#326 – Inside the Mind of a PPC Pro: Navigating Entrepreneurship and Billion-Dollar Sales

#326 - Inside the Mind of a PPC Pro: Navigating Entrepreneurship and Billion-Dollar Sales with Liran Hirschkorn Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 326 of the AM-PM Podcast. One of my goals with this podcast is to have it just feel like you're listening to two people talking. You know, we're talking about Amazon or e-commerce or just life experiences in general. And this week is no different as my guest is Liran Hirschkorn. Liran's been selling e-commerce for quite some time, been doing this Amazon game since about 2015. And he and I talk about everything from growing your company and implementing EOS into your company to running a PPC company and how do you deal with the ins and outs and unpredictability there to just all kinds of stuff about this space. I think you're going to really enjoy it. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Liran Hirschkorn, welcome to the AM PM podcast, man. It's great to have you on. Speaker 2: Thank you. Super excited to be on. I think I was on the AM PM podcast. Has to be like, I don't know 2016 was it live in 2016? Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's when I first went on was 2016 I think Manny started it in late 2015 right around the same time that he started his journey as a seller and 2016 the spring of 2016. I think it was March or April is when I first went on So yeah, I'm sure you were on in 2016 as well then. Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure I was on back then and have not been on since. It's kind of crazy. The podcast itself has had quite the journey of hosts. You're the third. Speaker 1: I'm the third. Yeah, but for me though, it's kind of back to my roots. You know, the reason I am even doing any kind of training or an influence or being on stage anywhere or being on podcasts like yours that I was just recently on a few weeks ago is because I came on AM-PM Podcast. Manny saw probably the same thing with you. We were active in the Facebook group. I think the High Rollers group was the big one back then. It's still around, but they didn't have the Helium 10 group at that time, and we would go in there and set people straight. There'd be someone posting about whatever it was. This is how such and such works, and other people would just start parenting that as the truth. It was usually me and you, and I guess sometimes Brandon Young would go in there and just like, no, that's not how it works. I'm sure Manny probably saw something that you posted and said, hey, you want to come on the AM PM podcast? Because that's what he did for me. Speaker 2: Right. And I think also networking, right? I'm not sure when the first time I met Manny or anything, but there's events too, right? And if you go to events like Prosper and other ones in the space and you end up meeting people face-to-face and kind of form these relationships that I feel like will lead to things. And outside of just, let's say, as I'm somebody who is, let's say, a speaker or has a service business or whatever it is in the space, even for sellers. I think there are partnerships and masterminds and all these things that happen from developing these relationships, which a lot of them started on Facebook and then became stronger when you meet the person face-to-face. Speaker 1: Yeah, we met face-to-face I think at an event in Atlanta from Cellar Labs I think was doing an event and I think that's the first time I remember meeting you at one of their events that we were both attending. Speaker 2: And that was, I think, also 2016, probably, or 2017, something like that. Speaker 1: Yeah, 2016 and 2017, one of those two, yeah. I think it actually might have been 2017. But yeah, I remember meeting you there, and we talked about this on your podcast a little bit, but it's like, who's this guy? Because we're just all sitting around talking, and you knew too much. I was like, I got to get to know who this guy is. He actually knows what he's talking about, and he knows quite a few people. Yeah, I remember that and I remember too, you... Oh, and you're still this way, but you like are always online. It seems like you were all back back in like 2017 2018. I was like, how does this guy even sell anything? How does he do anything? Because anytime someone posts something on one of the Facebook groups for Amazon sellers, he's responding to and he responds to like every single message. I'm like this guy is just like a machine. It doesn't matter what time of night it was or what time of day it was and you recently told me that's that's one of your philosophies is you ignore you try not to ignore anybody even if it's something you don't want to deal with. You at least give them the courtesy of a response. And that's pretty honorable. I mean, in today's world and the amount of messages and people reaching out to you, that's pretty honorable and a tough thing to do. Speaker 2: Yeah. And look, I mean, there could be a point, I guess it's not there for me, but there could be a point where you just get too many messages, right? And you can't answer. So I don't put blame on anybody who doesn't do that. But, you know, if I see somebody asking a question and can take me a minute or two to answer. And if it's longer than, you know, I might just tell them like, Here's a quick thing and this is a longer answer. It's also an opportunity to give back a little bit. I don't really do much coaching calls anymore. I used to do them once in a while if somebody asked me and I don't really do them anymore. I have a lawyer that recently asked me to do some calls because they had a case related to Amazon. I think I'll end up being an expert witness in this case for this lawyer. There's actually an interesting lawsuit between a model and the brand because the model signed an agreement that the brand was supposed to use the images only on their website and it's been on Amazon for the last five years and the model is suing. The lawyer reached out to me to try to understand what the sales are and all these things on Amazon. Speaker 1: The lawyer for the model or the lawyer for the seller? Speaker 2: I'm a lawyer for the model. They don't know anything about Amazon, so they're trying to understand, well, can we tell what estimated sales are? How much sales they've had? They're trying to gather all this data. Would somebody be more likely to click if it was Just it's clothing so the models in the picture if it was just the clothing without a model versus with yeah you know and you know the clothing model is also the different colors and he's also on the most popular color. So does that mean he should also be entitled to helping drive sales on other variations where he's not the model because his variation ranks and you click on him, right? And so maybe you buy a different variation. So does that, you know, can, can you claim that he's helped be responsible for sales on other variations and you know, it's pretty, pretty tricky stuff. Speaker 1: So they're looking for, they're looking to assemble how much damages they can go after and prove. Yes, try to get a caveat that case will come down to