The following is a transcript of Episode 21 of Return on Podcast, the show where we help e-commerce sellers improve their ROI in business and in life. For more episodes, subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen on Podbean, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
All right. Welcome to Return on Podcast, where we talk about the experiences, the obsessions, and the habits of the most successful e-commerce entrepreneurs. Of course, I’m your host, Tyler Jefcoat. And I wanna welcome you to another episode of ROP.
Today’s conversation is gonna be really interesting because it’s gonna center around two questions that I get as a CFO all the time. One, how can I manage my inventory better? I’ve got cash tied up in containers and in different countries, and how do I manage that inventory better? And then number two, can I actually use my inventory management as a tool, my logistics practices as a tool to improve my profitability? So I wanna wrestle with those two questions today and to help me wrestle with those questions, I wanna bring my friend Chelsea Cohen into the feed. Hi Chelsea, how are you today?
Chelsea Cohen:
Good. How are you doing?
Tyler Jefcoat:
I’m actually having a pretty good day. So Chelsea, you are the co-founder of SoStocked, and you’re a dynamo in the industry and I’m really grateful to have you on the show today. So here’s what I gather. I wanna get a little bit about your story, and then we’ll dive into some technical stuff to help people make more money in their inventory. But why in the world did you decide to start an inventory management software?
Chelsea Cohen:
Yeah. I started out as an Amazon seller in 2014, and so selling on Amazon. In 2018, I started looking at my P and L and really feeling like I should have made more money, I should have kept more money, and the margins just kept getting slimmer and it was really frustrating.
The first place I really looked was inventory management. I had stocked out multiple times that year and started looking for solutions, looking for tools. Couldn’t find anything that worked right. Asked the community, of course, which is what we tend to do in this industry. And they all kept saying, we’ve tried everything, nothing works, we’re back to spreadsheets. So being an entrepreneur that kind of lit the light bulb, and I ended up meeting my business partner about two weeks after I decided that I was gonna find someone and build something. ‘Cause I had no background in software.
I ended up meeting my business partner at an event and he is a serial SaaS builder, kept saying he was bored. He needed a new software project, and I pitched it to him and he, for some reason, believed that, believed in it. And we kind of start from there, bootstrap the whole thing. And then now we’re, you know, we’ve been acquired by Carbon6 and continuing to run it.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Yeah, that’s so great. I think so many great tools, you need both sides. You need someone who really gets the engineering side of it, and then I think if you don’t have a co-founder that also just intimately understands the use case of the actual customer, you can be in trouble. And then, you know, like the opposite can be true. If you are a real entrepreneurial minded person, but you’re maybe just like from day one, let’s just hire an outsource dev team from India and try to build something that also has a lot of challenges.
One of my, one of my best friends is a guy named Brandon Checketts who founded a company called Seller Labs, and some of his journey is similar doing, writing that code and it flowing out of his Amazon business. That’s yeah, that’s pretty neat. So I mean, how has the transition from, SoStocked’s core team to this integration into Carbon6 been? I love the guys from Carbon6, by the way. I’ve really enjoyed getting to meet them.
Chelsea Cohen:
Yeah. Yeah. They’re great. And that was really, the decision was made because of the team. We weren’t looking to, to be acquired. We were looking for funding. We were looking to continue to grow. And the more that we talked to Carbon6 and got what their vision was and where they wanted to go.
And also just the rapport that we had built. The CEO, Justin is, you know, fantastic. And when I talked to him and I share ideas, he’s, you know, it’s one of those things where I have all these ideas that I wanna accomplish and all of a sudden I’m like, oh, I’m actually being given permission to do them. So the resources that we’ve been able to to adopt it’s been really fun.
So our team is all still there. Our team has moved over. We’re still all running, SoStocked, and then we’re starting to be able to incorporate some of what we’ve been able to create. How do we bring some of that to Carbon6? And then how can we use some of the Carbon6 resources to continue to grow SoStocked and then, you know, rising tide lifts all boats and that type of thing.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Absolutely. Wow. That’s so encouraging. I think Carbon6, my, an outsider’s perspective here, just meeting some of your colleagues. I consult for so many of the kind of Amazon rollups, the aggregators, and, you know, candidly, most of those guys are having a pretty tough year. I mean, maybe a 12 months or so, and it’s refreshing.
