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The Importance of Systems and Processes in E-Commerce – Go from Zero to Hero with Your Biz – 219

As entrepreneurs, one of the most difficult things to do is balance your workload.

Wanting to keep your hands on the wheel, knowing exactly how you like your business to run while delegating enough that you’re not buried in the day to day busywork.

Today on the AM/PM Podcast, Tim Jordan welcomes Trent Dyrsmid, an expert on implementing systems and processes that help entrepreneurs and e-commerce sellers manage that important puzzle.

Trent was responsible for creating companies that were twice featured on Inc’s Top 5000 list and on Profit’s 100 Fastest Growing businesses. In this podcast he tells how important it is to create processes that allow entrepreneurs to delegate more work, scale faster, and move forward. Trent says that the first step is to, “Just make one process for the thing you hate the most.”

He says that processes will help create an atmosphere of trust and make it more likely that entrepreneurs will find the business balance they’re looking for. That in turn will go a long way towards giving entrepreneurs back big chunks of valuable time.

Then, you can use that time to come up with your next great idea.

In episode 219 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Trent discuss:

• 03:00 – A Move from Vancouver to California and, What’s Internet Marketing?
• 04:30 – An Algorithm Change Causes a Pivot
• 06:30 – PPC Costs Derailed a First Amazon Selling Effort
• 08:30 – 0 to 100K per Month in Revenue in 5 Months with Amazon Wholesale
• 10:45 – Breaking the Product Sourcing Process into Steps
• 14:00 – What are the Biggest Mistakes that People Make with Processes?
• 17:00 – Step 1 – It’s Important to Just Start
• 20:30 – Don’t Undervalue Your Time – Ask for Help  
• 24:00 – Processes Need to Precede the Hiring of Virtual Assistants  
• 28:30 – How to Get Started
• 31:00 – “Just Make One Process for the Thing You Hate the Most”
• 33:00 – Here’s Where to Learn More from Trent  

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “join” our Facebook Group and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to our podcast.

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Transcript

Tim Jordan: For me, one of the most difficult aspects of growing a business is balancing the fact that I’m an entrepreneur, I think I can do it all, with how do I delegate, how do I outsource, how do I trust other people to do my tasks for me? It’s required when you want to scale a business, but it’s tough mentally to fathom. The way in which you do that is through flows and processes. Today our guest is going to talk to you about his experience, his story, and give some advice on how we can use processes to help scale our business without losing our sanity. Stay tuned. Here we go.

Tim Jordan: Hi. I am Tim Jordan and in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans, we all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Tim Jordan: Hey everybody. And welcome to another episode of the AM/PM Podcast. Today, like normal, we’re talking about entrepreneurship, we’re going to give it some really good content. We have a great guest today. We have Trent Dyrsmid, which is not spelled like it sounds so it took me a couple times to practice that. But Trent, thanks for being here. Hope you’re doing well today.

Trent Dyrsmid: I am indeed. Tim, thank you so much for making some time to have me on the show.

Tim Jordan: Yes, sir. So, as most of you know that our frequent listeners, we try to bring not just great advice, but also people with a lot of experience and some people with clout, right? There’s a lot of people that talk a good game, but they may have never been there. There are a lot of people with some great sounding ideas, but they’ve never really put into play. Trent is not that guy, Trent in Canada has been listed by magazines as a top 40, under 40 entrepreneur. He’s had a– Trent, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s a couple of companies now, right? That was listed in the Inc 5,000 list. And some of those lists in Canada and the US?

Trent Dyrsmid: Yeah. My first company was what’s called a profit 100 fastest growing company in Canada, which is kind of like being 5,000 lists in Canada. We were on that list for two years, and then I sold it. And we– my current business has been on the Inc 5,000, twice, both last year. And this year, last year, we were in a route 254. And this year we’re going to be number 622.

Tim Jordan: Well, that’s amazing. Congratulations. So those are you that are listening. We have somebody with some clout today. And, I know that a lot of that has been somewhat recent success. You weren’t one of those guys on that list at 25. I’d like to hear what you were doing in your younger years, but I will preface all this by saying that you’ve also worked in a lot of genres, right? You’ve done like traditional e-commerce, you’ve done Amazon selling, you’ve built software companies and mastermind products, things like that. But tell me, before you got into the e-commerce space, and serving the e-commerce space, what were you doing before then? And kind of give us the roadmap of how you ended up here today?

