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Hot Topics in the Office – Branding, Expansion, & Growth – 273

In episode 273 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim discusses:

• 03:00 – The Dangers In Selling In One Platform
• 07:00 – Your Should Start Being Brand Sellers
• 09:00 – Stop Hacking And Start Building Legitimate Businesses
• 14:30 – Brands Are Important On The Right Time And Context
• 20:30 – The Challenges Of Scaling Your Business
• 23:00 – The Concept Of Fractional Executives
• 26:00 – Direct To Consumer Expansions
• 30:00 – Sourcing Products In Latin America
• 33:00 – A Recap On The Things We Discussed

Transcript

Tim Jordan:

One of the things that has helped me grow in my e-commerce business the most is just listening to other people and having random conversations. And a lot of those conversations, I jot down thoughts and ideas, or as I kind of lay in bed at night, I think about all of the different conversations and topics that are being discussed. And there’s actually a lot of them. And sometimes I forget like, Hey, this is what other people are talking about too. Maybe I should kind of share what I hear or share my opinion on these things. So in this episode, that’s what we’re talking about. I’m going through a list of what I’m gonna call conversations in the office or topics in the office. Things that we are actively, I don’t know, adjusting to, or trying to figure out ourselves and are probably relevant to your business as well. Hope you like this episode, make sure to list and all the way to the end. And here we go,

Tim Jordan:

Everybody. Welcome to another episode of the AM/PM Podcast. I’m your host, Tim Jordan. And in this podcast, we typically have on maybe a guest, or if I’m talking basically by myself, we have a large format theme, something that I’ll talk the entire episode about. In this episode, we’re gonna do things differently. I’m gonna kind of go over a smattering of things that essentially are being discussed in the office. Now I do have a physical office and I have employees and staff here, but we also have our digital offices, our teammates, and our associates that we’re working with around the world. And when I think about the hot topics over the past, I don’t know, several months like leading into 2022, there’s a lot of ’em that may be hot topics for you. And I thought, man, what better way to, you know, put a podcast episode together than to share a lot of these different topics.

Tim Jordan:

So I’ve got kind of a I’d say a loose consolidation. I say loose because they’re not all related. They are related to e-commerce or business. Some of them not e-commerce at all, but just business, but mostly e-commerce, and they’re not all related to each other, but I think they’re relevant, especially in kind of the end of 2021 going into 2022. Some of them are gonna be much, much larger, or much longer relevant. Some of the topics that we’re gonna go over in this episode are things maybe some dangers of selling on Amazon. I know that’s a scary thing to say, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna say it and I’ll explain that more. We’re gonna talk about this hacking culture, you know, hacking systems. We’re gonna talk about brands. Do they matter? Do they not matter? We’re gonna talk about the professionalization of the e-commerce industry.

Tim Jordan:

There’s some interesting things going on. Some things that I think relevant to us that I wanna cover. We’re gonna talk about marketplace expansion to D to C all right. So expanding from marketplace selling to directly consumers, some of the dos and don’ts and pros and cons, and kind of my philosophy and mindset on that whole venture right now. And then we’re gonna talk about some of the shifts that are happening in the supply chain right now, specifically related to sourcing. So a lot of different thoughts. I hope this is valuable. I think it is. And this is literally not just a list that I pulled outta my butt to share with you to make up a podcast episode. These are the things that myself and my business partners and my friends in the industry and my students are all talking about right now.

Tim Jordan:

So I think it’s very, very important. So the first thing I wanna talk about is that dangerous thing we call Amazon. Now, I’m not gonna talk about legal stuff. I’m not gonna talk about you know, things that we should actually be scared of related to Amazon. And I’m first gonna start off by saying that Amazon’s amazing. All right. If it weren’t for Amazon, I wouldn’t have an e-commerce business right now. And I still, 100% believe that Amazon is the best conduit and the best incubator for especially startup e-commerce businesses and e-commerce brands, right? We all know the, the power of having a marketplace. It has the entire infrastructure built out for us. It gives us tools and resources. It gives us traffic, which is the most important thing. Customers come in and look for that. And if we learn how to use those marketplaces, it gives us an opportunity to launch a business without having to go and acquire our own customers yet. Right?