I was in Oregon hanging out with a couple of your colleagues a few months ago, and just to hear you know, hey, this, the roll up model is not broken. It just, you know, rolling up good assets. And then also, I think, I don’t know your CEO well, but I think there’s a really special skill set needed to be able to integrate these models. And wish you the best as you do that. ‘Cause it’s not easy, but I’m bullish on the way you guys are doing it.
Chelsea Cohen:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s the, I think the, like you said it’s not that the model is broken. When you’re too heavy on M and A, and you’re not strong enough in operations, that’s where the breakdown happens. And you know, I know several aggregators, we work with aggregators, and the ones that we’ve seen really weather the storm have been the ones that have focused on systems and processes and operations and hiring good teams. And that’s really, we’re really pushing and working towards within Carbon6 is making sure you have all the right people in the right places and then getting the systems to help run the whole thing.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Yeah, totally, I completely get that. So I was doing a little as one does when they lead a podcast, doing a little stalking here, Chelsea, to get to know you a little bit. And so you help Amazon e-commerce sellers avoid stockouts and improve profitability through smart inventory and logistics practices. I wanna dive into good practices, but let’s start with the bad news here.
What are some of the biggest mistakes that the brands that you and I represent are making with the way they’re managing their inventory and supply chain?
Chelsea Cohen:
Sure. First and foremost, one of the things, even before we faced restock limits in 2020, 2021, I talked to hundreds of sellers. In the first year and a half, two years, I onboarded every single person into the software, did one on one calls. We still onboard everyone. We offer one on one calls. I was doing all of those calls, and my partner, Dan was handling all the tickets. It gave us a really good insight into what is happening and, you know, what are those use cases?
And, and then what is that, what are those top things that are happening within the community that maybe are causing these problems? And one of them is marketing into a stockout. It’s been a huge problem. Not tying your inventory and your marketing together, and I’ve seen eight figure sellers that I’ve worked with market themselves into a stockout, you know, have these huge Mother’s Day sales, and then Father’s Day the next month comes around, and they’re turning off all of their lightning deals and trying to pump the breaks because they didn’t realize that they didn’t have enough inventory.
So that was the number one mistake. Letting people have all your stuff, tying all your stuff up on the same boat, or sending all your stuff to Amazon and nothing, you know, no backup for when they lose your inventory or just don’t check it in. Those are some of the major mistakes.
And then the last mistake is just stockout calculations or sales velocity calculations not being accurate. You know, not properly factoring stockouts into your equation, sales spikes into your equation and removing those anomalies to be able to start at least with the right base sales velocity, which really sets the pace for establishing your entire order, your order plan.
Tyler Jefcoat:
That makes so much sense. I mean, for me, like the definition of insanity is in a market where it’s bearish, let’s, let’s do this, Chelsea. Let’s spend twice as much in TACOS to acquire a customer and then stockout so that we can spend triple the amount on a rush shipment to get it from Asia here.
And so you’re right. Like coordinating that marketing strategy with the supply chain strategy is I think it’s a missing ingredient. I mean, how do you, like, how do you do that?
Chelsea Cohen:
Yeah, it’s interesting because you know, and that’s, I love that you said that because that’s one piece that people don’t really factor into the profitability equation is the activities and the money that you spent to drive yourself into a stockout.
Everyone feels the stockout, everyone feels the air shipment. Everyone feels, you know, having to build up that revenue and that ranking again, but no one talks about the fact that you spent so much money to drive yourself into a stockout. You’ve paid a PPC agency, maybe, to drive you into a stockout, you know.
Every PPC agency that I talked to when I asked them the question, have you ever stocked out a client? The answer was one for one, yes. The number one thing is to really understand how much your profit is being affected. But as I started to work on these concepts and realized that there’s this huge disconnect between these two pieces of the business, I actually coined a term ’cause I really wanted people to, to have the idea driven into their mind.
