346 : Perry & Kim Coghlan – Find the low hanging fruit with your unimproved Amazon business processes

Selling on amazon podcast

Get ready for some nerd talk. Yes nerd talk. Perry drops some terms that hopefully will get you thinking about process improvement versus moving to a bigger warehouse. Imagine you can gain 30% more with your current space with no incremental costs? Sound good? Does to me! Great couple with lot’s of possible excuses for not getting work done but refuse to take any. They do the work and they do it right.

 

Mentioned:

Perry & Kim’s FBA Corner

Spaghetti Map mentioned in podcast

RASecrets.com

Sponsors

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Gaye’s Million Dollar Arbitrage List

Solutions4ecommerce

Scope from Sellerlabs

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Grasshopper

Transcript: (note- this is a new tool I am trying out so it is not perfect- it does seem to be getting better)

Perry & Kim:                       [00:00:00]               We set a lower Roi to make sure they get enough work to keep them working right though I think we still have that balance between us where I really want to minimize the work and just do the Higher Roi, higher net profit and Perry wants to look, look more at the opportunities in doing volume on a lower margin.

Cool Voice Guy:                [00:00:21]               Welcome to the ECOMMERCE. Momentum will be focused on the people, the products and the process of income are selling today. Here’s your host, Steven Peterson.

Stephen:                             [00:00:35]               He wanted to talk a few moments about some sponsors scope from labs. Um, when’s the last time you created a listing? Right? And when you create that listing, you’ve got to come up with the keywords, right? It’s all key word dependent. I don’t care if it’s a private label or wholesale. You’ve got to get it right. Well, what’s the best way to get it right? If you’re selling a similar product that’s really successful, you go and you take and use their keywords and that’s what scope does for you. So phenomenal tool brought to you again by seller labs. The leaders in technology when it comes to Amazon, right now, they are just crushing it with all their products, but scope allows you to get that listing right, get ranked for those key words as fast as possible. Therefore you get the sales. So go to seller labs.com, forward slash scope.

Stephen:                             [00:01:23]               Use the code word momentum, save a little bit of money, get some free key words to test, try it out and see if you see an improvement. If you don’t adjust, what’s cool about what I love about a seller labs is that you then message and say, Hey, I didn’t get this right tyler. Hey Jeff, this isn’t working right. What am I doing wrong? And Boom, you’re going to get the help you need and that’s what you’re going to get from solar lamps. And, and it’s a very special group that had been very. I’ve been very fortunate to be connected with them. And again, I look over time they’ve delivered every single time, you know, same thing I can say for Karen from solutions for ecommerce. I mean, she’s been carrying my account for a couple of years now, um, and our account, my wife and I, and she really does handle things for us.

Stephen:                             [00:02:05]               Um, I mentioned, uh, just last week we created a new listing with, I forget how many variations, but again, all the flat files uploaded done as I needed. I pop in, so she’ll send me a template, I pop in some information and then boom, it’s handled, await. These pictures weren’t done right, blah, blah blah. This upc, native poom modified adjusted. And again, the communication’s been phenomenal too. I get an email back saying, hey, this was done or this, you’re missing this Steve. Hey, you got to do this. So, you know, we had those challenges too and that’s why I like working with somebody who’s been doing it. I’ve been doing it for a long time to do, you know, Karen also does listings for Ebay. Yup. Lots of them. So if you want to build out that channel, which of course you should, it’s q four. You should be selling everywhere.

Stephen:                             [00:02:49]               You can, um, Karen can help you with that too. So you gotTa tell her I’ve sent you, so you’re going to go to solutions four ecommerce forward slash momentum. You’re going to save 50 bucks every single month. You’ve got to save that $50. But more importantly, you’re going to get an inventory health report. Um, did you just get hit with monthly longterm storage fees? Well guess what? If you haven’t, they’re coming. You want to get that inventory right and she can help you with that. You got to tell her I sent you again, solutions. The number for ecommerce forward slash momentum will get you into that. Save the 50 bucks. Get that inventory health report though. That’s really, really important. Get that going right away and I don’t want to miss my coach when it comes to retail arbor online or when I have a question and I do.

Stephen:                             [00:03:29]               Not that we don’t, we don’t really do much of it anymore, but when I do have a question, I go to Gaye Lisby because why? Because she’s really. She is a coach. I mean, she’s really phenomenal, but she also puts out a daily list and you’re going to get that list five days a week. You’re going to get tons of leads, the number of, uh, agreed to amount that you’re supposed to get. She at least she usually gets to those in the four days. And then the fifth day seems to be a bonus most of the time. Phenomenal Group, small amount of buyers where this list is going to. And the best thing is the nuggets that you learn. Hey, why is the red one better than the blue? One Gaye can help you with those questions. I saw. Hey, I got a, I got to the dreaded letter about a brand.

Stephen:                             [00:04:08]               Here’s the, here’s the way you approach it. Hey, receipts, um, how do you, what’s the best practice? I saw her leaving instructions, teaching me the accountant how to do a better job with it. And it’s phenomenal. So it’s Gaye Lisby made a million dollars selling. Um, I’ll have the link in here. You’ve got to use, um, the, my, my link and it does help me. I don’t want to say it that way, but um, it’s part of amazing freedom with Andy Slam Lee, Ron, hers, corn, and Nate’s lemons so you know, you can trust. Okay, so come back to the website, take a look at it, and you will get a savings and you can get two weeks free right now. Only through my link. You get two weeks free. Try it. You don’t like it? I get it back off. But right now is the time to make money. Get cashflow going right now. And so join you. Get two weeks free. The only way you’re gonna, get the two weeks for days. If you use my link, it’s on this episode. Come on out and give it a try. You will not be disappointed. Again. You’re going to see me in there. So reach out if I can help you too. Let’s get into the podcast.

New Speaker:                   [00:05:06]               Welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. This is episode 346. Perry and Kim Kaufman, you know, as a couple. They are a real, real opponent. I couldn’t not, I would not want to take them on, in any support in any way because together they are an unstoppable force, you know, and to be honest with you, they got an army behind them. Wait to hear that story. But it’s the truth. It’s funny how it’s not like they finish each other’s sentences. It’s, it’s more like there’s such an, the same wavelength of thought because he knowingly knows where she’s going to go and vice versa to me, when you can compliment each other that well, taking advantage of each other’s strengths, knowing when to say no to say yes and then add respect to it, man. You wonder, you wonder what could be if you took that same approach to your life.

New Speaker:                   [00:06:07]               So if you’re not listened to this and then go back and say to your spouse your significant other, I’m sorry, and I’m going to make a real effort to do this and if you are, do more of it, period. You know. And so I’m talking to Steve here saying, Hey, I could do better. I always can do better. Great. Couple. Very, very, very successful. And I spend a lot of time talking about a process with them because I think they have figured out a process and Paris advice about this lean Fba. I think it’s cutting edge stuff because as he describes it, you could almost double your productivity in the same space. Let me tell you, for a guy who just finished moving his warehouse, it took me a year and a half and I’m still unpacking. It’ll take me another year to unpack and I’m not exaggerating asking Andy, it’s the worse.

New Speaker:                   [00:06:56]               And so if you can stay where you’re at and be more efficient and be better there, figure it out. Let’s get into the podcast. Alright, welcome back to ecommerce moment, a podcast. Very excited about today’s guests, plural. Um, it’s a his and her type of operation where clearly she’s the brains of the operation. Perry Kim Kaufman. Welcome guys. Thank you. Thanks for having us. And Perry, you didn’t disagree. He didn’t say, hey, you weren’t standing your ground on that one. Where are you? Yeah, no, I tell people I’m writing her coat tails the fame and fortune, you know. Hey, if that works for you and you can get away with it, then that is absolutely the right thing to do. I’m one of the coolest things. Okay. About what you guys, just, your story is you are part of a large family. I’m downplaying it a little bit. You know, I came from a family, a brother and a sister and the mom and dad, but another day. And so that was pretty big family. My, my wife comes from, she had four brothers, so you know, that was seven in that household. Um, break it down for us. How, how, how, what size your family is.

