[Music] hey sellers welcome to ghost seller 2022 we are on day fourth which is the last day of our event andrea mittel and i will be your host for today's session firstly i would like to thank the speakers partners and of course you all for making the last three days so interesting and so wonderful so before we move on with our events let's have a quick recap in day one we spoke about product research and how you can source your perfect product in day two we spoke about funding rat in taxes and your perfect launch strategy for your amazon fba business third day we spoke about advertising and business monitoring and today we speak about brand management we speak about cross-border expansion and of course how you can exit your amazon fba business if you haven't already do not forget to register for go seller 2022 the register link is in the description box below registered users get exclusive discounts and benefits such as discount codes from our registered partners in form of a goodie bag and some pdfs that will help you excel in your amazon fba journey for more information do not forget to visit go seller official page the card will be on the screen right now we have agendas listed there if you have missed any of the previous sessions the watch link is available there we have all our registered partners and see what they're offering and of course all the speaker information if you want to contact them so without further ado let's invite ben leonard who is the co-founder of ecom brokers he is talking about brand management on amazon and over tu ben hello and welcome to my go seller 2022 presentation and thank you to seller app for having me today we're going to be speaking about understanding your customer and building a customer and brand avatar so who am i my name is ben leonard i'm an e-commerce entrepreneur and consultant i'm probably best known for founding a brand of fitness equipment called beast gear in 2016.
i grew that big business to mid-seven figures revenue selling right across the world sold it in late 2019 it was actually thracio's first uk acquisition and now i'm building new e-commerce brands because i love it and i know how to build a brand and make it something valuable i can sell i'm helping other people get amazing exits for their business with my brokerage ecom brokers today we're going to talk about customer and brand avatars and why they're so important for your brand scaling it and then selling it we're going to talk about people not products who is your customer creating a customer avatar creating a brand avatar something called the hero's journey and then we're going to bring it all together so avatars we have two types we have the brand avatar let's kick off with that this is your brand's personality it is a reflection of your customer it's a reflection of your customer avatar and who your customer aspires to be it's appealing to your customers naturally because it reflects them or who they want to be and it is going to be positioned and we're going to talk about this later as the guide in your customers journey towards buying your product okay the customer avatar then is a picture or an idea of your ideal customer it is the type of person essentially who buys your products or your services all right and people not products is going to be the focus of what we talk about today because when you focus on people not products you should be asking not what should i sell but who should i sell to you see you can sell stuff and make money for a period of time but that's not really sustainable right fidget spinners remember those wrist bands remember when that was all the rage but that's not really the route to selling or building a sustainable business all right what needs to be the focus is people real businesses focus on people and when you focus on people not product that is what is going to help you develop your marketing strategy so let's kick off with content marketing you see when you focus on people not products you will understand what blog posts videos podcasts lead magnets you should create to attract and convert your ideal customer because you'll know what they want when you focus on people not products you will know about your paid traffic strategy because you will know where your customers are and so which ad platforms you should buy traffic from and how should you target your customers when you focus on people not products you will know what products to create for them what solutions to provide for them because after all your products exist to solve problems for your customers and when you understand their problems you understand the solutions you need to create for them all right and when you understand people not products you understand how to talk to them how your copy should be how should you describe your offers in your email in your sales letters on your listings and your ads what's going to compel your customer avatar to buy from you and of course you'll understand how to email your customers and that links into copywriting there as well but you'll understand what kind of emails your customers and potential customers want to receive and when should they receive them when you focus on people not products you should ideally be scratching your own itch all right and i'm going to explain what that means let me focus for a moment on b skier that was the first brand that i built and then sold okay i wanted high quality training fitness equipment i wanted to improve on the kit that i already owned shopify was founded by a guy called tobias lutke he needed a platform to sell his snowboards so he built a website to sell his snowboards but in the process of doing so he discovered that he preferred developing that platform he scratched his own itch he created a simple website building tool which he could use to build his snowboard website and he realized that other people wanted something similar for their businesses going back to the beast gear example i scratched my own itch i wanted high quality training equipment for me and so when you scratch your own itch you experience the issues you have the best experience of the problem or pain point so there's no one better to sell it right you know the benefits of your product or solution you know that it works okay [Music] you understand the market better than anyone because you are the customer all right for instance jack o'neil from the o'neill surfing brand he knew a lot about surfing tobias lipka who i just mentioned knows what e-commerce merchants want hence founding shopify so who do you serve that is one of the earliest questions you need to be asking yourself who do you sell to who are these people are they crossfitters are they people with sensitive skin perhaps they're business owners and so these are three quick examples i want to work through right now okay what problems do they have let's answer that question for the crossfitter perhaps their existing gym bag gets torn up and worn out quickly when they toss it onto the uh the floor of the fitness gym the crossfit gym that they go to perhaps someone with sensitive skin is suffering from eczema or perhaps a business owner has problems with time management they're not very good at planning perhaps and so what do they want well they want a solution to their problem don't they so maybe they need a better bag to carry their kit so if you head over to king kong apparel dot com you'll see that those guys created a better gym bag that would not get torn up and worn out quickly and as a side note it's also excellent for carrying specific equipment the crossfitters want they've scratched their own itch cueforquin.com was founded by a mother who needed hypoallergenic socks for her baby who had sensitive skin and she has since built that brand out to provide solutions for all sorts of uh people with sensitive skin and creating high quality products which are eco-friendly and finally the best self codebestself.com uh they have expanded their brand to be an entire productivity brand but they started out just with a productivity journal for business owners and who better than them because they scratched their own itch that is what they wanted all right so it's about asking who you serve what is the problem they have and what do they want in relation to that problem and so from there we can start to build a customer avatar let me give you an example with beast gear again it's the brand that i built so i know it very well let's talk about liam the lifter he's 27 he's an i.t technician he's got a university degree that kind of doesn't matter often when people are thinking about their customers they immediately start thinking about demographics it's important but it's not the most important thing the most important thing is actually their goals what do they want what does liam want to do their values what do they care about their challenges as it relates to you know the topic or your brand so liam is challenged with what are the pain points as it relates to that and so we can go through these and begin to answer them in the voice of your brand as it were for example liam wants to deadlift his body weight that deadlift two times his body weight and squat about one and a half times his body weight he cares about equipment that doesn't fail he cares about looking and feeling the part and the main challenge is that he can't afford good kit okay and the pain point is that the poor service of the other brands isn't good enough and the kit that he kind of can't afford keeps failing on him all right so when we understand that we can think about well how do we appeal to this person and what can we provide for them okay we now know our customers goals values challenges and pain points how can we actually get noticed by them how can they even know that we exist well the answer to that is to get in front of them so returning to liam the lifter for a minute ask ourselves where does liam spend time online and consume electronic information he's on facebook because he's in groups for strength training he's on instagram because well everybody's on instagram but he's following the top coaches posting his gym progress following his friends he's on youtube watching information from training experts he's listening to podcasts listening to his favorite coaches okay and he's on blogs and websites consuming this information too from his favorite coaches and trainers and he's on online magazines okay so we know that this is where he's hanging out how do we get in front of him then okay perhaps we can get in front of him in these places we know where he hangs out but it's not as simple as just posting in these places we can't say okay he's on youtube let's make a bunch of youtube videos he's on facebook let's run a bunch of facebook ads we can't just post there and expect sales to come in we still need to understand a bit more about our customer avatar okay so he's going to object to buying from us even once we've got in front of him he's going to say well who are these guys why should i trust them all right why might he not want to buy from us again returning to the beast gear example perhaps it's still too expensive perhaps we need to therefore justify the price and we can do that in our copy in the information on our listing by creating and in our images by creating an offer which compels him to buy but demonstrating that our product is worth the money right perhaps he doesn't know like and trust our brand yet so we need social proof and we need to demonstrate competence we need to demonstrate competence we can do that by creating helpful compelling useful information which shows that we know what we're talking about so youtube videos of training tutorials blog posts about nutrition for training for example and perhaps he just doesn't know if the equipment will help so we need social proof so that's posts on social of influencers and existing customers using the product and also you know in our images on amazon listings as well and on our website too for example [Music] so we now know a lot of information about our customer right we know our customers goals values challenges pain points and we've addressed those okay we understand where they're hanging out and we know why they might not buy from us and we know how to bust those objections so what we now need to do is build a brand avatar which reflects all this and will compel our customer to buy from our brand okay we're gonna use our customer avatar to build a reflection of the customer in our brand and this will shape all of our marketing efforts our brand voice our copy our images even our logo the suite of products that we offer everything related to our brand will be underpinned by this brand avatar that reflects our customer so what is in a brand avatar it's how your brand is viewed it's how does your brand sound it's do you understand what you do and can you communicate that you'd be surprised the number of people who can't do that it's about do you know what your brand doesn't do and what does your brand stand against how do you want your brand to be viewed then we'll kick off with that all right this example i'm giving you on the screen applies to the first brand i grew called beast gear okay but really i would say that 99 of these points apply for for every brand so most brands want to be viewed as having high quality products and excellent service okay they want their personality or beast gears personality rather was independent relatable fun competent and not everyone every brand is going to want to be perceived that way not every brand has wanna necessarily be seen as fun you know perhaps you have a service which offers funeral care fun wouldn't be appropriate for instance your marketing what do you do well for my brand we wanted to be on social media email marketing chat bots other brands might want to be on on uh very particular channels your presentation how does your brand look and feel so for beast gear we want it to be seen as high quality high-end and cool now i would say that applies for most brands but not necessarily all because not all brands are going to want to necessarily be cool then we have something called the rational benefits okay and these are functional physical aspects as it relates to your brand and products so we wanted quality products help me train better that's how we wanted people to to to view our products from a rational perspective all right and then we have the process side of that rational benefit which is about how easy the products are to use and we wanted people to say well the products work well and they're simple to use so think about how that might apply to your brand what are the rational benefits for your brand and then there was the customer experience we wanted them to believe that we had and to not just believe but to know we had great service delivery and follow-up okay so what does your customer experience need to look like for your brand and then there's the emotional side and this is arguably more important than the rational side there's the perceived value so we wanted people to say well it's great value for the price and there's the external aspect of the emotional benefit what does it say about me as a customer because everybody cares what people think of them whether they uh admit that or not deep down they do it's a human thing we're wired that way and we wanted be skier or be your customers to say or to to feel that their products made them look cool and serious about their training and closely closely related to that is the internal emotional benefit how it makes you feel as a customer also cool but really important here part of a tribe a key part of bsgear's marketing was building this tribe of fans and so you need to ask yourself what are you doing for your brand and uh are you building a tribe for example are you building a community how do you want your customers to feel internally and externally about your brand