#325 – Dayparting PPC Spend & Other Amazon Selling Secrets With Rolando Rosas
In episode 325 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Rolando discuss:
- 01:15 – Meeting Rolando At The Helium 10 Elite Roundtables
- 02:30 – Sharing Is Caring
- 04:30 – Golden Hours In PPC, Dayparting, And Heat Maps
- 08:20 – Looking For Patterns And Separating It From The Noise
- 09:20 – The Results Of Rolando’s PPC Experiments
- 10:45 – His E-commerce Company Started In 2002
- 13:20 – Doing Business With Fax Machines
- 15:00 – Crazy Things We Do As Entrepreneurs
- 17:20 – Getting Into Entrepreneurship By Accident
- 19:15 – A Website Amplified His Business
- 22:00 – What Does It Take To Succeed On Amazon?
- 25:30 – Amazon Is A Game Of Different Pillars
- 26:20 – A Huge Risk In Reselling Products
- 28:12 – Amazon & E-commerce May Be A Challenge For Multi-Billion Companies
- 32:45 – Almost Hitting 8-Figures In Sales & What Matters Most
- 34:12 – Doing Business For Freedom And The Quality Of Life
- 36:30 – Rolando’s Struggles And Frustrations As An Entrepreneur
- 38:00 – Kevin King’s “Freedom Schedule” And Why It’s Important To “Live For The Now”
- 40:35 – Amazon Selling Is Not An Easy Business
- 43:12 – What Value That Rolando Get From The Helium 10 Elite Group?
- 45:00 – Rolando Sharing His Experience With Artificial Intelligence
- 47:00 – How To Get In Touch With Rolando Rosas
- 48:00 – This Week’s Golden Nugget Of Advice From Kevin
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 325 of the AM/PM Podcast. My guest this week is Rolando Rosas. Rolando is a nearly eight figure seller. Been doing it for about 20 years, about 10 years on Amazon, and we talk about his story about some cool strategies he’s using with PPC and what he is done to really improve his bottom line, as well as a lot of other really cool stuff, some mindset and different strategies. I hope you enjoy. What’s up, Rolando Rosas?
Rolando:
What’s up Kevin? I’m glad to be here and join
Kevin King:
You. It’s it’s nice to have you on the AM/PM Podcast. You know, I think we’ve met in person somewhere in the past, but I’m really bad with faces. Maybe we’ll tell that story a second, but the reason you’re on here actually is, we do these Helium 10 Elite Roundtables, and I’ve gotten to know you a little bit over the last several months on these round tables. And for those of you who don’t know, helium 10 Elite is the most advanced version of Helium 10 software. And coming with that package is a monthly training where we bring on different guests. And I do like seven Ninja Hacks, and then we do special in-person events every three months that are included for free for those members. They do weekly round tables with some of the Helium 10 staff.
Kevin King:
And then once a month I jump on a round table and it’s a Zoom call and it’s like 20 to 40 of us, 50 of us sometimes on there and we just kick it. I mean, we just talk about whatever is happening help each other out. There’s no set of agenda. It’s it’s pretty cool. It goes for several hours and you are one of the ones that’s always contributing and always like, got something to say and something to add. Like, man, you’ve gotta come on the AMPM podcast,
Rolando:
You know what? I’ve really come out of my shell more recently. I did not do any of those shows or conferences, and I just like I’m too busy for any of that stuff. And then I happened to run into Chad Ruben and we started doing some work together, and he’s like, you ought to meet this person, this person. And eventually I met some more people when I’ll get back how we met, but yeah, on Helium 10, that round table I, I’ve been in e-commerce for 20 years and there’s folks that are at the beginning, somewhere in the middle or some that are way past me. But I figured, you know what, let me just share what I have. And as an Amazon seller, you know how hard that could be cuz you’re sitting, sometimes somebody tells you, you do X and it’s gonna explode your keywords or whatever, right?
Rolando:
Or more people will watch you if you do this and you’re like, I’m gonna play it tight to vest. I ain’t giving them that away. I’m not giving that away. And you know, that, that’s the, that’s the community we’re in, right? But then, then there’s things that you feel I think of a lot more people would benefit if this was out there. And it, it’s hard for people to feel comfortable and we’re kind of in a group, I don’t know all those people that are in, in that round table, but I feel, you know what, if we really want to develop a connection with people, you gotta give. Right? They gotta know. This guy’s coming from a place of genuinely wanting to help others. And you know what? Over time, those same people that I really don’t know, and to me they’re strangers. They’re gonna be like, Hey, Rolando, or Hey Kevin, you know what? I’ve stumbled across this and I think you’re in that arena and I, and they’ll be beneficial if you took a look at this and you know what they’re gonna give back as well.
Kevin King:
And you just did that. Actually, one of the things that Helium 10 likes is hearing feedback from sellers or things that they want. You know, the Cerebro tool was actually developed out of something that Tomer Rabinovich was doing on his own in spreadsheets. And then on this last roundtable, you actually shared a pretty cool strategy that you’re doing. And I hope that I already talked to Bradley about this Oh, really? And we even talked about it on a podcast a couple of weeks ago that saying, Hey, you gotta take a look at this. You gotta, we gotta incorporate this some somewhere into Helium 10 and tell people what you’re doing with that. It’s really fascinating.