the release whatever The release says, if there is a release, that's what'll dictate. As we got sued by, you know, we do stuff with models and we got sued around 2014, 2013, 2014 by a model who we had on video actually saying that she loved the picture, she loved everything, that she signed a release, but then something happened with her family and they didn't know she was a model and she got embarrassed and so she said, I don't know where that came from. They didn't have the rights to do this. And so she hired a lawyer on spec, you know, who did it for free basically for a cut of the earnings and he came after us and we ended up winning but it cost us like 75 to 100 grand or something like that just to fight this thing. We had to hire some lawyer out of California, like $600 an hour back then. Yeah, so those are tough cases. Speaker 2: And yeah, probably what they want to either settle or fight for in court is some, you know, let's say they want 20 cents for every sale, right? Or whatever. I mean, there's been millions of dollars in sales, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So they want something. And what's tricky is that the brand themselves doesn't sell on Amazon. It's resellers who sell on Amazon. But the resellers could have only gotten the image from the brand. So the brand itself doesn't even have the estimate of the sales, you know, and they sell to a distributor. So they don't know what goes from the distributor to Amazon versus whatever. So really we kind of have to just go based on like estimates, you know. Speaker 1: That's going to be an interesting case. Speaker 2: So, it should be a very interesting case. I don't know how long it's going to go. All to say that, you know, I charge them a pretty high rate, you know, probably more than the lawyer is charging the client, you know, is what I'm charging the lawyer, well, the client really. Speaker 1: What's worth that, I mean, that's something that a lot of people, that's an interesting point you make that people come to us and say, hey, I want consulting. We're like, no, we don't really have time for that. But sometimes we say, we throw out a You know, like, well, if they'll pay me, you know, $5,000 for four hours, you know, or whatever, maybe I'll consider it. And the knowledge that we have as Amazon sellers and people like you and I that have been doing this a while, and we know everybody in the industry, we know the ins and outs of the inner workings, that's worth a lot of money. I mean, there's lots of lawyers out there that could take this case and, you know, if this model doesn't like the one lawyer, he can switch to another lawyer, can probably do a similar job. But they can't do that for someone like us. That brings me to a point that I noticed you do a lot of consulting, whether it's for aggregators or for other people. You have a good little side business there of just advising people. Do you go out and seek that? Is it just word of mouth? Do they find you on LinkedIn? Speaker 2: This lawyer reached out to me on LinkedIn. I got a chance to also meet her. She was in New York one time. I met her at the White Label Expo. She's in California and she came to Vegas during Salon Scale and I actually met her. I met her face-to-face, but she reached out to me on LinkedIn. Also, I'm connected to a couple of these consulting firms that also reached out to me that when somebody wants to investigate our space, They reach out to a company like Bain or they're working with these big consulting companies and those companies want to learn more about the space. Let's say you were a fund and you were going to Look to invest into Helium 10, right? You want to do a bunch of research on the space. So you're going to pay a bunch of experts in the space and you're going to go and say to them, I want to interview you basically for like an hour or whatever. And I want to say, what makes Helium 10 different? Why do people use it? Well, can you tell me a little bit about their top, you know, it seems like from what we see, the competitors is Jungle Scout. What's the difference between Jungle Scout and Helium? Do people use both or do people use one? You know, who's the customer for this? Is it any set, like, so they ask you all these questions, they try to understand the market. And it's interesting because 2020 and 2021, I did a bunch of these calls, but probably in the last six months, I haven't done any, right? Because like no deals, right? Because the market, you know, but 2020, 2021. And the interesting part is you don't know who's actually, what the deal is or what they're investing in or what's behind it. You just basically, like the intermediate company that hires me for them, then you get on a call that's recorded with them. You both dial into a number. And the intermediate company just tells me like, Hey, are you knowledgeable on, you know, this, this, and this? And if I say yes, then, you know, they'll say, okay, they want to talk to you and we schedule it. Or if I say, no, I'm not qualified. You know, to talk about this, then, you know, they won't schedule it. And then you just get on a call and it's like, Hey, this is John. And they should ask you a bunch of stuff. You don't know, you don't know anything about them really, who they are. Sometimes if they give you their full name, I can look on LinkedIn. I see there with Bain and Co or like some of these bigger companies that are like M&A advisors or, or whatever it is. But it's been, it's been very interesting because when this, let's say COVID time e-commerce was like really hot and the market was really hot for startups and A lot of money flowing in. I did, you know, I don't know, I probably did like six or seven of these calls, maybe 2021 or so, but each one's like, I initially charged them 500 bucks, right? They ask you like, what's your rate? And actually they have this meter that like, once you go past 300, it says like, it needs approval, right? So initially the first year I did it, like maybe 2019 or so, I set my rate of 500 bucks, right? Then I'm like, you know what, the next year I'm like, I'm going to up it to a thousand and see if they still approve it, you know, up it to a thousand, still approve it. Cause probably they're being, they're probably paying more than that to like the, the intermediary firm is charging them something, right. And then paying me a thousand dollars, but the intermediary firm is probably charging them 2,500 bucks an hour, 3,000 or whatever it is. I don't know how it works. But, you know, these are like big corporations and you can, you know, you can charge them more for those types of calls. But yeah, it's interesting also seeing those types of calls dry up really because of like the whole startup investment space right now is kind of, you know, down. So I get a lot less. I've still got inquiries, but like Not on things I consider myself an expert in and like I've turned them down. So recently, you know, you mentioned about answering people. I met somebody at SalonScale. It's like a newer seller and they reach out to me after like, hey, can, you know, they're too kind of early to be a client, but like, can I, can I do a consulting call