Tim Jordan:

The danger of it is that sometimes Amazon becomes a one-legged tool. Now imagine my analogy there of a one-legged stool, you’re sitting on a stool with one leg. If that leg breaks, if that leg slips out from underneath you, you go toping down. Right? I remember I was at a conference years ago, like 2016 in Seattle. And there was this woman who runs some and on a small business program for the country of Singapore. And she used the term platform, agnostic platform, agnosticism. It was the first time I heard it and I’ve used it since. And I love it. It is basically the idea of not putting all of your faith in one platform. Now I love Amazon. All right. But think of the danger of only selling on one platform, think of that. Think about if you get suspended, think about if something happens on Amazon, where you end up in too competitive of an environment, what if you become irrelevant to their search results?

Tim Jordan:

What if you Blackhat attacked and you get a bunch of negative reviews on your product, all scary things, right? And I’m not saying we need to run away from Amazon, but I do think that we need to consider the idea of not being Amazon sellers, but being brand sellers that sell on Amazon. Now, if an Amazon executive is listining to this podcast saying who the crap is this Tim guy saying, get away from Amazon. I’m not saying get away from Amazon, but I am saying that we need to not be a one-legged stool. We need to be thinking about being a brand seller that uses Amazon, not just an Amazon seller. Now, what this concept does is it does two things. One, it protects us and insulates our business. The other thing is it actually makes us better Amazon sellers. All right. So let me wrap back around to that thought.

Tim Jordan:

If we are only selling on Amazon, there are some risks there. If we think about selling away from Amazon, right? Selling on other marketplaces, creating our own sales channels, creating, you know, D to C sales channels, selling on social media for a time that does pull some of our efforts away from Amazon. But if you think of some of the best sellers on Amazon, they are these other brands that don’t just rely on the platform. Think of Nike, think of all the different supplement brands think of you know, all the different clothing brands. Think of all the different office decor. Like all of the major brands in the world are selling a lot on Amazon using Amazon, but it’s this relationship of a much larger presence in the ecosystem. Now, what I go just randomly. Here’s a Nalgene water bottle. When I go to buy a water bottle, I love Nalgene, okay. I love these brands.

Tim Jordan:

I buy them all on Amazon, but I didn’t find them on Amazon. I actually found them in Brick-and-Mortar stores years ago, and I have seen their websites and I just love their lifestyle brand. Right. But I buy it on Amazon. We can do that. All right. So we can actually accomplish a lot of goals by stopping being Amazon sellers start being brand sellers that use Amazon. It gives us an opportunity to have stability. If something crazy happens on Amazon or business, isn’t shut down overnight. But then also if we start thinking about creating traffic, creating branding, creating demand on other platforms and other places in the internet ecosystem, right? It actually drives more traffic back to Amazon. So it creates this big, like flywheel, this big reciprocal system that allows us to grow our businesses.

Tim Jordan:

I love the concept to Shopify. Now, Shopify is an actual like D to C, I don’t know how you, how you’d call it. It’s not, it’s not really a places platform, right? Like you have to create your own website, but it gives us the tools and resources to migrate potentially in the direct to consumer D to C world, without a lot of heavy lifting, we don’t have to develop a lot of things. If you wanna get more robust, you can go into BigCommerce or Magento, or WordPress site with WooCommerce, things like that. But if you’re doing that, this also needs to be in the whole ecosystem using marketplaces as well. You need to be selling on walmart.com. You need to be selling on eBay is like having a resurgence Facebook marketplace for a lot of different products, but make this a larger ecosystem, right? And in the office, this is what we talk about all the time.