Trent Dyrsmid: Sure. So it starts, when I sold my first business, the one in Canada, it was an IT services business, and we delivered our services over the internet, but we wouldn’t call it necessarily an e-commerce business. Companies didn’t like come to our website and sign up to be customers or anything. So, I was pretty ignorant about e-commerce and that was back in 2008 that I sold it. So it was a long time ago. But after I sold that, I moved to California to get away from the rain of Vancouver. And I started surfing each day and I met this girl surfing. Her name was Haley. And each day, I got the long story short. I got to know her. And she was an internet marketer, and I didn’t really know what that was at the time, but she told me that she was an affiliate. And she explained to me how that worked. And she was only working about an hour per day. And she was making about $200,000 a year. And I thought, well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. I was really enjoying my post-sale retirement. And I thought, I’d just like to stay retired, but I still need to generate some income at some point. So, I started out to become an Amazon affiliate. And in no time I was making two or 3000 a month as an Amazon affiliate. And that’s when I started my first blog and my first podcast and those blog– that blog and podcast became really popular really quickly, because I don’t think there was a lot of other bloggers. And there wasn’t a lot of other podcasts back then. And then in 2010, the penguin and panda were two updates that came up to the Google algorithm and myself, and a whole bunch of other people who were doing micro niche sites. We just had our clocks cleaned. I mean, it was over like that. And so I had to reinvent myself and that’s when the bright ideas podcast was started. And that actually led us into having a marketing agency, which we, my wife and I, because I got married in and around that time, my wife and I ran that for about four years.

Tim Jordan: But wait, not married to the surfer girl.

Trent Dyrsmid: No.

Tim Jordan: I really thought that story is going to be all– I met a girl surfing. We’re married now. So, you met a girl surfing, learned about affiliate marketing, then met another girl and got married.

Tim Jordan: Correct. That story would sound way cooler if it was all related.

Trent Dyrsmid: I know. Haley wasn’t into me.

Tim Jordan: Oh, that’s savage. Alright, sorry. Sorry for the intervention there. Keep going.

Trent Dyrsmid: For an e-commerce. So, as a result of the podcast, because I’ve got hundreds of episodes now that I’ve done. I know a lot of people and I call them my internet friends and I’ve never met them in real life. You’re now one of my internet friends. We’ve never met personally, but we’re meeting here. And so there was two of them who were selling on Amazon doing private label and they were literally harassing me to that. I should start. Every time they talk to me, have you started yet? Have you started yet? Why aren’t you starting? We’re killing it. And so finally I agreed. I said to my wife, I said, look, you seem to have the agency well on hand we had one really, really big client that she was servicing and leading the team. And I thought I can peel myself out of this and I’m going to give a stab at this Amazon thing. And it was a miserable failure. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t take anybody’s training course. I didn’t have, I had just them. And in the private label world, it all comes down to product selection. You’ve got to have enough demand, not too much competition and being a not rookie entrepreneur with some money. Of course, I went in there full of bluster thinking, well, I’m going to pick a more competitive product because I will out-market everybody else. And I want to give myself lots of upside. So I did that and got my ass handed to me. So, I was after about four months we were selling stuff, but I was spending so much on pay per click. I was not making any profit. So, all of it was a complete waste of time. I did learn a lot of stuff though about Amazon, which was very useful and it was around then that I interviewed this guy named Dan Meadors on my show who he was doing and is doing Amazon wholesale, it’s called, or just being a reseller of branded products. And I didn’t even know that was a thing that’s literally how ignorant I was. It never occurred to me that you could approach companies, buy products wholesale, and then sell them on Amazon. And when he explained that to me, I thought, Oh man, that’s brilliant. I like that because it’s super low risk because the products are proven. You can see the sales velocity used by the things and put them on Amazon and resell them. And it was easy. So, I hung up from that interview and I turned to my wife and I said, we’re going to do that, like start right now. And so I just basically killed the private label business immediately set out to do that. And within five months we went from zero to a hundred grand a month in revenue. The first year we did over a million. Now we’ve been on the Inc 5,000 list twice. So it was a life changer and there’s a whole bunch of spinoff things, which I’m sure we’ll get into in this conversation, how the software company came to be and so forth. But it was a game changer for me at that point in my life. And that was in the summer of 2016 was when I started that.