New Speaker:                   [00:08:07]               We have 11 kids at home. 13 total. So there’s a household of 13 people today. So at one point it was 15. He more or less. But when you get grandkids involved in there and without reaching cousins, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews. How big is it an event at your house? Oh, just just our kids. We only have two grandkids so far. Number three on the way, but I’m the oldest of six siblings and Kim’s the oldest of 14 siblings. So if you go much beyond that or you get the two families together, it gets big really quick. Really. That’s a deep relationship though, isn’t it? When I, when I think of those giant families who we are, and I remember having some of those in my, uh, when I went to high school, there was a family, they had nine or nine or 10 kids. They were so connected as a family. I mean it was just like a machine. So that’s still true in your, in your world.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:09:12]               I think it was more true when they were all little. It’s a different kind of machine now because a four or five of our kids in the house have driver’s licenses and vehicles and jobs. They mostly work for us, but we’re going in a lot of different directions at the same time. So it’s, it’s a more mature machine with a lot more moving pieces.

New Speaker:                   [00:09:32]               I think one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because that is so complex. I’m sure you know who’s doing what. There has to be a schedule that has to be, or at least there had to be, like you’re saying back when they were younger, just just organizing, you know, anything would be a large task. Who did that fall upon

New Speaker:                   [00:09:50]               and be fair? Well, no, our early in our marriage I was much less involved. I was working two or three jobs. Um, I, I don’t have a college degree. And so I started the week after our oldest daughter was born working as a janitor and a chemical manufacturing facility in central Ohio at [5:50] an hour. Um, and I always held two or three jobs until basically we got involved with Amazon a few years ago.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:10:20]               So parenting fell heavily on me. But Perry did help out when he was home. We’ve always kind of shared the duties, not in a 50 slash 50 way, but just in a, this is both our jobs kind of way.

New Speaker:                   [00:10:31]               So, so a homemaker for you is a whole different level, right? I mean, and that’s not a negative. I mean, a homemaker to me is a very, that’s a skillset. I mean, most people who come in with that skill set, they seem to adapt to this Amazon ecommerce where Ebay world so quickly because they can, they could truly multitask. We say we multitask, but guys don’t multitask. We’re one task, right? Will you move onto the next task? We just shut that one down and start on the next one. Right? But, uh, that’s uh, an amazing skillset and you’ve taken it cubed I think is the math, right?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:11:03]               Hmm. That’s interesting. I never thought about that, but yeah, there was, there were so many moving pieces back then that maybe maybe my parenting skills in a big family played well into Amazon.

New Speaker:                   [00:11:15]               No, I think that’s true. And, and here’s the other thing is that, you know, in that world somebody is always crying. Well, know I think of my three granddaughters. There’s always somebody crying. There’s always somebody going to the bathroom. There’s always a problem. Right now there’s only three, right? You add changing. Yeah. Right outside of your control. And so your ability to adapt and just roll with it. Because I’m like panic. I’m like, oh my God, somebody is crying. And they’re like, don’t worry about it. They started at finger in an outlet. Don’t worry. Come on. We gotta do this, you know? And it’s like, only do at once. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it’s just funny. I just think that that’s such a powerful, a powerful skill set that when people are like, well, I don’t know if I’m going to make it. I don’t know if I’d be enough in this Amazon ecommerce world. I’m like, man, you come with skills that me, I wish I had, I, I don’t have those abilities. Okay. So, so why Amazon? I mean, I understand you’re working three jobs. Um, was that not going to be. We’re none of them a future.

Speaker 6:                           [00:12:14]               Um,

New Speaker:                   [00:12:16]               our whole story is kind of interesting because we’ve been looking, trying to be soft unemployed since like the year after we got married, it started with a, a Foley Bell saw mail order course on starting a VCR, had cleaning business.

New Speaker:                   [00:12:32]               Oh, the VCR head clean. That was going to be big, wasn’t it when we did that? Yeah. Yeah. Really?

New Speaker:                   [00:12:38]               And so we had all these iterations of part time self employment, what Amazon sellers would call a side hustle. I’m, we’d mowed grass, I did some commercial janitorial work part time for a friend. Um, I had a carpet cleaning business. I ran out of the back of a dodge Colt hatchback because it was very compact equipment. So we’ve been on this journey since for 26 years together, but we sort of got a taste for ecommerce and 99 when we did some toy are a from big lots. And these $200 toys sold about 150 200 of them in. They were big toys. It was called an air maze. If you, if you google a haystack toys and air maze, it’s really interesting product. But we were flipping on, on Ebay for $150 profit. Um, so that got her feet wet. And this was 99. Yeah, we looked back. That’s why we basically started our ebay account, was to flip these toys, paid off our van, and three months we had like five or six grand on a van. I was making nine bucks an hour, like it was magic back then. It was big money. Right?

New Speaker:                   [00:13:52]               Yeah. You, you sell two or three of those. You made more in that transaction then you did all week working. Right. Um, what, what was it that made that attractive to you? How did you know that that was going to be a hot day? I mean, how did you, how did you come about it? Nobody just magically says, oh, I’ve got a big idea. Perry came talking. She’s like, Perry, I’ve got it figured out. We’re going to big lots. We’re going to buy this toy. Wait, wait. Does he hear this out? It’s going to be pig. And you’re looking at like. All right, Kim. Kim, it’s going to be big. It’s the big one. I got it. I got it. I got it. Yeah, right bud?

New Speaker:                   [00:14:27]               Yeah. No, no. It wasn’t even that. It was A. I am a 10 year old boy. Wrap. Stuck in a 45 year old man’s body. I can second that. Men Watch big lots of price to them at 180 bucks. And I’d been watching them because they look like something it’d be fun to play with my kids with and when they got down to 120 bucks I came home and the Internet was early and we were still using like a four 86 computer. Right. And I got on Ebay.com or no, I, I looked at the website and saw that macy’s and hammer and slammer and some other companies were selling the same toy for $300. And then Ken who had been looking at Ebay for used homeschool books, suggested that we look at Ebay and we saw that we could make at least a hundred hundred and $50 on him. So I headed back to the store to buy it while she made the auction.

New Speaker:                   [00:15:22]               Did you invest your, you know, call it your life savings at that point and say, hey, this is a calculated math or do you use a credit card? The first time

New Speaker:                   [00:15:34]               one is, she did a buy it now with a flat high price shipping, which was kind of new to Ebay back then. And this might have been 2000, I don’t know if it’s 99, but yeah, we’re right on the leading edge whenever it was. And um, so it sold before I brought the first one home from big lots. Like it’s, she made the auction live and it’s sold before I got home from the store. So she put up another option and I went and bought two more and they sold by the next day. At that point we had one credit card. We just ran the credit card up,

Perry & Kim:                       [00:16:06]               maxed it out, filled up our guest room with these big huge toys.

New Speaker:                   [00:16:10]               Did you, did you envision, I mean, was this going to go on forever? I’m sitting here thinking about, you know, was this a just a one time event and anomaly in your minds or did you think, oh my gosh, this could go on forever?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:16:23]               Well, there’s one toy was a close out so we knew it wasn’t going on forever. But at that point Perry definitely got the bug. He was haunting all the big lots for years after that, looking for our next big strike. And he was, he was finding items that had a modest profit margins and pastoring made a set up auctions and I just felt like it was too much work for the moderate margins he was finding. But he never let it go. In fairness,

New Speaker:                   [00:16:48]               by then we had four kids under six, so it was a little bit of a time sink.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:16:54]               We had four, four and under

New Speaker:                   [00:16:56]               and diapers or listing, Ebay diapers or sleep, sleep, stinky bay. Probably even better. Right. Well what’s interesting to me is that you started chasing. Did you start rationalizing? Well, you know, hey, we could still make six bucks. Can we could still make $4 on this one. Right. You start that rationalization. Did did. When you look to today that same mindset, is that still the same mindset, Perry specifically to you?

