting there saying, do we like this brand? Do we like the profitability? They have already baked in their margin with their logistics fees and FBA fees and their PPC costs to where they want as many SKUs, as many as in as many sales as possible. So as time went on, it became the number one place for us. It it was sometimes a little scary because we're like, well, Amazon daily metrics going in and look in the daily dashboard of sales reports is how we determined our business, which was good because we got real time feedback from customers based on reviews based on the the experience rating. And it gave us a lot of insights to be able to pivot real time versus, you know, selling into a chain store where it takes, you know, potentially months if not years to complete the the cycle.

Bill Teter 00:05:24  You don't get real time data the same way you do with Amazon. So for all those things, we always kept kind of going back and forth, is this the right decision for the business? Should we continue focusing on Amazon and you know, by the end and by the exit? It obviously made sense. But to go a little bit further into that, we made a big decision in 2020 when everybody was working from home and everybody was, you know, buying stuff on Amazon more than ever because it was a big shift in the market. And that actually drove a lot of buyers, the middle market guys, the aggregators to come buy up brands because there was so much strength. And during 2020, no one really knew exactly what retail looked like. I mean, we had business with Walmart and beyond for nine years where purchase orders were coming in every week, and in March it went radio silent. And that was the scariest thing for me because they said, hey, we're a non-essential item. So everybody remembers what was an essential item and what wasn't.

Bill Teter 00:06:08  Well, something to hold your glasses. We say it's essential because it's, you know, jobs and our business. And we felt essential going to work every day. But, you know, Walmart just said, hey, we'll let you know. So for those few months that they had us on pause, it was very scary. Eventually it came back and, you know, things stabilized. So it's a it's a it's a good, you know, good story and ultimate success even with retailers. But what we did was in July of 2020, we actually had a year before brought in blue light blocking, reading glasses. And so we had our patent and trademark product that was, you know, the key component of the business. It gave us, with the patent and trademark. It gave us the ability to defend against knockoffs. and I'll go back to that story in a second. And it was a, you know, we had a we had it was the Blue ocean strategy. We own the market completely.

Bill Teter 00:06:47  So we got to dictate the price. We didn't have competitors in advertising. And so we were able to say very profitable on that product. When we entered the white blocking glasses, there was no patent or trademarks except for our brand. So we had brand registry and that gives you some sort of, you know, either protections, you know, or, you know, protections for success. But when you're doing something like blue light blocking glasses and sort of a commodity where there's a dozen other people in the space, it's very much price driven. You know, Amazon is not much different than Walmart. They're the low cost leader. Amazon's very focused on, you know, the conversion rate search term conversion rate and price. You know are you review strong and are you the lowest price whether you're competing for an Asin with, you know, with other people on the same Mason or even if you own the assets under your brand registry, you still they want to know are you the best price. And so when we in July of 2020, I went to Rick and said, we really need to focus everything on Amazon right now because we don't know what the rest of the retail shops look like.

Bill Teter 00:07:35  The independent stores were, you know, either closed down by, you know, by regulation or we were on pause with some of our purchase orders. And I said, for whatever reason, this blue light blocking glasses, it's a hot item. We honestly got lucky to be in such a hot item because we didn't predict it in 2019, 2018 when we were, you know, developing our product line. We just honestly thought we should just add reading glasses as an obvious addition to the product line to sell into retail. And so come July 2020. It was if we just do this for the next six months, let's really get focused, prioritize this, you know, and make, hey, well, the sun shining. I mean, just take advantage of this opportunity because we don't know what tomorrow looks like. Next week looks like we'll stabilize. We'll get back on track eventually. But while we don't know what's going on and everybody remembers that, no one really knew what was going on in, you know, March to, you know, kind of September of 2020.

Bill Teter 00:08:16  And every business owner can, you know, if you're in business back then, you remember it. You know, there's it's starting to become a distant memory for some. But during that time, it was just one day at a time waiting to hear the news, what was going on, what was changing. And so we just said, look, let's give our employees some confidence. Let's stay focused, let's focus on Amazon, and let's really focus on growing the the glasses. And at that point, it was a it was the best decision we made because our core business stayed strong and grew. And then we introduced the kind of more red ocean strategy where it's very price driven, very competitive. And between the two, that's what led to our ultimate success. And so the back half of 2020, from July to December, our company, you know, the first part, the first half of the year was, you know, sales down purchase orders on hold. The back half was just ordered product order containers.

Bill Teter 00:08:56  And then there was the supply chain issues where, you know, we have a container sitting in the port of LA and I'm like, I've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of units sitting there. I've got to get this stuff out of the port. And we were backlogged like everybody else. And that whole essential items, you know, if it's toilet paper coming in, that was an essential item coming into the port glasses. They're like, well, your boats out there, you know, we'll let you know in six weeks. So it was a pretty chaotic time. But we just said, hey, let's do our best. Everybody understands what's going on. So we kind of just took the, you know, common sense approach to say, everybody is aware of this. We're not an anomaly, anomaly of what's going on in the market. And so we navigated it. We did our best. We continue to just, you know, be smart. At that time, the lead times were very long.

Bill Teter 00:09:30  From the time we placed a purchase order overseas, it took almost about six months from the time we actually guessed what our sales are going to be in six months to the time they manufactured, exported it, shipped it across the ocean to a truck. I mean, it was a lengthy process. So we we never had to take aim like that where we were guessing six months out what the growth would look like. So we actually, took on some, debt from Amazon and some other lenders through their portal and said, let's let's do our best. Let's let's take some risk here and let's grow our business. And because of the success we just said, this is what we got to do. So that kind of gets us to the point where we were at our peak success. Things stabilized and then we got into the exit.

Josh Hadley 00:10:03  I love that bill. There's so much to unpack here. so I'm interested to hear let's go back to, I think, the most recent one. So you launch these blue light blocking glasses.

Josh Hadley 00:10:13  This was a red ocean. How did. And it sounds like that product really helped propel your success even further. Why was that? What was your differentiation like? Were you just playing the price game like everybody else, or how were you competing with the cheap, cheap guys from overseas?