and your products okay so as you're going through this start jotting down ideas as it relates to your brand okay so we know how we want our brand to be viewed but the next really important part is making sure that we're viewed the right way by making sure that we sound right and that takes us into our brand voice okay and this is the manner in which you speak in all of your marketing material more often it's your actual copy okay so for example innocence smoothies popular branded smoothies the copy on the the label on the bottle of the smoothie is fun and friendly i actually find it a little bit annoying but i'm not their ideal customer you might be blunt and funny like the dollar shave club who did very well with their our blades are great campaign doesn't appeal to everyone but it's not supposed to maserati they have a very sophisticated brand voice and that's because they're trying to reflect who their customers either are or aspire to be and arguably maserati customers are either sophisticated or they want to think of themselves as sophisticated so they want to see that reflected back at them in the brand and in this case in the brand voice maybe you're sarcastic and rude cards against humanity or maybe you're very serious and empathetic if you have a funeral care company okay and people say to me but bang won't i exclude people if i do this and i say absolutely you will because you want to speak to your ideal customer there's no point in trying to speak to everyone you want to focus on people and focus on the people who are looking for solutions to the problems that your products solve you're not speaking to everyone you're niching down okay the best voice is your voice which is why it's so important that your brand is about something that you're passionate about or at least someone senior in your organization is passionate about otherwise you're not scratching your own itch and you don't understand the market you don't understand the products you don't understand the problems that you're trying to solve and you don't understand your customers okay now i'm going to show you an example on the screen i'm going to read it i know you can read i'm going to read it anyway it is from a piece of copy that i wrote for a listing for a weightlifting belt for beast gear and this appeared on the b skier website okay so it says wearing the beast gear power belt is like being the heavyweight champion of the world you've got the belt you are the [ __ ] you can strut around the gym like a boss because frankly you are one and then we got a little picture a little gif of stone called steve austin from wrestling saying that belt is coming with me and then we change tone a little bit our power belt is handcrafted with passion and care it's not designed to compete among the bulk standard mass-produced belts this is a stronger longer-lasting belt for serious beasts the power belt is distinguished by its premium all-natural materials and the painstaking manufacturing process our belts retain the natural characteristics of the leather and do not compromise on the intrinsic strength of the materials we trust our belts every day in training and so can you so notice that the copy there has been written for our customer to begin with we're a little bit cocky a little bit almost almost arrogant but still a bit tongue-in-cheek not taking ourselves too seriously a little bit fun but equally we know that our customers take their training seriously and they want good quality products so the second half of that copy is really paying particular attention to the detail talking about the features and benefits and why these products are so good and paying attention to the care that went into making them okay think about how that applies to your brand and how you want to speak to your customers all right so the next part of our brand avatar is asking ourselves do we understand what we do and how to communicate a lot of people you ask them what their brand does or what they do and they they know but they can't communicate it properly to you and here's a quick exercise that's going to help you do it it's called a quick pitch or a tagline and it's a short message which explains what your brand offers okay and it looks like this problem solution result all right now i'm going to show you a b square example and i want you to be thinking about what you can do for your brand okay so high quality fitness equipment has become a luxury preserved for elite athletes while affordable kit is not good enough problem b skier provides top spec training gear at a fair price and with service to match solution so you can concentrate on your training supported by premium products that won't let you down result all right and when you structure it like that problem solution result it's just so clear and simple so ask yourself what problem do your customers have what solution do you provide and what does their life look like when they have your solution and they have your product or products okay and i love to to use that in the last sentence there so so that you know it really makes people feel like oh this is how my life will look after i have this solution all right now some of you might be saying well yeah okay but what do we do with that well have everyone in your team learn it and then ensure that all your marketing material fits the essence of that message you don't have to put that message anywhere if you don't want to it doesn't literally have to go on anything but it's an exercise and you want to make sure that all your marketing material fits the spirit of that message now you can put it in some places you could put it in your email signature particularly well works well for smaller brands you could put it on the about section of your website and you could put it in your social media bios for example okay so we know how we want our brand to be viewed we want to reflect our customer we know how we want to sound we know what we do and we can communicate it but what do we not do you see that's really important what do you not do and what do you stand against okay you want to define your enemy because nothing builds a following for a brand better than a defined enemy think about brewdog if you're in the states you may not have heard of them although they do not have a brewery in the us they're a huge now uh beer company from scotland they stand against poor quality boring beer that's the way they've positioned themselves i'm not saying all their beer is fantastic but they've cleverly positioned themselves that way tesla stands against high polluting inferior technology again i'm not saying anything that's not a tesla is inferior or high polluting but tesla have positioned themselves that way apple stands against stuffy boring tech i use a pc but i respect apple's excellent marketing in the way they have positioned themselves remember that i'm a mac i'm a pc campaign that was very very clever [Music] so to define your enemy ask yourself this question what is the root cause of your customers problem and can you personify it can you whittle that down i'm going to give you a beast gear example again so be skiers root cause of the problem was the status quo of the elitist fitness industry and what is the problem then what does that cause as it relates to your products and that brings us back to that emotional side sorry external side that we spoke about earlier so for b skier relating to our products then it was that the best equipment is too expensive and affordable equipment is low quality and how does that make your customers feel the internal side of it why is that just plain well no we're not quite there yet how does that make your customers feel they feel then frustrated at lack of access to great equipment and overwhelmed by all the low quality options out there now why is that just plain wrong why is that just plain wrong it's 20 22.
It's just plain wrong that shouldn't be the state these days everyone deserves access to good quality equipment to exercise with reliable gear and excellent service should not be the preserve of the wealthy or elite athletes can you ask yourself those four questions for your brand can you pause this right now and go and do that right that is how you define your enemy when you stand against something everybody else comes with you because they're on your side okay so now you know your enemy now what you're going to use that directly and indirectly in your copy your marketing material your website videos social posts product descriptions to do a couple of things one you're going to guide your customer with empathy you understand their problem you understand the enemy the external and internal and philosophical issues i get it your fitness equipment uh is low quality because you can't afford the best stuff which is overpriced and that's unfair that shouldn't be the the state of play anymore and i wrote about that over there beastgear.compageslashphilosophy if you just go to be scared okay uk click on philosophy you'll see an example of how i have done that and positioned the brand in that way empathetic way and then you're gonna guide the customer with authority demonstrating that you know what you're talking about and again i did that head over to beastgear.com click on the knowledge bomb section you'll see basically a whole bunch of content mostly written by me some new stuff not written by me since i sold the business all about positioning yourself as an authority in your space so you're empathetic but you also know what you're talking about and when you guide with that in mind people are going to buy your product because they relate to you because you clearly care but you also you are competent all right and so they'll buy from you because now they trust you because they know you're a bit better and they know that you care but they also know that you know what you're talking about okay so that brings us very nicely to the next part of the webinar which is the heroes journey okay so i want you to imagine for a second uh the greatest film of all time uh it's back to the future as we all know and the hero in that film is a guy called marty mcfly and your customer is the hero and by the way this idea was uh put well it's been used for for decades but it was very nicely put together by a guy called paul jamin who's actually one of the writers on the cartoon you may remember it very funny adult cartoon called king of the hill and he's used this very well in some of his stuff so if you just youtube him you'll find some great stuff about this okay so your hero is your customer so think of marty mcfly in back to the future all right he has a problem he's stuck in 1985 sorry 1955 and he's accidentally changed the course of the future by preventing his parents from meeting and still preventing his own birth that's a pretty big problem so your customer has a problem all right now marty has an enemy biff biff is now his mom's boyfriend and that's the root cause of the problem really because if if beef is his mum's boyfriend his mom doesn't meet his dad and marty can't be born and the customer has a problem and there's a root cause of it too luckily marty meets a guy dr emmett brown also known as doc that's your brand your brand is a guide okay and the guide gives the hero a plan doc gives marty a plan to arrange for his parents to meet using a lightning strike to strike to get marty back to 1985 and so your plan that you as a guide your brand as a guide is going to give your customer is to purchase and you're going to give that to your customer using your brand voice your marketing material with empathy and authority and helpful useful engaging compelling content all right and the outcome then was that marty's parents met the future was saved marty safely got back to 1985.
your customers problem is solved your satisfied customer purchase from purchases from you again and again and again now [Music] what was the point in that other than to talk about the greatest film of all time well let me go into this a bit more no one cares about your brand the customer is king and that is why the hero has got to be your customer all right the customer just wants to solve their problem and so you need to make that central to your plot they're not interested in hearing about your brand until they've become a fan of your brand they don't care about their pr your brand they just want to solve their problem okay and as i said before everybody loves to rally against a common enemy so if you stand against your customers enemy they will love you okay the enemy of my enemy is my friend in this case all right and the customer just needs someone to show them the path they're overwhelmed by choice they don't know what to do there's so many options they just want a solution to the problem just show me the way give me a guide give me a plan and make that plan clear give them clarity just tell them what to do if you don't give them a plan then the customer is confused and some of you will be saying well how do i give them a plan let me show you an example you can do this on your own website you can do this on your social media you can do this on your amazon listing in your images in your enhanced brand content but think of it like this when you break something down into three or four steps suddenly everything feels a lot easier suppose you have a brand which sells wool okay you sell wool for knitting right what if it looked like this because i have no idea which wool to buy to knit my uh sweater for my granddaughter okay select your pattern choose your wool place your order knit your jumper doesn't that feel already a whole lot easier and better it's almost like each of those steps is a stepping stone over a raging river and i'm on one side of it trying to get to the other side but it feels way less overwhelming if i have some stepping stones all right the the sweater is on the other side of the river and i'm on this side yeah select your pattern choose your will place your order knit your jumper you could put that on your website enhance brand content images makes life feel a lot easier almost feels like i've already got a solution to my problem i almost feel like i already have the will and now i feel a lot more easy about buying from you okay and you can show them how life looks when they've solved their problem in your images you can show happy grandparents giving the sweater to the granddaughter or the or the daughter or whoever it might be and you can do that directly or indirectly in your your copy and your images all right make them feel like they already have the solution so let's bring all this together then you're going to focus on people not products and when you do that and put your customer not the brand at the center of your marketing material everything becomes a lot easier because people care about themselves all right put people at the center of your content your traffic strategy your product strategy your copy and your marketing because until you understand people you don't know how all of those things should look because you don't know who the people you're targeting even are and so to do that you have to define who you serve and provide value related to what your customer wants and that's content helpful free compelling engaging useful information which will give your customer a lot more confidence in you that you know you're talking about and your products should solve problems that your customer has and you understand what those problems are when you define who you serve hang out where they hang out right so if you're selling products where the customers or potential customers are on pinterest go on pinterest don't go on tick tock right make sure you are where they are and they might be in more than one place and that's okay bust their objections because they're not going to buy from you straight away reflect your customer in your brand avatar because your brand needs