New Speaker:                   [00:17:26]               I’m sort of like, back then I was only making 10 or 12 bucks an hour. So that was my calculus kid. If we sold four of these that make $24 an hour, you know, if we could find enough to make 10 to 20,000 a year. Today the calculus is a little different. We definitely have a higher threshold, right? Yeah. But we have to balance that against three or four full time shoppers who helped us with our sourcing. So some we set a lower roi to make sure they get enough work to keep them working. Right.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:18:03]               You know what though I think we still have that balance between us where I really want to minimize the work and just do the Higher Roi, higher net profit and Perry wants to look more at the opportunities in doing volume on a lower margin.

New Speaker:                   [00:18:19]               Well, I’m sitting here thinking about this. So you tempered him. However, this is a pro tip coming across from a couple that’s doing it well that it, it’s not a hard line in the sand as needed. Is that a fair way to say it?

New Speaker:                   [00:18:33]               True. We, we, one of the unique things about our business is we are almost polar opposites and our personalities, right? She’s very unemotional, analytical, Vulcan. I’ll own it. Yeah. And uh, although I kind of hate the term visionary, but you know, I, I sort of, I’m always looking down the road. What’s the next thing? Where do we need to adjust? And so we balance each other. We have psych when you have a CEO that nobody wants to criticize in a big company, they get out of balance. I’ve worked in those environments. Wait, sometimes there’s some heat and sparks, but we bring that, that balanced each other’s personalities and usually end up in a pretty good place.

New Speaker:                   [00:19:15]               Hmm. It’s interesting to me that that’s continued though, you know, when you look back that she was tempering you. Right. And, and, and with, with the sense. Right. And, and you’re doing that again today. So that to me is, it’s a, it’s a formula that works. And so I think that that’s very cool

Perry & Kim:                       [00:19:34]               ways. It works both ways because he also pulls me out of my little safety box. Oh, okay. We’ll talk about that outside of my comfort zones in this business. Give us an example. Um, well the Roi. I, I didn’t want to do a lot of the low margin items that he wanted, but we ended up finding that balance between us and it’s definitely outside of where I would have chosen alone. Yeah.

New Speaker:                   [00:19:58]               Well, it’s not only a financial decision though, right? I mean it because for me, I always use this, I use this term a hassle factor, you know, if you have to bag it, put three labels on it, you got to do this and you got and you know, it’s going to be, uh, you know, gonna have high returns, Blah Blah, that’s a hassle. So I’m out on that one. How about you guys?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:20:14]               But we, we outsource a lot of our labor so it does in a lot of cases come down to just a, just the numbers. I’m also using debt in our business. He’s a lot more comfortable with that than I am in between the two of us. I think we find a good balance.

New Speaker:                   [00:20:29]               Yeah. Or when we expanded, we added the second category. We hit really hard with groceries, Ra and um, she would want to test three to five and as soon as two souls I was bugging her to put 15 or 20 in stock and then find a new product. Right? So we were using debt and it was expanding, but I saw it as a formula where we could get our money back quickly and she saw it as, as a liability, the debt, and so we didn’t go too far into debt, but we kept expanding for three or four years and now we’re kind of in a place where we agree we want to stabilize and, and refine our,

New Speaker:                   [00:21:08]               our systems. Well, what does that mean? Stabilize and refined your systems. What does that mean? Stabilize.

New Speaker:                   [00:21:15]               But we have set min and Max spending goals for sourcers. So stabilize our cashflow for one thing, not expand the business,

New Speaker:                   [00:21:23]               stabilize your cash flow is one of the hardest things, right? It’s definitely one of the hardest things into businesses. Finding enough money to buy all this stuff you could find.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:21:32]               Right? And we’ve been on a steep growth curve for several years now. Um, and we use debt to get there, but we’re, we’re not, we don’t have any loans right now and we’re working to stabilize our, our sales, our gross, our, our spending, get everything on a, on a good path.

New Speaker:                   [00:21:48]               So would you, would you say then that your goal is to get to a place where you could sell fulfilled at cashflow? So when you need a loan, it’s you loaning the money?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:21:57]               Yes, I would love that. That’s where I want to go.

New Speaker:                   [00:22:01]               She indulged my crazy desire to put up big sales numbers and grow our business and build this machine that we have and we, we agreed ahead of time that when we hit about where we are and sales, we’d stopped. We pay off all the loans, paid on the credit card, stacks of cash, pay off the house, get, get a secure.

New Speaker:                   [00:22:20]               So just so that you agreed to them, but does that, that doesn’t sound like your nature. Is that pushing up against everything that your backbone and Perry?

New Speaker:                   [00:22:29]               Absolutely. I can tell that. Um, so there’s a couple things. Like, uh, I have some friends in the business that are bigger than me and I’m always teasing them. I’m going to catch them. Right? Um, I, I have internal goals. It’s a Pr, a guy pride thing. I know I can scale this because that’s my background and in logistics and warehousing, it’s a lot of things, but at the same time, what’s most important to me is my relationship with Kim and I know that she has a need from 26 years of marriage. He wants to be financially secure. Right. Um, and I think a lot of wives do, at least one person in the relationship generally does. And so now, since we’re at a comfortable level, I want to, I want to be respectful of her needs and wishes and desires.

New Speaker:                   [00:23:20]               Well, what does financial security mean to you? Because I think that’s relative, right? I think a lot of people, you know, want the big house, uh, that brand new car, uh, the yacht, right? You would like that. All right. Everybody likes, right? Everybody wants the yacht, but let’s take that out. But in guide, I’m sorry, I’m more of a Ford Mustang gt and kind of guy. Yeah. That’s a good sourcing vehicle to. You can fit a lot of stuff a lot kids too, right? Yeah. Oh yeah, sure. There’s a reason you want that car, then you’re alone, right? You get your downtime, but. But seriously, I mean, what does financial security mean to you?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:23:55]               Well, to me it means having a house paid off. It means having some cash in the bank, having a good cushion with zero debt that’s. And being able to live on less than you’re making.

New Speaker:                   [00:24:09]               Is that important you as a parent trying to teach a lot of kids that responsibility?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:24:17]               Oh yeah. Well we, we teach our kids not to go into debt. We see business debt as something very different from consumer debt and we don’t. We don’t do car loans. I would love to have our house paid off. I know a mortgage is a little bit different than consumer debt and different era than even then vehicle loans, but we talked to our kids about debt a lot and it’s a priority to us to maintain zero debt level if we can.

New Speaker:                   [00:24:40]               We. We’ve generally been in the Larry Burquette, Dave Ramsey cash only, kind of a mindset over the years, and so we have our kids take their gross earnings, take 10 percent out for to give to the church that split what’s left and put half into a savings. So we want them to be better at. I want them to be better at saving than I have traditionally been in my life. Um, and it seems to be working so far.

New Speaker:                   [00:25:08]               Well, I think it’s hard. I mean, it’s a little hard to measure yourself when you have 13 kids savings. I, I can’t imagine that you have any savings. I don’t know how you would possibly have any savings because you know, the enormous cost you must have had. So don’t put yourself down too bad. Um, you found out like, oh, okay. All right. Yeah. And you like your whiskey too, right? Isn’t that the right campaign? And that’s his thing. He does. He does.