Bill Teter 00:10:26  Yeah. So we found our our lane. There are the cheapest cheap readers that you can get for a few dollars, which I we never have made sense of that how people were making, you know, a 599 pair of glasses on Amazon with FBA fees and advertising. I was like, we can't compete with them. And then there's the more premium products that, you know, in the world of eyewear, it gets very expensive very quickly. So when you're selling a premium product, you're 60 to $80 minimum, up to hundreds of dollars. So what we did is we said, okay, what if we source a really high quality product with UV protection, blue light blocking, and, you know, try to make a premium product, but bring it into kind of that market.

Bill Teter 00:10:53  That was right about $16 roughly in retail to where if we could make sense of the numbers, we weren't, you know, competing for bottom dollar price. We were a very quality product. But we said if we can find this lane, then we narrow down our competitors to really only 2 or 3 versus, you know, let's say the dozen others. so that's how we found our spot, which is really important when you're trying to figure out your price, you know, and what product you're offering. You got to have a value proposition, you know, because when someone's, you know, paying, using their hard earned money to buy your stuff, they're going to consider, am I buying the cheapest stuff because it's available and reviews do matter, or am I buying a quality product? And so when we figured out the formula for can we bring quality product at an affordable price, that's how we ultimately want.

Josh Hadley 00:11:29  Nice I love that. So it was just kind of like the right timing. You got ranked really well I would assume.

Josh Hadley 00:11:34  Was it part of like the brand name association that you think helped?

Bill Teter 00:11:37  That definitely helped. being a brand and focusing on having the brand recognition, of course, the success of Shark Tank and being in the market definitely helped. There's no doubt about that. There's no way to ever truly quantify it. So we had that going for us with the momentum And then we also had a great team of people that focused on the search terms and how to rank for the strategy was actually a bit different in terms of search terms. If you go compete for something like reading glasses, it's going to be very expensive because you're competing with, you know, all the biggest budgets. But if you were to say, you know, blue light blocking glasses for men 1.5 power, it's so specific that if you can win that you are going to rank higher for these secondary and tertiary search terms, these keywords. And if you can win there and rank for those, you'll actually get an aggregate success, because then you're going to rank for other stuff.

Bill Teter 00:12:19  And Amazon will actually see your high conversions and the, you know, highly rated product and people responding to it. So then you actually become more favored when you go to work on those bigger terms. So, if you know any listeners, as far as strategy, keywords and how you find yourself in the market, you know, if you're in a place like reading glasses, you know, don't compete for the word reading glasses because it's going to be a very painful road up to try and scale. But if you can find little avenues where you can pick up kind of the crumbs and let the big guys play after the big keywords, you can build an amazing seven figure, if not more. Even eight figure business using all those specialty keywords, and the aggregate of those specialty keywords is actually going to drive your success. So for the small business guys, that's probably one of the key nuggets of you know how to win in the advertising space.

Josh Hadley 00:12:58  Fantastic. Now did you guys bring in like your own Amazon team.

Josh Hadley 00:13:02  Did you hire an internal team. Or was this working through an agency the whole time?

Bill Teter 00:13:06  It was an agency. one of the founder and CEO of the agency actually worked with us in-house for a while and then started the Amazon agency. And so they built a business and have over 50 brands they work with. So as they grew their business, they had more insights across the market. We're able to kind of compare if we had down days or up days, they could see across the board. Is this market just naturally the, you know, consumer flow is based off of certain months, or did we have an anomaly that we need to address. So by working with an agency that really specialized in Amazon, you know, brands and success, we didn't have to be the Amazon experts. We just said, you know, let's let's meet as often as we can to talk about real time feedback. And so that was another key component to our success.

Josh Hadley 00:13:41  Yeah. Makes makes a lot of sense. So Bill, tell me I'm interested to hear how the story shifted from 0% of your revenue coming from Amazon, and obviously it was all started from wholesale.

Josh Hadley 00:13:52  Right. And you were going into traditional brick and mortar retail stores. That was the story for, you know, for a long period of time. At what point did you see things start shifting more towards Amazon? And I'm curious to know, like, did you like Deprioritized the wholesale aspect of your business to where it only became 5% of your sales, or were the Amazon sales just so massive that retail kind of stayed the same year over year? But then Amazon was just a massive influx, like 95% more.

Bill Teter 00:14:20  So yeah, it was a it was a combination of both. And I will say the combination one was proactive and one was reactive. So proactively we were saying, okay, how much does it cost to grow the business. And in any market, whether it's, you know, an Amazon business or, you know, your own direct consumer website or brick and mortar, you have to be intentional. You know, unless you come up with, you know, the next greatest product and everybody wants it.

Bill Teter 00:14:38  If you're creating demand and if you're creating a market, you have to be intentional. So our, you know, proactive approach was we're going to trade shows, we're meeting buyers. We're following up. You know brick and mortar takes time. It takes you know, you can go to a trade show and write an order, or it takes six months to get into, you know, a large retailer. One of the largest was Walgreens. It actually took two years to actually get the deal done. And so those long sale cycles, we were, you know, still working on that, but the growth on Amazon was undeniable. So we were kind of reactive for a lot of years just saying, okay, let's do it, let's add it. Let's just keep doing this. It makes sense. And it was in the reactive model, we didn't really spend a ton of time and energy to, to perfect it. It wasn't until a later point where it became so undeniable that we had to turn it into, okay, let's go reactive on the brick and mortar side.

Bill Teter 00:15:17  You know, we still want to trade shows, but it was not our core business. And, you know, we didn't spend all the time and money doing it. We said, let's spend all our time and money trying to master the Amazon market because we're getting instant feedback.

Josh Hadley 00:15:27  Interesting what walk me through kind of maybe what that timeline looked like. When did you start doubling down on Amazon versus, you know, you know, when your focus was completely wholesale?

Bill Teter 00:15:36  I think the, the biggest shift was in 2020, and it was because with everyone working from home or staying at home, there was so much sales growth on Amazon, no matter what business you were in, that it was undeniable. And at that time, when you're getting undeniable feedback and results, you put your attention towards the things that are working and things that were on pause, like the, you know, the brick and mortar. We just said, hey, when it works, it works. And we'll keep, you know, we'll keep at it.

Bill Teter 00:15:57  We know it's a long sales cycle, so let's just not put a ton of time and money towards that. And so yeah, I, I would say that that was that that year, 2019 was was a big growth year on Amazon. But it was nothing like 2020. And how we shifted our mindset. And so in 2020 that was the catalyst in the in people working from home and buying from home, buying online that we just said it's time to give this our full attention. Let's go all in on this.