with you? I'm like kind of expensive, you know, like I don't, you know, I don't really like, it's not going to make sense for you or whatever. And they're like, no, like I want to pay or whatever. He's like, well, he's like, look, the most I can pay is like 350 bucks, right? And I'm like, tell you what, donate 500 bucks to a charity of my choice and I'll do the call. And I ended up just doing it for charity and the guy made a donation. So I was like, sometimes I'll use these opportunities maybe to do something nice or like I'll donate affiliate money. I'll post something as an affiliate and then I'll just say like, I'm just, you know. The affiliate money would be donated. Let's say I'm speaking at Kevin Saunders. He does these PPC summits and stuff like that. And then I'll post. It's like a $7 sign-up. And then if you buy the recording, it's like $100 or something. So I'll post an affiliate. I'll donate to some, I think it was last time I did it, it was like Hunger or Feed America or some kind of charity. Speaker 1: Well, in 2020 and 2021, when the aggregator space got real big, I know they were coming after people like me and you, left and right, for affiliate commissions. Because they were saying, hey, if you bring us a deal, we'll give you X percent. And sometimes that X percent could be $40,000, $50,000, $100,000, $200,000. Yeah. Speaker 2: Have you ever had a deal closed for referral? Speaker 1: No, I don't actually, you know, I turned them all down. I think I actually, there was like one that I think I ended up actually saying, okay, I'll do it, but then I never referred to anything because I don't feel right doing that. Even when I was out speaking four or five years ago in 2018, I spoke at like 30 some odd events and I was, you know, I would always be mentioning Helium 10 and Manny and Guy used to get on me and say, Kevin, you could be making so much money as an affiliate if you would just use your code. I was like, I just don't feel right doing that. You know, I don't want to come across that I'm talking about something because I'm getting an affiliate commission. So, yeah, I never felt right actually taking an affiliate commission and just recently I got a message from a quiet light. And QuietLight said, hey, we have this really big deal. Thanks to you, we got this client and, you know, we're just letting you know that they're on board and we'll keep you advised. I'm like, what the heck are you talking about? I haven't referred anybody. And just happens in conversation somewhere, you know, at one of these events, I mentioned this to this particular seller and he was, I can say, I guess, kind enough to say when they asked him, how'd you hear about us? He mentioned my name and QuietLight without Me being involved or having any relationship, you know directly for an affiliate reached out to me and said we're gonna pay you and this could be a sizable amount. It could be a six-figure amount depending on what he sells. I'm like, that's cool. So that kind of thing I don't mind. It's, you know, kind of a backdoor thank you. It's not me out there hustling it or pitching it. And I'm the same with software and the same with, you know, I'm careful even on that, like, the Freedom Ticket. People will say, hey, Kevin, what's a good freight forwarder? I need a good freight forwarder. I'll tell them who I use, but if I haven't used them, I won't recommend them. I'll say, hey, I know a couple of my friends that have used these. They say good things, but I can't vouch for them. You know, so I try to be very careful in that regard. Speaker 2: Yeah, I hear you. I would say I'm kind of very similar. I've had, I think, three deals that closed, like, since 2019. And one of them, kind of, actually, the first one was to Quietlight. And first of all, I felt better about referring to a broker versus just like one aggregator, right? Because you should Try to, you know, go get multiple deals and the best offer and also, you know, it's not The person's not paying any more, et cetera, for it. I referred this guy to Quietlight and didn't hear back for anything. If it happens, it happens. I'm not hounding down to find out if the business sold or whatever, kind of like you. Then they reached out to me six months later and the business sold and it was an eight-figure sale. They ended up telling me that somebody else claimed that they I also recommend them whenever, so they said they're splitting it between me and the person, but it was sizable money. And then they reached out to me like a year or so later, like in 2020, and they said, by the way, now the earn-out's been paid, and here's another check. Pretty good size check. So it just shows you they're honorable people, right? Because they could have been like, hey, we're not going to say anything to Kevin or me or whatever. And you don't really know what happens. You're not entitled to that confidential information. But I did have some aggregators along the way that said, hey, yeah, we want you to sign an agreement. One of them sent me the agreement to refer to them. And sometimes people would ask me, who would I recommend or whatever? And I said, look, I have Like direct relationships with a few, you know, a few that I like. I'll make a personal introduction. You'll at least get heard right away or whatever and like I kind of just saw it as I'm helping them because I'm also getting them maybe to the front of the line and to the right person. Because sometimes the aggregators wouldn't call you back if you filled a form on their site. And I'd refer them to a broker. I'd refer them to the aggregators. I'd refer them all around, wherever you get the best deal. But one of them had in their contract that basically if I refer to them and I want to get paid, they can be the only ones I refer the person to. And I said to them, hey, it doesn't make sense. I'm not signing this. It doesn't make sense at all. Because number one, if I only refer them to you, chances are the person themselves is going to 10 other places. So what are you really preventing? And number two, I don't think it's the right thing. So I'm not signing this agreement. So they end up changing They ended up changing the agreement because it doesn't make sense. Do you think that this guy who's sold millions on Amazon is only going to talk to the one place I refer him to and once he gets an offer, he's just going to take it and he's not going to talk to anybody else and try to get a better offer? It doesn't make any sense. They did change it. I guess, yeah, there are benefits. Look, some of these conversations that come up even in these referral opportunities or whatever it is, they come from just answering that DM too. It's not my motivation to do it. My motivation really comes from a general good place of trying to help, but sometimes the universe rewards you back for helping. Speaker 1: That's true. You might be talking about, we won't name names here, but One of the largest, if some people might consider them the largest aggregator in the space, at one time reached out to like, I was told, four different people, you know, influencer types, you know, like myself and others, maybe even you, I don't know, and offered