Rolando:
So the hardest thing on Amazon is to know what to do with the mountain of data. We are drowning in data and it’s like drinking out of a fire hose, right? And the only way to really make sense of it is to break it down in the chunks that are bite size and then you could do something about it. The hardest thing for somebody that’s, let’s say, not an analyst, not a statistician, not a mathematician, is to take a look, even in Helium 10, we use Helium 10 and other platforms and to take a look at data and say, this is what I need to do with what I’m looking at and apply it to my business. Right? You definitely have to listen to Bradley too, give you the tips and pointers on how to do that. Here’s where to put this and how to filter for that.
Rolando:
But what if I could take a really relevant number or a set of data and make it so that I can see it and understand it? And that’s exactly what we did. So one of the assumptions that a lot of PPC people say is, you’ve gotta run PPC ads all the time. And you don’t know when people are gonna click in the morning, day or night, or maybe on Sunday. I’m sure you’ve heard this. People browse on Sunday and then buy all Monday. I could tell you right now, from the evidence we’ve looked at, that does not bear out, not for us. People will browse on Sunday, but it doesn’t show up on Monday as a click or as a buyer, as a purchase in any way, shape, or form. The volume is too small, the purchase are too small.
Rolando:
So we set out with a theory in mind, most people buy our products Monday through Friday, and within that, is there a set of golden hours that we can take a look at and then take our budget, take our resources, and just pour right into those golden hours? Turns out there is, and not only that, but we were able to look at a real tight window when a bulk of the orders. So for example, Saturday and Sunday, totally not worth advertising anymore. Not doing it. So we’ve been go started day partying, and what allowed us to take a look at this was taking data that was already in Amazon. We created a spreadsheet with all of our orders and then created a heat map around it so that we could literally see Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Fridays.
Kevin King:
So you downloaded like one year’s worth of orders and pars that out to see exactly when the sales are coming in by the hour.
Rolando:
Yes, that’s right. We created a table and then from that table we were able to look at the overall picture. So for us, Monday through Friday, good Saturday, Sunday, 5% to 10% of our orders came from the weekends. And so it doesn’t make sense, it won’t move the needle if I pour resources into that, but if I pour it into the 90 to 95% when most of the eyeballs are there, then I can actually do something, I’ll go even further. The data, if we’re looking at this, bringing it down by weekdays and creating that heat map, we were able to see that orders tend to be front loaded, at least for us. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, still better than the weekend, but Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are better days for more activity. And on Fridays, like during the summer, what we see is that on some products, the drop off is dramatic.
Rolando:
Around 4:00 PM to the evening, there are virtually no orders. So if I’m pouring money into PPC on a Friday, I wanna cut that off at 4:00 PM 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, there are no orders. So the people that are looking for our products are mostly people in the office, right? So if you’re selling into the office space and office products, that person probably has to be in front of their computer. And patterns are hard to erase. You know, you get up in the morning, maybe you brush your teeth and you shower. And millions of people do that every single day, Monday through Friday. The same applies for Amazon. Where’s that pattern? And separate that from the noise. And if you can hone in on a pattern, it’s hard to break a pattern, millions of people every day, every morning, and come in, whether we’re working virtually or in the office, type in the computer, log in and start doing some activity, let’s find that pattern and establish that on Amazon. And that’s what we were able to zero in on the heat map that you were talking about.
Kevin King:
So prior to doing this, you were just basically running the same advertising campaigns 24/7, 7 days a week.
Rolando:
More or less. That’s right.
Kevin King:
I’m assuming you know your TACoS at that point was, I don’t know what, what that number was. And then as soon as you started doing this day parting and said, to heck with the weekend, to heck with after six o’clock at night on Fridays, we don’t need to do anything before, I don’t know, nine o’clock in the morning Monday through Friday, either let’s just do nine to six or whatever it is. What has happened with the TACoS in the bottom line as a result of that?
Rolando:
Well I’ll tell you what, you get better return on investment. Your TACoS improve the all familiar ACoS number that will improve. Because what you find is that the, your ideal customer is online at that time. And if you’re targeting your ideal customer, then that dollar, every single dollar you’re investing will get much better return than if you’re you know, trying to target that customer that maybe could be a customer or maybe they’re just shopping around. So what we’re trying to do is target that mid to bottom level funnel customer that has more serious intent, right? And Amazon is more of a platform where you will find more buyers that have that intent to purchase rather than browsing. You know, I buy on Amazon, you also probably are on Amazon buying, and there are sometimes you do some research, but I would say if I even look at my own behavior, I kind of have an idea of what I wanna get when I’m going of Amazon. It’s just, is there a vendor that has it? Is there a seller that’s got what I’m, what I’m looking for? And if so, buy, right?
Kevin King:
Do you only do office products aimed at the office market? Or do you have other products that are not office oriented products?
Rolando:
Yeah, we don’t do supplements. We don’t do kitchen category. It’s basically, if it’s sitting on your desk that’s pretty much what we’re targeting. And that’s what I’ve been doing for 20 years.
Kevin King:
So you’ve been doing it on Amazon for 20 years, or you’ve been doing it off Amazon before that and you migrated it onto Amazon
Rolando:
The second. So we started off as a Yahoo store.
Kevin King:
This is you. And when you say we, is it your company or is it you and some partners?
