The following is a transcript of Episode 3 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.
Structuring Your E-Commerce Logistics
Tyler Jefcoat:
Hello. Welcome Return On Podcast, where we talk about the experiences, obsessions, and habits of the most successful e-commerce entrepreneurs. I’m your host, Tyler Jefcoat. I wanna welcome you to episode number three of ROP. Now, you’ve heard of ROI, return on investment, but you probably haven’t heard of ROP. What ends up happening as we listen to these podcasts is that we don’t get anything that we can take action on from them. This is gonna be a different kind of show. With the podcast ROP, the one you’re listening to, we’re gonna guarantee you that there’s gonna be enough nugget drops, habit drops, the practices of the most successful people in the space, that you’re gonna walk away from this time really, really glad that you spent it with us. So let’s dive right in. I wanna introduce my guest for today. This is a friend of mine, Taylor Smits. He is the co-founder of the largest Amazon prep and e-commerce fulfillment network in the US. He lives this wild nomadic lifestyle that I can’t wait to learn more about as we chat. And I think you’re a Syracuse guy, Taylor, but lemme bring you in here, homie. Man, it’s good to have you on the show today.
Taylor Smits:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Tyler, excited to be here.
TJ:
So dude, listen, man, I cannot wait to learn more about the businesses you’re involved with. I mean you’re kind of a secret sneaky seller also, right? I mean, you actually own an e-commerce business.
TS:
Yeah, that’s true. My story is that I was in the corporate corporate world for a long time, 12 years in New York city. And I became obsessed with Amazon because I realized it would enable me to live the life that I wanted to if I learned how to do it right. At the time of course, I knew nothing. And here we are about five years later, and I think that’s true. The life that I wanted was to be able to travel, work remotely and you know, here we are. So that’s been great.
TJ:
Yeah. I think I saw you describe yourself in a former role, is it, was it a desk monkey? Was that what you called yourself?
TS:
I was a, I was a desk monkey. Yeah, just always, you know, getting really deep into it, I never felt fulfilled, which is one thing, but I also never felt validated. I always felt like in the corporate world that I thought internally I had really good ideas. But in the role that I was in, in the company I was in, wasn’t able to express those and turn them into a reality. And that, that wasn’t anyone else’s fault, it was just a result of the situation I was in. And so I think a lot of people listening to this are entrepreneurs themselves and can relate to that. And that’s probably one of the best things that’s come in my business journey, which is I strongly believe that your business growth is a reflection of personal growth. So being able to say, well, I thought I had good ideas, but I didn’t have the guts to try it out. And here we are, years and years later, where you say, well it was a lot, a lot more work than I thought it would be, but at least I’m getting to write my own story.
TJ:
That’s beautiful. I completely resonate with that. I was a middle manager for one of the top five banks a decade ago, Taylor, and had the same experience where I couldn’t see how my efforts were mattering. I couldn’t see how they connected to the big picture. I didn’t feel like I was changing anything important. And so starting my first company kind of flowed from that, honestly. And so I completely get that. So listen, dude, at Seller Accountant, we’re involved with due diligence, we’re the CFO side of things. And here’s what I’ve noticed, Taylor, and here’s the reason I wanted to have you on one of these really early episodes is when I see the giant, the monster exit, when I see my clients really get these kind of 8x plus kind of exits, they have a lot of things in order. Obviously you’re not gonna get that kind of multiple unless you have a really strong business, but one of the things that really holds these kind of brands together is that their supply chains, their logistics are clean. They’re not half-assed, they’re on purpose, they’re done properly. And so I just was really excited to have you come on today because I think getting this right, understanding when to, to maybe pivot to a three PL when, to even open your own warehouse, maybe whatever that looks like. I just think it’s really crucial. And so maybe before we dive into some of the tactics gimme a little bit of the MyFBAPrep story.
