#384 – The Slow Burn of Success: Cigars, Connections, and Business Talk with Abe Chomali

#384 - The Slow Burn of Success: Cigars, Connections, and Business Talk with Abe Chomali Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 384 of the AM-PM Podcast. This week my guest is none other than Abe Chomali. I've known Abe for quite some time. Abe was a seller for a long time. Owned some retail stores, got into e-commerce, did Amazon, and now he's running a very successful PPC agency. Abe and I talk about PPC, we talk about running agencies, we talk about some of the big events out there. There's a big one coming up next week, Prosper Show in Las Vegas. Abe tells us some of his favorite events and why he likes them and why events are important. He also talks about the Collective Mind Society event that he came to that I run with Norm Farrar. Enjoy this episode with Abe. It's gonna be a good one. 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. Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Mr. Abe Chamale, how are you doing, man? Good to have you here on the AM PM podcast. Speaker 2: Oh, I'm really, I'm honored and I'm happy that you finally got me on here. Speaker 1: I heard this was on your list. You like made a vision board or something. I don't know, maybe you do vision boards a little differently, but you made a vision board and said, hey, I want to be on these things. And the AM PM podcast was one of the things that was on that, I need to have that check mark. Is that true? Speaker 2: It's definitely true. About a year ago, being in the world of Amazon, I consume all things Amazon, from websites to social media and especially podcasts. And every time I would listen to podcasts, I would think, You know, I have a viewpoint or an idea that might be useful here and friends would say, you know, you should be on these podcasts. So, about a year ago, I said, you know, I want to actively connect with and reach out to all these people who I know anyway, but talk about being on all these podcasts and I made a list. It was about a dozen podcasts that I wanted to be on. By being intentional, I've gotten myself here within that time. So yes, I'm checking them off one by one. Speaker 1: There you go. Some of you are listening to this on the audio, but those of you watching here on YouTube, you see that Abe has a beard. And there's another guy in this space that also has a beard. And I know I've been at conferences where people have said, hey, did you see that Norm was there? Or hey, did you see that Abe was at this conference? And I'm like, no, Abe wasn't at this conference. Or no, Norm wasn't at this conference. So you two guys are kind of known in this Amazon space as the two beard guys because you both have similar beards. You're not in your 30s anymore. Is this deliberate or you always had the beard or is it as a marketing? I know Norm says it's for marketing. That way you can say he's the beard guy that makes him stand out. Speaker 2: My beard is definitely, it's a marketing beard. It's sort of a look, it's a thing I got comfortable with over a while. Through my whole adult life, I've had beards and I've taken them off at different points in time. And I think for the last three years or so, it has sort of become the thing that people who meet me recognize me for. So for the moment, it's sort of here to stay. Speaker 1: You and I, when did we first actually meet or did you see me speak somewhere or when did we actually first... I know the... Speaker 2: So the first time that I saw you speak was at an event by Ed Rosenberg. You flew into Brooklyn specifically to talk to a group of sellers that were there just to speak to you or just to hear you. And you spoke for probably four hours plus. With an intermission in between, and you basically said, guys, I hope everybody's gone to the bathroom because I'm going to be talking a lot and I'm going to be going at full speed, so you better pay attention. And at the end of it, you sent us a slide deck that had something like 400 slides on it. And that was my first, that was the first time I ever heard you. I had seen you on social media a little bit here and there, but I didn't realize the depth of what you knew. And I didn't realize the extent to which you understood how Amazon works. I think I gave you this I gave you this example of like a clockmaker. It's not just seeing the hands spin, but inside there's a whole bunch of gears turning and a whole bunch of little moving parts that add up to what we see when we look at the time. And I felt like Whatever you were doing, you understood all of those mechanics with how Amazon was working. It was really, really clear to me. Speaker 1: I appreciate that. That's very kind of you. Let's talk about you. When did you start doing e-commerce? I know before you used to run some retail stores. Tell me a little bit, what's the story of Abe when it comes to entrepreneurship? Speaker 2: All right. So, right out of high school, I was already in college, but taking a part-time job, I started working for a mail order house. The place I was working would take ads in magazines. It would be a page full of things that they had for sale with a phone number