Rolando:
My, my company. So I started this company in 2002. And then my wife joined in later. She was still doing her work full-time. But I started this thing in my kitchen with an old computer from college. It was a seven year old computer, a seven year old printer and a wall phone that I put in my kitchen. And that’s how I started the business.
Kevin King:
And you were selling back then, there wasn’t a Shopify or anything and there was all kinds of–
Rolando:
No Shopify.
Kevin King:
So it was different kinds of software tying into plug and pay or one of those authorized dot net or one of those–
Rolando:
I fill in this form and fax us the order.
Kevin King:
Oh, fax.
Rolando:
Okay. Yes, yes. My goal, when I started, I said if I can have a fax machine that literally is cranking out paper orders all day long, I’m gonna be rich. Like, there’s nobody’s business if faxes machine out, nobody really uses that orders. And, but that was kind of my goal, you know?
Kevin King:
Did you have it on a rollover? I mean, because if, if you’re ramping up and someone tries to hit that fax number and it’s busy, single ding, ding, ding, ding. Did you have it? Like, cuz I used to do this. I mean, when I was in college, I, I’m a little bit older than you, but I, I remember getting my first fax machine in like 1988 and I was like I don’t, this thing costs like $2,000 or something. I thought it was the coolest thing I had in my little dorm not my dorm, but my apartment. And I was doing stuff similar to you. I was selling business to business and doing some stuff on the side, and I ended up getting a rollover number where, so if the first number was busy, it would roll over to the second number. And so I had a second fax machine on that one. So that way no one ever got a busy signal. Did you do anything like that?
Rolando:
Yes. So I had two lines so that if think, if line A was busy you could go to line B. You know, I get this. So I had a client just years ago, he wanted us this, cuz we do some services on the as well tied into the hardware we do. He wanted to set up a bank of almost 40 faxes because that’s how much business Dave was coming through the door. I need 40 machines and I need you to tie them all together. And it has to work intelligently so that none of the lines are ever busy. We need those fax machines to be able to take in orders and documents at all times.
Kevin King:
Now, some people listening here probably don’t know what a fax machine is.
Rolando:
Two dinosaurs talking.
Kevin King:
For a fax machine was like, it’s like a little printer that sits on, on your desk and you would actually, it’s like a photocopier through the telephone line basically. So you would you’d have a fax machine on the other end, and you would take a piece of paper and you would run it through the fax machine and it basically, in essence photocopy it and it would send it to another machine somewhere else. You dial a phone number and that machine would actually reprint what you had scanned on on one side. That’s what a fax machine is. It got to the point where you could have virtual fax. I think even now you can have virtual fax machine.
Rolando:
Yes. Yeah. Now you can do it. It’s so much easier. You get a phone number and it sends it right over to your email and you have your essentially a copy of whatever document right in your office.
Kevin King:
So were people going to a website and like seeing your products and then having to fax in the order? Like print off an order, print an order form page or something, and like manually write it in.
Rolando:
So they were doing two things. One, there was a big at the top and at the bottom we had our phone number so they can call in and call us and we talk about what they wanted and they give us their credit card over the phone. That was one way to get in touch with us. The other one was like you said, here’s a form and we had a PDF online. You printed it out, you filled in your credit card information and you sent your order with the item you wanted in quantity over the fax machine. So we already had your credit card, you told us you wanted 10 of these, and then we charged your card and sent the product off to
Kevin King:
You manually had to type in the number literally into a little, back then probably into a terminal. Yes.
Rolando:
Yes.
Kevin King:
Not even, not even online, but into a terminal.
Rolando:
Yeah. Like a PayPal terminal. Or some, one of those credit card companies that would have a terminal that you could log into. And then you input the information.
Kevin King:
Just a side story, when I was 23, I think it was, I’d lived in Austin. I went to school at Texas a and m, graduated from Texas A&M University, came to Austin, lived on the couch some buddies for a year, sold t-shirts on the UT campus and all over. And then ended up moving to Arizona. And I had a little direct mail business and I remember I had one of those little terminals, it’s like a little box. You kind of see ’em sometimes now in the retail store.
Rolando:
Yeah. With a keypad on it. You’re talking about those ones.
Kevin King:
A keypad on it? Yeah, you can, yes. You could either, you could scan the card, the magnetic stripe and then type in how much to charge him. I remember I had an apartment in Phoenix about 1993, 1992, I guess. And I didn’t have an ethernet jack in this apartment that wasn’t common back there or whatever it was. You need to have some sort of jack that I didn’t have, or maybe I didn’t have phone service. That’s what it was. I don’t know. There was something where I had to actually take my little machine and drive up the street a little ways to the 7-Eleven and I would ask the 7-Eleven said, Hey, can I temporarily plug my machine into your wall to use your line? And they actually let me do it. And that’s, I would sit there and charge my cards for my mailed in orders and then and then hit the submit button for close the batch for the day and then head home. Entrepreneurs do some crazy things sometimes.
Rolando:
Oh, heck yeah. I mean, the availability of it wasn’t called broadband Beckton, but dial up services or ISDN this, before I was in the Amazon business, I worked for Altria a Fortune 100 company. And all of our work, everything we sent in had to be on the ISDN line cuz it was a little faster than Dialup.
Kevin King:
Not as fast as a T1 though. Not as fast as a T1, but faster than Hub.