Tim Jordan:

This is when I’m having conversation with friends. This is what we talk about. Expanding from Amazon, but not leaving Amazon expanding from Amazon, which will help you as a business to have more stability, but also help you on Amazon as well. So that’s one of my first things is we have to quit being one-legged tools. I’m speaking to you, Amazon sellers. We have to stop just relying on that platform. We have to become platform agnostic. We have to have more stability, which up our businesses grow. It helps the value of our business, but it also helps us be better Amazon sellers as well. Another thing that has been talked a lot about lately is the changes going on too, I don’t know, maybe the psyche, maybe the attitude of marketplace sellers, as I don’t know, hackers like system hackers, algorithm hackers. We’ve seen a lot happening on the Amazon side about review manipulation, even, you know, a couple years ago. And now the ranking manipulation,

Tim Jordan:

Hey, we have to stop doing that. If we figure out how to outran our components through ranking systems and ranking strategies using, you know, various methods like Amazon has pretty much put their foot down and said, you will stop doing this. They’ve disconnected several services from their API that allowed us to do that. And I actually like this because, for a long time, there were people that were generating sales but I think not building real businesses, like it was almost too easy, especially a few years ago to just get sales without actually having to do things legitimately. Now, did I make a lot of money doing that? Yes. Have I seen a lot of other people make money doing that? Yes. But by trying to stop that Amazon and other marketplaces are forcing us to become more legitimate, which is what we need.

Tim Jordan:

Sometimes as we need a good kick in the seat, we need someone to slap us and say, Hey, quit doing this and get legitimate, figure out how to actually build a real business. That’s going to have lifetime value and it’s gonna have, you know, intrinsic value for a very long time and help build the valuation of your business that you could actually sell it. So that’s another thing we’ve been talking about in the office is getting out of our own heads. This idea of hacking the system. We have to have to, have to build legitimate brands. Eventually, I’ll talk about that in a minute. We have to start thinking about serving the consumers, right? Good pricing, but also good brand, also good product, also good customer service and support and after-sale care and figuring out how to meet our clients and potential buyers where they want to be found, right.

Tim Jordan:

It’s giving us this opportunity to legitimize, which is, I think what, especially the Amazon world, but sometimes even the e-commerce world in general needs. Like we need to be slapped around a little bit. There’s been a lot of talk in the office lately about crypto, right? A lot of Amazon on influencers and, and e-commerce educators are talking about cryptos and bots and, you know, NFTs and all this stuff. And I was talking to one of my good buddies in investment banking the other day and he said, wow, I think that all the Amazon sellers are leaving Amazon selling and going to crypto and actually disagreed. I said I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think that legitimate, that online sellers are leaving this to go to one thing, but we’re seeing a big adoption of the conversation. We’re seeing a lot of people getting interested in this whole crypto, NFT, Bitcoin thing, because I think to an extent, the audience that’s interested in that is the same audience that was interested in selling online.

Tim Jordan:

It doesn’t mean that online sellers all wanna get into crypto, but I think that there is a way to message things and there is a way to sell things. And there was a way to sell ideas of the newest, the greatest, the latest, the coolest, here’s a quick way to make money online. You can live your laptop lifestyle and get rich. And that same messaging attracted a lot of online sellers. And is now also attracting a lot of these get rich with crypto audiences. Now, does that mean that they are definitely tied in together? No. I just think there’s a lot of overlap. So I don’t think that legitimate brand owners are stopping selling online and running away into this idea of crypto. But it did bring to mind like this concept of, Hey, maybe there is some truth to the idea that like the people that are into this are also into that.

Tim Jordan:

And it scares me a little bit because it reminds me that a lot of us that are selling online and started selling online in the last several years, had this idea of all we had to do was hack this system. It’s a way to get rich quickly, right? We have to make sure that we don’t fall into the trap of one, thinking that the way to succeed by selling online long-term right for the next years is by trying to hack the system. We have to do that, but also we have to not be distracted by these other hacks of these other things. If we actually wanna build a legitimate business, right, it’s easy to get shiny object syndrome. I call myself sometimes a Labrador puppy chasing butterflies in a field of wildflowers, right?