TS:
Sure. MyFBAPrep has been like many companies, a bit of an evolution, and I’ll try and hit on just the key points here. But soon after I had made that transition and was e-commerce full-time, I got a call from a guy used to work with in the corporate world. My partner is actually with me now, we’re doing an offsite and waiting for our third co-founder to come down and have a quarterly meeting. But I got a call from him and he said, “Hey, I have a friend who I’ve worked with on an account together, and we really like each other and we really wanna do something in e-commerce.” He said, “The only problem is I’ve don’t know anything about e-commerce and you’re the only guy I know who’s doing anything full-time. So would you hop on this call and chat with us?” And right away, we all, we all clicked and it was, I was so excited. Like this is gonna be the next thing that I do. I’m condensing the story here, but what I want your viewers to hear is that there were as many as 10 ideas that we had really written down and taken steps on and moved forward that didn’t pan out. And it, was just exploratory. But we had spent money and spent time exploring all these, and we landed on MyFBAPrep. I’ll tell you how we got there.
TS:
At the time, what we were doing is we had built a, we had built a website, and we were handling the drop shipping for a really large pet store, seven-figure brick-and-mortar pet store. And we said, it’s probably time to take your store online. And so we had enough experience between the three of us sales and marketing, e-commerce. running ads profitably to drive traffic. We had enough experience between the three of us to execute on that and do it well. But sort of the birthing moment of our company was we were looking for the right warehouse that was going to fulfill this pet store’s inventory. And we were actually arguing over whether or not a warehouse we had found was the right one. And for me it was absolutely the wrong one because of cost. And for my partner, it was absolutely the right one because of technology and how efficient they were in able, in order to give you for example, how many seconds it will take to pick that item. And, you know, they’ll attribute a cost to that, and a robot will do it.
TS:
And I said, you know, all that’s great, but it, it’s not what we need. It blows the profit outta the water where your shipping cost and your fulfillment cost is going to eat up all the margins, so it’s better that you just don’t have that headache in e-commerce in the business anyway. So about a week later, this partner that I was arguing with had gone to a new warehouse, and he was like, man, it’s night and day different than this fancy, beautiful robotics warehouse we were looking at. It was like you know, that Home Depot doors on two cement blocks kind of prep stations, it was very gritty, but the prices were right. And he said, at the time, he’s like, man, their prices are so cheap and they know what they’re doing enough to the point where we could actually serve clients. We could actually give this to other people and make margin on it. And I just remember being like, whoa, that’s a good idea. Like he hit on something that, I mean, today is the cornerstone of our business, and that’s what we do.
TS:
So today, MyFBAPrep is a network of e-commerce fulfillment centers and FBA prep centers. We have over 55 locations globally, more than 40 are in the US, and then we’ve expanded to Canada. And then we have tons in Europe. So for example, we have Germany, Italy, Poland, five in the Netherlands, three in the UK. So we just keep growing and growing. But we use this Airbnb analogy internally, where if Airbnb is a platform that connects travelers and hosts who own an apartment and wanna rent it out, MyFBAPrep is this platform that sits in between medium and large e-commerce businesses and this large warehouse of network, excuse me, this large warehouse network that performs all of those services that that the companies need. So in some cases that could be FBA and FBM focused. In other cases, it’s direct to consumer, bundles, kitting, everything in between, but we are matchmakers who help e-commerce companies get their logistics needs done and so much more. But that’s the analogy that works for most people where they begin to understand what we do.
TJ:
Yeah. Love it, Taylor. So it’s funny, you mentioned the “we had 10 ideas, we finally landed on one.” I think we kinda had a similar journey when I was exiting the healthcare company I started in 2012 and needed to start a business. And I’m just curious, so we had a whole bunch of ideas, and some of them were really, really bad by the way. Like we got a couple steps in and realized, yeah, like this is a terrible, a terrible idea. I’m just curious. Did you have any, were any of those 10 ideas ones that you guys started vetting, you were like, “oh, this is, this is not a business at all”?