across the top. And we would pick up phone calls, write down what the shoppers wanted. Mostly consumer electronics, digital cameras, video cameras. I actually started before digital cameras were a thing, if you can believe that. I still remember going to the CES show and having dinner with one of the product development people from Minolta. And they said, we are second to market, but we have the plans to own the space. And he got very, very enthusiastic about what digital cameras are gonna do. And at the time, we couldn't even wrap our heads around it. We were still selling film all day long. So, right from the very start, we were selling all kinds of photo equipment and we watched digital cameras turn into a thing. And of course, Just like the theme of how my business experience runs, we watched digital cameras turned into cell phones that could do everything. And it was a gradual change. Speaker 1: And so you worked for that company and then... Speaker 2: So I worked for them for, I think, five or six years. In 1997, I opened up my first business, also doing the same thing. But a year and a half later, around 1999, The internet and e-commerce started to become significant. Amazon was around for a couple of years before that, but it was not the thing that, you know, it was not the presence that it had right now. But people were just starting to place orders on the internet. People were just starting to be comfortable putting their credit card into the computer up until then. We would have a website and people would be calling from the phone number on the website because they wouldn't want to put their credit card number into the computer. So, the first place where people were comfortable putting their credit card number into was Yahoo stores. Yahoo is not even really around to this much anymore, but a Yahoo store was originally the first real e-commerce platform. It was enormous. Speaker 1: We sold a lot of product. I had the Yahoo store. Speaker 2: We sold a lot of product on those Yahoo stores. Of course, it came up and then it rolled down a little bit and we evolved to having our own website with our own server and our own web designers and all those things. And when we had that, we would start advertising on Google. We would start advertising on price comparison websites, which aren't a thing anymore. But back then when we first started, there were websites dedicated to comparing prices among all different websites. There wasn't a central place where you could do that. So, we sold there for a bunch of years. We did very well there also. And then of course, just like every other evolution, Amazon rose up to the point where it could not be ignored, to the point where it was actively taking a lot of business from other places because of the trust shoppers had in it. And the business evolved and shifted there. I started selling on Amazon around 2009. We leveled that up just like we leveled up the other places of selling. We did come to a sort of peak and I exited my business in 2018. Part of it was hitting that peak, but part of it was also the opportunity to lean into the piece of selling that I love the most. So whenever I was owning the businesses that I was in, I always had two responsibilities, two main responsibilities. Number one was advertising and number two was customer service. Anybody that had a problem came through me. As you can imagine, that is enormously draining, especially doing it for two decades. When I had the opportunity to just help people with ads and to finally get a value for my thoughts and my ideas and the actions I would take as opposed to the price of a widget, it was something that was interesting to me. It was something that I leaned into and it's six years later. I've just been doing advertising for sellers. Speaker 1: Now you have an agency. What's the, go ahead and tell people the name of the agency. Speaker 2: So the agency is called XP Strategy. I don't know if you need me to spell it or not, but it's pretty straightforward. Speaker 1: Like the letter X and then P strategy. Yep. Speaker 2: X like x-ray, P like Peter. If you're a video game player, it stands for experience points, which basically the more I do, the more experience I get and the more I'm able to use it for great results with brands. And yeah, it's xpstrategy.com. Speaker 1: The main focus is to help people manage their advertising campaigns on Amazon. Is it just Amazon or also other platforms as well? Speaker 2: So Amazon is the main platform we work with. Amazon is the system which works the most the way you expect it to. It's the place where the most shoppers buy the most things. It's the lion's share of our efforts. But of course, we are responsive to what the world of e-commerce does. So I do advertising on Walmart also. We're getting into TikTok as well. I have connections for Google advertising and Facebook marketing. We don't do those in-house, but we help coordinate it for our brands that want to implement it. We basically have a little piece of our Toe in every single little pool that involves marketing, but the real volume of sales still comes from Amazon, almost no matter what we do. Speaker 1: So when it comes to