Josh Hadley 00:16:17  Interesting. So you never necessarily like stop doing wholesale, right. Wholesale continued to be a part of your business, you know, and a lot of the accounts, I assume that you signed up back in 2012, 2013, you know, you continue to manage those accounts all the way up until exit. But Amazon was that big of growth to where it took 95% of your revenue. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Teter 00:16:36  So it's it when it took when it started to go, I guess it probably when it was close to 50 or 60%.

Bill Teter 00:16:42  That's another when we were looking at the metrics and the financials, it was like, this is undeniable when you have one customer. You know, in traditional, they say like 8%. I've heard different stats for what one customer should represent in terms of your overall revenue. So when Amazon was like 30%, they were like, hey, this is high customer concentration. And then it was 50, 60%. And I'm like, yeah, but it's it's millions of customers. They're all buying every day directly to us. And so as it got to 50, 60, 70%, it was just we had to give it the attention that it deserved.

Josh Hadley 00:17:07  See, and I love that you briefly mentioned this when you were telling the story. But, you know, as you guys were looking to exit and you're talking to M&A advisors, you know, I think that the fear is always like, oh, your Amazon account could be suspended, right? All your eggs don't put all your eggs in one basket. And I love the kind of the frame of mindset that you use there where it's like, well, Walmart, all your eggs are in the same basket, but you have one guy or gal that's in charge of keeping you on the shelf or kicking you out of the store.

Josh Hadley 00:17:31  Right? And it's what if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed? Whereas truly, like Amazon has its own issues, right? There are people that get caught up and suspended falsely. But, you know, it seems like if you if you're doing things correctly and honestly, there's a way to get your account back, more often than not, you know, it's the people that have been doing, you know, things they know they shouldn't have been doing. They get suspended, they can't get it back. And it's like, well, that's no surprise. Tell me your mindset on that. And especially as you were talking to, you know, M&A advisors, as you guys were looking to go out into the market, I know that, you know, theoretically private equity doesn't like high you know, high customer concentration. So how did you approach that?

Bill Teter 00:18:05  Yeah. So sitting down with the the key advisor to Rick and myself, he made the argument very traditional, been around for many decades and over $1 billion in deals and in the traditional sense.

Bill Teter 00:18:15  And he made this argument. I remember exactly where I was at lunch when I sat across the table from him and Rick and said, you know, yes, I understand the traditional model. However, the people we are talking to, and this is one of the key things that I even deal with today in my business, and I advise anyone else know who you're going to sell to if you're going to grow your business and do it as a lifestyle for the next 20 years, and you just want to run a great business, make an income, run your business, have fun and, you know, keep it. But if you're intending to grow rapidly or very successfully and you want to exit the business, know who your buyer is. And I have this conversation with my team now on some of the other stuff I'm doing where depending on the size of the business and the reason why someone would buy you that, you have to answer. And it's honestly, don't be afraid of it because talk to people that might buy you in a year or two from now and say, what are you guys looking for strategically when you buy a business? And do you have any concerns with high concentration on Amazon? Because at that time, I was actually following a marketplace pulse site that was talking about aggregators that were middle market guys, and they were specifically intentionally buying Amazon businesses.

Bill Teter 00:19:10  So my argument was if they're buying Amazon businesses, they may not even continue selling to Walmart's Walgreens Bed Bath and Beyond. They may go 100%. And that's actually kind of what they've gone to after buying. The rest is almost exclusively Amazon. But what they were doing their thesis as an aggregator, what they would do is they're middle market guys and they would go to the big guys, the big private equity groups and raise 3500 million, go buy up a couple brands through their success, and then they keep growing. And there's a lot on this. If you just Google these aggregators, the Amazon aggregators, the ones that ended up that we did a deal with, bought over 100 brands within a year or two. And so, you know, when you think about your brand representing like 1% of their sales, they actually strategically could say, yeah, it's all on Amazon for that one brand, but all of us represents 1% of our sales. So they actually had a very strategic plan for us to in some ways, you know, decentralize their customer concentration just by doing the aggregator model.

Bill Teter 00:19:57  And so when the conversation with them was we are primarily on Amazon, they said, great, you fit our investment thesis. You are a business that we would like to buy because we want as many brands that either have, you know, their patents and trademarks, their niches, you know, their brand reputation. They actually wanted limited number of SKUs. That's mostly just an operational thing. The less number of SKUs with high success means you can be very efficient. We had hundreds and hundreds of SKUs of reading glasses, and so that deterred some people. So that's probably just one other piece that I would mention be cautious about. Your skew count is a total it's not completely off the table, but some buyers said your skew counts too large for us. And some said it doesn't matter. You know, we we can we can navigate hundreds of SKUs. We can navigate thousands of SKUs. So as I talked to over 30 different buyers in this space, there were all Amazon aggregators. I got to basically go through and ask questions the whole way and cater our conversation and our exit towards what are these guys buying? So in that time, I was able to figure out if these guys are buying Amazon focused brands with high concentration on Amazon.

Bill Teter 00:20:50  This is how we exit versus if we were trying. So, you know, if we fought against ourselves and went and focus on brick and mortar and drove that number down on Amazon, it might have actually killed the deal. So, you know, at the time it made sense. And that's what I would say is know your buyer if you plan on selling your company and just have a conversation with them, because they're just people like you and I that have conversations like this, and they might actually help you make decisions in your business that is going to lead to the ultimate exit and success of the business versus, you know, us trying to figure it out for what makes sense for us. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:21:13  I love that. And I think that does make a big difference, like knowing who you're going to exit to. And obviously somebody that's already on Amazon that knows the Amazon game once Amazon right. Then you don't have to have that conversation like, oh you know too much risk. Give me your mindset that you have though in terms of, you know, you currently have an Amazon brand, you have other you consult with other people that have brands on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:21:32  What's kind of your how do you tell them to approach their Amazon business like in terms of being worried about being suspended by Amazon or not? Because I think you have a unique mindset there.

Bill Teter 00:21:41  Yeah, I have,

Bill Teter 00:21:43  Just being another business and, you know, knowing the risks involved, there's always risk in business, no matter, you know, what contract you strike with the with the brick and mortar or any other type of agreement. And so knowing that Amazon, if you look at their, their model is to sell as much product as possible because they have figured out they're going to make money, even if it's just freight fee, the logistics and handling fees, their long term storage fees, I mean, go down the list. They keep growing. They're going to make money if you're selling products. And so Amazon is not incentivized or interested in shutting you down. Now this is where it gets into kind of the nuance of the terms of service. So if you're doing things where you're technically or blatantly violating policy, where you're in, a lot of times I actually want to say this.