New Speaker:                   [00:25:35]               Sitting at her desk looking at a bottle of. Well though, so it’s not one sided, but I heard

New Speaker:                   [00:25:40]               that it’s because this, uh, this embarrassment by your cowboys. I, I what I’ve heard, so I was told to ask about that, so I just want to make sure that I’m clear on that and that’s just me. I know I’m not a football guy. I had to go there, but you know, that’s, that’s a very cool thing. One of the things you’ve talked about, Perry, is that you have some experience in warehousing. Talk about that and then talk about how that you apply that into your current business.

New Speaker:                   [00:26:09]               Okay. Um, so

New Speaker:                   [00:26:13]               the last longterm job I had before we got into Amazon was in a, a small, um, a small multichannel retailers warehouse and multi multichannel or me. What does that mean? More multichannel? So we had a catalog, we had a website and we ran a print ads and magazines. And so we did mail order, we did web, we did email marketing. So we marketed in multi channels and took orders and a couple of different ways took, they did phone orders, web orders and mail orders. You’re two years old. It was dying, like when I started in 2003, it was mail order was over half of our, of our business from the catalog and by 2013 when I got a new position as a consultant, it was less than 10 percent. So I definitely lived through the growth or the, the shift rather. Um, so I had this 3000 skew warehouse, 20,000 square feet. We did about 90,000 orders a year, give or take a few thousand and 25 percent of those orders. Steve came in the three weeks after thanksgiving, starting with black Friday. Are you kidding? Yeah. No. So the scale was September, end of September, early October. We’re literally shipping 60 to 80 orders a day with two or three people. And by black Friday I had to have 40 people trained, um, temps, mostly 40 tents, recruited and trained and prepared to handle between two and 3000 orders a day for three weeks.

New Speaker:                   [00:27:48]               And how many skews again,

New Speaker:                   [00:27:51]               counting all the multipacks and bundles. And the kidding we did. It was about 3000 skews at one point.

New Speaker:                   [00:27:57]               So 3000 skews. Uh Huh. You said two to 3000 a day

New Speaker:                   [00:28:03]               orders

New Speaker:                   [00:28:04]               Pika and orders a day. Oh my gosh. It’s so many moving pieces and in different sizes and all different. Right. You know, packaging wise.

New Speaker:                   [00:28:13]               Yeah. So that was everything from an audio cd or even a harmonica. One time we had it harmonica, an old fashioned one in the catalog all the way up to the Davy Crockett rifles that they used to sell in the fifties. There’s a little toy company in Kentucky that still makes them and so those things are like 39 inches long. Right. Versus a five by six inch CD case. And so yeah, it was easy.

New Speaker:                   [00:28:38]               That sounds crazy. So a 20,000 square foot warehouse, what I would think is majority of it would be for storage and then very little for shipping. Right. Typically the shipping is usually crammed in a corner, not very big. Not a lot of value put on it. How do you manage how, how does that work in that q four time laying out a warehouse to, to house all those employees?

New Speaker:                   [00:29:01]               Yeah. Well, that was, that was the challenge because it was set up by people before I got there who were layman in terms of warehousing and pick, pack and ship operations. My job prior to this was an a chemical manufacturing, nutritional supplement manufacturing environment. So I had shipped in the 10 years previous about the same dollar amount. Um, but it was a tanker worth $150,000 of solvent. Right. Our barrels of flavor compounds were 20 or $30,000 so that the average order size that at the fulfillment company was 80 bucks. So there’s a big difference in volume. And I was pretty much a layman when it came to pick and pack operations. So I came into this environment was kind of a mess and two or three years in I had a problem on my hands where I knew it needed to be better, but I didn’t have the tool set or the language to make it better.

New Speaker:                   [00:29:59]               And that second or third year I’m the guy who would become my mentor and lean thinking came into the warehouse. His kids. It was kind of an odd situation. He was between paid consulting gigs. He was a leading a business process improvement consultant. He was a black belt, they call it in the lean world where he had a. He had a big homeschool family and his kids wanted to work for Christmas money and he just wanted to hang out with his kids, so he volunteered in the warehouse and picked orders and after two weeks he came up to me and said, I don’t want to insult you, but your warehouse is making me crazy. Can I give you some advice?

New Speaker:                   [00:30:38]               I don’t want to insult you, but you suck, Perry. I mean, it’s just not good, right? Yeah. And I knew I suck. How hard is that? Especially as a guy, right? I mean, you know how. How hard is that? You know it’s wrong. You wanted to fix it. You probably did fix a lot. Maybe you when you came in it was really, really, really bad and now it’s only really, really bad. Right. And so you made all these improvements, but somebody comes in and within two weeks as, oh my God, this is just terrible. How hard is that to hear?

Speaker 6:                           [00:31:07]               Um,

New Speaker:                   [00:31:09]               you know, I can be that guy, that’s hard to correct, but in this case I was desperate. I didn’t, I’d hit a wall that was Kinda the end of my abilities and I knew it

New Speaker:                   [00:31:18]               and it wasn’t your system anyways that he was criticizing. Okay. Okay. So it was, you might have enhanced a little bit so. So walk us through the, like the easiest first thing that he fixed where the light went on for you that there’s way better ways.

New Speaker:                   [00:31:36]               Well, I had this long packing line where 30 people’s does shoulder to shoulder and we conveyed orders down in front of them. They would grab one order each pack the whole order with air pillows are peanuts to fill it and then set it on a conveyor behind them and shove it down to the shipping station. And Chuck came to me and he says, uh,

Speaker 6:                           [00:31:58]               yeah,

New Speaker:                   [00:32:00]               it can get three people to pack one order faster than your fastest, most experienced guy. And I looked at him and said, you’re insane. You’re full of crap. There’s no way. Right? And so he challenged me to a time trial and at the end of that time trial I gave him the three greenest temps and I was trying to game the system a little bit. Sure. I took the guy that had been with me for it or had been in that Organization for eight years. It was only my third year. He’d been packing since he was like a 12 year old kid. Chuck’s three guys packed an entire order and about 28 seconds total. About eight and a half, nine seconds a piece, right it, my guy took 90 seconds pack that order.

New Speaker:                   [00:32:40]               Wow. Yeah. And it was like

New Speaker:                   [00:32:43]               I was neo and I could see the matrix.

New Speaker:                   [00:32:45]               No kidding. All right. So, so you’re looking, you’re stepping back and you’re like, okay, he might be onto something. I mean it was, that was that you say you were like neo watching the matrix, but, but realistically, because you have to sell this to somebody else eventually. Correct. Yeah. And they weren’t buying it. Right. So that’s the next challenge, right? You gotta buy all in. If you’re going to go convince somebody who probably created this system or his father did, and we’ve always done it that way, Perry, I mean, that’s just the way we do things, right? Um, how do you get the buy in to be able to go and sell this next level?

New Speaker:                   [00:33:21]               Um, well, you know, it was a, it took about another 18 months to get the company to buy in. Wow. It got playing with things around the edges in an unimproved process. There’s always low hanging fruit, right? There’s always little things you can change that it seemed to have a big impact. But, uh, what really happened was in 2008, a couple of years later was the first year that the company really invested in, went out on a branch and tried to private label some of their own toys and had a bunch of inventory coming in. And then the stock market crashed. Finances crashed in [inaudible] eight in the fourth quarter. Right? Right. As our catalog was hitting people. And so we, we slashed our prices preemptively and tried to move volume, but we didn’t have a lot of profit. So it was interesting, all of the office staff, the administrative staff volunteered that year to work some evening shifts and had made just enough improvements that they could see what we were doing, why we were doing it and after that.

New Speaker:                   [00:34:26]               Yeah, that’s big. That’s big right there. So. So if you’re trying to sell something to somebody, let them come and participate. Yeah. Okay.

New Speaker:                   [00:34:36]               And all of these improvements were a based on what American business would call lean manufacturing or lean process management, which springs out of the Toyota production system. Right. And in the Toyota world, in the lean world, a group involvement, getting stakeholders involved and buy in and participate in suggesting improvements is huge. And in my experience, every time I’ve done that, rather than me trying to be the expert, get the guys on the floor and the guys in management together and broker, that conversation is paid off. Huge.

