My Ecommerce Business Was Stagnant Until I Started Doing This...

whether you're thinking about starting an e-commerce business or if you're already selling on Amazon or Shopify watch this opening keynote that I gave live on stage at seller Summit 2023 my annual e-commerce conference that I put on for the past eight years now if you ever want to hang out in person grab your ticket below now in this talk I revealed a secret to how I've grown and scaled my e-commerce business for the past decade while working around 20 hours per week enjoy in the next couple days what you'll notice is that we're going to be eating together we're going to be partying together and every session will have actionable strategies and everyone here is a brand and I guarantee you that you guys will leave with with friends and what's amazing is you never know who you're going to meet and what effect they're going to have on your life so I want to tell you guys a little story uh this is my buddy Lars are you here Lars okay let me tell you a couple things about Lars Lars is someone who I met at an event many many years ago and he actually hates attention he he hates being in the spotlight so I hope we're friends after all this but I want to tell you guys a story of how Lars made me over a million dollars against my will kicking and screaming and I actually went back and I dug through all the old emails from way back way back in 2014 when he first started selling on Amazon and if you don't know Lis he's he's a very giving guy and he wants everyone to be successful and he was trying to get me to sell on Amazon and he he had nothing to gain from it at all and so what ended up happening is he he was very subtle about it like he didn't want to just push me into it so stage one was just a little bit of gentle prodding and what he would do is he would send me these emails and say hey hey look what this guy is doing on Amazon he's making a lot of money and at the time my store bumblebee Linens was doing very well without Amazon and we were already making enough money so I was like ah you know thanks for thinking about me and I've been tempted to try it which if you ever hear someone say that it really means that they're not going to do it right so this is July 28th 2014 but lar didn't give up so what he end up doing was by the way uh the context with these photos like I I kind of dug through lars's Facebook profile and he's got this folder where he's just doing the robot like uh uh just randomly so uh so he started sending me these income reports he just dropped like a quick email saying hey I made 5K the other day off of this one product and all I got to do is just send it in it's like an ATM machine and he just kept sending me these emails week after week oh you know you don't like money do you want an extra 10K a month do you want an extra 20K a month and that wore me down a little bit and so I was like okay I'll give this Amazon thing a try right but the problem was is that at the time I think Amazon isn't as was wasn't as mature as it was today and so I listed something but the listing didn't go live and I was having all sorts of problems with the Amazon listing and so I gave up and then I told Lars this and he was like he just kept reminding me hey any luck with the listings tell you what I will list one of your items under the maup brand bee Linens and then you can take over that listing and then once you have it up you know you can take it over from there he offered to do that for me and again the guy has nothing to gain at all from doing this okay but I still didn't really follow through I didn't take him up on his offer because I didn't want to impose and you know I just I just let it sit and so finally lar got fed up because he was trying to make me money and then he I remember what Tipp me over the edge was he he went up to me and he said hey you went to Stanford and you can't freaking figure out how to put up an Amazon listing so we tried all these tactics finally shaming me is what got me P pushed me over the edge and so we made uh 3K in our first month three products on November 2014 and the rest is history so thank you Lars I appreciate you all right I want to tell you guys another story um I was invited to this Mastermind uh run by Andrew udarian you Andrew are you here okay he's back there he's in the back so uh we were in this Mastermind and the way it works is just like The Mastermind that we run here we do Hot Seat style right and so I wanted an opinion on my website but here's the thing I thought my website was really good at the time this is what it looked like I I don't remember what year this was so I got in and I was in the hot seat and I was like hey can you guys critique my site thinking that it'd be just great feedback all the way around and I was just ready to to hear it but what ended up happening was they really tore it apart and here were just some of the comments of so Dana who's actually closing out the event here what what's at this Mastermind uh if if you don't know Dana uh before she retired uh she used to buy companies and then you know build them up and sell them at like a two or 3x profit and she told me flat out hey these are the types of businesses I buy for pennies on the dollar and fix it up for profit Kevin stco who's not here unfortunately he says hey you sell a class if I saw that site I wouldn't buy it and that hurt and so I