Bill Teter 00:22:17  If sometimes you have to do it to fight for your business because there is some, you know, bad players out there, you know, competing brands, writing negative reviews, that's really tough. I mean, if I could wave a magic wand, I'd tell Amazon to fix that. Figure out a way to make sure the review process is more altruistic, the way it's used to be before people got smart and started playing very aggressively because I know brands and I work with them, that they have competitors go on there and just direct them and write bad reviews. And, you know, you can have friends and family, different IP addresses, and there's a pretty easy way to get around Amazon actually figuring it out. And what you have to do sometimes is fight for your brand. And it's just like anything else. You have to fight for your business. And, you know, sometimes the terms of service they're written to, in large part, keep a fair and free open market. So I can respect the fact that Amazon's trying to do its best to keep it fair and free for other sellers, but there's a time and place to say, we got to do this because we got to maybe bend the rules or push it a little bit, and it's because we're dealing with things that are truly not fair.

Bill Teter 00:23:06  And there's no, you know, real justice system within Amazon. You can't really go and, you know, bring it to a court of law unless it's something so obvious, like blatant violations of patents or trademarks and things like that. But outside of that, if they're just doing things to compete with you in the free market of Amazon, you know, I just go back to fight for your brand. And, you know, sometimes you gotta get your hands a little dirty, but be cautious because, yeah, you might get your warning a notice. You know, a lot of times they say, you know, address this or 72 hours your account get shut down. I mean, that's scary. Like if your whole business is Amazon and they say 72 hours, your account gets shut down, it'll scare even the best business owners. But what I will say to that is, even if you were to have, you know, rightfully, wrongfully got your account shut down, you could always appeal to Amazon.

Bill Teter 00:23:45  You can create a new account. You could always find a way in within a matter of days or weeks, get back on track. Whereas if you had lost a contract that you were working on for years and it took you nine months or a year to get back on track in your business, Amazon as a marketplace allows you to, you know, come back and keep fighting and, you know, yes, maybe that account had a mark, but, you know, I'm a little more aggressive and say, you know, it's you got to fight for yourself and, you know, play by the rules. The terms of service are there. But, you know, that's a I just say fight for business.

Josh Hadley 00:24:10  Interesting. Love that love that perspective. so Bill, another thing that you addressed was, you know, finding the right type of agencies. So, I mean, it seems like Amazon agencies are a dime a dozen right now. You go to lots of different e-commerce conferences, and there's an agency left and right, PPC agencies, there's full service agencies.

Josh Hadley 00:24:27  I mean, I hear lots of pros and cons, pros of, you know, like you said, like, oh, they have their their pulse on a lot of different products and markets because they manage a bunch of different brands. But as you also mentioned, like nobody cares about your business as much as you do. so the agencies like you're just another number to them. give me your perspective when it comes to working with an agency. It seemed like it turned out really well for you guys. But how do you find that? Right, partner?

Bill Teter 00:24:50  Yeah, that's a that's like, asking how do you find a good girl or a good husband or wife? it's there's not one size fits all. and what I'll say is finding someone to work with is is just like, dating. and it's very important to obviously do due diligence when you're talking about, you know, engaging because there's always going to be some sort of, you know, timeline. You get engaged and they're going to learn your brand.

Bill Teter 00:25:11  You're going to learn them some of the best do deep dives and kind of put proposals together about what they would do. what I would do now is if I were to today start fresh and go, how do I navigate finding an agency? I would reach out to everyone. I'm that type of entrepreneur that would say, talk to 30 people, you know, 50 people, whatever it is. Because like, your point, there's they're abundant. They're readily available. Go through the painful process because the painful process to find the right partner, the right fit is going to be exponential to your success. Whereas if someone has just a really good, you know, 30 minute intro, You like them? They said a lot of good stuff, all the right things. But if you go into it and then you've now committed to them and they have access to your account and they're doing your PPC and they're building it and it's just not working over six months or a year, it's going to be exactly the opposite negative, not exponentially high.

Bill Teter 00:25:50  It's going to be exponentially down. Or it might just be flat and, you know, your profitability might just be bumping along. And so going into it, I would say, you know, talk to them about what they've done, make sure that they are, in some ways just a bona fide agency where they've done brands and they know your market, they know your space. So if you're in reading glasses and you know items like that versus if you're in health and beauty or, you know, you know, let's say if they had success with, you know, an animal product or, you know, the pet lovers, that's probably where I'd start is find someone that has success. Now, there's obviously a caveat there because they can't compete. So if they have, you know, your number one competitor, you can't go to the same agency because they're going to be competing for the same keywords. So, there's there's a caveat to that. But the main thing is find someone that it feels right.

Bill Teter 00:26:29  Just like dating, you know? Does it feel good? Trust your gut. That's one of the main things as being an entrepreneur is you got to trust yourself and trust your gut. If you feel like I don't know about this, keep asking questions until you figure out why you feel that way or, you know, uncover what's holding you back. Because it might be, you know, are you concerned that they're going to spend too much money on advertising and not get the results, you know, and so you can learn the acronyms, the customer acquisition costs, the Roas, the total ad spend to Amazon revenue. You can determine what works for your business. And so when you go into a conversation with an agency, say, here are my margins. My, you know, main thing is gross profit margin. And then minus Amazon fees, you're going to know what you can actually operate and have and have a budget. Make sure you know what makes you comfortable as a budget, and make sure that's in the contract to where you say, hey, I would love to work with you guys, but I need to maintain this margin.

Bill Teter 00:27:11  I need to maintain this ad spend. I have to know your business, know your numbers. And that's, you know, kind of every time I'm on shark, think that's what they tell everybody or any business conference. Know your numbers. So know what works and what doesn't work before engaging because they as an agency can respond and react to what you need as a business. But if you don't know, they can't ultimately be, you know, held liable for the success or failure. Obviously failures. If it's a failure, it's a failure. That's obvious. But I'm talking about if, let's say, your goal as a business owner was to break even because you just wanted to drive results, you wanted to grow top line and you're like, look, in a year or two, I'm going to cut back on advertising. I want to be the number one in the market. And then, you know, and that's my plan. Go to the agency and say, I want to go hypergrowth. I want to double my sales in the next 12 months, I will break even.