TS:
I think we were excited about all of our other ideas. They just didn’t get traction. I’ll share with you two that I remember. I had gone to ASD, and I had met with someone who had this great NFL license for pet gear. So think of like pet harnesses, blankets, and you could like, if you’re a 49ers fan, you could put your bulldog in a 49ers coat, and it was NFL licensed. And I thought that was amazing because I thought that we could run Facebook ads you know, geo-targeted to where the NFL teams are, and we could, you know, capture an excited audience that would very likely buy that. As we vetted that out further, it turns out the person who had the license wasn’t exactly the person who had the license, and it, and it was, it came to an abrupt stop right there. We also were thinking of doing some of the healthy pet food, like the raw pet food delivered to, you know, wealthy communities in Florida that could support that, et cetera, et cetera. So we turned over a lot of stones, but we really love this idea when we landed on it, and we’ve kind of not looked back since then.
TJ:
Love it, love it. All right, listen, I wanna talk about mistakes. So whenever you have a conversation like this with someone who is a true expert in a field, you’re gonna have insights into the mistakes that the average million-dollar seller will make, you know, better than most of us would. So what are the, what are the screw-ups that you’re seeing that really cost a lot of money and resources to people related to logistics?
TS:
I think a lot of logistics comes down to planning. So what we’ve seen with COVID has been you know, the lead times have just gone out of control, and the cost of shipping containers, as another example have just skyrocketed. And so there’s, those changes you cannot predict, I wanna be clear about that. But the reaction time needs to be almost immediate. So some of my clients that we service talk about how nimble they are or how they never try and set their logistics strategy in stone. They kind of have a firm plan of what today looks like but knowing that Amazon can change on you on a dime. So that’s, that’s, I think, the strategy I agree with approaching logistics is don’t expect that today’s vendor will be your vendor for 10 years because things might change so much, and you need to be working with people who are able to fluctuate.
TS:
A concrete example that I think many of your listeners will resonate with is during COVID, many, many, many sellers would send us inventory and say, “Hey, can you turn that on FBM as well?” So rather than prepping a hundred percent of it, sending it into the fulfillment centers for FBA inventory, they would say, “well, actually we want to keep some of it FBM,” which is where our warehouse delivers it to the customer. And the reason for that is there are many delays getting product checked in on Amazon, and if you keep an FBM listing where our warehouse fulfills it, as well as an FBA listing where Amazon fulfills it, then you can always ensure that your listing is protected in the sense that you won’t drop in the rankings for going out of stock. So that, yeah, I think everyone needs to be a little bit nimble with how crazy the supply chain has been the last two years.
TJ:
Taylor, that’s such a great hack. And I would say that my strongest CFO clients employ that same tactic where instead of 100% being dependent on Amazon to properly receive my products and get them into circulation, to where they pop up in that column that says available, I’m gonna create a duplicate listing where I can fulfill my products directly. I think that’s a really good way to make money instead of making mistakes. Are there anything else, anything else you can think of that you’ve seen, even yourself as a seven-figure seller or your clients, that when it comes to planning their logistics has made them money, has made them better, more productive as a business?
TS:
Yeah, I think a lot of our clients that have, let’s say, hundreds or thousands of SKUs, what they’ve learned to do is segment out – I’ll give one example, which is standard and oversize. And what they’ll do is they’ll go the extra step to try and understand, what does it look like if I direct fulfill our oversize inventory? Are we getting a cost savings there that’s meaningful to the margin? So the more granular you can be, the better off you’ll be in the long run or from a profitability standpoint. So we’re seeing a lot of people say, “with this inventory, I want you to do that with it, but with this inventory, we’re gonna do that with it”.