Tim Jordan:

Like I’m just running around. I’m happy, I’m excited. I’m jumping around. I’m chasing all these different things. And sometimes I need to sit out and buckle down and focus because the opportunity has never been better to create wealth, to create something that is of massive value, but we can’t run away to the next best thing and take our eyes off the prize, which is an e-commerce brand that has a lot of potential to make us money and sometimes very, very passively. So that’s a second thing that, that we’ve been talking a lot about lately is getting over this mindset of it’s all a way to hack the system to make money and be glad that maybe there are other things in this world, would it be crypto or, or real estate investment or something else that may drag some of our potential competitors away from this? Because they see it as the next shining object and it leaves us more opportunity and less competition to dig in and actually build these e-commerce businesses.

Tim Jordan:

The next thing we talk about in the office or in my coaching program, whatever is brand, there is a lot of conversation about brand. Do we build a brand? Do we not build a brand? When is the time and place for it? I have put out a lot of content out there within the past 24 months. It said, guys, stop worrying about brands. I may have even been misquoted a little bit, or maybe I wasn’t clear enough on what I actually meant. I think brands are important, but they’re important at the right time or in the right context. Okay. Here’s what I mean. I see a lot of people that are wanting to sell a product is on launch their first product and they’ll go out and they’ll create a brand name.

Tim Jordan:

They’ll get a trademark. They’ll set up social media. They’ll do all of these things. They’ll say, Hey, I wanna sell home decor. And they create this big brand before they actually create a product or find a product with opportunity. And they get stuck in this like frustrated. I don’t know, matrix of, I have all this stuff I’ve invested all this time and even money into building this brand. But now I’m not making any money cause I didn’t figure out a product to sell. So where I’ve been maybe taken out of context or misquoted is, I have said, Hey, don’t worry a brand yet. Worry about what you’re gonna sell. Now, there are a lot of ways to sell online. I’m not saying you can’t create a brand and then backfill it with products. But I find it easier to create products, sell products that may be all unrelated, like just a lot of different types of products.

Tim Jordan:

And then once I start to generate a grouping of products that are related, start to build that brand. Now this is only like step one, find products to sell, especially at a marketplace like Amazon branding is important, but I think branding comes secondary to selling products. Now, when I say secondary, I mean timing, not importance. Once you get products rolling, once you get some sales and once you have, I don’t know, clear vision of the way you want to continue selling, then branding becomes more important than it’s ever been. Right? It used to be that we could just sell generic crap with low prices on Amazon. That doesn’t happen anymore. When we think about the power of brands, not only can we create profit, but we can create actual asset to it. Let’s talk about profit for a second.

Tim Jordan:

I’ve used the example before TOMS shoes, TOMS, TOMS shoes. It’s a canvas shoe. That’s really a crappy shoe. I mean, they’re like, what’s special about these things? I can buy the same canvas shoes at any sporting goods store for like $4, a pair or $5 a pair. But TOMS shoes sell for like $60. They built an actual lifestyle brand. They have the story that buy a pair, give a pair. They have the desire from consumers to actually wear their product and support their product. I’ve used the example of Warby Parker glasses. The eyeglasses themselves are not any better than a lot of other glasses, a third, the price, but they have this whole branding messaging and this whole lifestyle I idea and lifestyle behavior of like, Hey, if you support us, we supported the people. And they sent, you know, eye doctors into places like India and got prescription glasses made for, you know, developing nations or people in developing areas that couldn’t afford good glass themselves.