Tim Jordan: And these stories always sound great, Oh, I accidentally found this. I had some failure. Then I went really big, things worked out great for me, but a lot of times we miss how that actually happened. We miss the big aha moments or people don’t necessarily talk about the actual things that happened, like the actual steps that had to take place to make those successes happen. And for you, because I know the software that you have and a lot of the stuff that you preach and teach ,a lot of that I suspect can be put on the shoulders of outsourcing and flows, right? So, setting up processes, setting up procedures, setting up reproduceable functions that you can outsource that will allow you to let things scale. Is that an accurate statement?

Trent Dyrsmid: That is a very accurate statement. I got started with my love of process way back with my first company in Canada. I I read the E-Myth by Michael Gerber. And I was profoundly impacted by that book. And literally ever since then, I have been fanatical as a CEO about making sure that we were a process driven company because there’s so many benefits to doing it. So, when I started the Amazon wholesale business, I had already been working with virtual assistants to run my blog and my podcast for years. So, that was super comfortable to me. And so I never set out to do what most people do. They come to understand how to source products, for example, and then they start doing all the work themselves, which is very laborious, very time consuming. And to be honest with you in this particular business model, it’s really very boring as well. And I thought, well, I’m not going to do that because it’s not a good use of my time.

Trent Dyrsmid:                 So rather than roll up my sleeves and start paddling my boat like crazy. Instead, what I did was I opened up because I didn’t have a software company at this point in time, I opened up a Google doc and I did the thing, but then at the same time that I was doing it, I was writing instructions on how to do it because the thing that I was doing, I didn’t ever want to do again, because it was really just mind-blowingly boring and it was going to have to happen hundreds, if not thousands of times. And so I broke the product sourcing process down into– let’s see how many steps. So, the first step was identifying competitors and then extracting their product catalogs into a spreadsheet. And then having that spreadsheet, we have a bunch of formulas in it to show me the products that would be profitable versus not. And then having a virtual assistant go onto LinkedIn and identify the company that made each one of the products that was going to be profitable. And then identifying the person at that company that we should talk to using a variety of tools to find their email address, and then ultimately sending them an email that said something along the lines of, Hey, we’d like to open a wholesale account with you. Who do I talk to? Can you send me a price list? So, all of that was broken down into, I think it was three or four critical workflows. And then I hired a small army of virtual assistants for three bucks an hour to do all that work. So, that all I had to do was every single day I would come into the office. Tim and I would look at my inbox. And of course, because now we’re sending or my virtual assistants, we’re sending hundreds of emails every single week to all of these different brands who had products that I wanted to carry. Some of them would reply a decent mail, like half of them would reply. And so I just spent all day dealing with my sales guy hat on, dealing with those replies, asking for price lists, doing analysis on profitability of products, trying to negotiate better prices, trying to get the accounts approved. And it worked because eight hours a day for the first six months, I did nothing but that. If we want an account, it went to my wife and she placed the order and she double checked everything. And then if we promise that brand, we were going to run pay-per-click campaigns, or we were going to optimize their listings. I didn’t do any of that stuff. I was literally the closer and I closed like crazy because I had a lot of leads coming into my inbox every day.

Tim Jordan: So, fast forwarding a little bit. I know that you’ve built out systems and processes tools like for e-commerce and sellers, business owners. I know that you have also worked extensively with coaching and mentoring business owners in the e-commerce space, not even just on Amazon, but also direct to consumer. These are going to be your more traditional e-commerce websites. In addition to building these systems, basically to fulfill your own needs, becoming successful at it as with them, and then in turn becoming successful as an e-commerce seller, you’ve worked with a lot of people that are running through their growth process as well. And that’s important because I hear people all the time, especially in the Amazon space posting on the Facebook groups, Oh, this is how you do it because they got lucky and it worked once or it worked for them. It doesn’t mean that it always works. So, those of us that have worked with a lot of sellers have more of a holistic birds eye view on what’s actually going on in the space. And because you’ve been in that space, I’d like to ask you about some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making in their growth process when it comes to setting up procedures, when it comes to outsourcing, can you tell me some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making day in and day out?