remember at the end of that Mastermind meeting I immediately got in touch with my designer and I started designing redesigning my website right then and there and so I ended up finishing the project in around six or seven weeks and my desktop conversion rates increased by 46% my mobile conversion increased by 21% and my tablet increased by 25% and that ended up making me a ton of money okay you never know who you're going to meet and you you always want people who just tell to you like how it is now this final story is with my buddy Andrew udarian this is a picture of us on our little Montana trip we went to Yellowstone Park and uh just to set some context for this next story uh Andrew runs ECF which is e-commerce fuel which is an incredible community of seven and eight figure entrepreneurs and every year he puts on our great event called ECF live now the thing is every year on stage he roasts me okay so this past ECF he actually had AI imitate my voice and he made me say on stage a lot of foul things that I would never say on stage and it's been back and forth like this every year I do something but I think it's time to put that to an end uh I want to be the better person here so so to break the cycle so I want to tell you a story about about Andrew and just to give you some context also you have to qualify for this community you have to make seven or eight figures in order to do so so Andrew comes up to me and he goes hey Steve you know what I think it's about time that I qualify for my own Community because Andrew doesn't sell anything anymore so he said hey St this is like in 2016 2017 I don't remember the date say hey Steve I'm telling you hey I'm GNA sell these seatback organizers for the car they're going to be the next big thing do you want in because everyone needs a good place to put their paper maps in their car right and I'm thinking to myself paper paper maps like who uses paper maps anymore and so I hesitated to join him on this Venture but he launched it anyways you can see right there he's got the Montana maps right there and he launched this product and I really regretted it not joining him because I could have made tens of [Applause] dollars it just goes to show that not everyone you meet will make you a lot of money but I appreciate you a lot Andrew Andrew's one of my closest friends he runs a fantastic community so here's how I look at uh work and just networking in general I think of all the work that you do as adding lottery tickets to your stash and every person that you meet is like another lottery ticket and if you amass enough lottery tickets something good is bound to happen right so that's why it's so important to meet everyone you never know when someone in passing will make such a tremendous impact on your life and that's what seller is all about now you'll notice uh as you talk to people there's some high-powered sellers here there's sellers that are making 20 million plus there's a bunch of them uh there's people that are worth like hundreds of millions of dollars in this room and I encourage you guys to just I mean they're all just people uh everyone has their own problems and you shouldn't be intimidated to talk to anyone everyone here I I know a lot of these guys they're really they're really good guys and you should have no you should have no problems approaching them at all and and you got to remember that we all started somewhere so what I did is I kind of just dug through the archives of when we first started our business and we started out of our house uh this is a picture of my wife this is when my uh my daughter was born and we just had all our linens on a shelf and we were just printing labels and th those were like the good old days I want to say you know we'd get back we'd pack a couple orders and it'd be a lot of fun and then it grew of course course and our business became successful we started getting containers in we got a warehouse and all that stuff and on the surface you know we were we were viewed as successful right we got featured on CNBC I don't know if any of you guys saw this special but we got featured and it got us a lot of publicity and what's ironic about this feature was that it was taken right after the pandemic and if you guys don't know me that well we sell wedding handkerchiefs and our primary clientele is actually host hotels and Airlines also in addition to the wedding people and during that pandemic that was the worst because we lost like 60% of our business that year and here we were celebrating this on a on a TV show right and I just felt really fake doing this to be honest with you uh and we you know we filmed all these all this b-roll with my wife running the business uh this is like the most egregious one uh so the photographer or the videographer was like hey can you guys just sit at the dinner table or no C can you kids just walk down the kitchen and go oh hey Daddy what's for breakfast and they would sit down and be like oh I made you waffles I made you cereal oh would you like some milk and you know in a nice orderly fashion that's not reality like in the morning like those kids we got to get them up we said get your ass out of bed get your book bag and get your butt out the door right so what you got to realize is that in the media especially you see these companies being featured that are making millions and millions of dollars there's always a backstory