Tim Jordan:

And it created this real brand loyalty for Warby Parker. Now they have stores in large cities and they have, you know, an expensive set of eyeglasses that people want and people can’t get enough of ’em. And I love that. It goes to show that if we actually create brand, we can actually increase our prices. TOMS shoes sell for $60. Their competitors sell for $6. Why is that? Cuz the brand. So I don’t want people to be confused and think that when I say brands, aren’t important in the context of, Hey, just get your first product selling online. Like at that point brand is not that important, but building the brand becomes massively important to actually create profits, but also to create an asset. If we look at this phenomenon that we see of people buying up businesses, one of the things that creates a higher valuation and a higher selling or buying price for those businesses, higher selling price for you is that brand because it does set yourself apart.

Tim Jordan:

If we look at even what marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart are doing for brands to support brands, they give us extra love. They give us opportunities to advertise that nonbrands don’t have. If we look at like the enhanced brand content and, and storefronts in Amazon, if we look at the rich media opportunities on marketplaces like Walmart, they’re only really only available for large brands, right? And they will start leaking those to the smaller brands, but they’re gonna require you to actually have good branding. So brands are massively important. Just don’t get wrapped up in the idea of, I have to have a brand before I can start selling. Don’t let that be a barrier to entry, start selling, but definitely follow up with a great brand, cuz it’ll increase your profits. It’ll increase your assets. It’ll increase your stability. Going forward.

Tim Jordan:

Another thing that’s I’ve talked about a lot lately is professionalism in this industry. Now for those of you to listen to podcast a while, you know that I don’t have an MBA, I didn’t go to some corporate job and learn the ins and outs of businesses. I kind of am figuring this self out and I am pretty similar to a massive, massive number of e-commerce sellers. I was a firefighter. I know school teachers. I know stay-at-home moms. I know right now I have people in my coaching program that are literally listening into coaching calls, walking around the factory where they’re working, right? Like none of these people come from a wall street background or working for large brands and splintering off and doing it themselves. And I love it. I love the opportunity that creates. I’d still be sitting at a fire station right now if I hadn’t found e-commerce and I’m having a lot more fun now and making a lot more money than I was.

Tim Jordan:

But I think that one of the downfalls of this is as businesses grow, we don’t have that experience. We don’t even know what we need to know. And I’m seeing mistakes being made. I’m seeing people missing out on big opportunities with their businesses for sales or profitability or sellability because they didn’t have their finances or the business structure in order. I’m seeing a lot of people trying marketing that they’re reading off of some YouTube channel, but they’re not using just basic marketing strategies and basic marketing and selling principles, which is a problem. And we don’t have time to go out to learn all that. I think that as these businesses or our e-commerce business, continue to develop. We’re going to continue to struggle scaling, and scaling correctly and even, you know, having time for ourselves, cause we’re trying to do ourselves because we don’t have the experience of enterprise-level businesses.

Tim Jordan:

But that’s okay because there are a lot of things that are supporting us right now. And it’s wonderful, you know, sitting around the office. This is what we talk about one is the money coming in. I mean the money coming in this industry, whether it is supporting services. So more robust software, you know, we look at how much like Helium 10 has grown in the past two years because they became more professional. They became more enterprise level. They took on a lot of one investment from the purchase, you know, from Manny, Gui, and the crew that was able to, I don’t know, boost their capabilities and boost their services. And it’s been awesome. We look at things like incubators, which is kind of a new term. It kind of followed the term aggregator, but incubators companies that are investing a ton of money to help smaller businesses grow.

Tim Jordan:

The money coming in is helping us professionalize because a lot of us didn’t come with a lot of money and we don’t know how to go out and raise a lot of funds to build our brand. So it’s really, really awesome. The support that we have, not just for money, but education is now more enterprise-level, right? We have educators coming in space. If we look at like the show prosper, the prosper show, it’s probably the biggest conference in the Amazon space. The guy that’s running that now who I’ve had on the podcast here, Brian Anderson, he actually doesn’t come from e-commerce. He comes from corporate education. Like how do we educate people? Well, I that’s really cool because the guy that’s running this conference understands how to teach people and how to learn. So they’re actually letting those of us that understand the e-commerce space contribute with e-commerce knowledge, but he’s structuring the whole thing in a way that supports a ability to teach and educate better.