to be a reflection of either your customer or even better yet who your customer aspires to be okay and build a suite of products around your customer avatar a suite of products which which solves related problems for that same group of people make sure you understand what you do and that you can communicate it and make sure you understand what you don't do define your enemy and stand against it and then guide the customer with empathy and authority towards the solution and always remember why your brand exists to solve the customer's problem not to talk about yourself to stand against something and a great book which talks about this is start with why by simon sinek okay and this matters because when your brand reflects who the customer is and who they aspire to be and hangs out where the customer hangs out and busts objections and builds a tribe and stands against something and guides the customer you will develop better products you will sell more products and you will create raving fans who keep buying your products and telling other people about it this way you will build assets indirectly and directly but indirectly social email chat bots youtube and all of that adds value to your business by the way and many many more indirectly related benefits so that your business is more sellable and more valuable when it comes to an exit all right and that's really important [Music] so what do you do once you've built this awesome brand by focusing on people not products of course there comes a time when you want to sell it and that's what we help you do at e-com brokers so head over to ecom brokers.com uk we've been there and done it as you know i've built b-scare and then sold it i'm building new brands and i'm selling them now we're also accountants and mergers and acquisitions experts so we've got experience on all sides of the equation we do a free initial valuation and follow-up consult call when you mention go seller we'll deduct 10 off our fees and we will work with you towards the exit that you want so head to ecombrokers.com and if you want to look at something a little bit fun a little bit light relief go to ecom brokers.cody uk movie i hope you've enjoyed this you got a lot of value out of it you can hit me up on any social media channels my handle is ben leonard pro or on linkedin just search my name and i'll be happy to uh to chat with you um i hope you enjoyed that and thank you once again to seller app for having me today hey sellers we don't need to tell you how important listing optimization is for your amazon business optimizing your listing maximizes your keyword discoverability as well as conversions for your amazon product but how do you ensure that your listing is optimized the right way for the right customers seller app listing quality is your answer create high converting powerful listings with better visibility that wins top ranks on amazon serps with our powerful listing optimization tool suite this powerful ml powered tool analyzes product listings against best practices to provide recommendations aimed towards high visibility and conversions let us show you how to use seller app listing quality to benchmark and optimize your product listings log in to your seller app dashboard and click on product intelligence click on add product then provide your acen or product url after that open listing quality and select your product you can use this feature for three major advantages understand where your product listing stands a lower lqi score means your product listing is not very efficient an lqi above 80 can be considered to be a good quality product listing track your competitor products and sellers analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their product listings you can also use lqi to find products that have a good selling potential but a lower quality product listing you can start selling these products and obviously get better sales by putting up a better product listing and using keywords that are better than the current listing sounds fantastic doesn't it what makes seller app listing quality unique gauge your listing's visibility in organic search analyze identify and bridge the gaps in your seo strategy verify the organic search rank of all major product keywords recommendations based on proven listing practices get detailed recommendations to improve each metric lagging behind according to the a9 algorithm standards and perfect your listing convert clicks to sales with on-page analysis deep dive into the product title bullet points description ratings and reviews to identify areas for improvement with our ai backed analysis create a well-crafted product listing that will multiply your amazon profits with seller app listing quality if you have any questions email us at sales sellerapp.com feel free to chat with our experts thank you so much for that insightful presentation on brand management then i personally have so much fun watching it before we move forward if you have any questions for our speakers show them in the live chat box our experts are waiting there to answer them for you so next we have cross-border expansion as an amazon fba business or or as an amazon fba business owner cross-border expansion is very important for us right now and let me explain to you why as many sellers are signing up for amazon us we have seen the marketplace become very saturated and to make more profits you have to explore upcoming marketplaces that's why cross-border expansion is the way to go right now to talk about that we have ryan cramer who is the partnership manager at ping pong payments and of course many of you already know him and have seen him um almost in all the podcasts out there so he's going to be talking about cross-border expansion over to you ryan hey everyone and thank you for that amazing introduction uh like you had mentioned before my name is ryan cramer i am with the amazing company ping pong payments uh i just wanted to quickly thank everyone for attending the go seller session all right the coseller event i'm gonna bring it up a quick presentation for everyone who's listening to today about what ping pong is and how we are going to be helping you grow your entrepreneur uh journey and your business moving forward uh this is an amazing go seller event powered by seller app so to do this presentation i'm going to go ahead and share with everyone this amazing kind of information that we have ready for you all with ping pong payments we're going to be talking about today making it easier not harder for international e-commerce businesses to operate so i hope you buckle up get some notes ready uh pen and pencil or if you're taking notes on your computer buckle up because we're going to create some actionable items for you some tips and tricks for you as beginner and intermediate sellers to be able to understand and grow your business but also um some things you may not have known already and we're gonna walk away with some awesome content today so without further ado we're going to talk about making it easier not harder for international ecommerce businesses to operate before we get started want to kind of give my quick background uh my name is ryan kramer i'm going to go ahead and blow that up real quick my name is ryan cramer i am the partnerships marketing manager here at ping pong payments in our united states branch you'll understand why i dictate united states because we are an international company i have background in software e-commerce uh fintech solutions as well as being a seller myself back in 2014 and 15 helping our company grow from uh zero revenue general to six and seven figures so my background comes as a seller as a software provider working in that space and also as a as a service provider in the fintech space helping people save time money and effort my job here is to help put on events like this and help speak on behalf of the seller that is you who are listening to this and helping you grow um from your perspective and kind of connect the dots if you will from what ping pong does and also what um background i have as well so my job is to facilitate a podcast on my end i have a podcast called crossover commerce where we've done over 240 episodes to date of the podcast with uh sellers and service providers and lots of great content thought leaders throughout the world to help give you guys your uh to get insight that's that's ultimately what it's for um i've had great people from seller app come on before so enough about me this is about the content this is about you guys this is about what we are going to bring to the table uh today so gonna go ahead and just blow up uh disappear myself uh for a moment and go ahead into what we're gonna be talking about today and that is going to be secure first and foremost i want to talk about security regulations now uh this this might seem boring but it's uh it's kind of the uh the unsexy side of e-commerce but i think it's super important to understand uh where we're gonna come from in terms of growing your business moving forward so uh the benefits of making sure that your money is safe and secure and reliable as you start to develop that international brand with money coming and going it's always going to be tough to to know where your money is going to be invested into right whether it be under in your product category investing in ppc investing in software whatever that looks like you want to make sure that you know where all of your investments are going into in the appropriate places making sure that your money is secure and reliable um as a international fintech company we actually work closely with world-renowned banks in the sector you can see right there we have tier one partners here uh ping pong payments and we're helping sellers keep their money safe secure and reliable when they work with a ping pong in a ping pong account um such as a city a bank of america wells fargo jp morgan hsbc the list goes on and on in terms of tier 1 banks that we help with now why is that important um there's three initiatives to insert safety and security of your capital capital is important that's why you're an entrepreneur that's why you're in the business of growing your brand and business we want to make sure that your money is safe secure and reliable so we do that by our regulatory compliance we are reducing risk of our effective compliance program helps ping pong mitigate risks by preventing possible events from detrimentally affecting your operations we identify analyze take action and monitor control of any potential risk that might come to your money so when you have an account with us it's always makes you always want to make sure that no one's stealing money no one's taking it we want to make sure that your money is safe secure and reliable so you can add to it or use it however you need to grow your business we also have great efficiencies that we've built out over the years you want to make sure your money can get from point a to point b that's your bank account or um to your supplier manufacturer safely securely and effectively which means quickly and in the biz is what we call efficiently uh or quickly however you look at it we want to make sure it gets in the right hands as quickly as possible so with that being said we also have great insights and increased our brain reputation through trust and security that's where we stake our claim in making sure that as long as clients are happy and they know their money is safe and they know their money can get from point a to point in a fast secure and reliable fashion that's ultimately why we are in business so uh if you look right there through there we have compliance regulations for our money as we are secure no matter where you're sending money in the world whether it be china india mexico wherever you might be playing paying a supplier or a manufacturer or you're paying your va's you might be growing to a juncture where you have are bringing on um individuals that uh that can help you with your growing your business and that may be in vietnam for example or different countries around the world if you want to pay them a localized currency you can certainly do that too but we'll get into a little bit more of that here as well a little bit later risk management so in terms of risk management i want to make sure that everyone understands like this is not to scare anyone but as we grow businesses we want to make sure that people understand that their business is our business and we we try to mitigate risks from anything happening to our customers so we hold and possess licensing and regulations in europe usa uh united states uh for those of you out there who don't know what usa is um bad joke but uh hong kong japan in india and specifically in india i think it's really important to understand too uh we actually have rbi approval which is reverse bank of india our excuse me reserve bank of indiana um uh reserve bank of india and has approved our indian liaison office um what that means is the unique identification number provided by rbi to our ndo license is um is available so we actually have a solution um for foreign company registration number uh which is available as well for those who are for who need uh money in and out of our our entities in india and uh in terms of our online payment gateway service provider as you can see right there we are we are deemed an online payment service payment gateway service provider in india which in layman's terms means we act in india as an online payment gateway as prescribed by the rbi uh for purposes of facilitating certain payment services so we are one of the very few if not the only one of fintech companies that offer and develop our systems in the space in order to make sure that money can come in and out of india safely and effectively as well so that being said i want to uh make sure that everyone uh understands that it's very important to understand uh these regulations not every company can get these actions and you have to follow strict guidelines by every country entity or region entity here in the united states every state also has a compliance and regulation that we have to hold but in these countries you can know that we have these regulations in place that's safe secure and reliable as well so that being said moving on it's also easy to grow as you grow your business you need to make sure that you know that if you're going into multiple marketplaces not just on amazon amazon's amazing if you're starting on amazon amazing but what about the next marketplace as your brain grows what if you're growing into a canada or in australia or europe or any of those other amazing amazon locations what if you are going to be um what if you're going to be growing in the uh the space of maybe an alley excuse me uh not alibaba but a uh excuse me uh you're selling on uh wreckton uh in japan and or if you're in south america or central america and you want to sell in mercado libre or any of those amazing marketplaces worldwide um even in the united states we have we have loads and loads of amazing different um marketplaces that you might be growing your brand so you need a partner in the business that's going to be able to make it easier again that's the theme today easier not harder for you to grow your business and operate so why not operate under a single interface where you see your money coming and going this is gonna be your best friend for your uh financial partner your uh for your uh and for your if you're running your finances or if you have an accountant or someone who's running your business uh your monetary business you want to make it easier to see where all of your money is coming from into when it comes to international transpo uh trans uh first so multiple marketplaces multiple currencies you can actually have multiple receiving accounts in different countries worldwide saving money and time efficiencies as well it