TS:
I’ll give one more example. We have a client that sells, they actually pre-sell, which is very smart. They have these licenses with, let’s say, popular rock bands. So they pre-sell the inventory, say, “Hey, we’re having an ACDC launch.” I don’t want to use the actual bands in case they don’t want me to use their name, but let’s just say it’s ACDC. So they’re gonna sell a bunch of ACDC merchandise. And let’s say they have a hundred SKUs, and they have t-shirts as some of the SKUs, and they have notebooks as some of the SKUs, and they have bags. Well, they’ll sell, they’ll pre-sell as much as they can on an initial launch and then, when it lands to our warehouses, we’ll fulfill the immediate sales. And then the very next thing they do is they basically take a snapshot and say, okay, of those a hundred SKUs, what do we have left over? And then the items that they have highest SKU, volume count of units, they’ll put on sale. And then the items that are kind of all over the place, they’ll put into a bundle. And so they’re really creative with their inventory and Amazon and sort of retail terminology, you would say merchandising. They’re taking one first wave, which is the biggest wave and getting that inventory out to customer. Then they have this leftover inventory. They say, we don’t want to keep it. We want to do a different, we wanna move on to a different launch next month. How do we get rid of this? And they’ll make these creative bundles that we are then picking, packing, preparing, and getting ready as kits and sending out. It’s just a super, super lean way to run their business cause they don’t ever wanna sit on inventory for very long.
TJ:
And that’s huge. I mean, I think that one of the biggest challenges – I am actually even seeing this with some of the larger aggregator investors that we are involved with, and I know you guys serve some of them also, Taylor, but like, if you’re not keeping your eye on the ball in terms of return on working capital, right. I’ve got my precious dollar, begged, borrowed, stolen, invested in product A versus product B, somewhere in my portfolio. And if I’m not focused on maximizing the return on that investment, I’m gonna really be in trouble. I’m gonna have to constantly borrow more money to grow my business, and I think you mentioned several things there, Taylor, that are crucial business owner tactics. Like I wanna understand which ones are not my fast movers, try to find creative ways to get them moved, either to make them profitable – sometimes you can bundle two relatively low margin products and all of a sudden it makes sense, right? Like it’s kinda like one plus one equals three in terms of the margin. And then when you discover that something’s a loser, it’s time to go ahead and cut bait and make it be liquidated so you can redeploy that capital, right?
TS:
Yeah. So what’s interesting, you, you mentioned some of your large sellers, and if this is any sort of stamp of approval, the company I just referenced, I met them in California at one of our warehouses. And I was just kind of getting the story, just like we’re talking here, was getting his story, and he said, yeah, him and a buddy did this launch. They had marketing backgrounds but not deep in e-commerce. They did a launch, and then a few months later they did another one, and they said, okay, now it’s time to scale. They went out and they showed their numbers to a venture capital firm, and immediately they got investment which allowed them to then secure more licenses, more inventory and keep the machine going. But I have to imagine one of the things the venture capital firm liked about them is how tight they were on using money and trying to deploy it effectively where you’re getting returns on everything you spend and you’re not just, you know, buying deep and hoping things work out.
TJ:
Yeah. Completely agree. So let’s talk about like somebody who’s maybe listening to this pod or watching this YouTube video. What does they, what do they look like? When does a seller need to consider maybe layering on some additional sophistication in their logistics operation? And maybe if there’s an example that kind of helps us understand, okay, if you look like this, here’s a step you should take. If you look like this, maybe you take a different step. I don’t know if you had any examples like that that can kind of make it practical for our guests.
TS:
Yeah. I’ll start with when does it not make sense? If you’re not doing enough volume or your margins can’t support it, or if you’re, if you feel like you’re still getting your business up and running, you should do it because it it’s incredibly valuable learning experience and it will help you better manage your 3PL as you go on. So I think everyone should kind of, you know, get their sea legs under them in the e-commerce world before they switch over. Now typically it’s, this is not a great example, but it reminds me of when, when you’re letting an employee go, which is by the time you think that it’s probably time to let someone go, you’re probably months too late. So by the time you think, “man, my life is really busy with all of this warehousing and all this prep,” you’re probably a few months behind, and you should have thought about it earlier. That’s okay.