And that term was “inventory-minded marketing.” ‘Cause we’re all very marketing minded. And so if I can tie inventory and marketing together with the phrase inventory minded marketing, I started driving that message as, you know, I mean, it’s actually advanced in terms of a concept, but it started with simply, your marketing plan should be sent to your inventory team and your inventory team should vet it out and make sure that you’re not gonna stock out. And that’s the first iteration of inventory minded marketing, which is fairly –
Tyler Jefcoat:
And I was actually, I was talking to an agency owner, a marketing agency owner the other day. It’s a friend of mine, I love this guy. And I was surprised to learn that when they build their dashboarding out for their clients, they don’t, they are actually really intentional that they don’t want landed Cost of Goods Sold information. And I don’t know why, it’s something related to privacy.
And I was like no, you can’t do that. You can’t turn a marketing team loose without understanding two things: one’s implicit, what you said, and one’s explicit. The implicit thing is we gotta understand what our profitability, what our margin is after advertising on each sale so that we can understand if we’re happy or sad with the current campaign. And that just ACOS or just TACOS is not enough to really calculate that.
And then the second thing is we do need to understand where we are in relation to our supply chain relationship and our ability to get product in in enough time to maintain profitability. And, yeah, it’s so crucial. I love that, I love that phrase, the inventory minded marketing. That would probably be a bad word on a plaque in some of our marketing partners’ offices. I mean, people don’t think that way.
Chelsea Cohen:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it’s funny ’cause you know, we do a lot and upfront when I started talking about this in 2020, it was all about “marketing has to do this.” Marketing needs to give this and blaming marketing because marketing, you know, was an easy target because they are driving all of that. But then the realization comes well, inventory is being very reactionary, and they need to become more, they need to be moved into a proactive role.
And what that then ends up being is inventory reports that they should be delivering to the marketing team to not only avoid stockouts, like that’s obvious. You know, “these products are gonna stock out if you are not careful.” Send that report and they can turn off some of those high TACOS ads, they can, you know, raise the price.
They can do some things, without sacrificing ranking, they can do some things to make more money on those products that they sell and potentially even save from stocking out. So that is one of the reports, but then the other reports have to do with what I call the silent killers, which are holding fees.
People don’t really factor holding fees into the equation. You have the storage fees and every single month that you have those, that product sitting there, it’s becoming less and less profitable. So you have the holding fees. And then if you get to the point where your products are no longer viable and you have to remove them, you’ve got the removal fees as well.
So these reports that need to be sent on top of that are a slow seller report, which is a minimum maximum range of, this is a product that is in danger of becoming a dud, but you could still possibly save it. And so, putting eyes on that for the marketing team, they can then become proactive in moving that inventory faster so that it reduces those holding fees and maybe even becomes a viable product.
And then you have the liquidation report, which is you just gotta get rid of these because it’s gonna cost you every single day. Come up with a plan for that. And then the overstock report would be that last report, which is usually the stuff that’s on those other reports, but then sometimes it’s your best sellers, and you’re sitting there going, I would really like to rank higher for this keyword.
If you’ve got you know, 97 days worth of inventory, you actually have the assets to buy yourself into that better ranking. So it just completely changes the way that marketing should be thinking about inventory, about marketing in general, by being inventory minded marketing on that side of things as well.
Tyler Jefcoat:
I love it. And as a CFO, the thing I preach if, and you and I are the kinds of people that would speak at the conferences, there’s only a few of us, and we all seem to be in the same shows here, but like the thing that I preach constantly when I’m an advisor for some of these investors, it’s understanding profitability in a vacuum is not enough.
I need to understand. It’s almost profitability, kind of think about it, it’s my batting average, if I’m thinking about baseball, and then the number of at bats I get per year is the inventory turns. How many times do I get to use that same borrowed dollar –
Chelsea Cohen:
The velocity of money is one of those. I’m just like, I can’t wait till we have some real conversations about this in the community.
Tyler Jefcoat:
And we need to. And I was helping some investors postmortem, a couple of assets that they purchased that didn’t turn out so well, and it turns out that in both instances, they didn’t even request a balance sheet during the due diligence period.