agencies, there's a lot of these have popped up. There's a lot of, you know, they do different things. Managed services, PPC, listings, creative writing, you name it. What is it? People always ask me, Kevin, who's the best? I want to job out my PPC. I don't like doing all this math and all this stuff. This is just gives me headaches. I want to job it out. And they say, who should I use? And I say, well, you know, I know this guy, he's pretty good. I know this guy, Abe, he's pretty good. I know this guy, but Abe's not gonna be working on your account or this person's, another person's not gonna be working on your account. It's gonna be someone at the company. So I always say agencies are not, it's not about the, to me at least, this is my thoughts. I wanna get yours. It's not about the agency, it's about the person running the account. So in some agencies, you may get a good person and other agencies, you get someone who just went through, finished the training a few weeks ago from the agency trainer, his own training, and he's learning with your money. So how do you, what makes a good agency and how do you convince people like, hey, you should go with our agency and how do you, actually, you said you dealt with the advertising and the customers, so you're still dealing with that. Make someone feel at ease that, hey, you guys can or gals can do the job as well as or better than someone else. Speaker 2: So, we really try to put a personal touch on all the work that we do. I speak to many sellers, people who are interested in working with me, people who might just ask me for a tip here or there, people who just want to talk about whatever they're doing in business. And I use whatever I hear to influence and steer the ship within my own agency. And one of the things that really resonates with me is the fact that a lot of sellers don't know what's being done to their accounts. So they'll see some videos from somebody, they'll start to work with an agency, but they really don't see or understand anything what's being done to their accounts, except for maybe a report once a month or a meeting for 15 minutes here and there. What we try to do is we try to collaborate with the brands, not try, we do collaborate with the brands. We do a lot of work to understand their goals. We do a lot of work to communicate what we're going to do to help them scale or to help them achieve their goals. And one of the things that we do, which I don't see a lot of other brands doing is we put in place a team, which is really available for My clients. So we open up a Slack channel in which every person associated with the account is in that channel with the brand. So if they have a basic question or a SKU running out of stock or a variation that's coming back into stock or any of the things that typically happen as we run a business, they can just shoot us quick messages. We'll be responsive and acknowledge that we understand what's happening. And we'll put it into place. The same goes the other way. We advise clients when we see things happening that need their attention and we don't wait for the twice a month meeting to talk about the thing that's happening. If something needs attention, we will actively bring it up and discuss it with that brand. So the communication is really, really important. Communication and I guess the collaboration first strategy is also really important. A lot of times people will say, I need a lower A cost or I want to grow sales. And then the people they're speaking with like, okay, we'll work on it. That's the end of the conversation. They don't know what's going to be done. What we'll do is we'll look at what advertising is happening right now for a particular product and we'll say, okay, there's a hole here, there's an opportunity there and this is where we're going to put resources and focus into. And when they understand what we're doing, they feel comfortable to see the process run and to see them getting towards their goals. Speaker 1: What is it that makes a good hire for a PPC agency? Is it someone with experience that was a previous seller? Someone that's just got raw talent with numbers and planning and that you can teach them up on the systems? What do you look for when you're trying to hire someone that's going to be managing potentially multi-million dollar accounts for people and spending a boatload of money? Speaker 2: The number one thing, I look for two things. Number one, they need skill with numbers. Simple. We have tests that we give that can tell if somebody knows how to manipulate Excel with skill. We have interviews that we do which are specifically talking about their ability to understand trends and numbers. That's one thing that we require of everybody. But the second thing that we need is a mind which is flexible. It used to be with Amazon as recently as a year or two ago that you could take a course, the course would have an instruction or a PDF and they say, okay, do A, do B, do C, and you'll get a certain result. And it was really, really clear. I used to hire based on an ability to follow instructions. Okay, if something is happening, pull out the relevant checklist. Did you do A, B, C, D, E? That has changed