Trent Dyrsmid: How much time you got? So, first of all, I do want to quantify or qualify something. I’ve done a decent amount of coaching and actually I really don’t enjoy it that much. What I’ve done a lot more of is providing copies of all of these standard operating procedures to people who wanted to buy them. Because I spoke at a conference and a bunch of people just– we really want to get that from you. That said, I still have the opportunity to interact with a lot of people and the mistakes. Let’s take newbie. They’ve been exposed to this idea of selling on Amazon using the Amazon reseller model, or even starting any business for that matter. Analysis paralysis is a huge mistake. First of all, so people who haven’t yet begun the journey, they mistakenly believe that if they watch enough videos on YouTube and listen to enough podcasts, and do enough brainstorming that some magical idea is going to come to them. And they’re going to take that idea and they’re going to go in a straight line to success. That does not happen. Becoming successful as an entrepreneur is a very iterative process, kind of like a jungle Safari. So, I’ll use a story to illustrate my point. So, let’s say you’re Indiana Jones and you want to go get the thing from the temple of doom or whatever. So you have your eye on this prize, assuming that you can come up with an idea, and what happens is, so you go into the jungle and you’re trying to find the first temple, the first, whatever, the first prize. And so you’re getting good at mashing through the jungle, but you’re really not having a lot of success, but the byproduct of the journey towards prize number one or idea number one is that you actually discover idea number two. And then so you pivot and you think, well idea number one, like in my case, idea number one was maybe Amazon private label. Tried it, wasn’t super successful at it, had spent a bunch of money, spent a bunch of time, but was immersed in this world of how do I become successful on Amazon and lo and behold, I– as I’m on my jungle Safari, I discovered that there’s this other business model called Amazon wholesale, and there’s another one called Amazon retail arbitrage. And another one called online arbitrage. And another one called Amazon brand management. All of these are prizes in the jungle for somebody to pick up. So in my journey, I discovered that Amazon wholesale makes a whole lot more sense to me. So, I alter my path and I go and I go on become super successful at that. So the takeaway, the first takeaway is the most important thing to do is literally just start. And I realize how awful that sounds to the new entrepreneur. Because they’re like, we’ll just start on what, I don’t know. What if I started this and it’s a waste of time. I literally– I had a friend over at the house that night who’s making a transition from being an employee to self-employed, and he kept getting hung up on, well, how do I start? I just want, I want the exact path, and the thing is, there isn’t an exact path. Everybody’s path is different. So by starting taking an idea which you’ve seen other people do, and trying to assuming that it’s appealing to you and trying to be successful at it, you may not be successful at that particular idea. Matter of fact, you probably won’t be, but what you will happen if you persist, if you stick with it is you’ll discover some other better idea along the way, and you might become moderately successful with that second idea.

Trent Dyrsmid: But as you’re trying to become more successful with the second idea, you’re going to discover the third idea. And maybe the third idea is the yellow brick road. And it’s going to take you onto all of your dreams and wealth and whatever it is that your goals are. But if you never started Tim, you would never have discovered the third idea because you had to be chasing the first idea to get the second idea. And you had to be chasing the second idea to get the third idea. And so, that whole analysis paralysis and waiting for the perfect idea to come along and just only trying to be in business in theory, by watching videos and listening to podcasts without actually being in business is by far the biggest mistake that new entrepreneurs make.

Tim Jordan: I couldn’t agree more.