used to be that you would have to go to these entities or these countries and have a physical locale in the united states or canada or japan or germany or any of these places you want to have a receiving account but now with the likes of a ping pong you can have all these receiving accounts and convert money at a safe secure and reliable place but also it's easy to have one interface no matter what marketplace you might be on so that is how you grow as you're growing your brand make sure it's easy for you to grow long term not just have multiple logins and passwords and things like that for different receiving accounts why not just keep it all in one awesome location and that's going to be with the ping pong hopefully all right moving on hassle-free onboarding with us there is an amazing process that's hassle-free and onboarding so as as you open up a ping pong account and how you operate we to mitigate those risk uh in compliance measures and make sure that your money is safe secure and reliable anyone who opens up an account we go through a pretty easy straightforward process it's called kyc it's know your customer um what what you do here in order to make sure that your money is safe secure and reliable the kyc process is submitting your entities and making sure that once you register for a free account you can instantly gain access to local banking information in the countries where you want to do business plus you can make payroll and pay suppliers and much more without ever leaving the comfort of your home wherever you are in the world so by doing this in the kyc process you just have to submit your docs it's really uh documents it's really easy to do your protection is it's for obviously your protection and safety you upload the required and standard business documents in our uh and know your money is the safest hands as possible uh to prevent money laundering into account uh an account fraud by verifying your identity and preventing anyone who isn't you from accessing your account and information so once you do all that in our compliance team make sure that all things are in order again that's a pretty standard and easy process you can start to send and receive your money global ecommerce at the fingertips sending money accepting payments paying your va t and gst if you operate in marketplaces that need those or need to pay those you can top up your account and so much more with one single convenient platform that allows you to see all of your marketplaces all the time as well so with that being said now that you know how the process works how the final flow works so again if you're going to be growing your business in the form of payments for marketplaces and platforms and like we mentioned before like i see discount a shopify store rocky10 amazon of course all those different ways you want to make sure that your money is safe secure and reliable and it gets to you quickly and effectively um once once the money comes into your account you can receive it in any country or current excuse me any currency that uh can receive with ping pong uh account that could be the us dollar the inr uh euro the gr uh the british pound or the um great britain pound the canadian dollar japanese yen australian dollar the singapore dollar the the durham and the united emirates and the mexican peso once that money is received into your account again every two weeks amazon typically will pay you out to your to your account that you load in there but you actually have the ability to whenever you want to convert the funds other than having amazon do that for you so when that comes to play you want to make sure that you convert it safely on your terms so if you are just starting out your business you may not have a lot to convert and that's okay as you grow you want to make sure that you have control over the currency conversion instead of having the likes of amazon do it um we'll get to more of that in a minute uh when they have control of your money they can effectively charge more fees and effectively you lose more money in their account so when you do that when you're withdrawing your money you have a current account in your savings account um however you want to withdraw the funds it can be transferred to your india bank around the world in inr or the us dollar at high competitive rates um once the funds land in your ping pong account they're automatically transferred then to your india bank account uh effectively and safely and you're again you're not paying the fees that you would typically do when you are converting funds like through a bank or through a third party entity like a paypal or another technology so that's super important to understand and know that once you're once all this is happening you want to make sure that you're not leaving money on the table so how is amazon global selling program is going to help indian sellers so um i think this is very important uh for those of our uh our clients who are in india right now how is amazon's global selling program helping india sellers so there's two ways to sell obviously um that's not very uh it's not very difficult to understand so that there's sellers don't need to worry about packaged products um or arranging deliveries amazon fba can take care of packing delivering managing product returns everyone knows what fba is you pay the fees to store your items in the amazon's fulfillment centers to use amazon's fulfillment services and then mfn or you know after receiving orders through your merchant fulfilled network amazon once you receive the orders amazon will mention to you you ship out the orders and products directly to from your home business warehouse wherever that might be and you're solely responsible for locating the stock the packing picking the orders and organizing the shipments making sure that they get to that customer uh quickly and effectively and taking care of all the customer care so that being said those are the two ways that amazon's global selling program is helping india sellers but under those com comparably of the two um one you can rely on amazon's ways of fulfillment which is nice and convenient but unfortunately that might come at a cost for a lot of people um fba is always the the way to go i think as you're starting out if you don't have the solutions in place if you don't have a great resource network in place but also um but as you grow and as you develop and have these omni-channel approaches and the ways of growing your business you might want to effectively take on some of that responsibility yourself and uh fulfill um maybe as a backup or if you have low inventory in their warehousing you can fulfill through merchant fulfilled network it's it's definitely possible to do that so there's always a nice balance depending on who you were and as you grow your business moving forward moving on um what are the some of the pitfalls i i promised at the beginning of the session that uh for the go seller session that we would be talking about some tips that you might not know or tricks that you might not be aware of when it comes to some of the fees or some of the associations when it comes to um doing business with amazon after all again this is about uh we don't want to be anything that's hidden we want to make sure we uncover and we know what our cost of business is so there is a program called amazon currency converter uh for sellers or accs this is a program that amazon launched to help people who are not in one country that are doing business in that country but they need to receive money in their localized economies so for example that would be if i'm in the united states i'm in the united states and i'm about to decide to sell in canada i have no use for canadian dollar here in my local uh if i'm gonna buy groceries or pay my employees here locally or any of anything here in my local economy i can i very rarely would uh it would use canadian dollar here in my economy so i want to be able to have my my us dollar but when i'm selling in amazon amazon charges uh the the buyer canadian dollars and they receive canadian dollars but the program was created so that for the seller like myself once i receive those funds and every two weeks i get my remains paid out to my local bank account they will convert it for me but at a cost of course amazon with convenience comes cost and there's always a catch and with that catch i will i'm gonna go ahead and kind of bring back up to make sure that you all understand that with that convenience comes cost amazon will convert the funds for you every two weeks and they will convert it without hesitation every two weeks for you but that comes at a fee and i will and i'll blow up the the uh the screen again for you so you can see it comes with a percentage of your revenue at the end of the day so that is after your referral fees your warehousing fees all of the fees associated with the traditional fba model you're going to pay that and then you should have your net revenue but amazon will still convert your revenue over for you at another percentage of costs so as you can see access if you're doing an annual monthly income even if i'm selling a thousand us dollars in canada for example amazon will charge me 1.5 on that initial monthly volume to charge me just to convert my funds over to my local bank account so if i'm receiving doing a thousand usd uh canadian dollars they're gonna charge 1.5 percent to exchange that over to my bank account in the united states that is a lot as you start to scale as you can see twelve thousand dollars over the over the year that's not too much uh that's not terrible much uh if you if you're um you know a seasoned seller but as you grow you can see that you know that's 60 that amazon took from me that that was mine but they converted it for me but as they grow that number starts to skyrocket so if you're doing ten thousand dollars a month um you know that goes up to six six hundred dollars a year that you're you're losing out on or if you do a hundred thousand dollars a month or a million now we're now we're cooking now we're working with gasoline we're we're actually growing our business in all these marketplaces again this is just in each marketplace that you're operating in amazon every time that you convert and if you're working on that monthly volume just for example the hundred thousand dollars or that a million uh monthly volume you're going to see the that number start to skyrocket in terms of annual savings that you could be saving when you use the likes of a ping pong just for clarification their rates amazon's access rates do go down the more you sell but when you work with the likes of a ping-pong those rates are always going to beat out amazon no matter what so you're going to see that scalable solution as you do more business and as you're receiving more funds just for receiving money just to get paid out you could be saving the likes of forty two thousand dollars a year per marketplace or if you're you're one of the eight nine figure sellers out there that's listening to this you could be saving over half a million dollars if you're doing great business in international markets you don't want to leave money on the table make that money work for you especially when there's fees that are constantly being stacked up and you're going to pop back on here when there's fees that constantly get stacked up like this you want to make sure that it's putting and working for you you don't want to have to pay money more money towards amazon than you already have to and this is a very few places where you have control over the rates at which you are given as a entrepreneur so this is very important as you grow your international business know your numbers not just cost of goods not just your ppc costs but as you grow you need to know that your revenue is going to be uh your money is not left on the table so again going a little bit farther just to kind of this is one of the the core competencies and areas i want to make sure we hammer home is the amazon currency converter ecosystem if you're a part of this know that you have options um that are okayed by amazon and they're part of their referral network that are excuse me their partner network that um can save money for you um down the road so just to kind of kind of showcase again how much we're saving for uh indian based sellers just kind of quickly back down i don't need to go through the numbers because i know everyone here can can read but up to one percent or below all inclusive rates you're bringing home more of your hard-earned money from your international sales so just kind of give you a little bit of insight bring more money home may everyone's in this business too to be effectively uh and grow their business and be entrepreneur and grow that business uh to pay out their employees themselves their family members whoever that might be it's important to know that you have control over these funds um another thing i would like to kind of highlight too for everyone is that fastest payments when it comes to time and we we alluded this to the beginning that time is money um the fastest payments in the industry we pro that are processed again by any sort of third party service provider unfortunately if they don't have a good network in place it can delay your businesses anywhere from two to three business days again receiving your emits on day zero amazon mark initiates the payment transfer the service provider receives the funds and usually within two working days it's processed so you get paid out but with ping pong you can see that you're saving yourself two to three business days because instantly you're going to receive that same working day you're going to be receiving your payment instead of waiting on an international entity with other service providers so again the faster you receive your funds the more you can quickly invest pay off your debts pay your employees you know pay off the ppc uh or invest more into ppc again all these things when there's more money when your money gets to the end result quicker you can start making decisions quicker and the more you can turn your inventory the more you can invest and you don't have money tied up into uh this the the network that is money transfers you can start making business decisions that are effectively going to make your business run quicker and smoother so what we offer our customers in india as you can see international payments get virtual receiving accounts in us uk eu canada australia um the japan dubai you can receive anywhere in the world um you get a local bank withdrawal obviously funds automatically are transferred to your india bank account inr usd at high highly competitive rates and is also fast secured reliable transparent as well we don't hire any of our fees that ping pong makes when it comes to converting your funds you're going to see that front and center so the value of when it comes to valuable service with uh within our entities again trying to emphasize how secure it is you need to know um there's a theme here and making sure that you know that money is safe secure and reliable in our ecosystems when it comes to our international business um and making a lot easier for you um in terms of the op the ability to grow as your business grows again paying suppliers is the number one focus that ping pong has to date um you can have a virtual credit card and make payments to uh suppliers manufacturers with us um you don't have to worry about um the uh you have the option now to withdraw from an indian benefit uh beneficiary bank at the lowest currency conversion possible um and then obviously working capital loan uh by our partners that we have available as well that we that we make sure that is available for individuals so how how paying your suppliers gets easier just to kind of show you how um ping pong kind of makes the transparency process easy um the old traditional