#384 – The Slow Burn of Success: Cigars, Connections, and Business Talk with Abe Chomali
Join us on this episode of the AM/PM podcast where I sit down with the multifaceted Abe Chomali to explore his journey world of e-commerce, entrepreneurship, and owning an Amazon PPC agency. As a veteran in retail and now at the helm of a flourishing E-commerce agency, Abe offers a lot of insights into the significance of networking and industry events, sharing how these gatherings serve as critical conduits for growth and building connections. Listen in as we chuckle over Abe’s famed beard and its role in personal branding, while also retracing his remarkable evolution from mail-order work to Amazon mastery, an intricate dance akin to clockwork precision.
As the conversation unfolds, we tap into the nuances of managing a PPC agency, stressing the importance of personalized and transparent client relations. Discover the collaborative strategies his agency uses, including the integration of tools like Slack, to keep brands in the loop and drive toward their goals. Abe and Kevin dissect the hiring process for agencies, underlining the need for a blend of numerical acuity and agile thinking to navigate Amazon’s dynamic terrain. Tune in to learn about the Amazon PPC tactics that truly add value to your Amazon FBA business, as we navigate the shiny distractions in favor of tried-and-true ad placements like Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands.
Wrapping up this insightful dialogue, they dive into the steps one agency owner took to dramatically boost operational efficiency and client rapport. Hear how the introduction of ClickUp and the strategic placement of a traffic manager can revolutionize business workflow. The episode also peeks into our unique interview tactics that aim to build a harmonious team dynamic. We don’t just talk shop; we also celebrate the cigar culture and its ability to foster profound connections amidst the fast-paced buzz of the business world. Sharing anecdotes from events like the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and the Collective Mind Society, I reflect on the transformative power of these experiences in forging deep personal and professional ties.
In episode 384 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Abe discuss:
- 00:00 – E-Commerce Entrepreneurship and Amazon Success
- 12:39 – Client Collaboration for Effective Communication
- 16:10 – Adapting to Changes in Amazon Algorithms
- 19:19 – Common Mistakes in PPC Management
- 22:58 – Effective Keyword Campaign Strategies
- 24:24 – Improving Agency Efficiency and Client Communication
- 27:59 – Effective Interviewing Techniques for Staff
- 34:26 – Brand Acquisitions, Challenges, and Changes
- 39:16 – Deepening Connections Through Cigar Conversations
- 43:46 – Importance of In-Person Networking
- 47:38 – Business Event Experiences and Connections
- 49:14 – Collective Mind Society Trip Experience
- 53:41 – Cigar Lounge Discovery and Membership Benefits
- 57:00 – Kevin’s Words of Wisdom
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 384 of the AMPM podcast. This week, my guest is none other than Abe Chomali. I’ve known Abe for quite some time. Abe was a seller for a long time, owned some retail stores, got into e-commerce, did Amazon and now he’s running a very successful PPC agency. Abe and I talk about PPC, we talk about running agencies, we talk about some of the big events out there. There’s a big one coming up next week Prosper Show in Las Vegas. Abe tells us some of his favorite events and why he likes them and why events are important. He also talks about the Collective Mind Society event that he came to that I run with Norm Ferrar. Enjoy this episode with Abe. It’s gonna be a good one.
Kevin King:
Mr. Abe Chomali, how are you doing man? Good to have you here on the AMPM podcast.
Abe:
Oh, I’m really honored and I’m happy that you finally got me on here.
Kevin King:
I heard this was on your list. You, like, made a vision board or something. I don’t know. Maybe you do vision boards a little differently, but you made an Abe vision board and said, hey, I wanna be on these things, and the AMPM podcast was one of the things that was on that I need to have that check mark. So is that true?
Abe:
It’s definitely true. About a year ago, being in the world of Amazon, I consume all things Amazon, from like websites to social media and especially podcasts and every time I would listen to podcasts I would think I have a viewpoint or an idea that might be useful here, and friends would say you should be on these podcasts. So about a year ago I said I wanna actively connect with and reach out to all these people who I know anyway, but talk about being on all these podcasts, and I made a list. There was about a dozen podcasts that I wanted to be on and by being intentional, I’ve gotten myself here within that time. So, yes, I’m checking them off one by one.
Kevin King:
There you go, and I don’t know that some of you are listening to this on the audio with those of you watching here on YouTube. You see that Abe has a beard and there’s another guy in this space that also has a beard, and I know that I’ve been at conferences where people have said, hey, did you see that Norm was there? Or hey, did you see that Abe was at this conference? I’m like no, Abe wasn’t at this conference or no, Norm wasn’t at this conference. So you two guys are kind of known in this Amazon space as the two beard guys, cause you both have similar beard. You’re not in your 30s anymore and so it is this deliberate or you always had the beard, or is it a is a marketing? I know Norm says it’s for marketing. That way you can say he’s the beard guy that makes him stand out.
Abe:
My beard is definitely it’s a marketing beard, it’s sort of a look. It’s a thing I got comfortable with over a while. Through my whole adult life, I’ve had beards and I’ve taken them off at different points in time and I think for the last three years or so it has sort of become the thing that people who meet me recognize me for. So for the moment it’s sort of here to stay.
Kevin King:
You and I when did we first actually meet? Or when did you see me speak somewhere, or when we actually first?
Abe:
I know the so the first time that I saw you speak was at an event by Ed Rosenberg. You flew in to Brooklyn specifically to talk to a group of sellers that were there just to speak to you or just to hear you, and you spoke for probably four hours plus, with an intermission in between, and you basically said guys, I hope everybody has gone to the bathroom because I’m gonna be talking a lot and I’m gonna be going at full speed, so you better pay attention. And you, at the end of it, you sent us a slide deck that had something like 400 slides on it, and that was my first. That was the first time I ever heard you.