New Speaker:                   [00:35:10]               Well let’s take it forward for a second. I, I stay. I want to go back to the lean because I think you’re completely on to something and so many where I think of our own warehouse here in him and Andy and I are here doing something. There are times we sit back and say there’s got to be a better way. Right? But bring that forward. Can you apply this lean concept? And I always call it reducing touchpoints. Is My theory on stuff, right? Every time you touch something, there’s a cost time or money, right? Can you, can you apply that in these smaller, uh, you know, six figure to seven figure FBA businesses?

New Speaker:                   [00:35:46]               Yeah, I think you absolutely can. And um, from the beginning of being exposed through my friend chuck to lean, what I’ve seen is a huge hole in the market, right? Where guys like chuck, they work for $500 an hour. These black belts, he’s master lean process engineers, lean six sigma, all those guys. Um, but then there’s the small businesses were a little bit of knowledge and a couple of tools will double, triple, quadruple your throughput. Um, let’s bring it back to Ra because that’s what I know, right? Um, if you have a 2000 square foot space you’re working out of and you can double the speed of your prep and your and your output, your shipping, you can stay in that space twice as long. You can do twice as much with the same man hour. You don’t have to hire, you don’t have to go find a bigger warehouse. This is absolutely achievable for any business owner that wants to study, understand the tools and teach it to their employees.

New Speaker:                   [00:36:54]               So I’m thinking about that, right? So what you just said. So a lot of people, um, and I’ve seen this story, I always think of Dan and Eric, right? They started with a really small warehouse and they doubled and doubled and doubled and doubled and um, or Craig Murphy who’s in this massive warehouse, right? It’s just monstrous because it just needed. He’s out of space, right? So you’re suggesting that through efficiencies, right? Through addressing those pain points, first off, finding out what the pain points are. Then addressing them like that at the plan with a real plan, not ignoring them and saying it’s always done that way. Perry then that you could extend the life is, it’s probably really valuable to extend that life, especially when Amazon is changing outside of your control. Right? I mean a seller fulfilled prime didn’t exist very long ago. Right?

New Speaker:                   [00:37:43]               What does that do for certain size products? Right? You don’t send them the FBA if it doesn’t make sense yet, you still get the prime value, right? If that makes sense. In your business that didn’t exist, that variable didn’t exist. So if you’re able to hold onto your costs because the other cost is finding a facility then adapting it. I mean moving is the worst thing in the world, right? Um, all those costs, you’re thinking that you could extend the life of where you are. Have you. Can you give us an example where like, because you guys have a warehouse, can you give us an example of what you’ve been able to improve and, and, and did you, what percentage did it improve? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s quantifiable.

New Speaker:                   [00:38:24]               No, no. It’s not. Not only as a quantifiable but a andK , Kim, jump in here if you want to. We, we try to measure everything we can. Right? Um, you should it as a business owner, if you’re not measuring it, you don’t really understand that you have, you have a group of metrics even for an Ra operation that you’re tracking. I do. Um, we, we measure the line items shipped per man hour on a daily basis and average it across a week for the whole team. One team, one fight. We don’t pick on any one person, but we do coach, like we had a girl who every time she worked she would slow us down and we worked with her over two months and now she just seamlessly integrates into our system and by looking at touches, travel motion, um, supply stock points and reorder.

New Speaker:                   [00:39:15]               We’ve taken our operation from, I would say high teens, I think it was when we moved in in February to the high thirties in terms of line items shipped per man hour. Now this is a shoes and clothes are a operation where 60 to 70 percent choose. Um, we’re basically cross docking, we ship about five to 700 items a day and we bring in about 500 items a day on average and we have a couple of prep clients. So you have a similar product mix. So, um, we’ve, our, our current baseline is 30 items per man hour and we’re stretching for 50 items per man hour if we can.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:39:57]               And those numbers are measured across an entire day. So it includes everything, every touch point in the process from receiving when our shoppers drop stuff off and counted in and scanning receipts. It’s everything except, yeah, everything except cleaning the facility and admin stuff. Right. So we tried to, which they should be outside of that. Right, that makes sense. Yeah. When, how big is the facility? Twenty 500 square feet. So in 2,500 square feet, is that, that’s, that’s the warehousing portion or is that also have some administrative space? Oh, that’s, that’s the whole entire space. I’d say fully using 1800 square feet for the product prep and shipping 1800 square feet and you’re able to move that much product through and, and a lot of it in and out in the same day. Did I hear that right when we do a up to a thousand pieces in a day with just a staff of a couple of people to. So I just wanna make sure I’m clear on that. Some of that, a portion of that comes in and goes out the same day.

New Speaker:                   [00:41:02]               Correct. Our Eric. This is another metric that we have and we’ve got some, some cool visual management techniques we use, but uh, to, to make sure we, we do this and our internal commitment is nothing sits more than two days. Um, and we always, we have to prep customers who do shoes and clothes, who do probably an average of three d, 300 items a day, two to 300 items a day. And a second commitment is we always ship their stuff first. So if there’s a labor, it falls on my

Perry & Kim:                       [00:41:33]               business, not theirs, but typically items don’t go out the same day they go out the next day because the way our process is set up.

New Speaker:                   [00:41:40]               Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about your process. So you have a shippers or I’m sorry, shoppers out there buying for you and um, are they using their money or your money?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:41:51]               They use our company card.

New Speaker:                   [00:41:53]               Okay. So they’re using your money. And so I remember one of the best process people I had on my show talked about receipt management and how complicated it was for him. Um, and then making sure that, what he paid for his, what he got. Do you guys have a process for handling that? Especially in a lean way.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:42:16]               We have a google form that every shopper fills out each time they check out, um, and they, they input the exact amount of the receipt, the number of items and several other pieces of information. And then when they drop off they hand, they take the receipt and somebody else counts the items in. So we can see that we’ve got the same number of items from the same store, we don’t reconcile every single item against the receipt, but we do reconcile the account and the, and the stores.

New Speaker:                   [00:42:47]               So before they leave, you know, they’re in the parking lot and they tell you, Hey Perry, I expect that you’re going to get 100 pair of Adidas, a blah, blah, blah or whatever. Right. Is that kind of the concept?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:43:00]               Yes. And then that form, um, feeds into a slack channel. It’s used for a couple different things. Our warehouse manager can see the incoming so he knows what to expect and prepare for and we also use it to let our shoppers track each other because they shop where they want to basically will sometimes give them suggestions, but they plan their own day there, own a map and that way they can, they can see where other shoppers in our circle have shopped recently. They can talk to each other and say, hey, did you clean that place out? I’m going to go to another one.

New Speaker:                   [00:43:31]               Do they take advantage of, um, hot products and share that across the slack channel too?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:43:39]               Uh, yes they do. Sometimes that’s definitely available for that purpose.