And we have to understand so we call this Return on Working Capital at Seller Accountant and my CFO practice, this idea of taking annual, actual profit, so 12 months of after advertising, after Cost of Goods Sold, after Amazon fees, whatever that profitability is. And so that’s kinda like the happiness, and then divide it by the actual invested. So if I could actually look at SKU ABC, the blue one, and say over the last 12 months, I’ve had an average of $10,000 tied up in the blue one, now I can actually do a true ROI calculation to say, how happy am I on an annual basis with that investment?
And so we’re really steering our clients more and more in that direction. I love that you’re making money on that SKU, but we don’t understand how happy you are until we know how much you invested. It’s like Chelsea, if you and I bought a piece of real estate together, like we would not know whether we’re happy with a million dollars in profit unless we knew did we spend a hundred million to acquire the real estate or $500,000? And so anyway, I just wanna beat that drum again. This is so important to understand the return on capital.
Chelsea Cohen:
Yeah. I completely agree. There’s a term, I have a writing background. There’s a term in writing called “kill your darlings,” which is, I know you love that character, that plot line, that, you know, that piece of dialogue, but it doesn’t serve the story. So you need to get rid of it. And that’s what you have to deal with sometimes is that people fall in love with their product ’cause it was their first product or it was named after their child or whatever reason it is to be able to show the numbers.
And that’s something that I’m truly passionate about wanting to get to the point. We’re gonna be getting into profitability tools, wanting to get to the point where we can have that granular visibility on a SKU level to see is this profitable, you know, be able to determine if you took these tied up, this tied up capital, do you actually, can you actually quantify the opportunity cost? If you had this dollar and you got this dollar back, even though you know, it was less profitable, if you got this dollar back, could you triple it? Could you quadruple it? What could you do with that dollar if it was tied up, if it was put into something else?
Tyler Jefcoat:
I mean, it’s so crucial, ’cause you’re exactly right. And again, I know for those of you listening to this, I don’t have a slide up here, but what we’re trying to say here is let’s just say your profit margin’s a little lower. But you can turn that inventory 10 times a year. You actually might be happier with a lower profit margin if you have that kind of velocity over someone like you said that this is their baby. This is the, I named it, my oldest child’s name is Maggie. This is the Maggie product. I love this product, and I get 60% profit margin on it, but I have to sit on eight years of inventory. That actually may be a really bad investment.
Because by the time you take that return on investment over each year, oh no, that’s terrible. I’m not making very much profit at all. And so let’s get into some best practices here. So if you were gonna coach a seller, maybe a seven figure, eight figure seller, who’s using a spreadsheet. They’ve, they’ve given up. They don’t like the tools out there. By the way, I do wanna talk about SoStocked here in a minute, but just from a process standpoint, what advice would you give a brand owner that’s trying to devise a better process for managing their capital and their inventory?
Chelsea Cohen:
Yeah. So there are inventory basics that, you know, you have to look at first. And we talked about that, how to calculate that sales velocity. We call it daily adjusted velocity, and we put the word adjusted in there because it has to be adjusted for sales spikes that aren’t going to repeat themselves and stockouts. And if it’s not adjusted for that, your numbers get thrown off.
We actually had, we work with the wholesale space as well, and we had someone come in, he had a software that he’d been using for years that he knew was not completely accurate. And so he created a spreadsheet that he was using in tandem for his best sellers. And he was still stocking out using both of those systems.
So when he came into SoStocked, he was surprised at what the, what we were saying his daily adjusted velocity was, and he thought it was wrong. And so I got on a call with him, talked it out, went over the numbers and really started to see that the stockout calculations were incorrect, which surprises people.
A lot of people look at well, I’ve got, I’m pulling the data from Amazon. So of course the data’s gonna be correct, ’cause it comes from Amazon. But if you are looking at you’ve got, a lot of these systems look at stockouts and they say, okay, you had zero sales. You did not have any inventory at Amazon. That’s a stockout. But then what about that day when you’re usually used to selling a hundred units. You sell 23 units right before the stockout. During the stockout, Amazon finds one unit, sells that. Then you come back in stock, you sell five units at the end of the day, and then you have to ramp back up.