Rolando:
Not as fast as T1. That’s how you send all your work in. But not everywhere could you get an IDN line. So I’m sure that wherever you were, there may not have been any there may not a network or something where you could get even a dial up modem.
Kevin King:
Yeah. Just, you just remind me of that story where I was like doing anything to make a hundred bucks or 200 bucks or whatever just to stay alive.
Rolando:
In high school, I went door to door selling everything. And I didn’t know at that time, but it really was good training to become an entrepreneur. And I got kind of got this into the entrepreneur thing by accident. I, in the early two thousands, so the .com bubble burst, right? A lot of tech and telecom people were out of work. I was one of those. And for months I couldn’t find a job and no matter where I went, if there’s too many telecom people all applying for the same few positions. And I had had a couple of boxes of the stuff sitting in a closet and I thought I really don’t like this company. I could just burn it and I’d feel better. But then I thought, you know what? I’m gonna do something better than that.
Rolando:
I’m gonna see if I could dial up some other clients that I’ve worked with in the past and maybe they wanted to take this stuff off my hands. Sure enough, somebody took a meeting and and she said, you know what? You don’t have enough. We want more. Can you get more of that for us? And then the kind of light bulb went off and I was like, huh, there’s probably a business here. And I was just purely thinking of unloading this stuff instead of putting it in the landfill. And then I thought, okay, where am I going to get, I don’t have a line of credit. This is again, right at the beginning one of my first customers. And I thought, you know what? Let me call some of the people that I knew that were suppliers.
Rolando:
This is all reselling equipment by the way. And just on my name alone, they say, okay, we’ll give you a line of credit. Okay. Got to the line of credit, was able to actually ship the product to this client. And from there then I thought, okay, what do I need to do? Okay, I gotta get a car, I gotta get business cards, I gotta go do a website. And then I thought I don’t wanna travel everywhere in my car. This is 2002 and I want to go all across the country cuz I knew clients everywhere in the US at the time, and I wanna really wanna travel and it’s gonna take forever. I said why don’t we try this web thing? I bet we could probably sell to clients everywhere and it amplifies my efforts. So I got, I finally got somebody to put a website up for us, was what we were talking about very econ, you couldn’t really add to cart back then.
Rolando:
And that grew from just being in my kitchen to where I am today. But that’s how I got started in the entrepreneur game. Just really backed into it out of necessity. But then I realized as I was going there is a need for the products that we sell and the way it’s being sold, it’s too complicated. It gets back to our conversation about Amazon, the data out there on what to do is there, but it’s like drinking out of a fire hose. And it was this kind of similar situation for our products for a lot of the customers that were buying the type of products that we sell. And so I decided, you know what, I’m gonna make it very easy so that when customers decide we gotta put in a phone system in our office and we know we need what speaker phones in our, in our conference rooms and headsets to put on our people.
Rolando:
I know how to get to it because there’s literally thousands and now there’s even tens of thousands of options. And that is a kind of paralysis by analysis way too much information. So we made it easier to get what you need when you have employees when you send them home and they need to work from home. And that was my angle for the longest of time, this is just easy, just hit these, but come over here, check this out. You’ll, you’ll be able to get what you need within a matter of minutes rather than like, oh my God, I’m freaking out where I gotta get this part from over here. That part from over there. This and that was kind of the standard when it came to type of the equipment, the hardware that, that people would use when they have people in the office.
Kevin King:
So it’s everything you need in one package basically. And you don’t have to worry about stringing things together or, or, or whatnot. So basically like a bundle in a way. Yep. So in the beginning, this was somebody else’s brand, but is it still somebody else’s brand that you’re selling? Or now are you selling your own private label brands?
Rolando:
So now that we’ve been on Amazon going almost on 10 years, we do have a private label that we sell on Amazon, but we’re still resell, which for so many people. If you watch social media, there’s a lot of salesman ships out there or sellers or, or people selling services that to talk about drop shipping. And it goes something like this, go to Helium 10, find the highest search product, right? Go to Alibaba, sell that product on Alibaba. And they’re selling a bad build of goods cuz they’re not really doing a good service by telling you that because you can do some drop shipping, you could do private label, you could do both. But in order to succeed on Amazon as a reseller, or even as a private label person, or a company or brand, you really have to understand that Amazon’s platform is unlike any other Kevin, the first year on Amazon, we only sold $10,000 worth of sales.
Rolando:
Nothing. Nothing. That’s literally, I would say nothing. And so we probably lost money and that’s because we wanted to apply the exact same logic and metrics that we had on our own. We had big commerce, on our big commerce store where we were doing just fine and just say, okay, we just put a picture here and an image there and da da da. Same description, eh, we’ll sell and nothing $10,000. So then we come into the game thinking, we gotta change this up. We gotta figure this out because it’s not quite the same rules. And after we made those changes, every month got better after that. Oh my, we had, we had a, we finally had our first six figure month and our mid six figure months, and then we made top six figures a month. And then those, and, and it just kind of builds.
Rolando:
And then you start talking to people like yourself that are wizards of this game. And then you’re like, oh, wow, we could take this at the next level. And this guy knows a ton. I mean, I remember sitting next to you, you and Norm, who I was just, I was telling you, I was just listening to your podcast with Norm and I met both of you in the same, at the same time, at the same event. And in New York you were at an event I think it was the first New York event that Amazon had. The first one, like where Amazon Accelerate,
Kevin King:
I’ve ever been to any of Amazon’s actual shows.