Trent Dyrsmid: The next mistake is trying to do. So let’s say that, okay, I’ve gotten over analysis paralysis. I have started to do something. So we’ll use Amazon wholesales and example. Because I see a lot of people doing this. So, they get into the business and they follow them. Maybe they buy my product called webs and they’re following the procedures and they’re doing everything themselves. And I talked to them and I’m like, why are you doing that piece yourself? Why are you scouting for competitors on Amazon? Well, because I don’t have any revenue yet. And I don’t feel like I can afford to hire somebody, wait a minute. You can hire someone in the Philippines for three bucks an hour, right? Well, yeah, I know what that’s going to cost me. What are you kidding me? You’re basically doing $3 an hour at work. Why? You’ve just valued your time at $3 per hour. So, there’s this misconception, I suppose in a lot of the gurus out, there are totally to blame for this misconception in that people can get into a business and start it for no money whatsoever. That’s not true. You’re going to need help. You’re going to need software. You’re going to need to hire people, virtual assistants to do stuff. So if, I mean, people get into the Amazon reseller space and they want to build a million dollar company and they don’t want to spend $5,000 up front on some training and some software and some people to help them get out of the gates. That’s crazy like who the hell can build a million dollar business without spending $10. Can’t be done. So, second biggest mistake is people trying to do everything themselves instead of thinking, can I delegate this? Could I delegate this? Could I delegate this? Because if it’s a systematic linear process, it’s the same over and over. And it doesn’t require years of experience. What the hell are you doing that process for? That makes just no sense to me.

Tim Jordan: Absolutely. And that’s one of my biggest problems I’ve had in life is delegating. Right? And in here’s the God’s honest truth, at least in my opinion, there are some things that I’m going to do better than a virtual assistant. It’s just going to happen. I can look at products on Amazon. I can do research. I can do ,branding analysis better than a VA. So a lot of times I’ll say, Oh, I’m not going to outsource that. I’m going to do it myself and do it myself. I put it on a to-do list and it never gets done. And then a month later I realized crap, I could have done it better, but I didn’t do it. It would have been better to find a VA for four or $5 an hour, even which is pretty well paid. Let them do this job at 80% accuracy, or 80% efficiency, or 80% success rate. But at least I would’ve had something. Instead I sit around saying, Oh, well they can’t do it quite as well as me. I’m going to do it myself. And it never happens at all. Right. And that’s the ultimate thing that I see consistently happening with entrepreneurs is we, as entrepreneurs are go getters, right? We have confidence. We can do it. We’re the man, we’re the expert. Nobody loves this business as much as us. Right. I get that. But the truth is we can’t do it all. So, I am slowly changing the way that I believe. I need to delegate and spend my time and focus on exactly what you said, value my time. If my time is worth $60 an hour. Well, if I hire 10 VAs at $3 an hour, can those 10 VAs be more productive per hour than me alone. Yeah, absolutely. So, why am I not outsourcing? And completely agree with this misconception of you can build a million dollar business tomorrow from nothing. Now, I know people that started nothing and they have million dollar businesses, but they started washing dishes at a restaurant or they started driving Uber. They had to have a little bit of cashflow coming in and slowly rolled it in. And I hate like I’m looking right now at my bookshelf over there, the four hour workweek. And I hate that, because what he doesn’t tell you is you can set up a four hour workweek, your surfing buddy over there was working one hour a day, but it took a long time to get to that point. You have to build it first and then let it happen. So yeah. Completely agree. Is there another mistake that you see people making day in and day out that you would like to warn them about and warn us about, I should say since we’re all in this pool together.