Bill Teter 00:27:47  Here's what I can spend with you, and here's what I can spend on advertising every month for the next 12 months. And then after that, I needed to drop by whatever percent or whatever amount. And if you know your numbers like that, it gives them clarity and confidence to be understanding your model so you guys can be successful together. And so again, I go back to kind of dating and marriage. Go into it, talk about kids, talk about religion, talk about everything because you don't get married and then find out you guys don't agree on the main things of your, of your life, or in this case of your business. And you don't want to find that out afterwards. So I say, you know, talk to as many people as possible, find someone that's in your space that's successful. I'm a believer in letting people learn with you, but you obviously have more negotiating to have, you know, maybe get more favorable price per month or, you know, a lower fee if they're kind of new.

Bill Teter 00:28:23  But if you can find someone that really understands your business and you can articulate your specific goals as a business owner and they can stay within those parameters, that is probably the formula. You know, by and large, it's going to help you succeed.

Josh Hadley 00:28:34  Yeah, I love that analogy that you just shared in terms of, you know, you see it as like a dating relationship, right? If you're going to get married to somebody. Have those important conversations up front, which means you need to like, sit down and think about, like, what are those important conversations that I need to have with a potential agency partner and do your due diligence. Don't just, you know, don't just hop in with the first one that you meet, right? yeah. So I love that.

Bill Teter 00:28:54  They're all going to sound good. They're all going to have a great space. They're all going to have a great story. And so have 30 great conversations. Be polite. Be professional. Thank them for their time.

Bill Teter 00:29:01  And if it's a great fit, let them know. Keep the conversation going. But if you feel deep down, hey, these guys are great guys. You don't have to just engage with them just because they're, you know, you know, great guys or gals. Make sure it feels good because you are going to be working with them. It's as serious as finding a partner for your business or employees for your business. These are people every day that you got to be happy and comfortable with talking to. And when problems arise, which they will, there's always problems. We don't know what tomorrow's market brings. Cost of goods are increasing. Interest rates for cost of capital is high. You know the market changes, market changes happen in real time. You know what people buy, what people don't buy. You know. And you got to have a very healthy conversation with with your team externally and internally about how do we address change. Because what you, you know today what you might be thinking.

Bill Teter 00:29:36  It might change drastically. Just like we did from our, you know, our product. And we launched and expanded in the different program, you know, with the with the glasses. That was a massive change. And at that time we had that conversation with them, hey, let's be really profitable on the stuff that we kind of already own. We have momentum on. Let's not spend so much dollars in advertising trying to just maintain number one, because we are number one. We own the market, but let's find our route in this and then make sure that it makes sense to compete in this space. And if you can get a you know, that open dialogue as the changes in the market happen, you can react and then you, you know, in that way, just like any other relationship, you don't, you know, sweep it under the rug. You don't get upset with your financials. You don't say, you know, you don't build animosity and resentment when things change. Because if things change, have the conversation early.

Bill Teter 00:30:12  Just just address it and figure out a corrective action plan. Make your decisions, make your bets and then just keep moving forward.

Josh Hadley 00:30:17  Yeah love that. Great great mindset shifts. So my question to you Bill would be this. With this year we've seen a lot of margin compression on Amazon. The the increased amount of competition is higher than it's ever been on Amazon. And it will only continue to increase with the experience that you have in both retail wholesaling and on Amazon. What's your recommendation to other seven figure brand owners that started on Amazon? Do you recommend that they jump on, you know, try to go more omnichannel? Do you recommend that they go into wholesale if they're not into wholesale? give me your take. And what you would advise Amazon first brands right now in today's day.

Bill Teter 00:30:52  I would say if you start on Amazon in the last few years, anywhere from just a start up all the way to, let's say you got three, five, seven years of success, especially in Amazon brand, if you're being successful, but your margins are diminishing.

Bill Teter 00:31:01  Number one address why your margins are diminishing. If it's truly just Amazon fees, then you can accept and say, okay, I can't control this. There's no negotiating with them. So there's no way you can, you know, there's no reason to bang your head against the wall saying it doesn't work. It doesn't work. So what I would say is there's probably two obvious strategies in terms of being successful. Number one, I would say if what you're doing, let's say in our business I'll use an example. It's called Wicked Hard Goods and it's adhesives. And it was specifically because Rick loved this product and he'd been using it in a fire business and said, hey, there's not anything available on Amazon. So we're like, let's fill the market. If that that product isn't available. You know, let's let's fill it. But that alone isn't going to take us to victory. We actually had these conversations real time in 2024. We're saying, hey, this is not going to be the big growth and exit like we would like.

Bill Teter 00:31:42  It's not going to be as easy as 2021. So what we're looking at right now is bringing in new products with a fresh perspective that are patented or trademark able to where we can actually build some of that, you know, protections. And specifically, we're in discussion right now about bringing a product in that has patents. And we would also bring it under our trademark brand. By doing that, if we can kind of go and do the inverse where we were a blue ocean, you know, strategy, where we own the intellectual properties and on the market and then went Red ocean, where we just focused on big growth. This time we were the red ocean where it's price driven, you know, adhesive tapes, it's, you know, commodity item. There's no protections. But if we bring in other ancillary products that help overall sales, the advertising is going to be lower. The diminishing margins are still going to be there because cost of goods are, you know, up with inflation. but by diversifying and not saying so myopic and saying, you know, this is what we've been doing.

Bill Teter 00:32:27  So we got to keep doing it, keep doing it, make it make sense, you know, try and find ways to improve your margin or cut costs. That's all. You know very smart business. But if you can think outside the box, get outside perspective, you know, and for us in adhesives, you know, for us, we can go all the way to anything in home in Houseware. So specifically what we're talking about without getting to to detail until it's done, what we're talking about doing is a door repair kit. That is awesome. It's a great product and it's unique and it's patented. So it's not a tape. It's not an item of tape. It's it's an add on item that is going to give us the ability to add revenue with all of our existing infrastructure. So our overhead stays relatively the same. We get to plug that in. And now it's just a fresh perspective on the business. So I would say bucket number one, take a minute. Take a step back in your business.