and I guarantee you not all of it's good so everyone's got problems okay early on with our business once we started seeing some success I got this fever uh I'm sure you guys have experienced it like we were doing really well and all of a sudden I just wanted to grow grow grow the business so we would set these ridiculous goals and then we would hit them and then I would move the goal posts like let's try to grow another 50% next year and then we'd hit those goals and then we'd celebrate you know for dinner or whatever and the following we we'd just move those goal posts every year it got to the point where we started this business to hang out more with family but here I am on the Dumbo ride uh Jen caught me just sending out email blasts on the dombo ride and it got so bad and just just because it it's all my fault really I I had this fever I just kept wanting to grow grow grow grow meanwhile we don't I mean I'm cheap I don't even spend that much money we were making way more than we spend and finally my wife broke down and she was like I don't want to do this anymore right why are we trying to grow grow grow when we don't even spend that much money the reason why we started this business in the first place was to spend more time with our kids right so I want to talk to you guys about uh and you guys heard of the four burners Theory so so as soon as we had this talk so as soon as my wife broke down we had a talk and we did away with all income goals cuz once you have enough money making more doesn't really improve your life that much so the four burners theory states that your life is made out of four burners family friends work and health and if you want to be good at any one thing you have to turn off at least one of the burners and if you want to be good really good at any one thing you have to turn off at least two and if you're Elon musk you probably have all three burners turned off and your work burners taken off to the Max and what this theory states is that life is all about priorities you can't possibly keep all four burners burning at the max otherwise you're going to burn out so this theories about priorities okay so my priority if you guys didn't guess couldn't guess is is family and you got to realize if you want to turn the work burner all the way up you're going to have to sacrif something now that's all fine and good like family is my priority right and so I've kind of dialed down the work burner a little bit but I know if any of you guys are like me you probably have an ego right you want to grow your business to the max because it makes you feel good you want to be viewed as successful and that was the hardest part for me to kind of get over this you know taking the foot off the gas and you know not trying to grow like in triple digits every single year was really hard for me and and the way I overcome my ego problem is what I do today is I just work on one thing and I focus on it for an entire year to the best of my ability and then whatever happens happens so for example this year was the year of my book I spent the entire year focusing on marketing and I went all out I'm trying to hit the bestseller list I actually find out this Thursday whether I hit the best seller National besteller list and whatever happens happens last year it was YouTube and I managed to grow to over 200k Subs the year before that I was on Tik Tok for an entire year and I just focused on that and I found that as long as I'm learning I'm okay and the numbers don't matter as much but for all of you guys you have to find out what what will make you happy because unless you know what makes you happy everything becomes a priority here's another analogy that I love uh we're all running our businesses and we're jungling a lot of balls in the air but you have to know ahead of time which balls are made out of rubber and which ones are made out of glass because certain ones you can't drop otherwise they'll shatter so family is my glass ball because I know if I dro the ball there my relationship with my kids and my family might suffer whereas work it's a rubber ball like let's say I dro the ball it'll bounce back up we all know how to make money here so in the event that something were to happen I'm sure all of us could recover it wouldn't be a problem I've interviewed over 460 really successful entrepreneurs on my podcast and they're all really successful and we celebrate their success on the podcast but in a lot of cases the real conversations don't start until I stop recording one time I had an entrepreneur who hit $2 million in six months in e-commerce and that whole episode we celebrated his success but as soon as I hit the stop button I was like oh my God how miserable was that he's like oh my God it was such a show um I I was the most stressed out that I ever been but a lot of times you guys don't hear those stories and a lot of times a lot of those entrepreneurs don't want to admit that because you know it's it's an ego thing I I had a billionaire on the show uh private jet everything and I asked him you know what what was his biggest regret and he told me his biggest regret was that he lost his wife and his family because he was working too hard at work and he told me that he would just give it all back the business if he could be back together with his family so there's a lot more important things in life and you just got to figure out what that