TS:
So if that thought has entered your mind, you can assure yourself you’re already there. Other examples I give in terms of like, quite literally, what does it look like? If your garage is full of inventory or your partner rolls his or her eyes every time, you know, they see you taping boxes, it’s probably time that somebody else does that. What’s interesting, you know, file under the category of “things I never knew before I started my business”: the number of customers we have who either currently operate a warehouse themselves or have operated their own warehouses in the past, continues to boggle my mind. So many of them are saying we’ve been doing it, we filled up our warehouse, but I don’t want to grow into a bigger space. I don’t wanna hire and manage more employees. I want you to do it.
TS:
And as I mentioned, a lot of ’em still do it. They say, look, I’m happy running my 10-person warehouse, but for everything new, all of my growth in 2022, I need you to do the warehousing there. You know, I can only get to a hundred percent of where I’m at. Everything above a hundred percent as we grow, I want you to do. So that’s, you know, that’s very interesting. I’ll make, I’ll make another point here, which I wish I could take credit for, but the Buyboxer, Scott Needham, actually coined this when we were talking, and he says, “well, we all love Amazon because it scales, but prep does not scale, right?” Like the actual, if you’re growing your business, you are taking in more physical units. And if you think that every single unit needs an FN SKU label, that doesn’t scale. So it’s, it’s probably something you wanna look to outsource.
TJ:
No, I think that’s so well said. It’s so funny, you’re talking about how many sellers that have tried warehousing decide they’re not in that business. I think that’s another nugget here. I’ve seen this with some of my larger eight-figure clients where they leased a large warehouse, they hired a big team. They had the volume, they had the margins, and what they learned after 18 months, Taylor, was that they just weren’t very good at managing a logistics operation. And they needed to figure out what their lane was, what’s their zone of genius and actually operate there. And partnering with the right 3PL partner was a game changer because now, you know, my buddy Brian could focus on product development, which is his strength, or marketing, which is his strength, instead of managing warehouse employees, which is clearly not his strength, and he was bleeding big time.
TJ:
And so I really it’s, I’m surprised by this, to be honest with you. That was the, three years ago. I thought the evolution – as soon as, by the way, as soon as the IPI score came out mid 2000s, maybe it was ’18, from Amazon where they’re measuring inventory performance. All of a sudden the fees got a lot bigger, a lot more constraint in 2019, 2020. We saw two things happen simultaneously: a lot of movement towards 3PLS and a lot of movement towards your own warehouse. But I think that more often than not, the sellers that I worked with that opened their own warehouses were not real happy with those decisions. And now that may not be true for all of ’em. Some guys open a warehouse, it was perfect. They knocked it outta the park. But man, it’s like managing capacity is most challenging unless you’re really running a well-oiled machine. And I think that’s where having the right partner probably makes a lot of sense.
TS:
Yeah. Yeah. I think I it reminds me of a really well done blog article, which I’m sure still exists out there. It was Dan Meters, who’s one of the big wholesale educators. And they ran a warehouse. I wanna say theirs was around 30,000 square feet, so quite big. And they did a ton of videos as they were instructing people on how to effectively run a wholesale model. And he writes this blog post talking about like getting rid of his warehouse and outsourcing it. And his main point is understanding what business are you in? And when you said that, Tyler, it just made me think of that blog, which is, let’s say all things considered you, you are the e-commerce seller. You have a growing business, you can afford a warehouse, you can do it. That doesn’t even mean that’s what you should do though. Right? I mean, because it will definitely take up a lot of your time.
TS:
And yeah, I think your point of focusing on what makes your business run, I can almost guarantee you, if you’re running, let’s say an agency model – it could be, you’re running a PPC agency, it could be, you do listing optimizations. I guarantee you, when you are trying to win new business, what you’re focusing on is your core strength. “Here’s my PPC strategy, this is why you should hire me.” “Here’s what I do to optimize your listing. I think it’ll work great for your listing.” You are never, ever, ever talking about prep. Okay? You’re just not, I know that. So you wanna spend your time doing the thing that’s gonna yield the greatest results, which is what your competitive advantage is gonna be. And I often say, to take things to extremes, Amazon wants you to prepare the products like a commodity, meaning they want it to come in uniform based on their 40-page PDF on how you should prep products going into there. And it has to be compliant, of course, with terms of service. So it’s not something you would sell against, so it’s probably not something you should invest your time doing. You should have someone who spends their entire time doing that, you know, help you out there.