Abe:
I had seen you on social media, a little bit here and there, but I didn’t realize the depth of what you knew and I didn’t realize the extent to which you understood how Amazon works. I think I gave you this example of like a clockmaker, it’s not just seeing the hand spin, but inside there’s a whole bunch of gears turning and a whole bunch of little moving parts that add up to what we see when we look at the time and I felt like, whatever you were doing, you understood all of those mechanics with how Amazon was working, like it was really really clear to me.
Kevin King:
I appreciate that. That’s very that’s, that’s a very kind of you. So how, when? Let’s talk about you, when did you start doing e-commerce? I know you before you used to run some, some retail stores and you tell me a little bit. What’s the story of Abe when it comes to entrepreneurship?
Abe:
All right. So, um, right out of, uh, right out of high school. Um, I was, I was already in college, but, you know, taking a part time job. I started, uh, working for a mail order house. Uh, the, the place I was working would take ads and magazines. You know, it would be a page full of things that they had for sale, with a phone number across the top, and you know we would pick up phone calls right down.
Kevin King:
What kind of products?
Abe:
Mostly consumer electronics digital cameras, video cameras. I actually started before digital cameras were a thing, if you can believe that. I still remember going to the CES show and having dinner with one of the product development people from Minolta and they said you know, we are second to market, but we have the plans to own the space. And he got very, very enthusiastic about what digital cameras are going to do. And, um, at the time we couldn’t even wrap our heads around them. We were still selling film all day long. So, right from the very start, we were selling all kinds of photo equipment and we watched digital cameras turn into a thing. And, of course, just like the theme of how my business, uh, business experience runs, we watched digital cameras turned into cell phones that could do everything, and it was a gradual change.
Kevin King:
And so you worked for that company and then?
Abe:
I worked for them for, uh, I think, five or six years. In 1997, I opened up my first business, um, also doing the same thing, but a year and a half later around 1999, the internet and e-commerce started to become significant. Amazon was around for a couple of years before that, but it was not the thing that you know. It was not the presence that it had right now. Uh, but people were just starting to place orders on the internet. People were just starting to be comfortable putting their credit card into the computer. Um, up until then we were. We would have a website and people would be calling from the phone number on the website because they wouldn’t want to put their credit card number into the computer. So the first place where people were comfortable putting their credit card number into was Yahoo stores. Uh, Yahoo is not even really around to this much anymore, but a Yahoo store was originally the first real e-commerce platform. It was enormous. We sold a lot of products.
Kevin King:
I had one of those. I had the Yahoo store.
Abe:
We, uh, we sold a lot of product on those Yahoo stores. Um, of course it came up and then it rolled down a little bit and we evolved to having our own website, you know, with our own server and our own web designers and all those things. And, um, when we had that, we would start advertising on Google. We would start advertising on the price comparison websites, which aren’t the thing anymore. But back then, when we first started, there were websites dedicated to comparing prices among all different websites. There wasn’t a central place where you could do that. So we sold there for a bunch of years. We did very well there also. And then, of course, just like every other evolution, Amazon rose up to the point where it could not be ignored, to the point where it was actively taking a lot of business from other places because of the trust shoppers had in it, and the business evolved and shifted there.
Abe:
I started selling on Amazon around 2009. Um, we leveled that up, just like we leveled up the other places of selling. Um, we did come to a sort of peak and I exited my business in 2018. Um, part of it was hitting that peak, but part of it was also the opportunity to lean into the piece of selling that I love the most. So, whenever I was, whenever I was owning the businesses that I was in, I always had two responsibilities, two main responsibilities. Number one was advertising and number two was customer service. Anybody that had a problem came through me. Um, as you can imagine, that is enormously draining, especially doing it for two decades. Um, when I had the opportunity to just help people with ads and to finally get a value for my thoughts and my ideas and the actions I would take, as opposed to the price of a widget, um, it was something that was interesting to me, it was something that I leaned into. And uh, it’s six years later. I’ve just been doing advertising for sellers.
Kevin King:
Now you have an agency. Um, what’s the? Go ahead and tell people the name of the agency.
Abe:
So the agency is called XP strategy. Um, I don’t know if you need me to spell it or not, but it’s pretty straightforward.
Kevin King:
Like the letter X and then P strategy.
Abe:
Yep. X like X-ray, P like Peter. Uh, if you, if you’re a video game player. Uh, it stands for experience points which, basically, the more I do, the more experience I get and the more I’m able to use it for great results with, with brands and um, yeah, it’s xpstrategy.com.
Kevin King:
Main focus is to help people manage their advertising campaigns on Amazon. Is it just Amazon or also other platforms as well?
Abe:
So Amazon is the main platform we work with, the. You know, Amazon is the system which works the most the way you expect it to. Um, it’s the place where the most shoppers buy the most things. It’s the lion’s share of our efforts. But of course, we are responsive to what the world of e-commerce does. So I do advertising on Walmart. Also, we’re getting into TikTok as well. Um, I have connections for Google advertising and Facebook marketing. Uh, we don’t do those in-house, but we help coordinated for our brands that want to implement it. We basically have a little piece of our toe in every single little pool that involves marketing, but the real volume of sales still comes from Amazon, almost no matter what we do.