Tim Jordan:

Like I love that, right? We’re looking at a lot of people coming in this space now that don’t come from e-commerce, but from their specialties, whether investment banking or business development or brand development or of marketplace advertising or traditional marketing. It’s great. So even the companies that are putting out content like Helium 10, right? Like there’s enterprise level support for. So it’s massively encouraging because even though we don’t come from, “we are smaller e-commerce sellers” don’t come from a place of having a ton of experience. That experience is coming to us. Another thing that we’ve talked about a lot in the office lately, and I love this. This is so cool. Is this concept of fractional executives. Now let me explain what that is. A fractional executive is an that we can afford that has experience that we can’t afford. If I want to really grow my business, it would be great.

Tim Jordan:

If I could have a CFO, a chief financial officer that knew the ins and outs of this, that really understood exactly what I needed to know that was gonna understand how I could scale, how I could afford to scale, how to manage finance is how to manage all expenses, all of those things. But I can’t afford a $200,000 a year CFO. I would love to have someone that understands traditional marketing, someone that understands how the entire marketing system works and sets up marketing automations and all these things that are like way over my head, cuz they’re too techy or the newest and latest and greatest ways of marketing in different platforms. I would love to have a chief marketing officer CMO. I can’t afford a $200,000 or $300,000 a year CMO. A chief operating officer, it’d be great if I could have someone come in and audit my systems, figure out the operations of my business and how I’m communicating and the systems that I’m using and the accountability and the communications and all those things.

Tim Jordan:

Like I would love for someone to be able to audit that, that knows that way more than I, but I can’t afford for most of my businesses, a COO. Luckily there is raise of what we’re calling fractional executives that are those people that are for higher on a part-time basis. And it’s really stinking cool. I can get a chief financial officer, a fractional CFO that comes in and works for me eight hours a week. And you know what? That may be all that I need. I’ve already got bookkeepers and accountants and operations people. But what if I had a CFO to come in and look and say, no, you’re doing this wrong. You need to change this. Or here’s how you set this up. Or here’s a cool system that you should be implementing. And in a small amount of time, part-time, they’re able to accomplish everything that I need, right?

Tim Jordan:

I’m not doing 500 million dollars a year as a business and need a full-time one. I just need a part-time one. So I can get somebody that is working for multiple. So they’re making the money that they need to make, but it’s basically like crowd sharing this great brilliant mind. So not only do I get what I need, I can afford it as part-time. But also that person is also digging into all these other businesses and is learning about what’s working. What’s not working. So that person actually becomes more valuable because of what they see in the space, right? Like they see behind the curtains and under the hoods of other businesses. So the advice they’re giving me the insight they’re giving me the decisions, they’re helping make are based on seeing a lot of different case studies, which is massively valuable. So again, that’s one of the things we’re talking about the office is the professionalization of the industry.

Tim Jordan:

And the question of are we professionalizing, are we taking advantage of the services? Are we taking advantage of the other players of the game? Are we taking advantage of the money that’s coming into the space and are we taking advantage of an affordable solution of highly qualified, highly experienced executives and decision-makers within our business by using these fractional positions? So I would behoove all of you to research this and find out if this is something that you potentially need and ask yourselves, are you missing big opportunities for growth because you’re not paying attention to these resources that we have. Another thing we talk a lot about is expansion to direct to consumer. All right. I come from a marketplace background. That’s where I came from initially, you know, use someone else’s traffic, whether it’s Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Mercado Libre there’s a lot of different marketplaces, right?