is for you than just money so you guys all know that I uh launched a book I did a book signing uh last night by the way uh the books are all free because a company named sellerboard who does Amazon profit software purchased all the books for you guys so make sure you take one on your way out and if you want one signed by me I'm I'm happy to sign it for you I'll carry a pen around in my pocket if you guys don't time anyway um just a couple quick things about the book so I I wrote this book because I felt like a lot of the entrepreneurship advice out there does not apply to me and if you look at the entrepreneurs writing books and on social media you'll find that most of them are single guys with no responsibilities at all that can work 80 hours a week right that doesn't apply to me I can't work eight hours a week I have no desire to work eight hours a week I actually want to see my family I actually want to hang out with my wife even right so those things don't you know the traditional advice does not apply to me and that's why I wrote the book because if all you want to do is make a couple million dollars you don't have to work that hard right now I'm running two seven figure businesses working about 20 hours a week if you want to do that and you're very deliberate about your actions you can pull it off and that's what the book is about uh even if you don't have a family out there it's really about working less and making more and being more efficient with your time so the other reason why I wrote the book is because I've been blogging youtubing and podcasting for over a decade now and my mom has never read a single thing never read a single thing but when I told her that I was writing a book she flipped out and all of a sudden she's so excited she bought like 10 copies right away and that was worth it for me that's like validation right there after years and years of childhood trauma of not get and then I just found out that my book was actually on a New York Times uh billboard and I was so excited it was it was a nice pleasant surprise for my book launch Co but even more important than that is that my kids are actually reading my book kids where are you you guys better not be goofing off if I catch you guys on your phone then I'm going to be really do you need something we were just reading a really good book okay kids you you go ahead and read I'll I'll be all I'm all good I think he's gone now all right so uh the structure of this year's event is actually principles from the family first entrepreneur so principle number one is profit over Revenue uh what's funny about just making money is we often get carried away with the with the Topline numbers and I remember I was in a a member of this Mastermind group uh where this guy he really wanted to hit seven figures and it was it was purely an ego thing he wanted to hit seven figures at the time he was making a solid mid six figure profit with his business but he wanted to hit seven figures so what he did is he hired this huge team spent all this money on advertising and he hit his goal but when we went back back and looked at his numbers he actually ended up making less profit than he did back in the old days when life was easy meanwhile he was really stressed out with payroll and and all these other employees to manage and so we get caught in this trap how many of you guys get these bed bath and well not anymore because they went out of business but uh how many of you guys run Black Friday sales okay it's very common because it's we've been conditioned to offer deals on Black Friday and I I'm Asian I do math so let's just do a little bit of public math here okay let's say you sell a product for 100 bucks and your margins are 50% so every item that you sell you make 50 bucks on okay let's say in a typical day you sell 100 of these widgets so you make a profit of $5,000 Black Friday rolls around you fall into the hype and you decide to do a 25% discount okay so all of a sudden you're selling your product for 75 bucks your cost of goods is still 50 bucks bucks and you're selling the item for $25 well guess what all of a sudden you need to sell double the amount of product just to break even and it's not symmetrical you might think that you're only discounting 25% but you you need to sell 2x just to even break even so think about that next time you decide to run a sale and of course it gets even worse the worse your margins are for your product so just think about that a little bit hope you enjoyed that clip of my keynote speech the next seller Summit is on May 14th May 16th in Fort Lauderdale Florida we always cut off ticket sales at around 200 people so the event is always small and intimate so if you want to hang out in person in a small intimate environment join me in May go over to sellers summit.com and I hope to see you there

Channel: MyWifeQuitHerJob Ecommerce Channel

Views: 3,652

Keywords: ecommerce business, how to make money online, make money online, how to start ecommerce business, ecommerce business for beginners, how to start an online store, shopify store, ecommerce business tips, how to start an ecommerce business, online store, ecommerce business shopify, ecommerce business 2023, ecommerce business 2024, ecommerce business شرح, how to start ecommerce business for beginners, business motivation

Id: JXBMbIvyKSs

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2024