Kevin King:
So, when it comes to agencies, there’s a lot of these have popped up. Um, there’s a lot of. You know they do different things, um, managed services, PPC listings, creative writing, you name it. What is it? People always ask me Kevin, no, who’s the best? I want to job out my PPC. I don’t like doing all this math and all this stuff. This is just gives me headaches. Um, I want to job it out and they and they say who should I use? And I say, well, you know, I know this guy, he’s pretty good. I know this guy, Abe, he’s pretty good. I know this guy, but Abe’s not going to be working on your account or this person’s. The other person’s not going to be working on your account, it’s going to be someone at the company.
Kevin King:
So always say agencies are not, it’s not about the. To me, at least, this is my thoughts I want to get yours. It is. It’s not about the agency, it’s about the person running the account. So you had some agencies you may get a good person and other agencies to get someone you know who just went through, finished the training a few weeks ago from the agency training or his own training, and he’s learning with your money. Um, so how? How do you what makes a good agency and how do you convince people like, hey, you should go with our agency. And how do you, how do you guess? Actually, you know you said you, you dealt with the, the advertising and the customer, so you’re still dealing with that. How do you make someone feel at ease that, hey, you’re, you guys can, or gals can, do the job, uh, as well, as are better than someone else.
Abe:
So we really try to put a personal touch on all the work that we do. I speak to many sellers you know people who are interested in working with me, people who might just ask me for a tip here or there, people who just want to talk about whatever they’re doing in business. And I use whatever I hear to, you know, to influence and steer the ship within my own agency. And one of the things that really resonates with me is the fact that a lot of sellers don’t know what’s being done to their accounts. So they’ll see some videos from somebody, they’ll start to work with an agency, but they really don’t see or understand anything what’s being done to their accounts, except for maybe a report once a month or a meeting for 15 minutes here and there.
Abe:
What we try to do is we try to collaborate with the brands, not try. We do collaborate with the brands. We do a lot of work to understand their goals. We do a lot of work to communicate what we’re going to do to help them scale or to help them achieve their goals. And one of the things that we do, which I don’t see a lot of other brands doing, is we put in place a team which is really available to the brand. We place a team which is really available for my clients. So we open up a Slack channel in which every person associated with the account is in that channel with the brand. So if they have a basic question or a skew running out of stock or a variation that’s coming back into stock or any of the things that typically happen as we run a business, they can just shoot us quick messages that will be responsive and acknowledge that we understand what’s happening and we’ll put it into place.
Abe:
The same goes the other way. We advise clients when we see things happening that need their attention and we don’t wait for the twice a month meeting to talk about the thing that’s happening. If something needs attention, we will actively bring it up and discuss it with that brand. So the communication is really, really important. The communication and I guess the collaboration for strategy is also really important. A lot of times people will say I need a lower ACOS or I want to grow sales, and then the people they’re speaking with like, okay, we’ll work on it. That’s the end of the conversation. They don’t know what’s going to be done. What we’ll do is we’ll look at what advertising is happening right now for a particular product and we’ll say, okay, there’s a hole here, there’s an opportunity there, and this is where we’re going to put resources and focus into. And when they understand what we’re doing, they feel comfortable to see the process run and to see them getting towards their goals.
Kevin King:
What is it that makes a good hire for PPC agency? Is it someone with experience, that was a previous seller, someone that’s just got raw talent with numbers and planning and that you can teach them up on the systems? What do you look for when you’re trying to hire someone that’s going to be managing potentially multi-million dollar accounts for people and spending a boatload of money?
Abe:
The number one thing. I look for two things. Number one they need skill with numbers. Simple, we have tests that we give that can tell if somebody knows how to manipulate Excel with per, you know, with skill. We have interviews that we do which are specifically talking about their ability to understand trends and numbers. That’s one thing that we require of everybody. But the second thing that we need is a mind which is flexible. It used to be with Amazon, as recently as a year or two ago, that you could take a course. The course would have an instruction or a PDF and they say, ok, do a, do b, do c, and you’ll get a certain result. And it was really really clear. I used to hire based on an ability to follow instructions. Ok, if something is happening, pull out the relevant checklist. Did you do a, b, c, d, e? That has changed a lot. Amazon has taken so much into their system, so much into their algorithm, that a thing which works for one brand will not work for the brand that’s right next to them in listings. You can take a look at two ASINs right next to each other. Their expenses will be different, their sales volumes will be different, their conversion rates will be different and they simply need to do different things to have those positions right next to each other. So the ability to think with flexibility, the ability to observe what’s happening to a keyword, to a search result, to a rank for a product, the ability to look at those things and to make decisions and to think things through and to evaluate opportunities is really become the most important thing.
Kevin King:
Now you just do a mainstream, like sponsored ads and brand stuff, or are you doing also DSP and like Prime Video and Alexa ads and all that as well for clients?
Abe:
Yes and no. So on one hand, we do all of the ad types. We handle DSP, we do sponsor TV. I don’t do anything with Alexa ads because, except for a couple of small situations, it’s really really limited, but anything which has traction and volume available for the marketing we’re offering it to our clients. Having said that, 90% of brands really are best served by focusing on the core ad types that Amazon offers. Sponsored product, sponsored brand, Amazon sponsored display will almost always be the things which get you 90% or 95% of the way to your desired goals. And all of those other things are shiny objects which distract. They are things which give you much, much less of a boost compared to how much you invest into it. They’re limited situations which are perfect, but for most brands on Amazon, focus on the fundamentals. Get those fundamentals really right. Have a listing that converts, have a product with a good USP, a good selling proposition which is different from your competitors. Make sure your main image is perfect. Make sure our click-through rates are solid. We want to make sure all those basics and fundamentals are all in place, and that almost always gives us a ton of work, like endlessly.