this contract to refer people and to be like on an advisory board and we'll give you some equity or some options. It wasn't equity, it was some options. And they were all excited to send this to me and I read through it. I was like, no way in hell am I signing this thing. You basically own anything I say, anything I do. It had all these clauses in it and I was like, only a fool would sign this. And it actually turned me off on that particular aggregator. And I was like, I wouldn't recommend anybody to them based on this. So yeah, it got interesting there for a while. Speaker 2: It wasn't one of the biggest for this particular one. It was one that's I think doing pretty well and still active, it seems like, which is good. But no, it wasn't At least one of the top two or three, you know, biggest guys on this instance. But yeah, interesting space. So yeah, I mean you can say that, you know, there are benefits to getting into the space of services or whatever. It was never my intention, you know. Speaker 1: Never mind either. Speaker 2: How I got into it, I got into it because I took Andy Slaman's course in 2015. I took his course and because I was in his course, I became friendly with him. And then I went out to a bunch of other masterminds and learned and then I would kind of come back and I would share some of the stuff I was learning with Andy, you know, some of the things I was learning. And at one point he was doing a retreat at the end of 2016 in Colorado, private legal retreat. He rented out like a You know, kind of like a mansion in Breckenridge and he was teaching private label basically all weekend like Friday to Monday morning. Speaker 1: I did one in Orlando too after that or something. Speaker 2: Yeah, so we did a few of them and that was the first one and he basically invited me to come for free. He said, you know, just come and then leading up to that I ended up helping also come up with some content and I ended up doing some of the content at the event itself, especially on the PPC side, something I was learning and getting into. It was cool because it was like a $5,000 event, so just going free was kind of cool. I had a private chef. It was like 12, 13 people, good networking, etc. At the end of the event, Andy hands me a $5,000 check and he says, Hey, I want you to, and he was, he was in this business with his nephew, Nate. Now they're, they're continued. And then they also have a brand together, a very successful brand together and a podcast and everything else. And He said to me, here's a check for five grand, and I want you to be a partner with us, right? And, you know, again, like, don't kind of look for what people say, but look for what they do, you know, and like, that was very generous move in my mind, right from from his end, because he just he was already being generous by inviting me to come free learn. Learn, teach, whatever, right? Enjoy the house, private chef. The experience was great. And then gives me a check and says, I want a partner. And so then it was in beginning of 2017 that really started to create content together and have a Facebook group. And that's kind of how I started to get into the space of going from Being like, you know, just a seller, which, you know, it's what I started at, to also getting into the space of, and really a lot of the stuff we did came from needs, like helped Andy like revamp his course. And then we had a guy, for example, who contacted us and said, hey, can I post in your group, like my graphic design work, you know, that I do for people's images. And he said, in the beginning he said like, okay, you know, So he started posting and then he came to us, look, it's going well. I want to pay you like a commission on every sale. So we're like, okay, like, well, first before the guy even, I allowed him to post, I said to him, look, I'll give you one of my products. He revamped my images for me. It was like Photoshop. See if you do a good job, right? So he did a good job. He posted in the group. Then he started paying us like some, you know, commissions and we're okay with that. He was doing good work. But then he started to kind of like harass and spam people like, Hey, I did your images. And he would Facebook message him like, Hey, I want to, you know, rewrite your listing. And he would like get aggressive, you know, marketing. Right. So I said to Andy, like, Andy, like, screw it. Let's start our own image service. And, you know, this guy's like harassing people. Obviously, there's demand for this. There's a need for this. Let's just start our own service. That was the lead-in to starting copywriting and images. In 2017, I saw the ad space getting more and more complex. We have to start a PPC agency. We have to start it because I see what's happening. Amazon's adding stuff. It's getting more complex. People can't manage it. And I didn't know exactly how we would do it, but by 2018, we had started managing ads for people. And so everything kind of feel like evolved very organically and naturally. It wasn't like a grand scheme to come into the space, post a bunch on Facebook, make myself an influencer so that you can start selling people stuff. Speaker 1: So you're not actually actively selling anymore, right? You're focusing on the incremental digital and. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I sold one brand to a competitor. It was in the whiskey decanter space. I had three design patents on it. I had one brand in apparel that just had like 200 plus SKUs. So I wound that down. I invested in 2020, I invested 50% into a brand in arts and crafts. It was basically one listing that did like 400,000 a year with three SKUs. It's my COO and partner in the agency. I'm like, let's scale it up. I invested in the brand. We had a good year, 2020 and 2021. But basically, we were getting so busy with the agency that at the end of 2021, we just sold out of stock in Christmas and didn't continue to add on products. We thought maybe we would go to Shopify and do more with it. But we also decided we didn't really want to lose focus too much and decided to kind of just sell out of the products and be done with it. Speaker 1: That's the same thing that happened with Helium 10, you know, with Manny. Manny was a seller first and then when Helium 10 started taking off he's like, You know, I'm doing a million, two million here. I think he's close to two million at that point on his product. He just said, Mike, his brother said, you just take it. It's yours. You run it, take it and run with it. I got to focus all my energy and time on AM10 because I think this can blow up and make me a lot more money. And that was a wise decision because he had a very nice exit because of that decision. Speaker 2: Right, paid off. It also shows you the power of focusing. I mentioned to you before we got on that we implemented EOS probably, I would imagine, a good amount of people who are listening I've heard of it. It's called the Entrepreneur Operating System. It's off a best-selling book by Gino Wickman called Traction. We hired an EOS coach at the beginning of 2022, January. The reason why we hired that coach is some of the things we were talking about, we