You are not calculating – you take that, say a 30 or a 60 day average, and you’re not properly accounting for that, that one day got counted as a full sales day, or you also happened, suspensions were not being counted as stockouts either because you had inventory sitting there. So that’s where these calculations actually go wrong is the data isn’t fully being analyzed correctly. So that’s the first step. Is that base number being properly analyzed? And that some of these people it’s not.
Tyler Jefcoat:
That makes so much sense. My clients use several tools out there. A couple of them use SoStocked, and I think that’s actually a problem by the way, for us. I wish there was a tool that was like a little bit more ubiquitous, you know, but there’s so many use cases out there, but so maybe I’ll start with that question.
So the profile of a brand, I’ll let you answer these in whichever order you want to, but the profile of a brand that should consider biting off the project of setting up an inventory management tool, and then maybe the sub-question is what does that profile look like if it’s perfect for your tool, for SoStocked?
Chelsea Cohen:
Sure. I would say after about three SKUs. I mean, I think that anyone, there are tools out there that are part of these suites, you know, ManageByStats and Helium 10 that have very basic Inventory tools that could be okay for your first couple of SKUs. You do need to be careful though to not fully rely on them ’cause they could get you into trouble.
But for your first couple of SKUs, I know everyone, when you start selling, people generally get barraged with sign up for this, and sign up for that, and sign up for that. And you just do everything ’cause you’re told that if you have to sign up for these to be successful. So I generally say try to use that and then say your third SKU or whatnot, start thinking about a tool. But really understand how that tool works. And so we encourage people, you know, if you’re ready to start from a tool, go ahead and look at SoStocked at that point. We mostly, our sweet spot is, you know, six to eight figure sellers.
We do wholesale, private label, not necessarily wonderful for retail arbitrage. It’s a little bit of different business model, but that’s the realm that we tend to live in, and you know, if it’s, if it’s something where you’re, you’re not able to keep up in terms of your stocking out, you’ll feel like you know, you’ve got overstock or you know, just generally, you’re not able to keep up with things, you’re missing your orders. Your ordering is late, so you’re doing air shipments.
We had, someone came in and she was doing a lot of air shipments. Once she started to get her systems in place, buffer stock or safety stock would be a good practice, and that’s just basically, I will always order so that by the time my order arrives, I still have 30 days of inventory.
She gets those systems in, and she was able to switch to ocean shipments, and she started saving 65 to 75 cents per unit because she was no longer having to do the air shipments. So if you’re doing a lot of air shipments as well, that’s probably that time where you start thinking, okay maybe things aren’t as organized as they could be, and it’s causing me to lose a lot of money because I’m constantly late.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Yeah, I love that. I mean, so if I’m thinking about just my two entrepreneurial journeys and trying to apply that here to a seller, your first and foremost problem is finding a path to revenue. I sell bookkeeping, but I didn’t do my own damn books for the first six months of our existence because nothing matters except finding a path to revenue.
And it’s the same thing when you have a new product or a new listing. So that’s priority number one. At some point you realize that there’s tremendous opportunity cost of stocking out, and I think that, I think I agree with you there. That’s probably the moment to look at, okay. I need to up my game a little bit and include this concept called safety stock.
I need to have a little bit of extra ammo in the can so that I don’t run out because the opportunity cost of stocking out is pretty high, especially when it comes to organic rank momentum and that kind of thing.
And then I get to a certain scale where I realize that, oh no, I actually have way too much capital tied up in my supply chain. And again, having a tool plus a refined process for properly receiving orders and making sure that you know where your inventory is can allow you to then turn on and say, okay, I’ve got my buffer stock. Now I’ve gotta actually pull some cash back outta the supply chain so that I can invest in growth or hire the right people or pay myself for crying out loud as an owner, whatever it is.
Man, I’m a big fan of really well inventory managed companies and I love that SoStocked is an option out there. What’s, anything else that the listeners of this podcast need to know about SoStocked?