Kevin King:
So when a new client comes to you, what are the oh my God, here we go again. This guy, this accounts just a mess. What are some of the things that you see that either another agency is messing up or the seller himself he’s been trying to do it. They’re messing up and you just have to go in and clean out. We’re a couple of the common like oh gosh, beyond the fundamentals of like their listings doesn’t have all the pictures or whatever. But when it comes to PPC side of things.
Abe:
So the most common things I see, if it’s on the agency side, I most commonly I see accounts that don’t get touched. Very often I can’t tell you how many times I see, looking in all the campaigns that an agency is touching, they only change bids twice a month, which is not frequently enough at all. We look at campaigns in which match types are mixed. So Amazon has broad phrase and exact for their manual campaigns and sponsored products and best practice is to split those out. They perform differently. The bidding strategies that we use are different for each type. The goals are different for each type and we split them out to be able to manage them effectively. I see all the time people using strategies from three years ago in which they group them all together. There are softwares which do that. I don’t ever recommend using those softwares that are grouping all the match types together. So those are a couple of things that I see frequently with agencies that are doing work on other accounts.
Abe:
When it comes to brands that I see who are managing their accounts in-house, what I typically see are missed actions that should be part of a schedule. So, as an example, I’ll see that terms that aren’t converting well aren’t being negated. That happens all the time. I can’t tell you how often I see that there are zero search terms that are negated in the campaign and it’s very obvious that things are not working and they could easily be fixed and tightened up. Another thing that I see is campaigns which it sounds like a minor thing and it technically doesn’t have anything to do with performance, but it does have to do with managing an account. I typically see campaign naming which is one step away from Amazon’s defaults, like Group 1, group 2, group 3, or campaigns started on this date with no indication of what the goal of a campaign is, no indication of what product is being advertised, nothing that tells me what that campaign is about.
Abe:
And the challenge there is whenever we want to run marketing for a product. We don’t run marketing at a brand level. We run marketing at a skew level, at a product level. In order to be effective, each skew will have its own goals and each skew will have its own group of ads running together for that product. And naming those campaigns effectively to match campaigns to products lets us instantly look and understand what’s happening. So, within my own agency, any product that we’re advertising, I can instantly run a filter for an ASIN, because the ASIN is inside the campaign names and I can see okay, I have these nine campaign types running and this one isn’t running why. Or I can see that I have three exact campaigns for the same keyword. Why is that happening? Like I’ll be able to immediately look and get a clear picture because the naming is tight and Amazon, not just at a campaign level, but even at the group level. It’s even more important because Amazon gives us data at the group level for keywords. So when I’m pulling a search term report, if I don’t know what product that ad group is for, I can’t tell how to take actions on it. So those are a couple of the things that we see, which are immediate opportunities to tighten up when we take over an account and get things running much more effectively.
Kevin King:
What are your thoughts on the people that say you should have single word campaigns instead of putting four, five, 10, I know you can do up to what it’s a thousand or something in a single, but because of the way Amazon will sometimes prioritize certain words in there or the way it picks them up, they’re like just put them all separate or do you group things together and groups of five or 10 or 20 or whatever your number is?
Abe:
I typically do the latter. Most commonly, we will work with groups of up to eight to 10 keywords per campaign. That’s a good balance between dedicating spend, between extracting data and between setting similar goals for a group of keywords. The problem with managing individual keyword campaigns is every single one of those keywords needs its own budget and, in theory, if you have 4,000 keywords in an ad account, if everyone has a 10 or 20 or $30 budget, if something hits all of a sudden, you will have a $19,000 bill the next morning. By limiting it..
Kevin King:
You’ll have $1,000,000 in sales too, though.
Abe:
Most commonly unexpected spend boost do not come with matching sales boosts. I am pleasantly surprised when it happens, but that’s not usually the way it works. Usually, all of a sudden spend runs wild and it’s much harder to control at a single keyword level.
Kevin King:
Now I remember a few years ago you were running your agency and you were heavily involved in a lot of stuff and you remember sitting there having a cigar with you. One point. You’re like man, I need to get a, I need to put some systems in place, I need to get a hold of this thing, because this thing is just I’m going to, I’m coming, I’m going at both ends right now and running, running a. You know myself ragged and you made a few changes and I just saw you recently and you’re like man, those changes were like the best thing I ever did and now I can actually focus on this and I can run the company properly. Can you walk us through what happened and what you did to actually make those changes, maybe help some people through the thought process of maybe what they need to do in their business?
Abe:
Sure, so I did, I think, two or three things. The first thing I did was I implemented a task management system. There are a few that are available, but what we used is a system called ClickUp, and ClickUp basically is a tool in which every person in the company can set tasks, they can set a schedule for the task and they can put notes for all those tasks, and there’s visibility into what’s happening on any task or group of tasks or an account which has many tasks inside. For us, that makes sure nothing gets dropped. Every time we sign an account internally, we have a preset built group of tasks that we want to run every month and that immediately gets loaded in for that account. So every Monday we’re running budgets. Twice a month, we’re checking a certain metric. Twice a week we’re checking another metric, and already there’s a pre-built schedule. So the person that’s touching that account already has his schedule and things to do each day of the week. Now that, for us, is a starting point, because with every account, they all have different things they want to accomplish. I know too I’ve worked with hundreds of accounts. I don’t think even two of them have exactly the same goals. So what we’ll do is in addition to the base group of tasks, we’re able to easily add in tasks matching a goal. So basically, that task management system keeps everybody on point. It keeps everybody scheduled, and one of the things I did which is the innovation that I brought to the picture is I actually hired what we call a traffic manager.