got together, a few of us from the agency got together in person last year in December. We're planning out our year, and one of the things we wanted to get better at was systems, processes throughout the company, et cetera, and just level up. We hired this coach, and it really helped put a lot of things into clarity. When you're an agency or even a seller, you're thinking a lot about, what should I do next kind of a thing? How do I grow, et cetera? We have a lot of ideas of different services we can offer and where we can add value, et cetera. We were unsure. Sometimes we're unsure if we have an idea for something. Should we implement this? Should we just be focused on what we're doing and try to get better and better at what we're doing versus adding a new service or whatever? One of our goals for the agency My three-year goals for the agency was to get to 15 million in revenue. We got on this call with our coach. We're thinking of doing this other service or whatever. She asked us one question. She's like, do you need that service to get to your 15 million goal in three years? I'm like, no, heck no. I could do it just on PPC. And she's like, then why are you doing it? You know, like stay, stay focused on the goal. And it's that kind of like clarity that having a coach like that in your business, you know, is super helpful. And kind of like Manny, Manny probably could not scale both his Amazon business and Helium at the same time. Speaker 1: He did something similar. I mean, yeah, exactly. He couldn't scale on him. He had to focus. So he dropped his Amazon business to his brother. And then actually they went to a war room event. And war room, for those of you who don't know, it just wound down. They kind of split off the guys that started and are doing their own thing right now. They have their own individual masterminds. But the war room was $25,000 a year and they would meet six, eight times a year. They'd have a few big events and then it was private and there's a few hundred people in it, but they're from all, not just Amazon people, but like from all different industries. And they would bring in people about mindset and setting up systems and setting up processes and all this kind of stuff. And there was a talk that he and Guy went to that completely changed their philosophy on everything, that completely changed the way they were doing it. You know, at one point, it's similar to what you just said, Helium 10 back 2016, 2017, 2018 was doing affiliate deals. Where they would do webinars for, you know, a Kickstarter guy, some guy that was doing the Kickstarter campaigns would leverage the Helium 10 audience and to actually do a webinar and Helium 10 would make a commission off of that. They did stuff, you know, they did one for Trianturco. When before you he went with with Ben Cummings, they did several of those and then they dropped all that stuff and and it's like just focus on the core thing and and now like EOS it has like six principles that that kind of spin around a wheel. I mean, it's like and so it says look focus on these six things like people I think is one of them vision is one of them. The data is one of them. The process, traction and issues. So those are the six things that form a wheel on EOS and those are the things to focus on and how do each of these interplay and which ones can you do to actually move your business forward and hit that 15 million dollar goal or whatever it may be that you have. Speaker 2: It shows you the power of focus and also getting better at systems, benefits of hiring coaches. EOS has something called a level 10 meeting. The reason why it's called a level 10 meeting is at the end of the meeting, everyone rates the meeting. Your goal is to get a 10. We typically don't rate our meetings a 10, but we might rate 8, 8.5, 9. How much we kind of follow the system and focus, but there's a very structured way to run a meeting and we do that now throughout every kind of department in the company. You have five minutes of going around good news, personal, professional, whatever, kind of break some ice in the meeting. You then go over to a scorecard where you read off kind of some of your KPIs that you're following. If something is not, you kind of look and see if it's on track or off track. If it's on track, you don't do anything. If it's off track, you might add it to the issues for that meeting. You next go to headlines, which you cover anything any employee issues, any big win, something like that. A few minutes you cover headlines and then you cover rocks. So your goals, your quarterly goals are rocks. So like a to-do is something you can do in like a week or two. Your rock is like, what is your main goal for the next quarter? That's your rock. So everyone goes through their rocks. And they just say on track, off track. That's it. If it's on track, you don't talk about it. If it's off track, you might add it to the issues list to cover why. And then the next part of the meeting, the meat of the meeting is really the issues. You can add issues and we use a software developed by them to kind of run it called 90. And so before meetings, we'll like, I might add some things to the issue list I want to discuss with the team they add. And some things come up in the going through rocks and scorecard will add to the issues. And then we just go through those issues, talk about them, we might make some decisions or what the next step is. And create some to-dos in there. Actually, we've synced our to-dos from that software with Zapier right to our ClickUp that we use. And now every, we first learned it and then we, you know, actually Brian, my CEO, kind of taught it to the rest of the company. And now everybody runs on that one system to run basically every single meeting in the company. So you go away from a meeting with some decisions made, with action steps, and it's not like, you know, because a lot of meetings are a waste of time. And you kind of go away from these meetings with typically some actionable Actionable next steps for things and also it's a good accountability going into every week. Are you on track and off track? So I highly recommend it. You can read the book Traction and try to implement yourself. You can hire a coach. The coaches are not so cheap. So I would say probably if you have at least a few, I don't know, five, ten employees in the business, maybe it becomes more worthwhile to implement. But it's definitely made a difference for us in terms of how we're structured. And then other things you do initially is build the vision for the company, three-year vision. You also create an accountability chart, which is kind of different than an org chart. So as an example, the way we build this chart is not Who is your boss? But it's like, what role are you sitting in right now, right? And then, you know, will you be sitting in that role forever or at some point, will you need to hire that role? So for example, at Incrementum, I'm CEO, which is like the visionary. I have an integrator, which is my CEO, but I'm also sitting as like head of sales, right? At some point, I may replace that. But today, I'm sitting ahead of sales. And if there's a more junior