Rolando:
Or wasn’t Chad Rubin’s Accelerate? It was one of those two.
Kevin King:
It was probably Chad Rubin’s. Chad Rubin did an event where I ended up winning the hack contest and like a suitcase cool. Full of dollar bills or something like that.
Rolando:
Yes. So you were sitting at the table at dinner with him and you actually were next to me. And Chad was, you gotta meet Kevin, you gotta meet Kevin. And I heard that name. Oh, Kevin King, who is he? And you sat right next to me and we were talking about catalog stuff like this is what has going on and try this and try that. And I’m like, this guy really knows what he’s talking about because you hear, you’ve been around this, there’s people that are BS artists, they know something, but it’s a lot of bs. They don’t really know, they’re not really in the game. They don’t understand it. They’re very few, what I would call experts that really understand how to make things work on Amazon. And I hold you in that regard. You Chad and Norm you guys are in that kind of group, right?
Kevin King:
I think it’s more, for me it’s, I know a lot about Amazon, but there’s people that know a lot more than me of the inner workings and, but I know quite a bit, but there, there’s much bigger experts than me. But I think my strength is, I’ve been doing this so long in direct marketing, I bring a different perspective to it. A lot of people get into this and they have no business experience, no direct marketing experience. I’ve been doing this since before Google existed. I still do it direct mail today. I started off as indirect mail I was named Target Marketing magazine, which is like a direct mail magazine named me when I was like 22, 1 of the top 40 marketers under 40 in that space. So that’s what I think gives me an edge over a lot of other people is I can come to this with a different perspective than just what you learned on a YouTube video or what you learned in a Facebook group or, or what you learned by trial and error. And I think that’s what gives me an advantage and a different perspective of looking at things rather than just cookie cutter like so many people do.
Rolando:
Well, and you think about this Kevin, where Amazon is a game of many different pillars and somebody recently said something and the light bulb went off for me. Amazon, for me, the way I see it now, it’s a game of digital real estate like Monopoly, right? In Monopoly, you have the entire board, but if you just put your eggs in one basket the most expensive property. And that’s what I’m gonna get. You’re missing out on a whole bunch of other things. And the way to win, and, and this is I was, I’m, I’m still re still resell and a lot of manufacturers want to really eliminate you know different even authorized resellers. I think it’s a really wrong.
Kevin King:
They wanna go direct, they wanna buy that. They wanna take your margin and you’ve already built a listing. That’s a risk, I think for you. You’ve built a listing, you’ve optimized this thing they could at any time even though you have a contract, I’m sure with them at any time, they could still yank it from you and just go on to and take advantage of all your hard work and just go right back on that same listing and do whatever the heck they want as the brand owner, as that’s a huge risk I see in reselling is I would always be looking over my shoulder. And that’s why I asked you, do you have the private label too? I would be trying to develop something in parallel so that if that did happen, because you’re playing in someone else’s sandbox, they control it. You don’t ultimately control it.
Rolando:
Right. Well, let me tell you how we’ve been able to overcome that problem. And what I see as the Achilles heel in that model having w been having worked for a manufacturer like Altria, which is a big powerhouse, bigger than any of the brand, if you took all the brands that we resell today, they still don’t have one 10th of the sales of what Altria has.
Kevin King:
So what does Altria sell?
Rolando:
Altria’s, Marlboro, craft foods, they own a bunch of, okay? Okay. And all of them, all of all of the bills, big brands depend on distribution and getting their product to market, right? The masses. So you could go directly on, on the front end, like an e-commerce side, but in reality those businesses rely on payments from the big distributors that buy millions from them. So they don’t have to rely on teeny little payments from all of the customers. And so if I can get my cash flow from millions at a time, truckloads from a supplier that’s buying truckloads from me, my cash is more stable that way I can control it better. Now let’s jump into the Amazon side when we talk about that. So these manufacturers that also want to go to direct on the backend for them, they don’t have the manpower to manage Amazon.
Rolando:
And, and that’s from talking to all of them, and I talked to just recently to multinational beauty brand. They have three people that manage Amazon from multibillion-dollar beauty brand, mind you a lawyer and two people on the team. That’s it. You cannot win on Amazon with three people. If you’re multi-billion dollar company, this is gonna be difficult. And the problems they had were real counterfeiting and products going sideways and, and unauthorized resellers that were lowering their prices and just creating a mess. You can’t do that with three people. You got to have a team and you gotta have a way to make sure that that team is on board with your game plan, otherwise you get crashes. And that’s what’s happening on Amazon. Even with these bigger brands that we’re reselling, the problems they have, if they went on it by themselves, they went alone, would be much greater than what they have today.
Kevin King:
Some of ’em, as they just hire, put a $40,000-$50,000 a year person that just graduated with an MBA thinking they know what they’re doing and they have, they have no clue and they really don’t care. Ultimately, I mean, this is a gorilla marketing business. You’ve gotta be nimble, you gotta be able to move quick. It’s not a punch the clock nine to five job, it’s a 24 hour seven day a week for, for most accounts. I mean, you can take the weekend off. But to some degree you still gotta watch to make sure that something bad didn’t happen. But yeah, that’s where corporate, that’s where these corporations, they’re, they’re having a hard time making Amazon work and sometimes they work just by default. You know, they’re Nike or they’re Adidas or something like that.