way is receiving your invoice from your supplier you initiate a wire transfer with a domestic bank it goes through multiple gates and with every gate that you go through or i call them doorways every doorway you go through someone wants to pay a toll so every toll that you have to pay there's going to be higher and higher rates people would typically pay anywhere from three to five percent for currency conversion that's not the case with us um because we actually eliminate a lot of those gates that money goes through we've developed a technological advanced way to streamline payment processes from point a to point b with our partners in order to save everyone time money and effective uh and effectively their energy and their their sanity if you will so it's just a lot more simple when um you don't do the old our kick was no more bank transfers or international wire fees those are days of the past you don't have to pay in order to transfer and send money somewhere with us you have to have those fees for international wire again quick wins with supplier pay functionality the the perks of cost-effective it's trustworthy secured it's very convenient and again save your time on things that matter like growing your business uh working on different ppc campaigns developing new products to launch in the ecosystem don't have to worry about money being centered and received overall working with safe secure reliable technology and partners is what we do best about ping pong if you haven't already deciphered already ping pong has more process more than 90 billion dollars today it's 100 now um we've worked with more than one million customers worldwide um we're handling funds at a you know an enormous rate and making sure that people receive their funds their hard-earned funds um and get to from point a to point b um with safety and security we support um 170 different countries that you can send money to um 13 different currencies excuse me it's not 130 it's 13 um and we have employees around the world that we'll kind of talk with and just kind of pat ourselves on the back as our growth as our sellers grow and as our partners grow we grow too so as you can see the transaction volumes that's not something that we uh could do alone that's something that all the sellers that they're trusting themselves with ping pong they're growing and as e-commerce will continue to grow uh in 2022 and beyond so will pong and so as we grow um our recognition gets uh grander as well um we have presence in 43 different uh countries and regions um it's important just to kind of see as a global country uh company our focus is solely on e-commerce and making sure that sellers get more of their uh hard earned money back and really focus on that b2b aspect of business so global footprint again we have lots of offices worldwide our international offices and we're currently building um in hangzhou region we're building um in the technology region a new building and it's going to be amazing so we are here for the long run um to help businesses grow in this capacity um and all i want to say is just thank you everyone for uh listening to some some of the information that i had to share with you today um it's not something that again i call it the non-sexy topic of growing your business but it certainly is important to understand that when you are growing your brand and again making it easier not harder for international e-commerce business to operate again money is at the center of it so we want to make sure that you understand that it doesn't have to be complicated it can be a lot simple and when you have the right partners in place it can be a lot more cost effective as well so i want to just thank everyone for spending some time with me today spending some time with understanding and taking notes just want to kind of throw up here if you have any questions on my presentation or if you uh just want to get in touch with me directly i'm sure it'll be announced here later in the event but ryan.kramer at pingpongx.us is my email address or you can catch me on live on our channels on crossover commerce podcast or our webinars here on ping pong channels we are always excited to hear how we can help people grow um their business in different ways in connecting with people that's what it's all about so i just wanted to thank everyone today for for listening to a little bit of what ping pong is doing and uh in helping people grows up without further ado i'm rea i want to go ahead and say uh throw back to you and thank you for uh having ping pong on and myself on for this a great event and we'll catch you guys next time enjoy the rest of it thank you so much for that insightful presentations if you do want to check ping pong payments out make sure to check the description box or to check go sellers official page all the contact information will be there if you want exclusive discount codes from ping-pong payments or all our registered uh partner for the event make sure to register for the event because we have exclusive discount codes for you so when you are building your amazon fba business or when you're launching your first product on uh the platform i'm not sure how many of you thought that you will be executing your fp business or you had a goal of selling your amazon business let me know in the comment box below how many of you are actually thinking or have decided to sell your amazon fba business in the future um after you're done scaling it or you are at a point where you are ready to sell let us know in the comment box below now we have gregory alfrink who is the director of marketing at empire flippers he is going to be talking about your exit strategy if you are ready to exit and everything that you should know before and after you're exiting your business over to you gregory so i'm excited to share this uh presentation with you guys i am going to be giving a presentation on exit planning what you need to know this is pretty valuable information if you're looking to sell your business uh for obvious reasons exit planning can help you get a much larger exit than if you don't do it so i highly recommend it but for those out there who are just building their businesses that you're nowhere near close to actually making that decision to sell your business yet hey this presentation is going to be good for you too there's going to be a lot of good information in here and in fact just building your business to sell even if you don't go selling is actually a huge benefit for your business because you're going to be leaner probably going to be a lot more profitable and you're going to be a lot more organized and let's face it as entrepreneurs organization is probably one of your weaker skill sets speaking from experience so who am i there is an unbearded picture of me uh i am the head of marketing my name is gregory alfrink the head of marketing over at empire flippers i lead the team i help grow the brand nurture traffic and what i mainly do in a lot of ways is what you're seeing here where i educate the market about what is possible because a lot of entrepreneurs i talk to don't even know that they can sell a lot of us started our business as a side hustle that grew into this miniature empire kind of over uh almost accidentally right and so when it comes to actually realizing you can sell it's a pretty cool moment for you realizing the side hustle you built that might be your full-time hustle now is an actual sellable asset it's a hard asset with inherent value that people want so what are we going to cover today we're really going to cover four main acts we're going to talk about what is exit planning how to supercharge your exit what buyers want when it comes to your business and finally where to sell your fba brand because it's not always clear where you should go like obviously we sell fba businesses we are the largest curated marketplace in the world when it comes to that we've helped create 70 uh millionaires at the time of exit and we have a buyer network of over 6 billion but that doesn't mean that we are always the right path for you so we'll go over a few different options there and kind of the pros and cons of both at the end so let's get into what is exit planning so exit plan is a very simple concept to understand it is merely the process of making a plan of changes that you carry out typically over a six to 12 month period so your business will result in a higher sales price and easier sales price so you get a more premium valuation and your actual business is a lot more attractive to an investor so an extra planning timeline might look something like this now if you use someone like us uh this is what it would look like obviously if you're doing it yourself this is gonna be different but you can definitely use this in your own strategy if you are going to do you know some of this like diy style right so the initial step is doing a call with us we have a entire team just dedicated to doing exit planning with entrepreneurs they're happy to talk to you usually these calls are not very long now depending on the complex of your business they can be as short as a 45 minute call where we help you come up with an initial plan and a set of action items or it might be even a monthly or weekly kind of call to make sure you're on track with what you stated is your goal and this is something that at least us we provide this completely for free to our customer base uh after that is all done usually there will be a follow-up call say a couple months where we just review everything like hey how did that go did you hit your action plan of what you were saying like you wanted to launch these two products or maybe you're liquefying uh some debt inventory that is slowed in terms of sales how did that go how's the business looking like all that kind of stuff and throughout this and like i said for more complex businesses we'll sometimes have coaching calls so if you are a fast growing fba business and you're doing a lot of experimental marketing part of these coaching calls would be like hey you should be careful there because you're getting closer to your timeline the experiment is still kind of in that experimental phase in terms of you know these specific ad campaigns you're doing for example maybe it's okay to shut them off if your goal is to sell within the next six months and just get rid of that experimental uh cost on your p l completely and we've uh had this happen where fba sellers they decide to you know i'm ready to sell they get into vetting and then as we're building their profit and losses i mean we realize oh whoa whoa wait wait what's this this is a ton of bad news because all this budget is going to experimental marketing and that's not great when you're going to sell a business you're excuse me you're best off having about six months before you sell where the business is kind of on maintenance mode more so than like growth at all cost mode so you want to get rid of things like that and that's what these coaching calls are really meant for to understand your business more and to make sure that we are prepping your business to become a truly sellable product by the end of all this planning right and then we also do a lot of expectation setting i think this is extremely important for you if you're a brand new entrepreneur there's a lot of misconceptions out there when you go to sell a business and it's totally okay to have those by the way because look as an entrepreneur selling your business is most likely a highlight event for you it's not something you're doing all the time even the most prolific sellers are usually only selling a business maybe once every year or two years right it's not something that's super common that you're doing week in and week out now you might have a portfolio of businesses and you sell a bunch of them at once but it probably took you several years to make each of those businesses and that's just again the nature of entrepreneurship right it's not something you get to do every day because you don't always have like just the endless supply of sellable businesses on hand right uh and then after all that expectation setting is to tell you kind of like what the process is what to expect how to get rid of things like emotional equity and make sure you're flexible in deals that's when you would enter an actual vetting process which is a lot more technical hands-on process of the whole exit planning timeline where our team would make an actual profit and a loss statement for you perspectives all that good stuff now if you're doing this by yourself when you enter this kind of phase in you know in your little do-it-yourself plan the interventing betting phase i highly recommend instead of you know maintaining your profit and loss statement yourself get an actual ecommerce accountant someone who is trained to do this because there are a few things you want to make sure you do such as converting your a p l from a cash basis accounting to an accrual basis accounting just by doing this you're going to increase your valuation a lot more and it can literally be the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the size of your business right so this is very very important do not go cheap on this either use us or use a professional accountant to build that kind of profit loss statement for you it's very very important and you'll want to also build that p l broken down by skus so people can see trends of individual products as well of how well they're performing and if you haven't done that yourself yet you might want to do that because remember what i said earlier even if you don't plan on selling these are still good steps to take in your business but you might do that uh break down your piano by skus and realize oh i am not making nearly as much money as i thought i was on your product x y and z maybe i should look at uh revamping the the promotion campaign or maybe even getting rid of those products right so let's talk about some of the advantages of doing exit planning there's two potential outcomes increasing your valuation like i said and a quicker sales process and usually these two things go hand in hand because a more premium valuation also tends to denote a much more attractive business and a more attractive business often has less risk because it is well documented on how everything is done and less risk creates a again a better evaluation so at the end of it all at exo planning uh strategy call and sessions all it is is a quick engine check and a lot of what we're going to tell you a lot of what other people would tell you is going to be pretty common sense but us as entrepreneurs we can get a little myopic as we're working in the weeds right and maybe can't really see the trees for the forest at the end of the day right or vice versa the forest or the trees you know what i mean uh the other thing is erasing deal killers there are things that can happen in your business that you are things that you might even have that wouldn't be a good fit if you're going to sell your business so for example let's say you have a an fba business with a valuation of 500 000 you know it's not the smallest business in the world but it's not exactly a huge business either so in this case if you have say 500 products that you're selling on that business that could be a deal killer like doing exit planning to lower your sku count into a more manageable number for uh ratio with your valuation makes a lot of sense because buyers don't want to buy a business that has just a flood of products that don't match up with the actual valuation right you probably have a lot of products you can liquidate get rid of optimize or relaunch and be a lot more successful right so that's an example of a deal killer i already mentioned experimental advertising that's another one launching a new product while you're trying to sell a business is usually a big no-no as well