salesperson, they're kind of reporting to me too, right? They're not reporting I'm in that seat essentially. You could be the CEO and sitting in customer service if you just started. You're building out your three-year vision but then who today is sitting in that seat and what roles will you need to get to that 15 million three-year goal or whatever it is. So, it's super interesting. You'll probably get feedback on this, people telling you that they've implemented this in their business, I imagine, from this podcast. Speaker 1: So, $15 million in sales to the agency is, what, about $750 million to a billion dollars or maybe a little bit more in actual sales for your clients? Speaker 2: I think our clients did close to like a billion dollars in sales this year, something like some crazy number. We don't charge the percentage of sales. We charge more in ad spend. We didn't do $15 million. We did multiple millions of dollars, but we didn't get to $15 million yet. Collectively, our clients have sold a lot. We have one client alone that's over $100 million, so that kind of tips the scale. And another one that's like $45 million. We have a few that are pretty big, but I think collectively we got I think close to a billion dollars or something crazy. Speaker 1: And a lot of people don't know this, but Manny Coats, the founder of Helium 10, his girlfriend at the time actually was an Amazon seller too. And she had her own line and she was actually using you guys right when you first started and she had really good things to say. She no longer sells obviously. I mean, since they exited, there's no reason for her to continue that account. She just wound that thing down, said, the heck with this. I don't need to mess with this anymore. So how do you, as an agency though, I think one of the challenges for, there's quite a few PPC agencies that popped up, like you said, you know, it's getting more and more complicated. And a lot of people don't understand it and they want someone to manage it. But the problem is, what I've found, I've tried a few different ones. I have not used you guys. I've heard good things. I just haven't used you guys yet. But it really is not about the agency. It's about the person that manages your account. And so, I mean, you can go to a highly decorated agency that's won all kinds of awards and has all kinds of great case studies. And if you get the wrong account manager, All bets are off. How do you deal with it? Or if you get the right account manager, then you're like raving about this company. How do you handle that? How do you train your people? How do you deal with that issue when someone, one of your clients comes to you and is like, this just ain't working. I'm switching to a XYZ agency. And you're like, hold on, hold on, hold on. How do you handle that? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I would say in some sense, you're right. In some sense, no. I would say the answer is yes and no to that question. Because yes, there are managers that you'll find are rock stars and can be amazing. And sometimes you'll hire somebody and they turn out not to be amazing. But we try to minimize it as much as possible in a number of ways. The first year that I ran the agency, I probably sat in on I've done 250 or 300 interviews myself. And I quickly learned that the great resume and even some questions maybe asked the person before does not mean they really know how to manage PPC. And I had this experience both from interviewing people that were, you know, six figure type people that worked for like big agencies in the U.S. and or were U.S. based and, you know, had big salaries and also, you know, somebody overseas. We quickly learned that if we're going to not waste, because I remember sitting on this interview with a person from a big agency. It wasn't pattern, but let's say a pattern type. A big company that hires US people only and they were in the advertising space. I interviewed this girl. She was six figures. I asked her, What do you do when you have a keyword that has high ACOS? She's like, I pause it. Brian, my CEO, is on the call. On Zoom, I'm direct messaging him. I'm like, Brian, we need to end the interview. We need to just get off the call. Why am I going to spend another 40 minutes asking her questions? This person is obviously not qualified because you want to manage the bids. You don't want to just kill a keyword completely. It depends on the situation, but you wouldn't just pause the keyword, especially if it's a broad match or phrase match and it has underlying search terms, some that are good, some that are bad. You just killed the whole thing. So we realized we need to develop systems. So we developed first a test. Okay. So today you don't interview with us until you first take a test. If you pass the test, we also need to test your communication. Speaker 1: This is a test on, on what, what's an example of a question on this test? Speaker 2: Go to this listing on Amazon and give me, uh, what are the top 20 most relevant keywords for this, for this, for this listing. What would you do in this situation? You have an ACOS of 74%. The client's goal is to be at 30%. What are you doing? We want to see how they're thinking about PPC. How do you launch a product with ads? Questions that gets me into their mind of how they think about advertising. I'll tell you, I sat in so many interviews where somebody said to me, I said, how do you launch a product? Well, I put on an auto campaign. I let that run for two weeks. Then I see the search terms that convert and I add them to manual campaign. That's not how we run launches. We focus a lot on relevancy, exact match, taking advantage of the honeymoon period, driving conversions, top of search placements. We don't want auto campaigns with a bunch of irrelevant keywords in the beginning. We don't manage that way. As soon as somebody says that, that's it. It's over. If they put that on the test, there's no reason to talk to them. This is something people did in 2014 or something. This is what would happen on interviews until I said, we can't continue the interview like this. We need a different process. We have a test. Pretty extensive. You pass the test. So the test results go into ClickUp, gets reviewed by somebody, you pass. We then send you an automated message that asks you to talk about something related to Amazon ads or whatever, right? We want to see your communication, how you think about things, whatever. You pass that, then you go to an interview. And if it's a more junior-level ads role, because we have ad analysts that are kind of like assistants to the managers, and then we have managers, and we have senior managers, and we have team leaders, right? If it's a more junior-level role, the person interviewing Mansoor, who I believe he did some content with for Helium, he'll interview you. He's an expert. He's got the go-ahead to hire. If it's a higher-level role, senior manager, maybe Brian will sit in on it for a second interview or maybe I'll sit in on it, you know, if it's kind of like a higher-level role. And so that's one way to minimize garbage, first of all, is not to let it in, right? Now, the second way, you