Rolando:
Nike’s aren’t on the platform anymore. Was too disastrous. To disastrous for them, right?
Kevin King:
Yeah. That’s true. I mean, a lot of the big brands backed off it they claimed it on counterfeiting and control and stuff like this, but, and some of that may be true, but it’s also, they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. And this is not the, just like you said it earlier, most of these companies rather just sit back and just talk to one guy, some big distributor and Ingram Micro or something, or who are the big distributor is for them and let them handle it and get these big checks rather than dealing with all this day-to-day in and outs. And they leave a lot of money on the table. And the aggregators are, are the most recent example of this where a lot of them got into this thinking it’s kind of easy. And they apply in a corporate mentality to it. And that just doesn’t work. When you’re scratching an e-commerce, whether it’s Walmart or Amazon or Shopify or whatever it is, it just doesn’t work that way.
Rolando:
Well you look, I did corporate jobs up until 2002 when I started this business. And the pace, even if you work for a tech company that tends to be faster than most, it is nowhere near the pace Amazon wants you to work, right? Think about the moment somebody complains and put in a one star review. These guys are bums, they sold me bad product. And how fast that can take your BSR down cuz nobody wants to buy your product, right? Or you get several of those, or Amazon takes your listing down because one word appears and their bot happened to magically think that you’re doing something wrong because of one word. Or you get somebody that really wants to take you down and hijacks your listing and inserts some bad set of phrases in there. If somebody’s doing a nine to five job, like most of these big brands, the guy or girl that’s in charge of that, let’s say effort, let’s call it the Amazon effort on Friday afternoon, they’re looking at the clock. It’s Friday, July, I’m going to my barbecue here at 5. You know, problems be damned. I’ll handle it on Monday or Tuesday, right? And that’s the mindset for most people that work corporate jobs, when they’re told, Hey Joe, you’ve been handed the Amazon responsibility to drive that train for us. Okay, that sounds like fun, but they don’t even realize what how much work that’s gonna be.
Kevin King:
So how big is your team now?
Rolando:
We’re now going on 18-19 folks that all play different roles on, on different parts of the organization.
Kevin King:
And you’re at seven or eight figures or what, what general roundabout numbers are yet?
Rolando:
We’re just a hair below eight. Like I wanna maybe buy some product on Amazon one year to just get us over the hump and say we’re gonna be an eight figure seller. But you know what Kevin, something that more recently from me that’s become more important than just like eight figure, nine figure and all the rest is how much of that are you taking home to the bank?
Kevin King:
That’s right. That’s all that matters,
Rolando:
Right? Because there are sellers that make seven or an eight figures and and they
Kevin King:
Don’t have two nickels to rub together.
Rolando:
Exactly. And not even, I’m gonna give you something even more important than that. You can have those two nickels in your bank, but if you’re not able to take time off, whether it’s with your partner, your loved one, your friends, your spouse and the activities you want to do, what does it matter? I mean, we’re talking about health earlier, right? It is important for entrepreneurs to know that if you’re making seven figures, take as much as you can try to make your operation profitable. Eight figures, nine figures, doesn’t matter. You wanna be able to be profitable and if you can use time to spend it with the things that you want to do or activities or people or whatever. And that’s so important because we’re not guaranteed tomorrow. And being profitable allows an operation to do many more things than the eight figure sellers. Like you said, that’s just rubbing two nickels and barely making it and barely making payroll payments.
Kevin King:
That’s what people always ask that Kevin, what kind of sellers do you do and why you should be like an eight or nine figure sellers as much as you know, as many people as you know, I’m like, that’s not my goal. I’ve been there, I’ve had 16 people in an office and paid that overhead and had that responsibility of you got all those families to feed in addition to yourselves. Like, I don’t want to go back there. I’d rather be a smaller seven figure seller and enjoy my, have my freedom and my quality life. And so I base the products I sell and what I do around that. I have one of my businesses it makes probably you know, I’ve got several different Amazon businesses. One of ’em probably does about $700,000 total and gross top line sales per year, which is nothing people could laugh at that like 700,000, that’s nothing but outta that 700,000.
Kevin King:
It can potentially put in I got someone else that’s involved in that, but it could potentially put 500,000 to 600,000 in our pocket. The margins are that good. That, that right there. And no PPC, no launches. I mean it’s a, it’s a very niche product. It’s a very niche down thing and we just literally put it up and we do it right. That’s me and I, I know how to do it right and how to grow it and how to get it tied into the frequently bought together and all this kind of stuff. And that’s what it’s about to me. It’s not about speeding my chest and saying I’m my sales are bigger than yours. And that’s what I think a lot of people get lost in is they want to have bigger sales or feel like they have the nicest house on the block.
Kevin King:
Whatever. But I’m able to travel. Last year I just, not counting conferences Amazon conferences. My wife and I took 11 trips we went to the World Cup finals, we went to Dubai, we went to St. Lucia, we went to Paris, we went to London, we went to Cancun, we went to cobbles San Lucas we went to on Alaskan Cruise, we went to Aspen, we went to Panama City. I mean we did what we wanted to do and this business allowed me to do that. And that’s what’s most important. And I think exactly like what you said is people lose sight of that and they quit their corporate job to get freedom. And they end up being a slave to their own, own business and working more and longer hours and wondering why this thing’s not working and why their relationship or their family and their health and everything else is going into the toilet.