because remember you want to have a business that's kind of in this maintenance mode rather than growth at all costs when it comes to actually selling your fba business the other thing is identifying areas of growth so this is not for you to actually take and grow the business well it can be depending on your timeline of selling but this area can actually help you a lot when it comes to selling your business so if you tell a buyer and this is often uh doubles with us telling the buyer about all of our awards because every business has problems right every business has troubles has things that you specifically might not be the best fit to do and that's just the nature of entrepreneurship when you're wearing so many different hats but you can turn around these mistakes and these failures and these awards into opportunities for the buyer which you know we'll be talking about here in a little bit but by doing that by identifying these areas of growth or areas you're not that good at this can actually help you either if you're if you have like an 18-month plan to focus on those areas of growth increase your valuation or use those areas of growth to actually make your business more attractive when it comes to talking to buyers now by doing all this it goes without saying you're going to have a higher success rate when it comes to selling your business uh if you have a high quality business that goes through an exit planning like this whether you do it with us or whether you kind of do your own makeshift version at home this is going to help you to sell on multiple different fronts not just on the number front but also on the brand attractiveness front the good uh goodwill equity you have built and just honestly getting into the mind of the buyer because there's a thing that happens when you sell your business well or and people buy businesses do this too where we're all entrepreneurship or you're into entrepreneurship we're all into marketing all that kind of stuff but we tend to forget our copywriter hat at home when we go into this one of these m a transactions and we're not thinking about the buyer or the seller anymore what their what their desires pains and pleasures are right but by you doing this you start putting yourself more and more into the shoes of the buyer so you're able to customize your business or no matter which buyer you need to their needs like check like this will absolutely meet your lifestyle needs or your growth needs you know whatever your goals are right so who should do extra planning now i mentioned at the front of this even if you're still building your business you this is still valuable information for you but in terms of actually doing a call with someone like us or going through all the motions you should probably wait until you hit a certain uh a certain level so to speak and it's not it doesn't have to be a very big level but you should at least be making by right about five thousand dollars net profit per month and that's average say over a 12 month period and willing to be honest now the first part is clear that's the metric right but the second part you might be wondering like what do you mean by that i mentioned earlier uh that we as entrepreneurs we can be a bit myopic with our mistakes our failures and stuff like that and there's a tendency when you go to sell your business but you want to package it up like my business is amazing there's nothing wrong with it it this thing is like a gift to humanity if you take this over like this is such a good decision right by all you're doing by by saying that stop one if you're saying it to a buyer like if you go go privately that buyer is really not gonna trust you so that's not good right people who say stuff like that usually might be hiding something or they're they're so clueless about their own business they realize they're hiding something right uh if you say it to someone like us well through the expectations call we will cut down through all of that like hey you know we need to get the brass tacks and honestly it is much better for you to do that it is better for you to show your mistakes better to show your awards better to tell your broker or the buyer hey i messed up here what do like you know what do i do to fix this or whatever you know like because the buyer at the end of the day is gonna find all this stuff anyways and if you aren't honest and you aren't easy to work with these are all giant red flags for that buyer so you want to understand that going in so five thousand dollars net profit per month is usually a solid time to start uh you know a real extra planning call if you are looking to sell and the ability to be honest to be flexible and to keep the buyers desires in your mind the other thing is complex businesses so if you're running an amazon fba business that's operating in multiple different markets so usa canada mexico europe you name it you're there with all these three pls around the world all these different uh suppliers and manufacturers with that are helping your business grow at an accelerated cliff you have a much more complex business than like say a simple fba business only selling usa market with one product right you have a bunch of different stuff going on and in those kind of situations it'd be good to do exit plans you could look at supply chain with us you can look at your ad calls your tacos all those kind of things all like in each one of those things like in a more complex business like like your tacos taco cost optimization something like that can have huge knock-on effects when it comes to actually selling your business the other thing is three to 18 months to sell i would wager three months is a little bit too short but this is the general guideline if you're ready to sell right now three months is probably fine you're not going to do much to change the business anyways as long as you don't have a lot of the other stuff i was just talking about you probably could sell your business but three to 18 months those are you that's usually a good enough timeline for an exa planning exercise to actually make a reasonable difference in your business where you can actually focus on some of those areas of growth and pump up your valuation a bit and give you enough time to figure out what kind of sops you need to update or create because a lot of us don't even have them right to give to a uh to a buyer who's looking at buying our brand so let's talk about supercharging your exit and getting a much bigger valuation so a simple valuation formula looks kind of like this your valuation equals average net profit times your multiple now typically on average net profit we're looking at a 12 month average so there are other windows there are people who have used three months six months but 12 months is the golden standard and then there's the multiple and that's the real curious part of all of this like what goes into a multiple now i want to be clear here because if you are used to other m a brokerages you might have heard of things like two and a half three and a half x something like that when i'm talking about multiples i am not talking about annual ebitda or annual sde i'm talking about monthly sd and monthly ebitda that's a legacy thing that we do at ef because back in the day we used to sell three-month-old businesses and obviously you're not going to do an annual ipa uh but that is so when i say something like 36x that's 3x basically but your valuation your average net profit and multiple is based off of a formula called ebitda or sde so ebitda is earnings before interest depreciation earnings before interest depreciation taxes and amortization and then there is uh uh sde which is seller discretionary earnings so ebitda tends to be used in bigger businesses sde and smaller businesses but they're very very similar and for our purposes it doesn't really matter which one you call it because they are effectively pretty close to the same uh and that's all uh your average profit or your sde would simply be okay uh my revenue is thirty thousand dollars a month i'm making eight thousand dollars a month net profit after all expenses are paid right so your eight thousand dollars a month would then be times against the multiple and that's how you get your sd valuation so again there are multiple different windows here there's 12 months six months and three months we've seen it all we've sold it all 12 months so is the absolute gold standard if you want the best possible multiple you really want to do it 12 months so again this is why experimental marketing is not a great idea when you're going to sell because experimental marketing tends to be a loss leader at first do you really optimize the campaigns right so that is going to hurt your overall sds and you probably won't be able to make it as an ad back because of the ongoing cost so uh there are other things here too though so like a six month like when would you want to use a six month window well if you are experiencing a sharp decline in sales it might make a lot of sense or a sharp increase in sales so if your fir if your last six months reflects uh the more honest truth of the reality of the business versus the whole 12 month period then it can make sense for you to use this three months i wouldn't i would almost never recommend you using a three month window this is a window that most buyers are not very comfortable with especially at a high level but you could use it again for very similar reasons as i mentioned the six month or if your business is very young now notice uh the twelve six and three months as you go down that window your actual multiple will probably be less 12 month businesses like i mentioned is cold standard and they are going to get the best multiple so you always want to plan for 12 months unless you have you know other circumstances that are kind of forcing your hand and using that six and three month window so the multiple there are three main categories when it comes to increasing your sales multiple there's your uh net profit which is obvious why that would do it the higher net profit tends to create the bigger multiple uh and then there is efficiency so this is your marketing and your logistics and all of this is basically streamlining your business right so it is cutting down on your expenses and increasing your overall net profit which goes into the first part and then there are growth multipliers and these are often areas of growth you may not be seeing or you may not see being inside of the business some of these growth areas are easy to implement others are less so so all of them can have a meaningful impact on your valuation this is some of the examples of a growth multiple and i just want to be clear this is by no means an exhaustive list there's a bunch of other stuff in here too that we could look at during an actual exit planning call but again if you're doing this on your own these are some of the main areas for you to look at so your revenue streams the more uh revenue diversity you have and the same goes for traffic the better bigger and better multiple you're going to get so you have five different products that's better than having one product that makes up all the revenue of the business because what happens if that product goes out of style not it's not great for your business right if same with traffic diversity if you're getting all of your traffic from say facebook ads well what happens if facebook changes their policy or bans your account or the rising cpa cost gets too out of control for you well you might not have a business anymore right so having multiple layers of traffic and ability to make revenue is very very important then you have logistics and supplier relations and these obviously kind of go hand in hand making that as efficient and as cheap and as fast as possible is really the name of the game it's usually going to be a blend so the absolute cheapest uh supplier and cheapest logistics company is typically not going to be your answer you want it to have a bland blend and a hybrid so there's going to be some trade-offs here to give you the most max efficiency to actually getting your product into people's hands while having a good margin and then there's pricing so most entrepreneurs i meet are really bad at pricing they tend to under charge instead of overcharge so there's usually rooms of improvement here just by lifting the price a little bit and then there's utilizing email amazon fba in particular is a tough business model to build an email list but if you can pull it off i highly recommend it because an email list is one of the most powerful things you can do very evaluation because not only does it give you a chance to make more revenue off the same customers because now you can you have a captive audience right that you can promote new products to but you can also create traffic diversity because email marketing is its own traffic channel now let's move into uh cro conversation optimization so going back to pricing here you can use cro to help increase the conversions of your product listing page and usually these tests don't take very long they can be a week two weeks to find out like oh i just increased my conversions with the same amount of traffic by say 10 15 and you can use the principles of cro to find the fair market price of your product because like similar to the supplier and logistics the actual fair market price of your product is not usually going to be the highest price nor the lowest price it's going to be something in between that creates the most velocity of cells at the highest margin possible so this is something i highly recommend you use when you're using cro is to test pricing all the time a lot of most people they test it once and they call it done you know one and done never do it again never look at it again but markets change so i would recommend doing a pricing cro test at least twice a year if not more in certain occasions then there's your branding and branding is a tough one because in a lot of ways branding makes up a large portion of what your business is in terms as an asset the goodwill brand of what you have built but it is also the squishiest thing for us to actually put hard metrics on of what is a good brand the nice thing for you as an amazon fba entrepreneur is like you kind of had to have this built in your business model because you have all the reviews right so you have all your customers leaving reviews on your product listing page that is kind of your brand because most amazon fba uh businesses are only on amazon they don't usually have a ddc component or anything like that or if they do it's usually a quite small part of their mix but your branding basically comes down to those reviews and something that buyers love to see is tons of reviews with an average aggregate of four and a half stars or up or at least four stars and up cause that denotes this product is quality and the amount of customers that uh bought it gives us some statistical significance in its weight when it comes to your evaluation and then finally is team resources do you have a team are you a solopreneur is your team working at the most effective uh methods and patterns to increase your valuation you know are you allocating resources correctly and usually in bigger companies this the answer to that question is a no so there's almost always an improvement you can do to make your team work better uh have a better productivity and not burn them out at the same time right so with the effect of exit planning you can achieve a higher valuation with a minimum minimum amount of effort on your part and it kind of serves as this guiding light to help you make the most profitable decisions with your business whether you're going to sell it or not right because again this is all just very helpful stuff for you to consider even if you aren't planning on making an exit so let's talk about the best time to sell