Bill Teter 00:33:05  Look at what you're doing and go, hey, I'm doing this business. What else could I add to the mix to really increase customers to know who might, you know, know my brand? Or maybe they could buy this with that product. And it's obviously easier said than done, but it takes a certain level of vision to step back and say, what can I add to this? And go to tradeshows walk up and down. Think about it. If you're in Home Hardware, what are the other problems that you're dealing with as a homeowner every day doing handyman work that you could say, hey, I want to launch this product. And then, you know, focus on either building or launching that product and so that's number one is is thinking outside the box and bringing products that are, you know, you know, protected by some sort of, you know, patents or trademarks or you just might own the market. Because if you develop it until knockoffs come, then you can just own the market and dictate price.

Bill Teter 00:33:43  So that's number one. Number two is to figure out the omnichannel or ways that your brain can be successful, whether it's on your own direct to consumer website, affiliate websites, referral websites, or in brick and mortar. And if you look at the margins of brick and mortar, if you're doing like a keystone item, let's say you sell it for $10 and you sell it to the wholesale for five, you're actually going to make more money likely than you would on Amazon. And that's changed because when we were doing it, Amazon represented maybe 30 or 40%, you know, total cost. So if we sold it for $10, we were we always factored 30 to 40%, depending on, you know, what year it was or what time it was. And so we were making 6 or $7 per unit that continued to drop. And right now if you go in and you know that Amazon is taking 70% and there's different stats, every market is different. But I've seen up to 70% or more with Amazon.

Bill Teter 00:34:25  That's a scary proposition to say. I'm going to start at 70% off from knowing my Amazon fees and costs, and that's what we're all dealing with, as you know, Amazon business owners. Whereas you could go back to the model of Keystone items and you're starting at potentially, you know, 50 plus percent margin by selling it wholesale. And so it actually switched and I don't know exactly when that switched. It was sometime in the last 3 to 5 years. You could probably track it back and figure out when did it go from that. You know, 60, 70% all the way down to the inverse, you know, 30, 40%. And so sometime in the last couple of years, it actually made sense to go and say, I could sell wholesale and make just as much money as I did on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:34:56  Yeah, I love that. And I think that's been something that I've been, you know, preaching to the choir here, which is there were a number of times where I would go to Target or Walmart and I would laugh at like, oh, how are they charging such a low price for this product? But now the script is flipped because now Amazon's price for that product is even cheaper, which is exactly what Amazon's goal is, right? They want the cheapest thing ever.

Josh Hadley 00:35:18  but now it makes more sense to go into wholesale. So I agree with you that within the last I think personally within the last like 18, 24 months, that model has recently flipped where it's, you know and my prediction on Amazon. I'm interested to hear your thoughts, Bill. I think Amazon over the next 5 to 10 years becomes a single digit profit margin business. Now they have lots of volume. They're going to bring the volume. But because of the competition, unless you have an IP moat around yourself, which you talked about, I think there's I think you can have very healthy margins there. But if you don't have a patent on your product, I think you're working with single digit profit margins. At the end of the day, over the next 5 to 10 years. Agree or disagree on that, bill?

Bill Teter 00:35:56  I agree because Amazon is a growing hungry animal. And, you know, it's it's it's autonomous. They want to increase their margins to, you know, benefit shareholders of, you know, in the the you know, the people buying Amazon stock.

Bill Teter 00:36:09  So every way that it makes sense for them to legally do it they're going to do it. And so you're I think 100% spot on if anyone said otherwise I want to know what either you know or you know, you know, respectfully to say, I don't know what fairytale land you're living in, but it's not going to go the other way. Amazon is not going to relinquish profit margin just because you know they want you to succeed. and honestly, even the diminishing margin isn't the number one problem I have with Amazon. The number one problem I have with Amazon is that they are, to me, in violation of a fair marketplace. And I think in the next five years, the only thing that protects brand owners and FBA sellers is if there's actual federal legislation and Congress gets involved to say you have to stop competing on your own platform by making products and selling them against other competing sellers because you're in violation of free market. You have all the access to the analytics. You can see their sales, you can see everything you know exactly.

Bill Teter 00:36:59  You know how successful and successful their businesses. And by Amazon competing. And you've seen some of it where they had like the Amazon basics and they had to go branded where they kind of made it a cute brand, which honestly has made it more difficult for us to even see if it was an Amazon brand that we're competing against. You're not going to win. They're always going to beat you because they can, you know, internally they'll beat you on PPC, they'll beat you in margin. They have the unlimited, you know, buying power. They're going to win. And so the diminishing margin on their fees yes, it may be single digit. And I think it's you know, if you just look at the timeline of the trajectory, it's a pretty safe bet if you were just to look at the diminishing margin. But it's actually, I think, the biggest threat to FBA sellers is as you're successful and wildly successful, because if you start hitting seven eight figures and some nine figures, Amazon sees that and they're going, well, if this guy can do it, why don't we do it? And they have an unlimited amount of resources, unlimited amount of capital, you know, whether they're sourcing products from any country in the world, their export import teams, they're going to win.

Bill Teter 00:37:44  And so that's where I would say, you know, not to sound like doom and gloom, but it is daunting when you think about competing against the behemoth Amazon. And so I would actually point to that specifically as competing with Amazon brands and getting too successful to where they just come in and compete with you and there's no recourse.

Josh Hadley 00:37:56  Yeah, I love that fascinating prediction here, bill. Bill, is there anything else that you, we haven't talked about or address that you feel like our audience needs to hear?

Bill Teter 00:38:07  I think all I would say is, you know, we got we took our best guess as to when we exited. Did it make sense at the time? You know, we were looking at were campaigns going to get increased to ordinary income and how much more we had to ruin our sales and EBITDA to exit for the same amount. So things like taxes do affect your decision. We didn't know what the future looked like. We kind of guessed that there might have been a recession. We just had our best guesses on it.

Bill Teter 00:38:26  We said, let's take this. You know, we could probably make more money. We could run this for a few more years. But, you know, let's let's take the exit and then go on to the next business. And over the last three years, I'm really glad we did what we did at the time. And I'm not just saying that to say like, hey, we were, you know, so smart and we did that. I'm actually saying that for optimism for the future because it's been really tough. Multiples are down on Amazon businesses with the aggregators. It's a tough market, but I think that if over the next few years there's going to be another wave and a window of opportunity to have those exits, and it's going to be directly affected by things like the economy and interest rates and everything else. And just make sure that, you know, focusing on your brand, the things we talked about, about bringing on those extra items, building out your business, have good value propositions.