Rolando:
You know? Kevin last year, I wanted to throw in the towel. I was completely exhausted, completely. I was like, could I get an aggregator? Just give me, give me a nice big package to get out of all this. But part of that was my frustration of not being able to do what I really wanted to do, which is I love taking downtime. I live just outside the nation’s capital. We have beautiful trails. I live near the river, I walk with my dog I have a little one. So we take walks as well. And I couldn’t get to do that. And that to me, that’s joy. And then for you maybe like taking cruises with your wife and being able to do that on a regular basis gives you such joy and a sense of accomplishment.
Rolando:
Right. And in 2022, I had set my goal. I am going to not do what I was doing before. And I got to the end of the year this year and I was in a totally different place cuz I got to take, I took time off, I took more vacation and I had not purposel intent on taking vacation since my last job. I was working at the corporate job where you get I got, you get your vacations and you go off and you go away. Like you say your corporate mentality. Well why can’t I bring that into my work? The important part is to bring that into your work. And you could do that when you’re profitable. That’s where I was going with that. If you’re not profitable, the amount of stress that’s on you is insane. So having seven or eight figures means nothing if you don’t have profitability.
Kevin King:
I mean, I set my freedom schedule first before I set my business schedule. I will book a trip. Like I’m, I’m setting some of my trips for this year, like we’re gonna go to Japan. But I will book that first and then organize the business around that, not the business first. And when can I squeeze in a vacation? It’s the other way around. And most people don’t do that. That’s, that’s not their priority. I mean you only get one life and live it, now. You never know what’s gonna happen. If you’re gonna get hit by a bus, you’re gonna get pneumonia and die. Yeah. Just recently you saw what happened to someone in the NFL. You just never know. And so my thing is live now yeah, you might have to do a little bit of work to get to a point where you can do that.
Kevin King:
You know, I’m not saying you can just flip a switch and live for the now and be able to afford whatever it is that you wanna do. But some people say, I don’t have the money to travel or I don’t have the money to do this. Yes, you do. It’s a matter of priorities. It’s a matter of what you focus on and make happen. People say they don’t have the money to travel. That doesn’t mean that you gotta go stay in the four Seasons and fly first class. I mean yeah, if that’s what your goal is, then you need to something that’ll help you pay for that. But you can also go comfortably and most people in an economy class and stay in a more budget type of place and you can still have those experiences. Cuz life is about the experiences you have and the people you meet.
Kevin King:
It’s not about how much money you have in the bank account or how pretty your house is or what the physical objects in your life are. Those things, they break, they die off, you trade ’em off, you throw ’em away they deteriorate. They appreciate but experiences don’t. And you’ll have those, you’ll be telling stories for the rest of your life to your grandchildren, to your friends whatever. Those things never go away. And that’s what to me is most important as being an entrepreneur and selling in this Amazon space. And I think it’s something a lot of people lose sight of.
Rolando:
Yeah. And I think like you said, there’s a lot of misconceptions out there. People tell you that this is passive income. It is totally not, do not get into Amazon thinking that if you’re listening to this do not get into Amazon thinking you’re gonna sit back and the cash is just gonna pour in because it’s not, and that it will keep, that’s the other thing Kevin, you could get into Amazon, like I said they give you the the car, but you, you gotta know what you’re doing there, right? To continue growing or to survive on that platform. There’s a lot of things. There’s competition, there’s dirty tactics, there are changes that get implemented. All of these things, like almost and more recently in the last eight months, it seems like Amazon’s change machine has accelerated.
Rolando:
You can almost expect that they were gonna throw something at you every quarter, like once a quarter. And then recently, I don’t know if you see this Kevin, but it seems like once a week they come out with something new, something different. No, we’re not, you can’t do that. Fees have changed and this category, this is now, and now you gotta add these other attributes that are mandatory. You can’t do this thing that you could do two years ago. Like, and it’s coming faster and faster and faster and it’s harder to keep up.
Kevin King:
What do you think the key to success is for someone? If your best friend was like, Hey, I wanna, I see what you’re doing this Amazon thing. I stumbled across a couple of Facebook or YouTube videos. It looks kind of interesting, I think I’m gonna get into this. What would your advice be to them?
Rolando:
Start with something that you know. Like let’s say I sold coffee. I was in the coffee in the coffee industry. Well maybe you could something about how coffee’s well better maintained in a mug that has cork on the bottom or a special type of material where it inside it doesn’t degrade to keep the integrity of that coffee. If you know about coffee and that’s what you’ve been working or selling for years, try to go with something that you know, because when you get on the platform, you’re going to be able to withstand some of the issues that come. That somebody that just simply researched Helium 10 and then said, oh, I wanna be in the top category there cuz that’s the most searched in the category, you’re gonna probably crash. So start with something and build on that because then you were like, oh, I know exactly what to do on product one, on product number two.