your business so this is actually a question i get a ton uh people always ask me like when's the best time when our buyers buy when is it the highest multiples all that kind of stuff and those are great questions i get why people ask them but really if you want to time the market the best way to time the market is when it makes sense for your personal or business goals to sell if you can ask yourself the question if i sold my business today at say uh 30x of the uh 12 month average in a profit and that's a conservative multiple let's say 30x would i get significantly closer to my personal business goals if the answer is yes only then should you consider really selling your business otherwise just keep growing and don't worry about that because timing the market is impossible uh i've seen a lot of friends who tried to do this even uh uh at ef over my six-year career it usually doesn't work out great for them usually they end up losing money because of the things they do the things that they rush to do trying to time the market but the some things to look for also is what buyers are looking for right they want fba brands with strong finances right because p l's is usually the number one thing that is a mistake in your business in your e-commerce business most e-commerce entrepreneurs i know have made multitude mistakes in their profit and loss statements which hey i get it i'm not a numbers guy either but this goes back to what i said earlier hire an accountant and specifically a bookkeeper that is specialized in e-commerce you want that because it will save you so much headache heartache and so much pain thinking about stuff later on when it does come time to sell and you don't want to over optimize your business i have a friend he has sold many many businesses with us and it's always a herculean task to actually sell his business with us not because they're bad businesses it's just because he's too good at running them he optimizes everything to the inch degree it's to the point where buyers don't really see like what can i do like what is left to do on this business right so you don't want to explore all of your growth areas and maximize all the amount you want to leave some room for growth for the buyer so let's dive deeper into what do buyers really want when it comes to buying a business buyers are not looking to purchase a job they want an asset that has real leverage that can provide an aggressive return on their money while also being attractively aligned with the goals now i say aggressive because hey running a business is risky it is a very volatile business that we're all in or your career choice as an entrepreneur is probably one of the riskiest decisions you've ever made right so and likewise for the buyer they're about to outlay a bunch of capital into what is to be a fair risky asset right so they want to see there is potential in this business to really give good returns so what are examples that can make your business more attractive to buyers in general so these are just some stuff you can do and are by no means like an exhaustive list either but documented sops that are updated so maybe you got really excited one weekend and you did all these sops and uh then they're all out of date because it's been like two years since you even looked at them right to go back and update those because these serve as kind of like the buyers operator manual for your business and updated sops are fantastic for a buyer to see it shows you you're really on top of your business number one but two for the buyers like great i don't have to really think about the infrastructure here they have it all laid out clearly for me next is minimum hours so the less hours it takes for you to maintain the business the more the more of a sign that is to the buyer like hey this is a this is an engine of growth and leverage this is a system of scale we got here versus uh the entrepreneur working the burnout hours of like 18 hours a day seven days a week right buyers don't want that they want the investment machine so by you being able to uh minimize your own hours that's a really good sign like of course if you're planning on growing obviously minimum hours is thrown out the winner but if you're maintaining the business uh in preparation for sales you're not really going through one of those big growth cycles you should be able to work you say five ten hours a week on your business and everything is fine right everything is coming along smoothly the next thing is your mistakes i already went over mistakes i'm not going to go deeper into this but often your mistakes are the opportunities for the buyer so don't hide them show them you have to be proud about it but definitely buyers love to see this and it builds real trust between you and the buyer the next is a talented team and that this is by no means a requirement in fact i would argue most businesses we sell don't really even have a team it's often a solopreneur who's built just a really big business by themselves for the most part but if you do have a team there is value in that especially if the team is going to be going with the buyer or if the team is willing to stick around to help the buyer build their own team before they go off to join you on your next project right and there's clean p l clean profit loss statement all right i've already hammered this now many many times i will go into it again as well but uh finally there's the plug and play aspect and this kind of works into the minimum hours can someone just jump into your business look at the sops and do about 80 as good as you are doing if the answer is yes you have a solid business this is pretty plug and play and that is great because a plug-and-play business also is often easier to grow because the buyer doesn't have to figure out how do i maintain this it's already figured out so they can focus a lot more on the growth and scaling aspect of that business which they need to do if they're going to get an aggressive return so what are examples that buyers don't care about stuff to avoid vanity metrics is number one sometimes i see people say oh about 30 000 followers on facebook or you know hundreds of thousands on tick tock or whatever does not matter it does not matter revenue even in a certain cases is a vanity metric in my opinion that does not move the needle of the business now could it sure it absolutely could but for the most part it is a vanity metrics it's top line not bottom line people don't really care about it that much so don't focus too much on it extra domains you might have a whole portfolio of domains of unstarted sites right and that is basically worthless you uh it doesn't really matter you can throw into the bot of the buyer in fact you should it's a nice little add-on but it's not going to help you with anything uh no trademarks or trademark uh sorry let me move by you think yeah there we go uh trademarks can help you uh but sometimes they don't most of the time they don't really give you a big push so having a trademark or a patent all that stuff is good but they won't help you as much as you think when it comes to actually selling your business now things like you know amazon uh registry 2.0 brain ratios 2.0 i think though that stuff is very important and trademarks and pads those are good nice to haves but they're not requirements and if you do have one unless you have something really really special like a brand new invention or something like that usually the trade market patent aren't going to be the biggest driver for increasing your valuation or even the interest in buying the business and of course there's non-monetized email lists now this happens less and less than it used to but i have seen so many sellers at eap where they'll come to me hey i have this list of about 50 000 subscribers how much is it worth and i would say well how much how much money has it made you like well nothing i haven't emailed them yet because i don't want to annoy them i just was building it for the buyer to take it over do not do this because if you do this that email list is basically worth nothing you would have been better off not even having it right so non-monetized email list that actually hurts your valuation more so than helps you and buyers will probably discount you even further because like hey look i have this list of 50 000 people that have never heard from you and now they're hearing from me what's going to happen they're probably going to like like don't even remember where i am click spam and then they kill my sender's list right uh the other thing is less inventory so this is a double-bladed uh sword it is again like a a hybrid right you don't want too too little or too much so less inventory like too much inventory can make you selling your business harder it will not help you improve your valuation nor likely the attractiveness of the business instead you want to have a good inventory for casting where you always have the right mix of inventory like it is scary if someone's buying a million dollar business and you only have ten thousand dollars worth of inventory like you are very close to a stock out and that's going to hurt the algorithms dramatically right but it also can go the other way you know if you have a 200 000 business with 300 000 in inventory like what is going on why do you have so much inventory like you are ruining your margins by keeping so much inventory on hand right so you want to have a balance just like the pricing uh stuff that i talked about earlier next is potential never selling potential now i've given a few hints already throughout this whole presentation on how you actually can sell on potential but the thing we want to avoid here is what some entrepreneurs do when they go to sell their first business but when again they're dressing it up like this is the perfect thing it's the best thing ever they'll say like oh this is the next uh 5 million 10 million dollar brand right here you'd be so lucky to buy it right now and then the buyer would be like great i will give you two dollars and once it is a five million dollar brand i'll give you an extra million right they're going to do some ridiculous offer that doesn't even make sense because what you're telling them is a dream right like because they're you're they're hearing you say this is the next five million dollar business but in their mind they're looking at the p l and thinking like well according to the p l you're the next eight hundred thousand dollar business so like let's let's let's calm down on that right so the best way to sell on potential is again by showing your mistakes so you're not even really telling them uh uh you know what to do you're just telling them what you did bad and by looking at those mistakes that often builds the potential in the buyer's mind like oh wow they are really bad at pvc optimization i happen to be really good at that just by looking through their ad account i can see so much room for growth and that's the better way to actually sell on potential next is understanding the buyer so just like you the buyer has dreams wishes and nightmares that you want to avoid right what is the thing that is driving them to buy the business what are their pleasures what are their pays put on your copywriting hat they try to position your fba business that you want to sell as the perfect solution the panacea if you will to their problems right so maybe they're very lifestyle focused well you just been maintaining your business for the last six months working two hours a week and so you can point that out like hey look if you're just looking for a like a pure uh you know lifestyle kind of business you don't need to grow the business you can just buy it for the cash flow and work two hours a week maybe you know every now and then it goes up to four to six hours if you need to do something really extra but overall this business will provide you that work like balance maybe they're looking for cash flow so they want really high margins and maybe your business is that or maybe your business could become that right maybe you are running it as a hardcore growth cutting into your margin but now that you know that the buyer is seeking just you know healthy cash flow healthy margin you can show them hey look if you stopped doing x y and z that i was doing as an engine of growth they would actually increase the margin right next is scale like you if you know the buyer is say has a ton of capital and their plan is to scale the business you could tell them why you couldn't scale the business because you probably don't have all that capital you need to go and go really really big most entrepreneurs do not have say an extra million two million dollars to pop into inventory pump into product launches prompt it to uh paid advertising all that kind of good stuff they usually have to do a more incremental as a bootstrap entrepreneur right versus the buyer might be someone who has raised tens of millions of dollars so for them putting two million dollars into a business to really put fuel on the fire so to speak is no big deal you can position your business in that way or maybe the buyer has another business so let's say you're selling jump ropes they're selling kettlebells you can you find that out you can say like hey you can merge these two brands a bit together where they play off of each other right so maybe your jump rope business you had built that email list of five thousand ten thousand subscribers that bought your jump rips off amazon well guess what that person can instantly take that five thousand ten thousand email subscriber list and start promoting their kettlebells with the jump ropes right so now they're working together it's a synergy play and you can offer that kind of solution to that kind of buyer so who are buyers anyways so this is six archetypes that we use their customer personas buyer personas if you will uh of people that you'll probably be dealing with now newbie norm is the most common newbie norm usually will be buying something between uh usually three hundred thousand dollars in valuation price and less usually they're not buying the million dollar deals but it can happen we've seen it happen uh you know entrepreneurs coming from different walks of life they might come in and buy a business like that but newbie known as they'll usually need more handholding they're brand new so you've got to approach them where you're really taking them step by step this is again why well-documented sps are very very important because there's a high chance depending on the price of your business you will be dealing with a newbie norm next is do-it-yourself day which is like the next evolution of the norm someone that is really dive deep into uh you know a certain skill maybe it's like ppc or logistics management they've gotten really really good at it and these kind of buyers are looking for businesses with problems so let's say uh you run into a diy dave who's really into supply chain and that's not your thing that's not you're the thing you're best at at least that's the that's why they would want your business because that is the thing they are really good at they like rolling up their sleeves and getting to uh the engine themselves right next is portfolio paul and they're more of a lifestyle driven kind of person and portfolio paul they're really looking to buy a bunch of different businesses to create a portfolio of cash flows they're not necessarily looking to scale anything dramatically they'll probably want growth but that's not the main intent they just want a bunch of different revenue streams coming in then there's a flip of fred which is where we get the second half of our name and these are people who buy businesses that are struggling and then turn them around and sell that same business usually with us again we're in like six to 18 months and so for them they are probably going to really hard