Trent Dyrsmid: Yeah. And it goes in hand with the first one, is trying to hire. So, someone might be listening and thinking, all right, I’m going to go hire some virtual assistants right now. Well, if you charge out of the gates without having adequate processes in place and what, so what do I mean, like what process, what is that? It’s a written set of instructions that are highly detailed and ultra-specific, so you could give it to your mom who knows nothing about nothing to do with the world of internet, presumably, and mom could do it. If you don’t have that, your chances of having success with virtual assistants goes down exponentially because then, you’re either trying to hire a VA that already has experience in a certain area, in which case, maybe that’ll work. But what if the way that they’ve been trained to do it by whoever trained them isn’t the most effective way. And if you’ve never done it yourself, how would you know? So, you need to do these really boring tasks yourself, one to three times so that you can create these processes, so that when you hire a VA, they’re going to be able to follow your process. And on the off chance that they have some questions, you can actually answer the questions because you’ve done the process yourself. Whereas if I hired a VA, if I didn’t have a process and I had never tried to scout products myself and I hired a VA to go scout products for me, because they told me on their resume that they had product scouting experience. How the hell would I know if they were doing any good or not? How– I could be just, they could be hopeless and I wouldn’t know because I’ve never done it. And I didn’t supply them with a process to do it the way that I wanted and needed it to be done. So, that is also a huge area where people make mistakes. And I know why they do it because it’s all used the longer analogy there. They’re so busy chopping down trees. They don’t have any time to sharpen the ax. They feel like, Oh, I just don’t have time. And that’s why, honestly, that’s why people after I gave that speech years ago at a conference with 500 other Amazon resellers in the audience, and I spent an hour talking about my processes, never thinking that anybody was going to buy these things. That’s why people came up to me afterwards and they said, could we buy them? Because they didn’t want to spend the year that it took me to make them all. I understand that. And that makes good sense. And so that created an entirely new business opportunity for me kind of by accident. But in the event that there isn’t a me out there with processes available for whatever business that you’re in. Guess what? You got to make them, because if you don’t make them, you’re never going to scale. You’re going to have in business, you’re going to have growth or you can have control, take your pick because you can’t have both.

Tim Jordan: Well, I think you can have growth after control, but you can’t have them both at the same time. You’re right. You either– I use the analogy, you got to slow down to speed up.

Trent Dyrsmid: Correct. And let me just quantify what I mean by that. I have control of all of my companies and they’re growing. So, I’m not saying I’m out of control. What I mean is people who struggle to delegate will say, well, nobody can do this thing as good as me, so I’m going to do it. So, that’s control, doing the thing. But as you pointed out earlier, Tim, because of the difference in labor costs between what you can employ a VA from the Philippines for versus your own time, you could employ three or four people for a grand, an aggregate total of 10 or 12 bucks an hour. And even if they’re only 70% as good at you at doing whatever simplistic, repetitive task, there’s no possible way you could have a higher level of productivity than the aggregate of the three or four people that you hired.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. Absolutely, could not agree more. Awesome. So, let me ask you this. If I am an e-commerce seller, a business owner, entrepreneur, listen to this podcast right now, and you’ve basically poo-pooed on everything that I’m doing by talking about the misconceptions and the mistakes that people make, because we all do them. What is the best piece of advice on how to get started? Is that go and research other people’s processes, is it go and buy a done for you set? Is it going hire somebody that will actually set up your processes? Which for me that’s been it, not even set up my own, but hire someone that is a process engineer. What’s like the first small baby step people can take that may be struggling with this that you think will help put them on the right path.

Trent Dyrsmid: I think there’s two answers. Because there’s two different types of people that we could be speaking to right now. One is the person who is not yet in business, and the other person who’s already started and they’re starting to generate a small amount of revenue, but they’re nowhere near where they want. So, let’s deal with them separately for the person who hasn’t yet started the business. And obviously I’m biased because I love the Amazon wholesale business. It’s such a low risk business. It doesn’t require a bunch of money to get started. I would say, if you’re looking for an online business to start, that has immense upside potential go and do that. Whether you watch my videos or buy my stuff for find somebody else just start and it’s not hard at all. It’s the simplest business in the world. It’s find profitable products on Amazon, contact the brands, try and establish a relationship. That’s literally the business model. So, go get started doing that if you haven’t started doing something. The next person is the person who’s already in business. And what I would encourage they do, is if they want to become more process-driven and they want to scale and they want to be able to start employing virtual assistants look at okay, what makes growth happen in my business? So, in most businesses that is either prospecting for clients or prospecting for suppliers or increasing web traffic, if you’ve got an e-commerce business or whatever and think, okay, so what are the actual activities that cause that growth to occur? So let’s just say, if you’re running a digital marketing agency, for example, or an Amazon reseller business, you need to prospect, you need to prospect for clients or you need to prospect for suppliers. Okay. So, I need to prospect cool. Nobody likes prospecting. Nobody. So, let’s break prospecting down into as many micro steps as we can, and then document what those steps are. And then once I’ve got good documentation, now I’m going to start delegating pieces of my prospecting to virtual assistants, so that they can do it for me. So, maybe I should be doing some stuff on LinkedIn. Well, there’s a whole bunch of ways you can automate pieces of LinkedIn, but you can also, which is a violation of LinkedIn’s terms of service. You have to be very careful about that, but you could also be having a VA log in and do stuff for you manually, which is also a violation of LinkedIn’s terms of services. But if you use a VPN they’ll never know, and then get that one thing going, okay, so maybe I should be doing cold email. Okay, we’ll break that down. What does that look like? Step by step by step by step, create a process for it, and then figure out which pieces of cold email that you could delegate to somebody else. And, we could go on, but I think you get, the idea is if you’ve never created a process before. Make one, just make one for the thing you hate doing the most. That does not– and that thing can’t require years of experience and judgment and so forth, like process cold email does not require years of experience. Break it down and get someone doing it for you so that you can do the thing that you’re really good at which in my case, when I started my Amazon reseller business, as I mentioned to you earlier, I was really good at making presentations and getting people to say yes to wanting to work with us. And I would do that. My calendar was full. Just think of how successful you could be if your calendar was full of qualified prospects every single week.