Tim Jordan:

And I love it, but should we invest the time to go D to C, direct to consumer? And I would say that everybody needs to be thinking about it. Maybe not immediately, right, for a small business, with a thousand units to sell, it’s a lot of lift to go and build an individual website and start driving traffic and all of that good stuff. But I think that we should all be building a business that strives to and plans to stretch that way. When we’re ready. It’s tough. It’s a lot of work, but we are seeing so much data and we’re seeing so many case studies of successful businesses that absolutely prove that we should be doing this long term. We have to get there eventually it’s absolutely necessary. Right. I was speaking to the folks over at OrderMetrics. It’s a company that does analytics for Shopify businesses.

Tim Jordan:

And the numbers that are happening, the growth that’s happening, the business is exploding on Shopify crazy, right? I’ve been able to work closely with some partnership stuff going on with like BigCommerce. And it’s obvious that the more legitimate businesses are also using those D to C capabilities, D to C business models, D to C functions. You have to do it. You have to acquire your own audience. Just like I said, is one of my first points today is you can’t be that one-legged stool. And I think that my opinion even is changing faster than I thought it would because at time’s changing faster than I thought they would, that it is very important that we have a D to C mindset and a D to C game plan. Even if we’re ready, not ready to go D to C and expand right now, we need to be thinking about how to do that and have a game plan in place because it is becoming more and more obvious that it’s becoming more and more relevant in the ability for a business to expand. So definitely be thinking about D to C.

Tim Jordan:

I think that if I could listen to this episode back in like 2023, I might even slap myself for not being more compelling that we have to go D to C, just make sure it’s at the right time. Make sure you’re not chasing some shiny object when you’re not ready, but definitely be thinking long term about how to get there. The last thing that we’ve been discussing a lot in the office lately, something that’s like a huge topic is sourcing stability. All right, everybody that sells a physical product knows what I’m talking about. When I say that 2020 and 2021 has been rough for sourcing. The majority of us sourcing in Asia, we do, materials costs are going up. Factories are having more shutdowns from coal problems and power problems. Logistics are taking forever, you know, go just Google long beach port backup, you know, and look at the sometimes hundreds of ships parked off the beach for sometimes months cuz they can’t get into the port.

Tim Jordan:

So a lot of people have been talking about where to source next. Like how do we get away from Asia? The US is on just not ready for most products to be mainstream sourced and produced here because the US gave up a lot of their manufacturing capabilities and they have to get caught back up. A lot of people talk about, and I’ve been to India, I’ve sourced in India. I’ve sourced products from India and I love India. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. We can’t just immediately replace China with India. And there’s also been a lot of conversation lately about central America, South America, Mexico. That’s what I’m actually the most excited about right now is Latin America, Latin America’s geographically close to us. At least those of us in the US, North America Latin America is less expensive labor than the US. It it’s just what it is.

Tim Jordan:

You know, maybe one day they’ll catch up and I hope they do. But it’s less expensive. It is easier to build relationships, to keep relationships physically with suppliers in Latin America, cuz for the most part like Mexico, I can be in Mexico and you know, four hours of the direct flight to most cities, you know, and it’s easy to pop down there and have conversation with suppliers and look at samples and even go inspect my orders myself for less than a thousand dollars in travel, which is pretty stinky cool. There’s not all rainbows and unicorns. You know, when it comes to sourcing in Latin America, there are currently not good ways to find manufacturers except for sourcing agents. There have not been a lot, at least I’ve struggled I’ll say to find manufacturers to understand how to create and sell even prototypes, but especially factory orders. You know, production orders for small quantity, customized e-commerce specific products.

Tim Jordan:

But I think that’s changing. The reason I think that’s changing is a lot of things. One is there’s a lot of money being invested in Latin America. A lot of manufacturers in China and Vietnam and Taiwan are actually investing in that region, creating more heavy mechanization and automation and technology to actually get products up and running and rolling there faster. There has been a lot of investment when it comes to connections. You know, Alibaba I know is doing some work down there right now, connecting people to the space, the investments happening and what we’re seeing is an increased level of capabilities. That’s gonna continue to just grow over the next few years in manufacturing, sourcing and communications, and connections in Latin America. It’s a pretty exciting time.