Bill Teter 00:39:04  Think one, two, three years out. Not so day to day, because right now it can be really tough to get up and be motivated to, you know, just keep running this business. If it feels monotonous, you're not getting results. You spend your wheels. I'm optimistic about the future because if you know good business owners, they know how to pivot and they know how to figure out how to how to win. And, you know, plan your exit in the next 1 to 3 years and be working on that every day. And let that be the optimism and hope for why you're going to work today. Today's numbers. Today's financials may not make sense, but take a step back. You know what you got to do to be successful in 2 or 3 years? Because when that window comes, you got to be planning that now, not 2 or 3 years down the road doing the same thing, going, oh, I should have added these products or I should have been in preparation, think forward.

Bill Teter 00:39:39  And that's honestly that's what gets us excited as business owners to know that there's that light at the end of the tunnel, even its own, you know, self-motivation to keep going. It's something that you know, when when you know, you feel alone as a business owner, you know, you're diminishing margins or all hope is lost. There's always a future and there's always a way forward. So, you know, I just wanted to kind of end on a very positive note that if you think about a positive future because markets always change. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:39:58  Fantastic advice I agree I believe. Yeah. Despite Amazon's single digit profit margins in 5 to 10 years, there's still a lot of optimism. And you're right entrepreneurs we're always going to find the next path. But it's important to you know we just can't sit back and relax. And I think that's the most important thing is you've got to be proactive and have some foresight in the game. So Bill, as we wrap up this episode, I'd love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode.

Josh Hadley 00:40:21  Here are the actionable takeaways that I noted. So action item number one, I think what led to a lot of your guys's success was the impact of having an IPO around your product, right? You guys had the recognition on Shark Tank, which is obviously massive, but you also had a patented product which allowed you to charge a higher price, and you weren't dealing with knockoffs from overseas competitors. And so that's something you're doing with your current brand. You're trying to innovate and bring more things to the market. And I would say that will be good for the rest of our entire lives. If you can innovate and bring a new product to market, you can always find success there. If you can have some that's truly unique, innovative and patented. I think the sun is still brightly shining for the next decade. Two, three, four forever to come, really. And so I think that innovation is truly like the foundation of any good business. And if you're not talking to IP lawyers and things like that, and understanding that, I do think that that becomes more and more important to any successful Amazon based business down the road.

Josh Hadley 00:41:14  So that's action item number one. Action item number two is I love the analogy you shared with finding the right partners for your business. Now, whether this is hiring somebody internally or if this is partnering with an agency, whether it's a PPC agency or a full service agency. How do you know who the right one is? Don't just meet the first one you know. Don't just pick up the first one. You related it to dating, right? Are you going to just date the first or marry the first girl that you date? Probably not. Right. You need to have some experience, learn, you know, see the pros and the cons between each person or agency that you're figuratively dating. And you said go hard at it, right? Go interview 30, 40, 50. Different agencies get their mindset. Have those tough conversations of big, important items just like you would if you're going to get married. I love that analogy. I think that is so, so important because you're right, there's always going to be issues that arise.

Josh Hadley 00:41:57  So it's better to say, hey, we've already discussed this. I know this is kind of going to be the next step when we get when these type of issues are arise. So feel really good advice there. Last thing. Third but not last but not least. Third action item here is to not necessarily I'm not going to call it diversifying your business, but I'm going to say taking your business to a much more mature, segment of the market, which is going into wholesale or jumping on those additional sales platforms and marketplaces, whether it's she and her team or TikTok shop or in Shopify. I think it is so important to always be testing the waters. and like you mentioned, you know, Bill, you saw that the profit margins flipped recently where originally people loved Amazon because the profit margins were so high and everybody was like, oh, that old wholesale model, that's crap. That's that's old. Now that's almost the inverse is true. That wholesale model looks a lot more appealing because the profit margins are actually higher than what you'll see on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:42:47  So consider going into wholesale. Bill, is there anything else that I didn't mention here that you would leave as an action item?

Bill Teter 00:42:54  No. All I'll say is, if there's anything I've said that anyone wants to me to elaborate on, my info will be available. reach out if I have any resources or, you know, you mentioned IP attorneys. You know, people in business talk to other business owners and be vulnerable. You know, we've all been through it. It's it's a struggle. It can be lonely. reach out to people because most likely they've been through it and they might have a perfect fit for you. So if there's anything that I could, you know, offer for the success of other entrepreneurs and business owners, you know, I'd love to share it.

Josh Hadley 00:43:19  Love that. Now, Bill, as we wrap things up, I'd love to ask every guest the following three questions. So number one, what's been the most influential book that you've read and why?

Bill Teter 00:43:27  I'm going to say there's a lot.

Bill Teter 00:43:28  So this is why I one of the toughest questions. But I picked one, and it's extreme ownership by Jocko Willing. And it's because there's a handful of key principles. the title itself, extreme ownership. You can take that just for face value and say, hey, basically means it's all on me. But there's actually four key principles of the book that just on, you know, just a brief note on them. One is decentralized command. As a business owner, one of the things of being an entrepreneur is a lot of times you're unemployable because you want to do your own thing and build your own business, and you're gonna have to figure out how to give up some of the controls, find good people, have those tough conversations, and trust the process. You know, operations managers, marketing agencies. They may not be as good as you, but you're going to have to. If you're going to be successful, you're going to have to trust some people in your business and follow their lead and figure out how to turn off that, you know, fear where you know, a lot of the control or micromanaging just comes from the fear of being successful.

Bill Teter 00:44:13  And we all deal with that. It's like, hey, we just be successful and be successful and this person's not doing it, you know? Right. Good policies, procedures, have good team members. You know, take time, you know, to find the right people. And ultimately, you know, trust that they're going to eventually learn. Let them make mistakes. Don't blame them, you know, have a really healthy relationship. So decentralized command is one of the main principles. The other is no bad teams, only bad leaders. pretty self-explanatory. Get into the book. There's some incredible stories about how there's no such thing as a bad team. There might be bad people, and you can deal with that, you know, be slow to hire, quick to fire one of those principles. But it always comes back to how are you as a business owner and a leader, you know, motivating and incentivizing. You know, where your blind spots. I deal with business owners that have massive blind spots that I privately sit in a room and say, hey, this is what you really need to address because you see it one way, the team sees it another.