New Speaker:                   [00:43:44]               Well, I’m, I’m guessing, and this is Steve Guessing and you could don’t give away your secret sauce if you don’t want to, is I’m assuming that they’re paid a percentage and there’s some kind of, there’s some kind of incentive for them to buy more at the right price and make either profit or whatever the parameters that you established. Does that create a, if I’m correct when I say that, is that create a competitive, a notion between them and therefore sometimes it doesn’t get shared.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:44:11]               We paid by the piece. It could theoretically, but um, they’re pretty respectful of each other. Yeah. They each have their favorite stores that they like to go to and they know to avoid one store because it’s somebody else’s favorite and probably been cleaned out recently. They, they play pretty well together. They’re friends and I’ve got one that’s just what

New Speaker:                   [00:44:32]               I would call it, like a harvest or. Right. He doesn’t like to explore new new stores, so he just goes where he can get items and then I’ve got another lady who shops for us who is very much an explorer and we give a bonus for finding new stores that we can source regularly. So we pay 30, $40 to anyone who brings a new store that’s a consistent place to source. So we have different personality types which really work well together.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:44:59]               They tend to source where they enjoy shopping too, so that, that spreads them out. Also,

New Speaker:                   [00:45:04]               it is it, is it their lifestyle for them, you know, one of the things that you guys have created a very cool lifestyle for you and your family. Is this allowing them to create the lifestyle that they want? It sounds like with that guy and the lady they sound different.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:45:18]               Oh yeah. Very much so. One of, uh, one of our shoppers is also a seller. Um, and he, he, I don’t know for his side Gig now or I don’t know which one is his main source of income, but it’s really helped him to build up his own business. And a couple of our daughters work for us, they were in coffee shops for a while and they decided they didn’t like getting up at [5:00] AM. They really enjoy the freedom and flexibility that they have shopping for us.

New Speaker:                   [00:45:43]               Yeah. We’ve, we’ve got a shopper that earns 35, 40,000 a year working three days a week basically. And she’s pretty happy where she is time and money wise. It’s very much a lifestyle choice.

New Speaker:                   [00:45:55]               Yeah, that’s, it is. So cool. You know, and I think of the shopper that is also a seller that works for you. One of these, one of the notions that I’ve seen out there is that if somebody does, if you go and work for somebody else, means you failed, right? Because you’re, you know, you couldn’t make it, you know, uh, I couldn’t do it on your own. So you had to go work for somebody else. And my thinking is, you know, what you, you saw what it’s like to run your own business. And you’re like, oh, that sucks that part the. Because it’s not easy, right? I’m sure you know there are, you guys have to sweat all the details. Um, if, if you only have this, the best part of what you love to do, Perry is to buy and we’re going to pay you that. We’re going to give you everything you want. You’re not responsible other, you know, making sure you have followed some parameters, but you get to spend as much time as you want doing the piece that you love and then you can go live your life the way you want. How’s that? How’s that person fail? Would you create?

New Speaker:                   [00:46:48]               Yeah, I agree. I’ve actually, I love sourcing. So I’ve actually thought about being a hired gun for other people, but in this case, the guy we’re talking about is still selling and also sourcing for us. So in a way we’re kind of like a paid internship. We’ve helped him ramp is business up pretty.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:47:08]               He started shopping for us and one of our offers when he started shopping for us was we can teach you to do this. You can, you can sell and build your own business. Okay? So he’s taken the

New Speaker:                   [00:47:19]               the best things for himself. This is what I think people would say, right? Yeah. How do you know he’s not keeping the best things for me?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:47:25]               Yes, totally. You’re getting the crumbs. You’re getting

New Speaker:                   [00:47:30]               the crumbs, right?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:47:30]               That’s good crumbs. As a seller, he’s got really good insight into what’s going to sell and what won’t and his crumbs make us happy.

New Speaker:                   [00:47:38]               We’re 10 times his volume two. So our buying parameters are totally different. He is taking the best as he sees it, but that leaves what I would call the long tail, what he would consider the long tail that I’m perfectly happy with buying like a 40 percent, $12 kind of minimum Roi, ranked under two or 300,000 with no competitive offers. All that stuff that makes him nervous. I’m tickled to get that. So it’s, it’s really a win win situation.

New Speaker:                   [00:48:09]               Hmm. Have you guys, you know, looking where you’re at today, right? In the fact that you’re really trying to lean it out and trying to make sure that you’ve done all those fancy terms that you dropped. By the way, theory. I caught all those fancy terms. I mean, I did, I didn’t understand most of them, but I, I caught him. Um, I, I, I saw that um, have you guys had to pivot? And if so is it, was it intentional?

New Speaker:                   [00:48:38]               What, what do you mean by pivot?

New Speaker:                   [00:48:39]               Well, because you know, you can become complacent in this business. You can be, hey, this is what’s working. Boom, the whole down on it and we just keep going, going, going, going, going, and then all of a sudden, you know, restrictions happen, you know, or, or, or some guy does something in the Nike all of a sudden has a problem. It falls off a cliff or whatever. And then you have to change and pivot. Not like, not like adjust. I’m talking about like swing. Yeah.

New Speaker:                   [00:49:06]               Yeah. Um, so this goes back to why we decided to cap our business where we are volume wise because we’re a, we’re exploring other, other avenues related to Amazon but that aren’t selling related. Um, we’re doing a little bit of brand consulting on beginning, just barely dabble in private label, but yeah, we have. And uh, September of 2016, the Great Nike scare where Nike got locked down for so many people, um, Nike was 25 percent of our inventory but over 50 percent of our sales and we lost Nike for three days. That’s a wake up call right there, that’s, that’s a cup of cold water in the face. So we immediately pivoted away from Nike for six months. We got our, our inventory back live and sold through it. But just overnight, the thing that was driving half ourselves, we moved away from it for six months

Perry & Kim:                       [00:50:04]               and we did keep sourcing a little Nike and we still do source a significant amount of Nike, but were self conscious about not letting our business hinge on one brand.

New Speaker:                   [00:50:13]               Is that what the lesson is? I mean, is that what if you had to take a takeaway from that whole experience?

New Speaker:                   [00:50:20]               Yeah. The whole don’t put everything in one basket. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:50:24]               The Nike Basket, nothing. Amazon Ra basket, right?

New Speaker:                   [00:50:29]               I always look for a side hustle that you can expand into an income if you have to.

New Speaker:                   [00:50:35]               And as a side hustle, does it have to be related to what you’re doing or could it be something you’re interested in or is that a risk of distraction?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:50:45]               I think it can be anything that you’re willing to put some time and energy and passion into all. We have quite a few side hustles right now and they all tied pretty closely into Amazon but not into our Amazon Ra.

New Speaker:                   [00:50:59]               Well, one of the things that you guys, the reason you guys have a bunch of side hustles and people are attracted to you because they see talent and they see success and they’re like, hey, I’d like a taste of that. Right? So, so you guys are in a group with, uh, Brian fry filter and Elizabeth, correct. Um, it’s a, is it Marshall’s and Tj? Walk us through that because I lose because I know there’s two different groups and I don’t know who’s with who.

New Speaker:                   [00:51:22]               Sure. Well, um, do you mind if I dropped the url?

New Speaker:                   [00:51:26]               No, go right ahead. Absolutely. I have no problem with it because again, and I caution people, Steve doesn’t benefit in any way, but I look for longterm consistency and this group, I’m Brian who was one of my earliest interviews years ago, almost three years ago. Those groups have been going for years and you have members that have been in these groups for years. There’s a reason they’re paying money. There’s a recent consistency matters and so that’s why I have no problem with it.

New Speaker:                   [00:51:51]               Oh, thanks. Well, we were pretty close if not founding members pretty close to founding members of the group. Um, they used to be two groups, one that focused on Ross and Burlington and one that focused on Tj maxx and Marshall’s. Um, we’ve recently merged them into one group. So there’s just one super group now and we have a little website called are a secrets.com and yeah, it, it’s, we teach you, we, we tell you what we’re buying from those four stores in the group. We tell you are by cost, the rank when we bought it, how long it took to sell. But it’s more than that. It’s evolved into a community that we teach you how to source items with variations we walk you through based on our experience in authentics, um, we help you. It was just a very open, safe place to share any aspect of the business that you want to ask us about. We’ll share with you.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:52:53]               It’s very much a coaching group. We share 200 leads a month or more, but it’s not a Bolo group. It’s, it’s a coaching group.