Chelsea Cohen:
I would say just that it’s, there’s a cliche of, it’s built by sellers for sellers, you know, and that’s a general cliche, but it really was a process that we grew by having direct relationships with our sellers. You know, we’ve got sellers who helped in 2019 build SoStocked from the ground up. We, for the first six months, we ended up ripping out our forecasting algorithms, starting from scratch, gathering their spreadsheet, asking them what they liked about it, what they didn’t like about it, jumping on calls with them and restructuring the entire forecast.
And then building on top of that and just having personal relationships. I have people who still send me Facebook messages and emails who have been with us for such a long time. That’s extremely important for us is that we’re constantly, I’m still a seller. We’re constantly talking to other sellers and we’re very seller centric.
So I’m very passionate about how do we construct not just a tool, but also education around creating more profit. Inventory was the first big piece. And we actually ended up being fortunate enough to be one of the few people in that space when 2020 hit. But now we’re in a space where Amazon’s fees are just insane. I call it the Amazon fee stack.
And so our next direction is headed towards profitability. And so that’s what we’re always focused on is how do we create tools that improve people’s profit? Because , that’s one of the hardest things in the business. Once you become successful in terms of generating revenue, how do you actually know that you’re profitable and how do you become more profitable to scale?
Tyler Jefcoat:
I love it. Love it. I love it. SoStocked is easy to find, but I’ll make sure there’s good links to the site in the show notes here so that folks can find you. Chelsea, this is an awkward pivot here, but I think I really, we talk so much about business and the important, the crucial minutiae of running these companies.
And I just wanna humanize a little bit. Like, what do you, when you’re not chasing SKUs and new investors, what is it that you do for fun that brings you joy in your life?
Chelsea Cohen:
Sure. I would, I have been gardening lately, so I’ve been really trying to learn more about gardening. We have something called a lettuce grow, which is a hydroponic tower, growing basil and, you know, lettuce and cucumbers and that type of thing. So I dabble in that, and then I also really like to cook. That’s another kind of hobby of mine, like chopping things and cooking and, you know, organizing my fridge, which is random.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Yeah. That’s awesome. I love it. Wow. So I’m a my wife and I both work, and we have two kids and I, we have about a year ago, we picked up the Hello Fresh thing, Chelsea, which is, I mean, you grow your own stuff, and it’s like really legit. For me, I needed to be idiot proof, but I would say one of the most like cathartic moments for me a few times a week is just pop in a podcast, I’ve finished a long day of calls or whatever with my team or whatever, and then just cook something and it tastes good ’cause it’s well put together. So I’m, I am a fake cook in that regard, but I appreciate good culinary skill. Do you have a particular kind of food that you love to cook?
Chelsea Cohen:
I don’t know if I have a particular kind of food. My favorite thing is just chopping things. Like I love to, I love to chop vegetables. I love to, you know, prep things. My brother is a chef actually, he’s about to open up a restaurant. I at one point was better than him and that has ship sailed a long time ago, but I love Italian food, but I don’t necessarily say that I’m like, you know, great at cooking it. You know, I don’t make my own pasta or anything like that.
Tyler Jefcoat:
It’s just the dicing like, oh, so you’ve got, your knife game, I’m assuming, is pretty strong then. Like you’ve got a decent set of knives. I get that.
Chelsea Cohen:
I, yes. Yeah. The knife thing is important. I get, you know, if a knife doesn’t feel right in your hand, yeah, it’s not working for me.
Tyler Jefcoat:
It’s not gonna work. I love it. I love it. All right. As we close the show here, this is what we do every week here, Chelsea. We talk about the habits or the practices that have made e-commerce entrepreneurs really successful, and just wondering if there’s anything that’s happening routinely in your life that you feel like, man, this gives me a ton of ROI on this habit or this practice. Anything pop in your mind when I say that?
Chelsea Cohen:
The thing that I think has made the biggest success for me are the things I think are just relationships with people and engaging with people. And that’s been throughout, I mean, it’s really valuable with SoStocked, but it was even valuable with the Amazon side of things is connecting with people who can make you just think differently or, you know, I talk to sellers and they’ll say something like, oh, that’s a great idea.