asked about, you know, the quality of the person. The second way is we do have internal training. So we expect people to have experience with ads, but we have a lot of very extensive training of how we do things. How we use our software tools, how we do our reporting, how we set initial goals. So we have a lot of extensive training. We also start many people off as ads analysts where they're an assistant to a manager. We're not giving them the keys to manage a bunch of money until they prove themselves as somebody who can help another manager or at least work with another manager for four weeks. Let's say they're qualified to come in as a senior manager. They're going to work with another manager for four or five weeks, learn the systems, et cetera, before they take on a client. Then we also have an audit team. Our audit team will also randomly do internal audits on accounts. So they'll randomly go in and look at the account, pull a search term report, pull a bunch of reports, see if it's being managed well. At the end of the day, there is no full proof method. And I will say yes, like the best managers And when I say best most experienced, it means they have experience managing huge spends, a lot of SKUs, complicated things. But we also have incentives in the company where some people are incentivized, like team leaders, based on their team getting promoted and moving up. And they don't just get to say, hey, you're promoted. We promote the person. They say you're promoted and then that person goes on a three-month trial. They do some work that we supervise and see if they could become a senior manager or if they can go from analyst to manager. But we also have incentives for our best people to train people so that they can move up in the company and they also get rewarded for it. So try to do as much as possible to make sure the rock star in the company is also training other people to be rock stars. And that, you know, it's a win-win if that happens. And that we have audits and systems in place to minimize and probably why we have generally a good reputation because not every agency has the capability and the amount of people on the team, et cetera, to be able to do that. Speaker 1: And one other thing that I've noticed with your position in the industry as well, from your agency into just people who know you, is you seem to be tied really tightly with a lot of guys at Amazon. I don't know if inside information is the right way to say it, but you're like on a lot of the beta testing teams and you know in advance like, hey, Amazon's working on this. They're going to be releasing this. It could be something for ads or it could be something somewhere else and you post a lot on Facebook about that. How did you get tied into this kind of like, you're like on a seller advisory board or something for Amazon? Speaker 2: I would say also networking and going to a lot of events. I was in Amazon Exclusives as a seller. And so I built relationships. Being an Amazon exclusives, you got some opportunities to go to headquarters, meet your rep, meet some people there. I developed relationships. After I went, I sent them a package with like my products, you know, like I spent focus on developing those relationships. And over time have, you know, give you an example, right? Cellular Labs. We went to that. We went to that conference, right? Well, Jeff Cohen, who ran Cellular Labs, now works at Amazon. If you have some longevity in this space and you build relationships, and my good friend, Lisa Abel, who was a client, we helped her scale her brand. She exited her brand. Now she's on the Buy With Prime team at Amazon. About three weeks ago, I met with the top guy from Seattle who runs Buy With Prime because he was coming to New York. I'm friendly with Lisa. We've introduced clients to Buy With Prime. I've given feedback, et cetera, on it, and I got a chance to meet with him. So I would say mostly through networking. We are also an Amazon advertising partner. So we're like officially approved by Amazon, which means we meet with Amazon every couple weeks. They're not telling us all the secrets to everything and don't expect, you know, your rep to know the algorithms, but I can escalate things, you know, like there's some opportunities to like get someone to hear you out on stuff and we had a blog post written on Amazon's blog and you know, it's mostly relationships and I guess I would say that you know, I'm not great at everything but networking and like, you know, really relationships I guess is a skill set. Speaker 1: You were featured in one of their videos or some program or something at one point. Was it your brand or your agency? You were highlighted by Amazon. Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, actually, my brand, which was in the apparel space, was actually in an Amazon Prime commercial once. Again, I was in exclusives and so I got to connect. But it was hard to see. It was on a truck. They had this commercial where they had a freight train bringing products. Each freight train, each section of the train had a different brand on it. My brand was there. One time, I connected with somebody at Amazon that was a very high level in ads. I said, I would love to come meet you. They're like, sure, email my secretary. I flew out to Seattle to meet them and build that relationship. We had a blog post with Amazon on the agency. I think I was at an event. And a photographer like took a picture of me, you know, and like, if I'm going to be, it was an Amazon event, another Amazon event, they had like video, video filming people, like whatever. So I went up, I'm like, what are you guys feeling? Well, we're asking some people questions about the event and we might feature it tomorrow on the screen. Well, I filmed some stuff for it. And then the next day I was super disappointed because like Vanessa, what was it? The tennis player. I'm Venus Williams. I asked a question. They asked me some questions. It was supposed to be on screen asking her a question, and mine didn't make it. So I'm like, oh, it didn't make it. And then it turns out they used part of that footage for a YouTube video or whatever, a recap of the event or something. So part of it is just being wise about leveraging opportunities like that, networking, reaching out to people, flying out to Seattle to meet an Amazonian if they're high up. It's worthwhile to build that relationship because they know me. I can then email them on something or whatever, right? Speaker 1: So I know when you took that flight out to Seattle to meet them, I know you made a stop in the cockpit. Because every time you're traveling on a plane, I see a post of you, like in the pilot, smiling. How do you pull that off every time? Do they look at you weird? When you're getting on the plane, do you like, wait a second, can I talk to the pilot for a minute? What's the line that you use to get those pictures with the pilots all the time? Speaker 2: I did it once, and I think it was in 2018. In 2018 and 2019, I probably was traveling definitely over 100 days. I think in 2019 it was like 150 days that I was traveling to different events and stuff, including China multiple