a lot. Amazon takes so much into their system, so much into their algorithm that a thing which works for one brand will not work for the brand that's right next to them in listings. You can take a look at two ASINs right next to each other. Their expenses will be different, their sales volumes will be different, their conversion rates will be different and they simply need to do different things to have those positions right next to each other. So the ability to think with flexibility, the ability to observe what's happening to a keyword, to a search result, to a rank for a product, the ability to look at those things and to make decisions and to think things through and to evaluate opportunities is really become the most important thing. Speaker 1: Are you just doing mainstream like sponsored ads and brand stuff or are you doing also DSP and like Prime Video and Alexa ads and all that as well for clients? Speaker 2: Yes and no. So on one hand, we do all of the ad types. We handle DSP. We do sponsor TV. I don't do anything with Alexa ads because except for a couple of small situations, it's really, really limited. But anything which has traction and volume available for the marketing, we're offering it to our clients. Having said that, 90% of brands really are best served by focusing on the core ad types that Amazon offers. Sponsored product, sponsored brand. Amazon sponsored display will almost always be the things which get you 90% or 95% of the way to your desired goals. And all of those other things are shiny objects which distract. They are things which give you much, much less of a boost compared to how much you invest into it. There are limited situations which are perfect, but for most brands on Amazon, Focus on the fundamentals, get those fundamentals really right. Have a listing that converts, have a product with a good USP, a good selling proposition, which is different from your competitors. Make sure your main image is perfect. Make sure our click-through rates are solid. We want to make sure all those basics and fundamentals are all in place. And that almost always gives us a ton of work, like endlessly. Speaker 1: So when a new client comes to you, what are the, oh my God, here we go again. This guy, this account's just a mess. What are some of those things that you see that either another agency's messing up or the seller himself, he's been trying to do it, they're messing up and you just have to go in and clean up. What are a couple of the common like, oh gosh, beyond the fundamentals of like their listings, doesn't have all the pictures or whatever, but when it comes to PPC side of things. Speaker 2: So, the most common things I see, if it's on the agency side, most commonly I see accounts that don't get touched very often. I can't tell you how many times I see looking in all the campaigns that an agency is touching, they only change bids twice a month, which is not frequently enough at all. We look at campaigns in which match types are mixed. So Amazon has broad phrase and exact for their manual campaigns and sponsored products and best practice is to split those out. They perform differently. The bidding strategies that we use are different for each type. The goals are different for each type and we split them out to be able to manage them effectively. I see all the time people using strategies from three years ago in which they group them all together. There are softwares which do that. I don't ever recommend using those softwares that are grouping all the match types together. So those are a couple of things that I see frequently with agencies that are doing work on other accounts. When it comes to brands that I see who are managing their accounts in-house, what I typically see are missed actions that should be part of a schedule. So as an example, I'll see that Terms that aren't converting well aren't being negated. That happens all the time. I can't tell you how often I see that there is zero search terms that are negated in the campaign. And it's very obvious that things are not working and they could easily be fixed and tightened up. Another thing that I see is campaigns, which it sounds like a minor thing, and it technically doesn't have anything to do with performance, but it does have to do with managing an account. I typically see campaign naming, which is one step away from Amazon's defaults, like group one, group two, group three, or campaign started on this date with no indication of what the goal of a campaign is, no indication of what product is being advertised, nothing that tells me what that campaign is about. And the challenge there is Whenever we want to run marketing for a product, we don't run marketing at a brand level, we run marketing at a SKU level, at a product level. In order to be effective, each SKU will have its own goals and each SKU will have its own group of ads running together for that product. And naming those campaigns effectively to match campaigns to products lets us instantly look and understand what's happening. So, within my own agency, any product that we're advertising, I can instantly run a filter for an ASIN because the ASIN is inside the campaign names and I can see, okay, I have these nine campaign types running and this one isn't running. Why? Or I can see that I have three exact campaigns for the same keyword. Why is that happening? Like, I'll be able to immediately look and get a clear picture because the naming is tight. And Amazon, not just at a campaign level, but even at the group level, it's even more important because Amazon gives us data at the group level for keywords. So when I'm pulling a search term report, if I don't know what product that ad group is for, I can't tell how to take actions on it. So those are a couple of the things that we see which are immediate opportunities to tighten up when we take over an account and get things running much more effectively. Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on the people that say you should have single word campaigns instead of putting, you know, four or five, ten, I know you can do up to what's a thousand or something in a single, but because of the way Amazon will sometimes prioritize certain words in there, the way it picks them up, they're like just put them all separate or do you group things together in groups of five or ten or twenty or whatever your number is? Speaker 2: I typically do the latter. Most commonly, we will work with groups of up to 8 to 10 keywords per campaign. That's a good balance between dedicating spend, between extracting data and between setting similar goals for a group of keywords. The problem with managing individual keyword campaigns is every single one of those keywords needs its own budget. And in theory, if you have 4,000 keywords in an ad account, if everyone has a $10 or $20 or $30 budget, if something hits all of a sudden, you will have a $19,000 bill the next morning. Speaker 1: By limiting it- If you happen to yell a million dollars in sales too though. Speaker 2: Most commonly unexpected spend boosts do not come with matching sales boosts. I am pleasantly surprised when it happens, but that's not usually the way it works. Usually all of a sudden spend runs wild and it's much harder to control at a single keyword level. Speaker 1: I remember a few years ago, you were running your agency and you were heavily involved in a lot of stuff. I remember sitting there having a cigar with you. One point you're like, man, I need to put some systems in place. I need to get a hold of this thing because this thing is just, I'm going at both ends right now and running myself ragged. And you made a few changes. And I just saw you recently and you're like, man, those changes were like the best thing I ever did. Now I can actually focus on this and I can run the company properly. Can you walk us through What happened and what you did to actually make those changes, maybe help some people through the thought process of maybe what they need to do in their business? Speaker 2: Sure. So I did, I think, two or three things. The first thing I did was I implemented a task management system. There are a few that are available, but what we used is a system called ClickUp. And ClickUp basically is a tool in which every person in the company can set tasks. They can set a schedule for the task and they can put notes for all those tasks. And there's visibility into what's happening on any task or group of tasks or an account which has many tasks inside. For us, that makes sure nothing gets dropped. Every time we sign an account, internally, we have a preset built, group of tasks that we want to run every month, and that immediately gets loaded in for that account. So every Monday, we're running budgets. Twice a month, we're checking a certain metric. Twice a week, we're checking another metric. And already, there's a pre-built schedule. So the person that's touching that account already has his schedule and things to do each day of the week. Now, that for us is a starting point, because with every account, they all have different things they want to accomplish. I've worked with hundreds of accounts. I don't think even two of them have exactly the same goals. So what we'll do is, in addition to the base group of tasks, we're able to easily add in tasks matching a goal. So basically that task management system keeps everybody on point. It keeps everybody scheduled. And one of the things I did, which is The innovation that I brought to the picture is I actually hired what we call a traffic manager. Right after we implemented the system, there was definitely a bit of chaos as people who never ran ClickUp before all of a sudden being asked to create tasks and update them when they're done and mark them and add comments, like all of a sudden they had a whole second job to do with all these tasks. We specifically hired a person whose job is to steer the system. They create that base set of tasks so a new account doesn't require 20 hours of work and they always watch the schedules for when things are supposed to get done. So if a campaign needs to be built or a group of campaigns needs to be built and we're allowing 72 hours for the keyword research, for the building out of the flat files, for the uploading and working through any failed uploads, like we give it 72 hours, This traffic manager will be able to see, hey, this