Abe:
Right after we implemented the system, there was definitely a bit of chaos, as people who never ran click up before all of a sudden being asked to create tasks and update them when they’re done and mark them and add comments, like all of a sudden they had a whole second job to do with all these tasks. We specifically hired a person whose job is to steer the system. They create that base set of tasks so a new account doesn’t require 20 hours of work and they always watch the schedules for when things are supposed to get done. So if a campaign needs to be built or a group of campaigns needs to be built and we’re allowing 72 hours for the keyword research, for the building out of the flat files, for the uploading and working through any failed uploads, like we give it 72 hours, this traffic manager will be able to see hey, this guy is getting close to that, 72 hours passing, he’s not there yet. Hey, specialist, you’ve only got like 19 hours left. Are you really on top of this? And they’ll be able to give the nudges and everything gets done on schedule like that. So that’s one of the first things that I did.
Abe:
And the second thing I did was I started interviewing differently. I worked with people who taught me how to interview. I read books on it and I started asking questions which are really different, and that led to the composition of my staff being completely different.
Kevin King:
What’s an example of that?
Abe:
The most important question, or the two most important questions, are what do you hate to do? So I’ll ask what tasks you like to do, which you’re good at and which tasks do you hate to do? And if anybody says they’re good at everything, they’re a liar. Everybody has a thing they hate to do, and I sometimes get really interesting answers, but the answers guide me on whether they’re a good fit or not, just whether they’re a good fit where they fit. If I know a person doesn’t like to do a certain thing, I am not going to put him in a position where he has to do that thing all day. It’s torture for everybody. So that’s number one.
Abe:
And related to that question, I ask what’s the biggest failure you ever had? What’s the worst disaster you ever went through? And, based on that disaster, what do you do differently afterwards? And again, anybody that says they never had a disaster, they never had a failure, you’re full of it, get out of here. And the way that they talk about their failure it gives you insight into them as a human being. Somebody who blames it on everybody else around them that tells you a lot. Somebody that said I made this mistake, I was in this situation, I should have done this, I did this and I learned not to do this thing afterwards. That’s a person who has a lot of self-introspection and you can tell that that’s going to be a person who’s thoughtful in the work he does.
Kevin King:
So for those listening that have never actually hired an agency, a PPC agency, how does it work? Is it a flat monthly fee? Is it a percentage of the total sales? Is it a percentage of the sales over a certain level that they achieve and boost you to? Or how do you guys work the structure?
Abe:
So our typical structure is a flat monthly maintenance fee plus a percentage of ad sales. That’s what we work with. I know that you can speak to 10 agencies, get 10 different pricing models over a whole lot of experimentation. This is what works for us, for two reasons. Number one in any account, even if an account doesn’t make a single sale, we are still doing X amount of work. Realistically, If we sell a lot, there’s more work. If we don’t do sell anything, there’s still a baseline amount of work that’s done. It’s something that’s out of our control. The second part of it is realistically as an account grows, the amount of work involved in managing the account grows as well. So having a piece of the fee that scales with it is intended to be small and manageable for a brand to be able to absorb, but also reflects the amount of work. A brand doing $10,000 a month simply has much less work to do than somebody doing 10 or 100 times that amount.
Kevin King:
So what’s an example of a client that comes to you and is interested in hiring you or partnering up with you for your services and you decline them? You’re like, no, I don’t think this is the right fit. What would be a situation like that?
Abe:
A couple of things. So the first thing is somebody that tells me he’s been with several other agencies. This is a big red flag. If somebody is with one agency and it doesn’t click or the agency is not great at what they do, I can understand that, maybe even two, but somebody who is a serial agency hopper, they’ve been through five or six. No, the problem is done. The problem is not the agencies. So that’s a massive red flag to me. The other red flag is simply not having the right resources to be able to support growth. So one of the biggest challenges I have is a challenge of success. It happens that we take an account, we fix the things that need to be fixed, we put the things in place that need to be put into place and sales jump. They go up significant amount and almost immediately afterwards the brand runs out of stock and for all the work that we did, being out of stock for seven weeks until they get more inventory is a disaster. All the work that we did runs out the window and re-ranking is really, really difficult. So when someone says we run tight or we run lean or things like that, this is a thing to be concerned about and we start digging further. I mean, the third thing is just personality. I have to be able to communicate with the people. I have to be able to communicate with the brands I work with and they have to be able to communicate with me. And if we sort of don’t get along, if we can’t communicate together well during the audit process, during the discovery process, it becomes clear to both of us that it won’t work as an agency relationship.
Kevin King:
So when a client leaves your agency or maybe stores you’ve heard from others sometimes it’s just not working. You’re not performing at the metrics that we were hoping for. Other times they think, oh, I’m paying them all this money, I can just do this myself. They sort it out on my campaigns. They got them all structured properly. I’ll just hire Johnny over here, my second cousin that needs a job to just check in and oversee it. Now I know what to do. What are some of the reasons that people leave agencies and these serial hoppers? Why do they hop? What are they looking for? Are they have unrealistic expectations? Or why they hop in?
Abe:
Most commonly, I don’t like to say bad about anybody, even if they’re anonymous, but there are people who are difficult to work with. They’re difficult to work with in every facet of their life. You know, even the barista at the coffee shop rolls their eyes when they see this guy walking through the door. Okay, so there are people who every time they want a thing, it has to be now, no matter the size of the thing or the importance of the thing they want it now. And there comes a point where we are just spinning so hard and so frequently to get things done that you can’t keep up with all the things they ask for and, realistically, they start being unhappy with those situations. Another situation might be things which are out of our control, where brands get acquired. You know people who sell their brands, that’s it, the acquiring aggregator, or whoever they sold it to, takes over that account with the process they’ve built already.