Tim Jordan:

So, I will wrap back around and say that I don’t think that in the next 20 years we’ll be able to completely replace China. China just does things better electronics, synthetic materials, heavily manufactured, heavily engineered. Like they just do well. I mean, they’re just awesome. I’m looking around my office right now. And probably 90% of the things in my office were all made. I mean, everything here like was pretty much all made in China just cause they do it better. But I do think that 2020 and 2021 gave us a real dose of reality when it comes to the stability of our business and we should be realizing that, Hey, like we need to have redundancy. We need to not all be again, that one-legged stool thing. This time about sourcing, not all be relying on one supplier, one manufacturer, even one location we need to be thinking about sourcing other locations.

Tim Jordan:

Now, what’s cool is especially with Latin America, there are opportunities to actually create more of a brand presence. Like we talked about earlier with the TOMS and Warby Parker. There’s some pretty cool things you can do there by sourcing in Latin America or sourcing in the US that people love. They love those North American-produced items that love those items produced out of China. So just to wrap back around, I wanted to share some thoughts of kind of hot topics what we’re talking about in zoom rooms, what we’re talking about in coaching programs, what we’re talking about internally for our own businesses, right? Just share these thoughts. And I hope there’s some stuff valuable here, but when it comes to marketplaces specifically, Amazon, you shouldn’t just be selling on one. You should be spreading out and spreading out what I actually hope you sell better on the ones. I’m not saying migrate away from I’m saying migrate in addition to which will help a whole cohesive selling strategy to grow by having more stability and more branding on different places.

Tim Jordan:

The time of hacking it to grow our business is coming to an end. We have to be thinking about legitimate businesses. The plus side is the people that are just hacking it are probably gonna move away. Which is awesome. Gives us more opportunity. Brand matters, building a brand matters, but don’t get stuck in the weeds of building a brand before you start selling your product. So when the time is right, build a brand, but it absolutely matters, it’s very important you to be thinking about that. The industry is professionalizing. They’re gonna expect you to professionalize if you want to increase the value of your business and even the sales of your business, cuz they want to see you look more professional. The good news is there’s a lot of resources coming towards us. There’s a lot of education, a lot of support and there’s even some cool things like these fractional executives that allow us affordable opportunities to tap into and leverage some of this wisdom, education, experience and knowledge, which is cool.

Tim Jordan:

We must be expanding to D to C right? We have to be direct to consumer. I still think Shopify is the easiest conduit for that from a marketplace seller just in the way that our brains work and the way that we understand that it’s a lot of packages rolled in not saying only sell D to C. I’m saying it has to be, you know, part of a bigger picture, but we need to start selling D to C as well. And then also we need to be cognizant of the fact that shifts are high happening in supply chains, in availability, in demand and capabilities. And we need to start thinking about shoring up our supply chains. And if that doesn’t mean leaving China or leaving Asia, make sure you have multiple suppliers, make sure, you know, every once in a while you go and get quotes from a different manufacturer for your product, that way of one manufacturer craps out or they disappear the jack the prices up, you’ve always gotta redundancy

Tim Jordan:

And then also start thinking about maybe other places to source from. Ideally, I’d love to source everything from the US because it commands a higher price and obviously communication, things like that are faster for US-based companies. Not always realistic, but I have my eyes set on Latin American. I’m pretty excited about it. So hope you guys like my random brain dump I’ve given you on this up. So a lot of different things to think about. I’d love to know what your thoughts are about this. Message me, find me on social media, and message me. You can message us through the AM/PM Facebook page. You can message that page directly. I get those messages. If you’re watching on YouTube comment on this video and tell me what you think and I’ll make sure to get answers to you or just reach out to me independently on LinkedIn or on my private social media, you can find me anywhere specifically. Facebook’s probably the best place to find me, Tim Jordan. All right, guys. Thank you so much. Appreciate you listening to the episode. We’ll see you next week.

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