negotiate you on the actual price because for them the cheaper they can get you the faster they can really cash out on that growth of equity so flipper press tend to negotiate much harder but at the same time flipper threads tend to buy a lot more declining businesses because that's a big part of what they do it's just like in real estate right you want to buy the thing with a broken foundation or you know the cosmetic damage so you can fix it then flip it for a much higher price right so if you're running an fba business that is declining then this is the type of buyer you might end up dealing with a flipper fred or a diy day flip or fries they will tend to negotiate much harder than say a diy dave they tend to have a lot more experience because they're buying businesses all the time the next is strategic sally so this is the buyer uh that is similar to the synergy play i was talking about earlier so they have another business they're and they're looking to buy a business that complements their first business which is usually already a decent sized business with good cash flow good margins and this buyer is actually in my opinion the absolute best buyer out of any of them because strategic sally when she buys a business one plus one doesn't equal two for her it equals five because of the amount of compounding growth she can do between the two brands so this is the buyer that can pay you the absolute most and because the buyer uh is buy box is extremely narrow it's very specific right because i just any business is going to be a nice bolt-on acquisition for them has to be a very specific business they are often willing to uh bid the most they're willing to pay the most and usually give you the best terms because they can beat out all the other buyers pay a premium for you and they know they still come out dramatically ahead for it now the next buyer the second best buyer on yours probably investor ivan these are people who have raised uh family money for office from family offices right money from family offices and private equity sometimes to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars they tend to be financial wizards they tend to have a an m a background like a traditional m a banker background and these people are at once the easiest people to work with but the ones you have to be pretty careful with because because they have such good experience with the m a world and you probably don't they can run a circle around a lot of sellers with all their terms in terms of earn out stabilization payments how those are structured so for them the deal really comes together in the structure of the deal and less of the actual purchase price of the business so that's obviously a factor too so you want to make sure you really dot your eyes and cross your t's when working with an investor item now again usually they're very great to work with they're very professional uh and they're a pleasure to work with we've sold tons and tons of businesses to the investor i've been category it's just something to watch out like if you're not using a broker these are the people to really watch out for because they are so skilled in the deal structure process and you most likely don't have the same skill set so where do you sell your fba brand so you really have two main options you can do it privately or you can do it through a broker so let's go over these two things now obviously i'm extremely biased i'm going to tell you to use a broker but uh there are benefits to both that i'll get into here so let's go back here a slide uh or to just look at the private deal versus the broker so private deal if you're going to do a private deal you have a lot of hustle in front of you you got to go find a buyer list uh either you can buy one or you most likely you'll just create a listing like a google spreadsheet and just have a ton of people to manually outreach to on top of running your business like normal then you need to get them interested in your business you need to build their p l you need to do all the negotiations yourself you need to do all the legal contracts yourself say like the asset purchase agreement i highly recommend don't use theirs well not necessarily don't use theirs but be careful of theirs because remember what i said like in investor ivan they have an uh boilerplate apa but that boilerplate apa works in their favor usually not your favor so you want to look into that and it's important for you to remember so a lot of people think that a private deal will get you more money at the end of the day because you don't have to pay a broker to the commission uh and that makes sense but there's a lot of problems with that there's a like if you go like like the benefits of this is only surface deep because once you dig in a little bit you realize this is often the worst option you can do as a seller because and the buyer will tell you like hey look yeah don't go with a broker don't pay that 10 15 or whatever the number is right pay nothing and keep the rest of the money because brokers only charge a premium that they have to pay which some of these people will say and it's absolutely not true the reason why they're saying that to you is because they know if you go with a broker you're going to get a real valuation and now there's going to be competition for your business which inherently makes it harder for them to uh buy your business or makes it more expensive at least for them right the only benefit a buyer gets and this is an important thing to remember even if you still choose to go to pri uh privately it's very important to remember the only benefit a buyer has with going privately instead of using a broker like us is they get the business for cheaper because the entrepreneur doesn't know what they're worth and so there's a higher chance that they can find a business that is lower price from what it should actually be from what the market going rate would be right versus going through a broker you don't have to deal with these problems because broker has a valuation team as a marketing team as a buyer network it does this every day so you don't worry about the skill disparity between the uh you and the buyer and they know how to read these term sheets to make sure that the apa as a purchase agreement when you do sign isn't against you but rather is for you or usually it's a mix right because at the end of the day at ef for example we operate on a win-win-win basis the buyer wins because they get a good deal the seller wins because they got a life changing exit that is also a fair deal and ef wins because our buyers and sellers win right so that's the way we operate but if you go private it is a different story don't fall into what i call the off market fallacy buyers will love you if you do because that will tend to mean they'll get a better deal now with this meme now i can go on to the next part here this is one of the best parts of using a broker and this is especially true if you have a million dollar and up fba business still true even if you don't have a million dollar fba business uh but once you get into seven figures and eight figures in terms of your evaluation this is wicked important for you to do you need to make your buyers compete they hate it they don't like it and this is a big reason why they'll tell you don't go with a broker but even if you go privately if you choose not to go with a broker still make these people compete make them compete for what you have built they are hyper hyper competitive they will like to start out bidding each other to try to get your deal at one point in uh the last two years uh as the aggregators really came onto the scene i had a very funny moment a funny comment from an aggregator you told me hey if aggregator x makes an offer on a deal let me know because i'll beat it and that was their due diligence that was like their initial like five minute due diligence like hey good enough for them good enough for me let's go i want to get in on the offer right so these people are hyper hyper competitive they also have investment mandates to buy businesses they raise all this money and they have to deploy it so by making them compete all you're doing is increasing your valuation and if you have a high quality business you most likely will not drive them away now using a broker makes it super super easy because again we do this every single day of the week so we know what to watch out for what to look for and how to help you with this but you can definitely do it alone as well now just to beat a dead horse here here is why competition can breed life-changing exits so what you see on the screen is a real story this is a real customer of ours and i actually have a lot more stories like this nowadays so if you want to reach out to me feel free to uh but this seller they got an initial private offer for 1.4 million dollars with an earn out and they only had a few days to decide this is super super common because what is happening here is aggregator wants to take the fba business off the market quick and they want to use the tried and true marketing principle of scarcity and urgency combined so in this scenario you have one offer right you have a scarce offer and you have the urgency you got three days to decide if you're a solopreneur getting offered 1.4 million dollars like whoa that's a lot of money like you are literally going to become a millionaire all you have to do is say yes it's hard to say no to that as a bootstrap entrepreneur luckily this person did he went came to us for a second opinion and we sold that exact same business for over 2.1 million dollars a 1.8 million dollars up front that's 400 000 more than the entire deal that he originally got right and that was yeah he also got a 200 000 per year stability payment based on uh revenue milestones and five percent uncapped revenue share for two years on anything above the agreed upon milestone so yes this seller definitely paid a commission in fact he paid a bigger commission than he was expecting to but he is pretty happy because at the end of the day he has a lot more money in his wallet so was it worth it for that entrepreneur i say yes he's thrilled in fact he just went on a giant kayaking trip with his family all across canada they had this awesome thing they took like two three months off and made all these cool memories all because he didn't give in to the scarcity of urgency and he didn't buy into the off market fallacy now i'm not saying you need to use a broker at all to do what i just showed on that last slide i'm just saying it helps if you go with a private uh route keep everything i mentioned here in mind and if you want an exit planning call you can uh use the link down below and even if you don't use us like it's it's still very useful for you i have friends who use our accent planning service and then they go sell privately totally fine it's no pressure at all if you want a more automated thing because you're an introvert like me and rather not talk to anyone you can just use our evaluation tool and you'll get a rough estimate of what your business is worth based on real sales data from our marketplace if you want to connect with me my email is just greg empireflippers.com and of course you can come check us out at the blog the youtube channel all that good stuff and i hope you guys all got a lot of value from this presentation talk to you later bye thank you so much for that insightful presentation gregory um i personally think that selling your amazon fba business is a really big decision that sellers have to make recently i met a seller who decided to sell their amazon fba business because they found a new product that excited them so much that they wanted to focus their time and money and effort on that and when you're doing that if another product excites you it's important for you to sell your previous business um because you will not be giving it 100 there and many people need capital to fund their new um product as well so sell their business and of course you can use that money or capital to fund in your new project if you are um in the similar situation like the seller was i think this was a really great session for you all right this is all we have for you today and before i end this event and before i end day four of ghost seller 2022 i think it's really important for us to see what all we've learned by far so day one was all about product research so if you are a beginner level seller you need a really good product to sell on amazon so check that day out we spoke about product research and of course kian who is the ceo of titan network spoke about how you can source your product um effectively on amazon so check that out in day two we had three amazing speakers don hines spoke about funding and raising capital for your amazon fba business followed by oliver muller who is a tax advisor in hellotax who spoke about vat in taxes and how most sellers miss that while calculating their profits on amazon followed by um prabhat shah who is a marketplace consultant who spoke about how you can launch your amazon fba product um on amazon heat to spoke about a perfect strategy and covered everything that you need to know if you are planning to launch a product on amazon day three was about advertising nathan ventretti who is the director of customer success covered that topic on how you can or what are the advanced level pc strategies that you need to bring down that a course on amazon he spoke about how seller app can help you achieve that as well then we have dilapidant who's the co-founder of seller app he spoke about business monitoring and important data metrics to track if you want to make more profits on amazon and see where you're leaking money from and of course their fourth the last day we had three amazing speakers again first we had ben um ben leonard who's the co-founder of pcom brokers he spoke about brand management followed by ryan kramer uh from ping-pong payments who spoke about how you can or how you should be indulging in cross-border e-commerce cross-border e-commerce across border expansion and of course lastly we had gregory from empire flippers who spoke about exiting your amazon business exiting of course is really important for you before i end the event i would like to thank everyone who made this event happen um the marketing team at sellerapp thank you so much for putting in day and night to making this event really successful the audience who are watching right now thank you so much for your constant support and thank you so much for being so interactive throughout the event um i really love uh creating content for you all we love creating content for you all so thank you so much for being here and of course this event would have not been possible without our trusted partners and speakers who recorded their bids and put in time and effort to being here and spreading the knowledge of how you can be successful on amazon i would like to thank you all for that before you leave if you haven't already you can still register for go seller 2022 we have a very limited time offer running for you all if you register for the event you get exclusive quotes from all our trusted and registered partners alongside with some pdfs that are going to help you make the most out of your amazon journey so of course there's still some time left and you can do that for more information check out our go seller official page for watch links for previous days if you want to get in touch with any speaker or partner you saw speaking in the past four days all the information will be out there and if you have any more further questions leave us an email at support there is seller up.com and we would love to help you i'm afraid this is all we have for today thank you so much for tuning in to go seller 2022 and of course until the next time i see you happy selling [Music]
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