Abe:
There are situations where people have business challenges that have nothing to do with the marketing. I’ve seen situations where people go through a divorce and they have to sell their business for the assets. I’ve seen situations where people have a batch of product that is all defective and then, all of a sudden, the entire account tanks and they can’t. You know, they have to cut everything out, from layoffs to services etc. And there are, of course, people who want to try something different. Somebody who says our performance is alright, but this guy is promising me more. I want to see what this other person can do. That certainly happens.
Kevin King:
Now, one thing I’ve never seen you leave is a good cigar. I’ve never seen you leave a good cigar and I think that’s become a tradition. Every time I see you at an event it’s usually me and you and sometimes Danin. Norms around, norms there, and then whoever else wants to join in and we’re smoking cigars. For I think on this cruise we just did back in January I think, every night we’re out there four to five hours.
Abe:
It wasn’t a marathon.
Kevin King:
The only thing left was a pizza place that was open, the whole ship or something. What is it about Amazon, or not just the cigar culture? It’s something that a lot of people are like, ah, you’re just smoking, it’s nasty, it’s gross, I don’t want to kiss you, you know your wife or whatever you smell. But there’s just something about when people, especially business people, they get together it can be men, women, doesn’t matter and you just sit there and smoke a cigar and just stories are coming out. Personal stories are coming out, stories. I mean, you educated me and Norm on this cruise. We got a presentation Two in the morning from Abe about it was really good. Here’s the steps to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this. I was like man, I wish I was recording this or taking some notes, but things just come out and I sit there and analyze and I think one of the reasons is, if you go drinking alcohol with your buddies, the drinking imbibes you, it actually it makes you a little bit different, opens you up. You get a little loosey-goosey, a little wild or whatever, or you start to feel bad. But when you smoke it’s more chill, it’s more. It’s not loud music, it’s not dancing it’s. You’re just sitting there chilling. You’re just taking it easy.
Kevin King:
A good cigar can take an hour, hour and a half, sometimes two hours to go through and it gives you a slight buzz, but it just chills you and gives you something to do so you don’t get bored. You’re not sitting there, you know, doing a bored. It’s you know 10 minutes of the conversation. Someone’s japping about something that you don’t really care about. You’re still smoking your cigar. You got something to do. There’s something to it and I think it’s becoming a tradition in this space and a lot of events you know, you can see it on the Billion Dollar Seller summit website there’s people smoking cigars at the very first one and much of us on a patio. Talk to me about this cigar culture and why it’s kind of cool and why you’re into it.
Abe:
Oh boy, I could probably talk about this for an hour, but when it comes to so, it’s definitely a passion of mine. Like you said, we’ve had cigars at all different continents around the world together. There is definitely something which you need in order to smoke a cigar, which is time and a calm place. So in order to, in order to drink, you can really drink anywhere. In order to smoke a cigarette, you can go out in 15 degree weather, smoke it and come back inside in order to, in order to be at a business conference, hopping from place to place to place, you could do that and you don’t have to sit. Still, you can’t do any of that with a cigar. In order to smoke a cigar properly, you need to plant yourself down, you need to sit, you need to go through the process of lighting it, you need to be in a place which allows for cigar smoking, and those places are typically quieter. And when you’re in a place with several people like you, everybody has committed to an hour in a calm place or two hours in a calm place.
Kevin King:
Or five hours sometimes. Or five hours yes.
Abe:
So once you’re committed to that block of time and you know you’re not getting up in four minutes or you know there isn’t a thing that you have to run off to because you got a notification on your phone, whatever things come and like, have you bouncing around all day long? When it comes to the culture of smoking cigars, you are in one place for an extended amount of time, which is not so common in today’s society. It used to be. We lived in a different world. Now this is almost a throwback to the time when people spent time together just talking, and the more we talk together, the more we get to know each other, the more different kinds of conversations can happen. That wouldn’t happen if you only have three or five minutes, like you said, the kinds of conversations I can talk about an article that I read about philosophy and we can talk about the moon landing. We can talk about all different things. But if we’re in a business environment and I’m saying hi to you but four other people are also saying hi to you, that really you’re very limited in the kind of the quality of conversation you can have.
Abe:
So the types of conversations that we can have while smoking a cigar are better than anywhere else, and that boat that we were on, that online seller cruise that we were on, was even beyond whatever I described. It was absolutely unique because a group of like-minded people were almost captive. We were captive for seven or eight days so that really became the thing to do and we were able to build on a conversation of the day before. If we spoke about something on Tuesday night we could speak about, we could continue the conversation on Wednesday night, as opposed to the rest of our life where we speak about a thing on Tuesday by Wednesday. I don’t even remember that we spoke the day before. Here we can talk about it and we can continue to talk about it and we build on it and it deepens the ties. That’s it. I mean, the people who we were on that boat with are family almost.
Kevin King:
But so, yes, cigars or something else. Another thing you know we’re speaking of events, events or something that you go to. You go to a few, I go to a handful or more, and what is it about events? There’s a lot of people listening to this that never even been out of their house for an Amazon event, and maybe that’s okay. But what is the value of actually going to events? And if you’re going to go to event, how do you choose what to go to? Is it based on whichever one’s the cheapest and easiest to get to, or should you choose it a different way? Or how should you choose going to events? And what are some good events that you might recommend people actually check out? You know that you’ve been to.
Abe:
All right. So when it comes to events, there’s like a really clear and specific value, and that value is being able to connect with and communicate with people who are in similar positions to you or maybe even slightly ahead of you. When we run our businesses, wherever we’re at, we typically speak with a small group of people every day. You know, we speak with our employees, we speak with our employers, we speak with family. You know a few friends. It’s a pretty tight group of people we have actual conversations with, and that is limiting. You know. There’s only so much you can hear or learn from with the person you’re speaking to every day.