times for the Canton Fair, et cetera. And one time I got on the plane and I was flying so much that I made like Delta Diamond, which means whether you have a business class seat or not, you get on the plane first. So I got on the plane and I said, hey, can I take a selfie in the cockpit? I don't even know why I did it, but I did it and I posted it and it got like, All these comments and everything, you know, so I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. So the next time I went on, I did it again and then I just made it a thing and I just like every time I went on the plane, it's like your trademark now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So generally if it's like with Delta, I get on the plane first because I don't know if I'll continue to maintain that status, but they extended it multiple years because of COVID. So like 2020, they're like, no, you know, we're not going to cancel people. There's no flight. So, so I think mine will end this year, but I think I'll still be able to do it. But I get on the plane and I see that the flight attendant, they're like, Hey, can I take a selfie in the cockpit? And usually they're like, sure. Or let me ask the pilot or whatever, you know? And they're like, Hey, somebody wants to take a selfie with you. Sure. And then I'll go in and like the pilot will be like. You know what? Why don't you sit down? I'll take a picture of you. I never ask to sit in their seat, but sometimes you'll see me holding on to the joystick or whatever. The pilot says, hey, sit down. I feel like, first of all, it's customer service in a sense. Also, I think there's somebody who thinks your job is really cool if they want a picture in the cockpit. One time there was a woman in the cockpit. I happened to be with my daughter. And I brought her in to see like a woman pilot. And she was talking to my daughter about like, look, anybody can be even, you know, women can be pilots too, right? Because you don't see women pilots that often. And yeah, just kind of, just come in and ask. One time I went on a plane recently and I said to the flight attendant, can I go take a picture in the cockpit? She's like, no, you can't do that. I'm like, are you a new flight attendant? Maybe you don't know this, but I have like 200 of these pictures. Unknown Speaker: So she's like, OK, let me check. And she's like, oh, yeah, it's OK. Speaker 2: You can go do it. I gave her an education. Speaker 1: That's awesome, man. That's awesome. Well, Liran, man, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on today. We could sit here and talk about anything and everything for quite some time. It's been great having you back on the AM-PM Podcast after, what, six, seven years or whatever it was? Everybody out there, and Liran has a podcast as well, and I was on it about three or four weeks ago. Make sure you go check that one out. I think he said it's like the longest podcast he's ever done. We talk about the NFT space and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. How do they find that, Liran, if they want to go check that out? Speaker 2: It's an e-commerce mindset podcast, so it's Apple, Spotify, whatever, Google podcast. It's called e-commerce mindset. Just find it. Also, we have a really good newsletter we've been putting out weekly on LinkedIn, which just updates in the Amazon space. There's not even an email opt-in or anything. You just go to Incrementum Digital, our page. Speaker 1: How do you spell Incrementum for the people that don't know how to spell that? How do you spell that? Speaker 2: I N C R E M E N T U M, Incrementum Digital, or just search for me on LinkedIn, Liran, L-I-R-A-N. Find the page, Incrementum Digital. There's also an Australian Incrementum Digital, so find the right one. And then you'll see on the page, you can subscribe to our newsletter and then you'll actually get an email notification when it's out. We're going to put a sign up on our website too. It's good. It's just valued. We don't pitch anything. You'll find it valuable. You should follow Mansoor also on our team. He puts out a lot of really good PPC content. Again, we don't pitch at all on social media, so everything should, if you're an Amazon seller, should be valuable. Speaker 1: Awesome. Thanks again, Liran Mann, and I'm sure I'll see you at an event sometime around the corner. Speaker 2: Yeah, sounds good. See you at an event soon. Speaker 1: Liran is always a pleasure to speak with. Really sharp guy. Knows a lot about everything to do with Amazon. Definitely check out his podcast, like we mentioned. He's got some great guests on there. He does it every week. And don't forget, coming up, actually in about 12 days now, on February 7th, The Bulls and Apes Project is releasing The Apes. And they did a pre-mint back in January and it went bonkers. And there's a limited number available on this February 7th minting date. And if you don't know bullsandapesproject.com, you can check that out. It was started by the founders of Helium 10, Manny Coates and Guillermo Puyol, along with Anthony and one other person. They are running one of the most incredible projects in the NFT space. A lot of projects in the NFT space have tanked. It's run by people that don't know what they're doing, but I'm personally invested in it. My wife's personally invested. A lot of people in the Amazon space are personally invested. And we've seen our investments in a market, in a bear market, when everybody's losing their shirts, we've actually gone up, I think we're up about four and a half to five X right now. And with this new release of the apes to complete the project, which are synergistic with the original bulls, it's going to be, I think we're going to see most likely some huge gains. You never know what's going to happen, but I think we're going to see a big multiplier on our investment. If you want to get on the allow list, which is like a private special list to actually be able to mint Some apes look me up on Facebook and just send me a direct message and say I like to be on the allow list. Here's my email address and I can get you on the allow list. So you heard this on the podcast. So I make sure I put you to the top because if you're not on the allow list, you're probably not going to be able to participate in this apes meant and when new ones meant Is when you want to be in on it. And so if you're interested in getting on the allow list, which is like the kind of like the VIP secret advanced list for this February 7th minting. Just look me up on Facebook and you'll be able to find me and send me a direct a DM there and say you heard this on the podcast. Please add me to the allow list. Here's my name and email address and I'll do my best to get you on there. I hope to see you again next week on the next episode of the AM-PM Podcast. But before we go, as always, I've got the little nuggets of wisdom for you. And here it is. You know, most advice really sucks. Advice is always well-intentioned, usually. But it can be dangerous to use someone else's map of reality to navigate yours. Winners develop filters and selectively implement advice. Take the signal, but skip the noise. We'll see you again next week.