Bill Teter 00:44:53  And so, you know, that's, you know, someone close trusted that, you know, you can be vulnerable with and say, what are my blind spots? What am I glaring defects? What am I doing wrong? And it might be one of your key people that you can just have a one on one with. another is discipline equals freedom. That is in every aspect of life, whether it's your relationships, your health, your business. The more disciplined you are, the more focused you are, the better you're going to be, and it's for the opportunities that are to come. So you're prepared and also the challenges. And so the more disciplined you are. I'm a big advocate of being disciplined in all areas. The big pillars of your life And last but not least is prioritize and execute. And again, read the book because there's incredible stories on on every of why these are such driving principles. But when you think about, prioritize and execute. Go back to the part where we talked about what we did in 2020.

Bill Teter 00:45:31  We figured out what was the priority. We could we could have sat around. We could have made excuses. We could have blamed, you know, the market or the change, the landscape, Amazon's fees. We prioritized what we thought was right, and we just went all in and we said we're going to execute. And with that level of execution, it gets you through the tough times. And so I'll leave it at that. Enjoy the book.

Josh Hadley 00:45:47  Oh that's a that's a fantastic book summary. We'll have to turn this podcast into a book summary. Now. This is great, Bill. next question. What's your favorite AI tool and why?

Bill Teter 00:45:55  So I'm actually I'm probably one of the least qualified people to speak on AI. So I, I have seen some incredible things that I does. And if you have tools that are making everything more efficient, faster, better, stronger, utilize them, utilize them all. Learn, grow. I mean, I'm excited to watch it. I'm not an investor in any of them.

Bill Teter 00:46:10  I know it's early. I'm just watching it on the sidelines going, man, this is this is a big change. This is a quantum leap. This is like the.com, you know, growth in the late 90s. But I think it's you know, whatever multiple ten times bigger because of how fast it's growing. And what it's going to do is it's going to change employees, it's going to change business, it's going to change the speed in which you have to react. And so I don't necessarily have a certain product. Like I said, I just don't have a ton of day to day experience other than maybe using a ChatGPT to write a blog or an article like everybody else. But outside of that, I would say if you're, you know, if you're interested in it, just try. I'm just like the 30. Try them out, learn them, apply them, figure it out because it's going to grow and it's going to get perfected. And my only thing to what I would say to it, and this is kind of just my thought on AI is in the next five years, AI is going to change every aspect of our lives, not just our businesses, but every aspect of our lives.

Bill Teter 00:46:57  And there's going to be challenges with it because it's a great tool and it's going to provide some speed in every way. One of the challenges are you're going to be able to replace a lot of key employees and people you trust. And so it's actually in conflict of having the decentralized command and having that, you know, team of people. But there's going to be things about AI that can't ever replace human beings. And so what we have to do as humans and business owners is accept that the change is coming, you know, watch it, learn it, and know that as the months and years roll by, it's only going to get faster. What that means for us is what we thought about 18 months ago or 36 months ago. You have to throw that playbook out because the market is changing now and it's only going to get faster. And so, you know, we used to have the privilege of making decisions that were well thought out over seasons with data and analytics. Now go look at some of the young guys that are young guys and gals.

Bill Teter 00:47:40  There's teenagers and people in the early 20s that are crushing legacy businesses in months or years. I mean, you can go pick your poison. Kylie Jenner is probably one of the most obvious ones about what she's done. And that's not necessarily AI, but the guys in AI that are mastering it that are 18 to 22 years old, I'm like, I got to hire them for a business and hope to God I can make them, you know, motivated to work with me because I don't get it. I mean, I'm young, but I feel like I'm still ten years too old for, you know, mastering AI. So what I'll say is the luxury of time that we used to have in business to make good decisions. We don't. We are losing that luxury. And you're going to have to make decisions faster and faster to stay competitive. So be disciplined. You know, run your business and be willing for, you know, for the changes to happen because they're coming and they're coming quick.

Josh Hadley 00:48:21  Love, love that, insight and, foresight.

Josh Hadley 00:48:24  Very cool. All right, final question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Bill Teter 00:48:30  Another tough one. I got a long list of people that I admire. I ended up deciding that I a I think that the guy that inspires me or, you know, I'm intrigued with most I look up to most right now is the guy named Alex Hermosa, and he's more recent. You know, there's guys like Lopez that have been around forever that have been doing it. And they're, you know, they're the game changers that have been doing very well. But in the last year or so, I've seen Alex Ramos go and just do so much, aggressive advertising, growing his personal brand, which is feeding his, his, other brands, some of them e-commerce, some of them, you know, actual physical stores. And what I'm intrigued by most were I have the utmost respect, is he physically walks around clearly disciplined. If if any listeners know he is he's a beast.

Bill Teter 00:49:05  He's a gym guy. So you're like, that guy is disciplined, equals freedom for sure for him. But what I am most, the respect ultimately comes from just being willing to get out there, speak like this instead of talking in concept. It's real data. It's facts, it's real problems. It's real challenges. And he's going in the tent mentality of if you think this is good enough, you know, one a week, do ten a week, and there's another guy for ten. But I actually like Alex Ramsay much better because he just applies it. He's real. He's vulnerable. He makes you feel like you're talking to a real person. Not some you know you know educator. He's a real guy. That's like, here's how I grew to $100 million business. And so for that I he's a he's the number one guy on my list.

Josh Hadley 00:49:40  Yeah. Alex is one of my favorites to be following right now as well. Now Bill, if people want to follow you they want to reach out to you.

Josh Hadley 00:49:45  Where's the best place to do so?

Bill Teter 00:49:47  You know, I'm an old school guy. I have my cell phone text me or call me or shoot me an email. I'm not really one to post on social media. I'm probably in conflict because I could probably do a lot better and bigger if I were to, you know, really, you know, get out there and reach out. you know, introvert by nature. So I focus on the businesses I'm working on. But if there's, you're not going to probably see social media posts for me, but my phone number in email is going to be available, one that responds and reacts. And if there's any way that I can be helpful, please feel free to reach out.

Josh Hadley 00:50:11  Awesome. We'll drop your info in the show notes. Thanks again for your time, Bill. Enjoying the podcast.

Bill Teter 00:50:16  Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me.