Abe:
When we go to conferences and we speak to and I see or I meet many people who are either other agency owners or other people who are sellers, whether or not I work with them, I have opportunities to have conversations that I wouldn’t have in any other place, and it basically lets me speak about things that are working for me, things that are challenges for me, things that are working for somebody else, things that are challenges for somebody else. We’re able to have conversations that will never have just being at home or just seeing each other on social media. It’s funny, we were speaking about cigars and the value of spending hours together. But the truth is, at these events, spending five, 10, 20, 30 minutes is still a million years ahead of not speaking with other people at all. So when we’re home all week, when we’re home all year with that tight group of people, it’s really, really tough to understand how we’re doing. It’s really tough to have a mindset which leads to growth, to focusing on the right perspectives. But when we get to a show where people are like us, we can understand better how we’re doing, we can push ourselves, we can have maybe comfort or sympathy, knowing that a challenge we have, we’re not the only person dealing with that challenge and we can get inspiration and those inspirations are huge.
Kevin King:
Well, what’s the difference, though? Why spend all this money to get on an airplane, go to stay in a hotel and go to an event, and just do this on Zoom? I just joined a mastermind. I have 20, 30 of us on a Zoom call, and can I do the same thing?
Abe:
It’s not the same. I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but being physically next to another human being is still totally different than being on a Zoom call. It’s not at all the same. The spontaneous element of having many people around you is definitely different than those 20 or 30 people on a Zoom call. The connections you might make from a person you weren’t expecting to see or from a person you wanted to see but don’t have time to schedule a call with those things are what lead to the growth in your business. I have made deals, I have made relationships, I have had all kinds of great interactions with people that were not even on my radar. And I’ll see somebody at a show, I’ll be talking to a friend or to a colleague and somebody that they know will become a three of us speaking about things and all of a sudden I know a new person I would have never known otherwise, and that leads to all different places.
Kevin King:
What are some of the best events that you’ve personally been to? I know you haven’t been to every event out there, so there might be something excluded from the list. That’s actually good, but what are some of the best events that you’ve been to?
Abe:
So there’s probably three or four. Again, at any event, there can be an amazing moment or an amazing hour or something, but if we want to talk about what the full best events are, there’s a few clear standouts. So number one is ASGTG. I still am not sure what the letters stand for, but there’s a show, there’s a show in Brooklyn called ASGTG, and that show has the highest concentration of strong sellers in one room that you’ll get anywhere. I mean it’s the level is beyond. The things that are happening in that room are really, really powerful. It’s a one day event, which makes it unusual in the event space. It’s in Brooklyn, which is definitely it might be close to New York City, but it’s not exactly a mecca of tourism or a magnet for people to come to. And yet people come. I’ve spoken to people who would come from Europe for one day and fly right back out afterwards. It’s a testament to the fact that this show is so powerful that people are coming in for us. So ASGTG is one of them.
Kevin King:
What would be another good one?
Abe:
The next one and this might be one where we have a little bit of a difference of opinion in is the Prosper show. The Prosper show is held in Las Vegas, which is a magnet for people from all around the world. It’s held for a few days. It has other events that bookend onto it, which MDS Inspire is another show which just started last year, but it’s a great show and they connect themselves on the calendar to Prosper. But really a lot of people are coming for Prosper and adding onto their trip for MDS Inspire, so those two are sorted together. But Prosper has been around for close to a decade now. It is a magnet for many, many sellers, for people who are in the business of Amazon. It still is that they’ve had ups and downs. I think that the actual show was purchased by a company that specializes in shows, so there may be getting a little bit more by the book in how they run it and that shows itself in all different ways. But putting those aside, it is still, as of now, one of the shows to go to if you have to limit yourself to a few. I know people who are coming from all over that don’t go to many other shows. That’s it.
Abe:
If we move past Prosper, the next one on which I haven’t been to but it is forever on my list, is actually yours the BDSS, the Billion Dollar Seller summit. What makes BDSS an amazing place to go to is the quality of content is off the charts. Every other event is mostly about networking, mostly about the city the event happens to be in, and the quality of the content will be very much hit or miss. Some years better, some years not as great, some years the speakers are off the charts, some years none of the content applies to anybody, but BDSS is. Every single year, every speech, every presentation is actionable. You can walk out of that specific speech and make a change in your business that makes you extra money, every single one. I haven’t attended it in person. I have seen a bunch of the presentations afterwards on video and every single one of them is like wow. I’m saying that as a person who has a lot of experience on Amazon, who has a lot of experience in business. I see people speaking about do ABC and we’re observing that when you do it in this order, it works differently than what you might think Really actionable all the way through. Of course, I know that, besides all of the content, the people who are attending are very strong people within the Amazon ecosystem. They are the people you want to be around for sure. A to Z, it’s great.
Kevin King:
There’s another event that’s not an Amazon event that you’ve been to that Norman and I do called CMS or Collective Mind Society. You came to the very first one we did at the F1 race in Austin and we’re doing another one. It’s a trip across the Canadian Rockies on a train from Vancouver to Calgary, stops in Lake Louise and a couple other places. It’s going to be a really cool trip in August. You were on the first one. The idea behind this was not to have an Amazon event with presentations. It’s to bring people with similar minds. It goes back to that cigar smoking sitting around people with similar minds. They’re entrepreneurs that have similar goals and get together and hang out and do something fun almost like a bucket list item or a cool trip or something fun, where you’re doing fun stuff by the day and you’re experiencing some sort of experience you wouldn’t have otherwise experienced. Then by night, you’re hanging and chilling and getting to know each other and maybe talking some business, talking, life, talking. I learned more about the Jewish faith. I think one night during that event that I’ve ever learned out of any book or any other documentary or something. You were explaining stuff in detail which was very fascinating, very cool. It’s not just business, it’s other stuff too. But how was that event for you?