TJ:
It’s beautiful. I just again, I think one of the recurring themes of our podcast here is this idea of being strategically lazy. And it’s not the same thing as actually being lazy. It’s just being focused, being focused on fighting as few battles as possible so that you can win. The richest guys that I know in this space, the guys that did the $30 million exits, all had very, very focused business models. And that’s what I want for the audience of this podcast also. Hey, listen, Taylor, I want, I wanna make an alert here. We got a geek out alert. So I wanna pivot here for a second. You do some things, actually. I found some things when I was kind of stalking you, dude. Like you’re a, you’re like a licensed pilot, and you’re a scuba guy, you’re a, maybe a licensed minister, and then obviously you’re jet setting, kinda living this nomadic lifestyle. What’s the thing that you’re obsessed with right now that you’re loving kind of personally or growing in?
TS:
Yeah. I’m working on, there’s an author and personal finance guru named Ramit Sethi who has a New York Times bestseller, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and he gives you a playbook to create your own rich life. And so I’ve stolen some of his, but that’s the point, you gotta make them your own, you gotta figure out what matters to you. But in my rich life, one of the things that I’ve committed to as a rule is “never ever question the price of appetizers, books, golf, or scuba”. So those things are interesting in my life, important to me. And it actually just becomes easier if you set those rules, where it’s like, I’m never gonna be out to dinner and say, “oh, I’d really like to try that, but I don’t want to add, you know, $8 to the bill by ordering that.” It’s like, I just, I don’t even do that. Books, golf, scuba, all those things I’ve learned have given me something for my mental health, my happiness that, it’s not worth, it’s not worth it to think about the price of, and I encourage people to think about, you know, their rich life and how to build it and what it looks like, and then, you know, how to commit to it and double down where it matters.
TJ:
And so, with you traveling, cause you’re all over the place, right? I mean, you’re, most of your job, Taylor, is actually visiting the warehouses. So, you know, thank God was doing your organization. So are you bringing golf clubs with you on this trip? Or do you just, do you play any?
TS:
So I, I had a friend ask me last week. He’s like, “do you have any status anywhere?” And I was like, oh yeah, I have status on airlines. I have status at hotels. So I’m always bringing my golf clubs with me, but I don’t have to pay for it, which is kind of lucky. But yeah, definitely. They come with me. I’m not saying I’m good. I’m saying I bring my clubs with me. Those are very different things, but yeah, yeah.
TJ:
Yeah. But bringing you joy doesn’t mean you have to be good on it, right? It’s just something that enriches your life. I mean, that’s such a good such a good geek out. So listen, here’s what I wanna pivot to here as we kind of close our pod here today is we call it the ROP. Everyone’s heard of ROI. We wanna make sure people are gonna get return on this podcast. Actually it may not be three hacks, but we’re gonna talk through some hacks here. So you maybe alluded to one there a little bit about, I will – what was the book by the way, again, that you mentioned?
TS:
It’s called I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and Ramit Sethi is the author. He’s a great person to follow on Twitter if you wanna be entertained.
TJ:
Okay. So entertaining plus helping you get rich seems like a pretty good combination, but if – for any of you guys that have listened to our other episodes, you’ll know that at the end of each episode, we just kind of have hacks or habits. Taylor, I’m a big fan of James Clear, a book called Atomic Habits, the idea that we really don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our habits. So how can we integrate the best rhythms in our lives that’ll give us success? And so I just wanna ask you, man, what’s what’s working for you right now? What’s giving you an unusual return on investment in your life and in your rhythms?