Rolando:
I’m gonna talk to Norm Ferra and I’m gonna get that beautiful packaging. I’m gonna put the, like you were talking about knife sets and this and that and the other with him. And I’m gonna make that this coffee mug that was a $10 mug into a $40 coffee mug and it’s gonna sell like hot fire because now I know what to do with this product and I’m gonna make the packaging even better prettier and all that other stuff. And that’s my advice. Start with something, even if it’s something mundane that you can attach, maybe there’s a particular sleeve, I don’t know, you’ve seen this sleeve you can put on and now, I know a chemist that can help me with these new space age materials that can put a sleeve on this mug. And now the coffee stays hotter all day long. Now you don’t have to go back and refill with a hot coffee pot anymore. So start with something your likelihood of success is gonna be higher than somebody that’s just saying, go buy this hot product.
Kevin King:
Now you said you were for a long time, you just kept to yourself, kept your head to the ground or selling to the office industry and recently you popped up and you said you know what? I’m gonna start getting a little bit more involved and come outta my shell a little bit value. Do you see in like groups like the Helium 10 Elite or any other groups that you may be in, or where are you getting your information or where are you in some ma other masterminds that are sharing stuff or talk about some good ones that, that you may be involved in that and the, the value of that?
Rolando:
Well, I’m obviously involved in the Helium 10 Elite group. There’s a lot of value in that group. That’s why you keep seeing my face come into, I had, you had not seen me in there at all and you’ve probably been leading those round tables for a long time, but I popped my head in there now every it’s on my calendar. I don’t care what’s happening. Those round tables are on my calendar every month so that I’m there listening to and learning at the same time. If I can contribute and add, I’d do that, I would advise anybody out there that wants to take it to that next level. The Helium 10 Elite group is really powerful for that. I really love it. I mean it’s great. As well as some of the MDS, there’s a couple of other people in my circle that we just informally kind of just talk and exchange information. More recently we’re talking about the whole artificial intelligence and how that is a game changer. And definitely if you’re not looking at artificial intelligence, you have to be it will save a ton of money, time and effort for everything you’re doing on Amazon. Everything.
Kevin King:
I agree with that. By the way, if you haven’t listened to last week’s episode of AM/PM Podcast, go back and hit that episode 324 talking with Anthony Lee all about exactly that, how artificial intelligence is gonna have a profound impact on e-commerce. So check that out. And that was something we talked about in the most recent Helium 10 Elite group round table as well. That was some really good stuff.
Rolando:
It’s a game changer, Kevin it’s available for the masses. And if it’s not on your radar screen, it is a big mistake. If you’re a marketer or you’re a business owner or you’re in a brand, you’re in a corporate environment, obviously corporations have a different process of getting to those tools cuz they got to vet them and all these other things. But if you’re not that and you’re, you’re a solopreneur, get with artificial intelligence ASAP, it will make your life easier. You could create listings faster. It does it just as smart. We did an exercise today with folks that do our catalog. We took keywords from Helium 10 and I said, make this thing, create bullets. Boom, in 10 seconds we had seven bullet points all well written, and not only that, but then I said, tell type in there, create it with FOMO so that fear of missing out, boom, spit out 10 more results.
Rolando:
Creating that FOMO kind of concept into the bullets using the keywords. And now for the folks on my team that create those bullets, that create these descriptions and titles, their jobs got a lot easier and in some ways more fun because now you can play with more possibilities. But essentially you have limitless possibilities with a artificial intelligence that can create on demand titles, bullets, description, give you tips on how to sort things out in a way that you couldn’t do before. You know it takes a lot of brain power, especially just think about creating a title that works on Amazon and uses the right keywords. How much time in your brain that takes up to dictate Oh yeah, it’s, that’s a good one, that’s a good one time, right? If you have a VA doing it and maybe English is not their first language, this is especially useful for them.
Kevin King:
Oh, it’s a game changer for sure. Well, Rolando if, if people want to learn more about you, I know you have like a podcast you’re doing now too, right? Or you have a few things. How would people that want to–, that liked this episode? Like, man, this guy sounds interesting, I wanna know more about him or reach out to you. How would they do that?
Rolando:
You could check us out. So we have a, a website called circuitloops.com, circuitloops.com. And it’s got all of the podcasts that we’ve done. It’s also available on Apple and all of the rest. But circuitloops.com is where we have that. I’m on also on LinkedIn. I hang my hat on a little bit more on LinkedIn and to just look up Rolando Rosas Global Tech. And I am there I’m open to working with others that need assistance in this arena. And then I’ll try to answer your questions as best as I can.
Kevin King:
Awesome, man. Well, it’s been great having you here on the AM PM Podcast. I’m sure I’ll see you in the next roundtable coming up. Appreciate you taking the time today to come on and share with us.
Rolando:
Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. I appreciate the opportunity.
Kevin King:
As you can see, Rolando is very successful at what he does and a very smart guy. This is the type of people that you get to meet in the Helium 10 Elite Roundtable. So if you’re not a Helium Tent Elite member, you might consider joining the next time it opens, which I believe will be in March of 2023 if memory serves me right. But to watch for an announcement from Helium Tent about that, if you’re on the Helium 10 list, it’s definitely worth getting in there because every week and every month with me, we have round tables where we talk with people like Rolando and just share what’s going on out there. It’s a really valuable resource. I hope you really enjoyed this episode, and I’m looking forward to seeing you on the next episode. But before we go, I’ve got this week’s words of wisdom for you. Success without fulfillment is a failure. Success without fulfillment is ultimately failure. We’ll see you next week.
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