Abe:
I speak about. It’s two years now at this point, almost a year and a half we still actively speak about it. That event, when I heard about it and when I made the commitment to go, a big part of it was what the event is going to be. You took us to an F1 race in Austin. I had never been to an F1 race and it was very much a thing I was interested in doing. I knew you had the way that you described what the event was going to be like. It was like the way to do it. If you have to do a thing you haven’t done before, I’m very much of the opinion to do it the best way you can. The description sounded like it was going to be the best way. I brought my son. I say my son, but he’s a full-blown adult. I brought him because he’s an F1 fan and I brought him because I wanted to expose him to or have him meet and see and speak to people in a different business than his own and see what it takes to get to an established place in life.
Abe:
For that weekend that we spent it wasn’t a one-day event, it was technically a two or three-day event. For those two or three days we spent together. It was experience after experience, every single hour or every single two hours was memory-worthy on its own. We would go to a restaurant. It would be like, wow, this restaurant was unbelievable. What an experience. It was fantastic, just literally. Just picking us up and bringing us to the event was a whole story of its own in a good way. Every single piece of it, the vibe, the energy, the electricity, the connections, the communications, all of it was really really I sound almost like somebody is paying me to say it, but really it was really really fantastic. Being in having almost a front row seat to the event we actually technically did have a front row seat to the event was unbelievable. I’m remembering it now and my brain is moving faster than my mouth because I can’t remember all of the things that we did during this weekend.
Abe:
What I could say is it was powerful. It was a lot. We saw concerts, we had meals, we saw a race, we had A to Z experiences, and not just experiences, but we made connections. I think that we became friends more than we ever were at that event. I became friends with Norm. I became friends with other people who were at that event more than I had ever been before. Now, when I see those people at places, we have a bond. Remember that, yes, we’re hugging, we are talking, we are laughing, we are friends. There are not many experiences where you walk away from something like that.
Kevin King:
The best one was at the very end of the last day. You had an extra day. What did we do? We found a cigar lounge in Austin. Yes, they had supply. As a smoker, you’ve been to a few lounges, you’ve been around, you know a lot more about it than I do. This lounge has, Kevin, they have seven boxes of this, 21 here. Those are rare, hard to get. I think me and you bought the holes. I think you bought one or two and I bought the rest of them, or something like that.
Abe:
When you saw me that, it was like oh yeah, but everything that was like a hidden treasure. It was not part of the agenda but like as a smoker, it was like going to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. They had every rare thing. They had like a few of them, and they had limited editions and they had brands you don’t run into in other places and I’m just like, oh this, oh my God, I can’t believe they had this, I can’t believe they have three of those. And, like it was amazing, I remember that you signed up for well, to be part of their membership club and then we both got the discounts based on it exactly.
Kevin King:
Well, anybody it’s moving, talking here for a while, and we could probably keep talking for a while, just like we do on a cigar nights, on cruises and at events and stuff. And I’ll be having another cigar night with you, probably some point pretty soon at another event. But if people want to reach out, find out more about the agency or follow you or reach out to you, how do they do that?
Abe:
You can find me on all the social media. LinkedIn is a place where I post frequently. I’m also on Facebook. I’m on Twitter, I’m on Instagram All of the places you can just look for me by my name Abe Chomali.
Kevin King:
How can you spell the last name for people?
Abe:
Last name is C-H-O-M-A-L-I and the first name is Abe A-B-E. There’s actually two Abe Chomalis, so you want to look for the one with the big white beard. But yeah, you can find me everywhere. I think I just told you something you didn’t know.
Kevin King:
I didn’t know. There’s another one? No, there’s two. Kevin King. There’s a Kevin King that’s a football player, NFL football player too, so yeah, yeah, so there are. You should do Kevin King Amazon to actually find me instead of just Kevin King, otherwise this other fellow comes up and at this point I think I’ve pushed my cousin out of the Google results just from being present on Amazon.
Kevin King:
But yes, you have to. If you get both results, look for the person with the beard. If you want to connect with me on an advertising basis or on a brand building basis, one of the things I do is I am happy to audit your account. I am happy to discuss an account with any brand, so you can go right to my website. There are contact us forms and there are also free audit forms, so I’ll be happy to take a look at your account and to suggest places where you can do better. Even if you don’t, even if you just take it and use it within your own company, I’m happy to use the experience I’ve built to grow businesses everywhere to pay it forward.
Kevin King:
Awesome, Abe. Hey, it’s great chatting with you again and we’ll have to do it again soon. Appreciate you coming on, man. So check that off the list onto the next thing on your vision board.
Abe:
Yes, it was amazing. I really appreciate you having me today.
Kevin King:
That’s it for this week. Great guest with Abe. If you missed my Billion Dollar Seller Summit last week Billion Dollar Seller Summit #9 the virtual edition you might be able to still grab a copy of the replay if you go to billiondollarsellersummit.com/virtual. There’s about 50 of them available. I’ll only make 50 available just to keep this content exclusive. Abe was at the event, was raving about it. If you haven’t ever been to a BDSS, you’re missing out. But you can catch copies of the replay if they’re still available. It depends on when you’re listening to this, blliondollarsellersummit.com/replay. We’ll be back again next week with another great guest, but before we leave I’ve got some words of wisdom for you. Don’t touch somebody’s wallet before touching their heart. Don’t touch somebody’s wallet before touching their heart. Back at you next week. See you then.
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