Tim Jordan: Sure. So, I know we’re coming up on time. We need to start wrapping it up, but you’ve also got a source for more information, right? I know you’ve got a place you can tell people about right now where they can go and get more information about processes and process engineering and outsourcing. Where is that?

Trent Dyrsmid: So, there’s a couple of places that I want to direct people to. One of them is we put together– and I’m just pulling up the page to have a quick peek to make sure, yeah, we put together a special offer of free stuff for your audience. It is a collection. I call it my growth accelerator packet. It’s a collection of five of my done for you work flow templates that live in my fluster software application. It’s all free. You can go sign up if you go to flowster.app/ampm. So, if you want to get those five, do that. If you want to learn more about it, if you’ve gotten interested in, Hey, I really like this Amazon reseller idea I want to get started. And I want Trent’s SOPs for that. You can get those by going to brightideas.co/webs, webs. There are videos and testimonials and sales page and the pricing and all that stuff. You can get that if you’re super-duper brand new and don’t even know what this whole Amazon thing is all about. I do have a regularly recurring webinar and you could go to brightideas.co/masterclass, and that will enroll you in that webinar. And I’ll explain how my whole product sourcing thing works and all the tools that I use and give lots of examples. So, those are probably three really good calls to action for people at various points in their journey

Tim Jordan: And you can’t beat free. So, I appreciate you putting together that free information. Again, that was a flowster.app/ampm. Did I say that right?

Trent Dyrsmid: That’s for the free growth accelerator pack. Yes.

Tim Jordan: I usually mess that up. All right. Great. Well, thank you Trent, for being on. I want to be respectful of your time, and I know that there are a lot of things you could be doing, but sitting down and sharing some of your experience, sharing your story and sharing your tips with our audiences, something I’m extremely thankful for. So, thank you very much. And if we want to follow you on social media, where can we do that at?

Trent Dyrsmid: If you, as for first off, thank you for having me on the show. I much appreciate it. If you want to get links to all my social profiles, if you just go to brightideas.co, That’s my personal brand blog, the header of the foot or whatever, there’s links to all my stuff and you can follow whatever you would like.

Trent Dyrsmid: Got it. Well, thank you again very much for being on. Thank you all for listening. If you are watching this on YouTube, make sure to give us a thumbs up and leave any questions in the comments below, and I’ll make sure to get those questions to Trent, get those answered. If you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform, whether it’s a Spotify or iTunes or whatever it is, make sure to leave us a review, let us know how we’re doing. We’d love seeing that love come from you guys. We’re getting tens of thousands of downloads now. And a lot of times we want to hear from you. So, make sure that you reach out, let us know what you like, what you don’t like. And yeah, we’d appreciate that feedback. So thank you again, Trent, for being on. Thank you all for listening and we’ll see you guys on the next episode.