New Speaker:                   [00:53:00]               Yeah. I think that that’s the key is people go in and say, Oh, you’re going to give me, hey, you didn’t give me a great list. Everybody else. There was none there. Right? Well, that’s not the trick is then why did the blue one cell versus the Red One? Right. Why? Why are certain sizes, right? Shoes especially. Right? Why do these sizes sell the most? Right? Yeah.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:53:19]               Where are you buying items ranked over a million and passing on items rank $20,000. Right? And why would that be?

New Speaker:                   [00:53:26]               Give me some example why that would be.

Perry & Kim:                       [00:53:28]               Um, if an item is completely out of stock and you can see on a keep a graph or by the number of reviews that it, it was in demand when it was available, that would be a good reason to buy a very high ranked item.

New Speaker:                   [00:53:41]               Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so with each markers for pent up demand basically is as best we can. You’re dropping terms again to you? Oh sorry. It’s not there,

New Speaker:                   [00:53:53]               right? Uh, okay. You get to speak Steve Language, right? I mean, you know, you don’t be talking over my head. I mean come on, you to keep me in the game. It’s not like I’m playing Dallas here. I mean t

Perry & Kim:                       [00:54:03]               there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of clues to look for when you’re deciding to buy something or to pass on it. Things to watch out for. And when we talk about that in the group and in a lot of detail,

New Speaker:                   [00:54:12]               one of the other things that I think you guys have really done is kind of stayed focused. Um, despite all these other things going on. And I, I, you said you have a bunch of side hustles, but you guys have really stayed in your lane for the most part. Is that fair?

Perry & Kim:                       [00:54:30]               Yes. And I think we found a business model that’s really working for us and while we want to remain flexible and able to pivot, we also want to keep doing what, what is working well for us.

New Speaker:                   [00:54:42]               Yeah. But you could drop private label though into your warehouse model and as long as the, you know, all that efficiency stays in line. It’s just another product, another skew coming through. To me that’s, that’s masterful

New Speaker:                   [00:54:58]               that, that’s true. Um, you know, we, we were convinced a couple of years ago when everybody was saying red is dead, we need to get into wholesale. And while I’m kind of an extrovert, I don’t like selling myself so much and she’s very much an introvert. So we looked at wholesale and we went, Oh man, we have to sell ourselves to companies to convince them to give us accounts. We didn’t want to do that. And then we got into private label and I’ve been studying it this year and it was like, Oh man, there’s no instant gratification here. I’ve got to like chart things out three to six months in advance before I launched and then I’ve got to have good pay. Like it’s just nothing fits our constantly changing family dynamic as well as Ra has so far. But we haven’t ruled the other stuff out. We’re, you know, we have a couple of wholesale accounts. I’ve got a tiny little product that I’m practicing private label with where, you know, we don’t rule it out. It’s just hasn’t been a good fit yet. Okay.

New Speaker:                   [00:55:56]               The other thing that you guys just had was a meetup. I’m with a group of people. Talk about that for a second.

Speaker 7:                           [00:56:03]               Yeah,

New Speaker:                   [00:56:04]               well it’s, it’s a little bit of just. We wanted to know who the other sellers were in the area. Right. You want to know who your competition is. Our right. Are you talking about our local meetup we do, or a little workshop?

New Speaker:                   [00:56:17]               No, I’m talking about the workshop, but I mean you could talk about the local meetup because I’m big into local meetups to and I don’t go for the competition because, you know, I don’t do ra so for me I just like to talk to other sellers because it’s lonely in the warehouse. Perry.

New Speaker:                   [00:56:30]               Very true. No, wait, we did found a local San Antonio meet up and we’d try to have monthly meetings but we’ve missed that. We haven’t hosted, they’re wanting a couple of weeks but we’re just like talking shop and hearing other people’s perspectives and you know, knowing where other people are, are uh, sourcing and we share where we source. We’re pretty open people but as far as our, our little workshop, um, and I’ll try to stay away from the jargon.

New Speaker:                   [00:56:59]               Yeah. Well, I mean what was the concept? I mean, what were you thinking?

New Speaker:                   [00:57:04]               Well, I have all this experience and in improving physical material, you know, like inventory processes, warehouse processes, and like I told you before, I know there’s a lot of small businesses that can afford a $500 an hour consultant.

New Speaker:                   [00:57:24]               So. So you wanted to, you have a demonstrated, a level of experience that you’ve been able to apply to your business, not only your business, other business had been now into your business. It’s worked, it’s made you x percent more efficient. And so you’re saying to other like minded people, hey, we might have an opportunity for you to take that 2000 square feet and stay there, as you said longer, therefore reap the benefit of not having to expand and, and all that additional cost. And last time, I don’t want to downplay that because that’s a huge deal. Moving sucks. Um, and so, so by doing that, is that, is that kind of the start of this lien Fba thing that you’re talking about?

New Speaker:                   [00:58:02]               It is, that’s the working title of our workshop. We’ve been inviting people to San Antonio for about two days of eight hours worth of learning where we help them analyze their internal, how they do their work and find a better way to do it. Um, it’s very much the start of it. I love helping people. I love seeing the look of realization on their own

New Speaker:                   [00:58:22]               facebook. Give us an example because I think it’s very cool. I want to hear about a light bulb moment where somebody, what you would say was no big deal, but in their mind you saw like the clouds opened and a light beam down on their head.

New Speaker:                   [00:58:36]               Well, without naming names, we’ve done. We’ve done three kind of Beta tests of this and one technique that we use, which you can just go on youtube and search first. How to do a spaghetti map. Um, it’s Kinda like, remember when billy and the family circus mom would say, go put this in the mailbox quick and need the letter to go out and he would do anything but go straight to the mailbox. You remember those?

New Speaker:                   [00:59:00]               Oh yeah. He did all that little dotted line that went around the neighborhood and under everything and through everything,

New Speaker:                   [00:59:05]               right? Well, you just, you do that with your, you do two different colors of ink. You draw your floor plan and then you draw the start of where your people come to work and how they move through your warehouse and where they stop at the end of the day. And then you do it again with different colored ink for their product path, so you’re tracing the product path and the people path through your warehouse, through your workspace. And it’s very enlightening. Like usually there’s just a couple of key tweaks you can do to cut half of the movement out of your people’s Day. I consulted in in materials management for hospitals for 18 months after my last job, before Amazon was full time and we did that for nurses in an icu ward one time a wing and they were walking like five to seven miles a day because things were just not self consciously laid out. It’s no wonder they were exhausted by the end of the day because they were almost doing a hit out. They were doing a 10 k every day at work.

New Speaker:                   [01:00:14]               I remember the story about a Walmart being the one that put batteries next to the things that needed batteries, right? Kmart, sears, and whoever else was big at the time had a battery department. If you wanted to buy a battery, you had to go buy a battery. Guess what? Nobody went and bought their battery. Right. And so Walmart said, hmm, let’s put our batteries in 17 different places. Yeah, it sucks for the inventory people. But who cares? We want to sell it anyway. There shouldn’t be any inventory left. Right? And they took and made that efficiency and all of a sudden they saw the huge improvement in their business. And so something so simple as putting tools next to where they’re needed. Right? It sounds so obvious,

Perry & Kim:                       [01:00:54]               right? Yeah. And, and everybody that’s come through our workshop so far has had one of those moments are more of those moments. Everybody said, Oh wow, this is this little thing right here is going to change my life. This is going to change my whole business. No, wait. So this little workshop, you’re going to change somebody’s life. Now think about that. I mean it, I, you know, I’m not downplaying it. That’s a big deal. It’s not always the things we expect. It’s a lot of times we bring them in and they see our employees working and we actually had a lot of them work the line with us and there were just very small things that we wouldn’t have thought to say do this, not this, but they saw it and they picked up on it because it was hands on. Are we back to you and

New Speaker:                   [01:01:38]               this catalog company, Perry, bringing the office staff out to work the line. That’s what. It’s the way you just described it, Kim. That’s what I thought of exactly. I’m like, you, you demonstrated again and they got to get out there and say, Huh, I see it now. Because when you sit in an office and you’re in there making, you know, Perry, I want 10 percent more efficiency from the team. Let’s go make them work faster. Just, just one more bathroom breaks. No more bathroom breaks. Come on, move. But bringing them out. So this is another example where we’re back to Perry.