TS:
Yeah. I really loved thinking about – this is, this is maybe the only question I thought about beforehand. And I really loved it. Here’s what I have: ask an outside expert, land look for extraordinary returns. I mean like, a hundred percent returns or more. And I’m gonna give one example from our business and one example from a client. So in our business, my partner brought on an absolutely amazing company that has helped us quite a bit in our business development efforts. One of the things he’s done for us is he’s built us a funnel, and he’s really taught us how to approach large e-commerce companies and how to talk to supply chain folks. And that single initiative is responsible for, I’m just, I’ll just say conservatively, millions and millions and millions of dollars in revenue.
TS:
And it was something that I personally at the time thought we could do on our own. We could maybe hire somebody a few thousand bucks a month and pay for, but actually jumping to an expert – I remember sitting on the demo with him, and he brought up a funnel he had done for Ferrari, and I was like, okay, take my money. If you’ve worked with Ferrari, I want to know, you know, I wanna know what you do. He also worked for LinkedIn, which makes him quite a bit of an expert, but I can’t say enough how going out to somebody who knows like 10 times more than we ever would on that topic really, really paid for itself over and over and over and over again.
TS:
A similar example with a client: we have an electronics brand that was introduced to us by one of our existing clients. They do $800 million a year, and most of that’s in brick and mortar. So they sell predominantly at Best Buy Sam’s Club, Walmart, and Costco. Obviously great names to be in. But they admit that they missed the boat on Amazon. So I’m not casting stones, I’m just saying they internally say, yeah, we were late to Amazon. We missed it, but we’re there now. In three years, they went from zero to $20 million on Amazon. Now for their internal numbers, that’s not earth shattering, but it’s really, really, really rapid growth. And they did that by reaching out to an agency, an Amazon agency. And I just think, you know, they had two people on their internal Amazon team, and one of those guys is our client, and he’s the one who told me, yeah, I went out to this agency and they made all the difference in the world.
TS:
So when you’re looking for these outside experts, I think you should also be looking for like absolutely extraordinary returns, really, really dig in. Obviously they’re gonna have case studies, but ask to speak to those people and try, and get an understanding of like, what’s in the realm of possibility here. Even if you’re not hitting something like a hundred percent return on investment, you know, in 90 days, you probably are gonna find something that’s definitely worth it, right. Fifty percent returns. Okay, I’ll take that. And the more you do that I think the more success you’ll find. So that would be my ROP tip for you.
TJ:
That’s so good, Taylor. It’s so good. And it even kind of flows from the rest of our discussion, where again, you – and this is me. This is actually a pride thing that I have to get over, but I’m only going to be great at one, maybe, maybe zero things, maybe one thing. And I think to the extent that I can embrace the humility required to find the smartest guy in the room and ask him, or the smartest lady in the room and ask her, and really lean on that. You know, ask an expert, but internally demand a gigantic return on that investment. I think that’s, I think that’s a great mantra to have as a business owner. Anything personally, anything that you’re doing to – I dunno if it’s, whatever, like fitness or, or anything that, mindset, is there anything that you’re doing, that’s kind of been serving you on kind of a – especially as a traveling guy, like how do you stay in a routine to stay healthy when you’re moving around so much?
TS:
Yeah. On the personal level, this is what I came up with. This one stumped me, and I was like, ah, I don’t have any advice to give to anyone. And then I just thought back over the last, like 15 years of, of my both personal and professional life. And I’m one of these guys, like – always take the meeting. I always wanna meet new people. I always am curious about other people’s story. If you’re doing it from a personal level, where you’re trying to make friends, you’re just trying to enjoy your day more than if you didn’t say yes to every, you know, every opportunity to have a conversation or to meet someone new, that’s your, that’s your bar is “will my day be better if I just had this conversation or just met this person?” But it kind of in my brain keeps the ideas firing and just keep thinking about new things.