We need to add that feature into the tool. Or, you know, I’ve actively gone out of my way to go to an event where I come back and my partner’s like, oh well, we’ll probably not go to many events anymore, ’cause that wasn’t very, you know, you guys didn’t make a lot of sales or whatever, but it was about relationships.
Like thinking that everything has to be this immediate transactional thing is very shortsighted. I very much put myself out into situations that maybe didn’t look like it, quote unquote benefited my path, but they ended up paying out in spades. And so that’s why I think it’s just approaching relationships a bit of a different way. And also, I mean, what are we here for, if not to enjoy our lives as well at the same time?
Tyler Jefcoat:
Man, it’s so good. I mean, I think for a lot of the founders out there in the e-com space, we’re really driven and we wouldn’t be doing e-com if we didn’t like data. And so I do think that it’s like a, it’s like a pretty important encouragement to be like, hey first of all, stop and smell the roses. Enjoy, enjoy people, but also don’t forget that at the end of the day, we are, you keep using the word community, which is why I wasn’t surprised that you brought this up, Chelsea, but like this idea that we are still people.
It’s a shockingly small world of influential players in the Amazon space, and getting to know people, taking an interest, spending the time, even when you can’t close a transaction, I think is really, I am taking that away. That’s really good. In addition to your phrase, inventory minded marketing, those are the two things I’m taking away.
Chelsea Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. I was just gonna say, you know, to wrap up that, that relationship concept, it’s just, if you’re not approaching life and your relationships, as you know, first and foremost that you want to get to know the person and you want to enjoy the person’s company, I feel like you don’t have to know where something is going and just connecting with a person because you enjoy that person.
Things will happen. And it doesn’t mean that it’ll happen over here. You know, if you’re a good person, things will happen some somehow some way. And if you’re not a good person, if you’re just seeking a relationship to have a relationship, people are gonna be able to sense that, and it’s actually gonna work against you.
So no matter what you’re doing or what you’re doing in life, I think genuinely just trying to be a good person and enjoy people for who they are is the better way to go about it, and it will come around somehow and you know, so you’ll win in the end.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean that’s yeah. Live out your values and don’t be afraid to call it a success just connecting with another human.
Chelsea Cohen:
Yeah. We think, we feel like, you know, everything’s gotta be, you know, a zero sum game, you win, I lose, I win, you lose, or, you know, what have you done for me lately? And luckily in this industry and in this space, that doesn’t work actually. so, So it’s actually, that’s one thing I value about this community is that really doesn’t work. Some other industries, maybe it does, but this industry, there’s some pretty good genuine people in influential places that, that just doesn’t seem to fly.
Tyler Jefcoat:
And case in point, I sold my healthcare company in 2017 and I was, I just decided to open an accounting firm cause I’m an accountant, figured let’s do this. Why not? And my first three phone calls were the Google search of my biggest competitors in the space. And all three of them picked up the phone, and I had to email them, but they jumped on a call within a week. And we’ve created an amazing community of just even financial professionals in the space. So it’s a, it is a cool place to work, this kind of e-commerce universe and I’m with you on that.
Chelsea Cohen:
Yeah. Yep. Exactly.
Tyler Jefcoat:
All right. Well then, Chelsea, thank you so much for joining me for the show here. We’re gonna make sure your contact is down in the notes and any final thoughts before we close the show here today?
Chelsea Cohen:
I guess I would just say that profit is so important. It’s becoming more and more important. Amazon’s been just hammering people with fees. I feel like not enough people are paying attention to that side of things, and so if you can start looking at your business differently and identifying, you know, how to mitigate stockouts, how to avoid holding costs, how to extract more profit across your supply chain, you’ll be a lot more successful in the long run than your competitors, especially I think as inflation continues to rise. I think that we need to put more attention on that side of the business, and smart sellers will.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Amen. Well said. And leave it with that friends. Thank you for joining Return on Podcast. Chelsea and I know how valuable your time is, and so we don’t take it for granted that you would sit through a pod and listen to us talk about technical stuff like ROI and inventory. And so our sincere hope is that you grab something meaningful. Feel free to share this podcast with your friends and until next week, thanks and take care.