New Speaker:                   [01:02:10]               Yeah, it is. And um, so this was an American in addition to an American business addition to, to lean lean management. And it was an eight at breaks down a production and material management waste into seven categories, but the eighth was very American and it was underlying underutilized personnel. And part of that is when the front office loses connection with the production floor. In our case it would be the boss, the owner loses connection with the prep process or the order fulfillment process. Right? And it’s, it’s critical that you don’t just become an outdated experts sitting in the office telling you guys how to do things, but until you’re actually in the trenches looking, learning, expanding, cooperating, collaborating so that, uh, you guys are all on the same page is huge.

New Speaker:                   [01:03:07]               How quick, how quickly could somebody become that outdated expert in today’s fast paced ecommerce world?

New Speaker:                   [01:03:14]               Months, I think months. Um, I, I have a goal. It’s been a busy summer writing workshop and getting it the last six weeks, getting it just right, but moving into the fourth quarter, I intend to go down to my, my warehouse, um, once a week and work a shift with the guys and just be like, just plug me in. Let me do the work.

New Speaker:                   [01:03:36]               Does it also apply to your shoppers because you know the stores, you know, when we all see the, you know, certain stores, band people or were they, you know, take the coupon today. That depends on who you ask and Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, does that also a place that you could run into a rub?

Perry & Kim:                       [01:03:51]               Oh yeah. Things are changing every day. Every week we do, we do generally have pretty close communication with the shoppers, partly because there are daughters, uh, some of them are our daughters, but we, they come and go a lot more so we see them more. I think it’s easier to lose touch with the prep side of the process,

New Speaker:                   [01:04:09]               but let’s be honest, the shopping side is more fun. So we naturally

New Speaker:                   [01:04:12]               what did the shopping. I get it. Okay. Well this is very cool. So if somebody wanted to find out more information about this lean Fba, and I know you’re not, this isn’t a course out there or anything that yet yet, right? Yeah. But this is in the development phase. If somebody wanted to, to find out more, what’s the best way to get info on that?

New Speaker:                   [01:04:33]               Um, well I’m, I’m pretty all over the place on facebook and the FBA groups. We have a little, a facebook group where we post occasionally and help people with Ra questions. And it’s a free group, correct? Correct. Yeah. And the name of the group is what?

Perry & Kim:                       [01:04:52]               Apperian Kim’s FBA corner.

New Speaker:                   [01:04:55]               I’m a member.

New Speaker:                   [01:04:57]               I mean people, people know us. Where those Weirdos with the 13 kids. Right? So,

New Speaker:                   [01:05:03]               yeah, I don’t know about the Weirdos. I, I see a connection. I’ve met several of your kids and they’re pretty good kids. I mean, so I think there. I think you guys have done. Okay. All right. So, you know, I think we, we, I’ve gotten all the questions that I answered. Um, I love the direction you guys are going. I love the lifestyle that it’s evolved to, um, because you guys work a lot of hours and it clearly comes into your personal life, your business. But would you have it knowing what you know now, would you have in any other way?

Perry & Kim:                       [01:05:37]               No, I love this. I love, I love what we do and I love that our kids have chosen to be involved in it and I love working with my husband. About you Perry.

New Speaker:                   [01:05:50]               I wouldn’t change a thing where it’s a big statement. Yeah, it’s, it’s fun. I’m looking forward to what the future holds. There was a definite adjustment period after being a consultant for 18 months and then it was like military reintegration. Right on top of working for my wife. She’s tough. I get it. Yeah. Well, you know, dad comes home from an 18 month tour of duty. I was only home for a day and a half or two days every weekend for 18 months. We’re both. The oldest kids were both a little bit type a. She started a business in my wheelhouse which is fulfillment and materials management and then I had to take orders like, and I’m not the best, easiest employee but, but we’ve gotten through all that with communication and I love it. It’s, it’s a flexibility that lead says I’m homeschool and manage our house away. We want to manage it. We’re bringing in our friends and family and to our business and be working alongside people we love a wouldn’t change a thing.

New Speaker:                   [01:06:55]               Lean family. You guys have to have that. That’s another core. She should be teaching you st lean family dynamic because it sounds like it’s working. All right, so the goal, and so I’m going to have links to all this stuff, so I’ll put links. There’s an Ra secrets. That’s where you can go find out about. It’s Tj Maxx, Marshall’s Ross, and who the other one or is that a Burlington? Burlington. That’s right.

New Speaker:                   [01:07:17]               The easiest way to find our, our group Steven, is actually from our website. It’s a free little website. Perry and [inaudible] dot com. Real easy.

New Speaker:                   [01:07:24]               Perry. And came back home. And it’s the one with all the picture of all the kids together, right? Yep. Yes. Yeah. I love that one. Okay. And so then we also have Perry and Kim’s Fba. A corner. Okay. So that’s a facebook group. I’m going to have links to all this stuff. So the goal of the podcast is to help people get past the point of stuck. And so what I’m going to suggest to people is, if you’re attracted to any of these things they’re talking about, especially this lien Fba thing, man, I’m telling you, you know, having a big warehouse like we do, we, we have lots of touch points and I’m always trying to reduce. And so if somebody’s been able to do it and help you figure that stuff out as Mitchell Lipo, he says by that time, by time, by paying somebody else who can help you get to where you want to go. So, um, you know, to me, if you’re interested in that, reach out to these guys, that’s the, that’s the best thing I would do if I wanted, if I wanted to get past the point of stuck, but give us another tip, something that you advise one of those low hanging fruits that somebody can go into their existing business and try to move it forward.

Speaker 8:                           [01:08:23]               Hm?

New Speaker:                   [01:08:26]               Yeah. My Mike tip was actually, I’ll send you a link to a very short spaghetti map video on youtube. It was like a minute long and there’s no secret sauce there, but take the time to trace out your physical motion through your process, take to time to trace out your products, motion and travel to your process and then just rearrange it so there’s less movement that’s, that’s worth 20, 30 percent efficiency right there in my opinion.

New Speaker:                   [01:08:56]               Nice. Low hanging fruit. Kim, anything you want to add on top of that? Oh, that was mine. To keep an iron fist rule with an iron fist right over that husband. Okay. Alright. Hey guys, I really do appreciate. I appreciate a giving spirit. I mean, to me, I see it, I see the advice you’re giving consistently. Again, you’re helping others in, in both their business and their life and I think again, I think we’re also fortunate to have the two intermingle because I just think it’s so much healthier than what it used to be and so very, very cool. I really appreciate it and wish you guys nothing but success. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. What a great couple. Uh, what a great couple of business people too. Again, I know it gets a little techie and he dropped some nerd terms, um, but he does know what he’s talking about and so if that’s attractive to you in any way, and sometimes that’s, that might stifle your growth, but if you could build up some cash because you stifled your growth because you figured out where your inefficiencies are and you purge some of that nonsense, how are you not better off for it?

New Speaker:                   [01:10:09]               And so I think they’re a great couple. They got a lot of good ideas they got. It’s a very open group. Come and join those groups and start investing into your business. Start investing into your life to gain back that time. Imagine if you gave, if you were a double your productivity, and then took a little bit of that time to work on your health, to work on your mental health, to work on your relationships. How much further could your business be? ECOMMERCE, momentum.com, ecommerce momentum.com. Take care.

Cool Voice Guy:                [01:10:34]               Thanks for listening to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. All the links mentioned today can be found at incomers momentum dot come under base, episode number. Please remember to subscribe and the lake us on itunes.

 

Stephen-Peterson

About the author, Stephen

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