TS:
And I’ll tell you, when I look back on the business, clients we’ve received, Tyler, even meeting you – for the audience, we met at Prosper. We were introduced through Chris Fryberger who, you know, I was introduced to from someone else just by saying yes, yes, yes, and here we are today. That’s happened with clients. It’s happened with personal relationships, happened with friends all over. And then you have all these ideas from all the people in your network who are mixed up, and exactly what you just said, which is being humble enough to say, who in my network do I know that could maybe tell me about this? And I am often, often putting a group text message together with two people and saying, “Hey, I wanna know more about this idea, you know, about this thing, and you know about that thing. Could we all three jump on a call and just say hello?”
TS:
And that has worked for me – again, it’s not just business. It’s every area of my life where I can learn travel hacks of where I might want to go next, I can learn tech things, how should – what’s the best way to have my personal and professional set-up on my computer, the list goes on and on and on. But that works for my personality. Just always say yes, always take the meeting, always meet new people. And then it’s usually months down the road where you can kind of put the pieces together and you go, “oh my goodness, that’s the right person to call for this thing, and then I have this person who can do that for me.” How about you? Does that resonate with you?
TJ:
It totally does. I think the – it resonates on so many levels, but I think what I’m hearing you say, and this is why it’s not surprising at all that you have a wildly successful business, is that you’ve coupled genuine curiosity with humility and also just an ethos of connection. At the end of the day, e-commerce can feel ethereal, right? You and I are talking on screens right now. We’re recording this for people to consume later. And yet at the end of the day, it’s still human relationships that drive value in every business, and our businesses are no exception. And that’s huge. I love it. I think those are massive hacks. I guarantee you, guys, if you do that, if you just be the person that starts the text feed with somebody, that’s curious, genuinely curious, if you’re the person that’s eager to find the real expert, if you don’t know the real expert in a problem area, somebody in your network probably does.
TJ:
And I just wanna say this. I mentioned this on an earlier episode of our show, but the time to nurture relationships with supply chain partners and bankers and key friends is not when you’re at two o’clock in the morning and it’s an emergency and you’re gonna run outta cash in five hours. The time to nurture those relationships is today – actually it was yesterday. But if you didn’t do it yesterday, do it today. And so I think that’s my takeaway here, listening to you, Taylor is let me – cause I share that that core value with you – is let me continue to lean into being genuinely curious and interested in the people around me and finding ways to add value for them, and you know, good things tend to happen when you do that. So it’s really, really, really well said. Hey, listen, I wanna wrap up this episode. Taylor, this has been awesome. This has been absolutely just laden with nuggets and hacks. I really, really appreciate your time. If anyone who’s listening to this wants to learn more about MyFBAPrep, what’s the best way for them to learn more about it?
TS:
Yeah, they can check us out on our website. It’s MyFBAPrep.com. I’d encourage you to go to our blog, MyFBAPrep.com/blog. Just read the titles. If anything’s interesting, go ahead and click on it. If not, send me a message, let me know that as well, but yeah, check out our website and our blog.
TJ:
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Thank you again, Taylor. So guys listen, thank you listeners for listening to Return on Podcast with me, Tyler Jefcoat. If this content, if these shows are serving you, man, it would really be great if you could like or subscribe or share these with your friends. If this is a topic that has particular resonance with you, feel free to forward it to a buddy who’s maybe struggling with their supply chain or their logistics. And with that, I’m gonna close this episode. Have a great week.
Taylor Smits got his start in eCommerce over a decade ago by selling sporting event and concert tickets online. He has since added dropshipping, private label, and wholesaling to his repertoire. Today, Taylor has built a 7-figure Amazon business and guides MyFBAPrep as a co-founder and Amazon seller. Taylor is responsible for onboarding new warehouses and managing the relationship between MyFBAPrep existing customers and warehouses. When he’s not staring at a screen, Taylor is most likely seeking adventure. He holds a Private Pilot’s license, SCUBA certification, and he is an ordained minister. Find out more about MyFBAPrep at their website.