guy is getting close to that 72 hours passing. He's not there yet. Hey, specialist, you've only got like 19 hours left. Are you really on top of this? And they'll be able to give the nudges and everything gets done on schedule like that. So that's one of the first things that I did. And the second thing I did was I started interviewing differently. I I worked with people who taught me how to interview. I read books on it and I started asking questions which are really different and that led to the composition of my staff being completely different. Speaker 1: What's an example of that? Speaker 2: The most important question or the two most important questions are what do you hate to do? So I'll ask what tasks you like to do, which are you're good at and which tasks do you hate to do? And if anybody says they're good at everything, they're a liar. Everybody has a thing they hate to do and I sometimes get really interesting answers, but the answers guide me on whether they're a good fit or not just whether they're a good fit, where they fit. If I know a person doesn't like to do a certain thing, I am not going to put him in a position where he has to do that thing all day. It's torture for everybody. So, that's number one. And related to that question, I ask, what's the biggest failure you ever had? What's the worst disaster you ever went through? And based on that disaster, what do you do differently afterwards? And again, anybody that says they never had a disaster, they never had a failure, you're full of it. Get out of here. And the way that they talk about their failure, it gives you insight into them as a human being. Somebody who blames it on everybody else around them, that tells you a lot. Somebody that said, I made this mistake, I was in this situation, I should have done this, I did this, and I learned not to do this thing afterwards. That's a person who has a lot of self-introspection, and you can tell that that's gonna be a person who's thoughtful in the work he does. Speaker 1: For those listening that have never actually hired an agency, a PPC agency, how does it work? Is it a flat monthly fee? Is it a percentage of the sale, total sales? Is it a percentage of the sales over a certain level that they achieve and boost you to? How do you guys work the structure? Speaker 2: So, our typical structure is a flat monthly maintenance fee plus a percentage of ad sales. That's what we work with. I know that you can speak to 10 agencies, get 10 different pricing models over a whole lot of experimentation. This is what works for us for two reasons. Number one, In any account, even if an account doesn't make a single sale, we are still doing X amount of work realistically. If we sell a lot, there's more work. If we don't sell anything, there is still a baseline amount of work that's done. It's something that's out of our control. The second part of it is, realistically, as an account grows, the amount of work involved in managing the account grows as well. So having a piece of the fee that scales with it is intended to be small and manageable for a brand to be able to absorb, but also reflects the amount of work. A brand doing $10,000 a month simply has much less work to do than somebody doing 10 or 100 times that amount. Speaker 1: So what's an example of a client that comes to you and is interested in hiring you or partner up with you for your services and you decline them? You're like, no, I don't think this is the right fit. What would be a situation like that? Speaker 2: A couple of things. So the first thing is somebody that tells me he's been with several other agencies. This is a big red flag. If somebody is with one agency and it doesn't click or the agency is not great at what they do, I can understand that. Maybe even two, but somebody who is a serial agency hopper, they've been through five or six. No, the problem is them. The problem is not the agencies. So that's a massive red flag to me. The other red flag is simply not having the right resources to be able to support growth. So one of the biggest challenges I have is a challenge of success. It happens that we take an account, we fix the things that need to be fixed, we put the things in place that need to be put into place and sales jump. They go up significant amount and almost immediately afterwards, the brand runs out of stock. And for all the work that we did, being out of stock for seven weeks until they get more inventory is a disaster. All the work that we did runs out the window and re-ranking is really, really difficult. So when someone says we run tight or we run lean or things like that, this is a thing to be concerned about and we start digging further. I mean, the third thing is just personality. I have to be able to communicate with the people. I have to be able to communicate with the brands I work with and they have to be able to communicate with me. And if we sort of don't get along, if we can't communicate together well during the audit process, during the discovery process, it becomes clear to both of us that it won't work as an agency relationship. Speaker 1: So when a client leaves, like your agency or maybe stores you've heard from others, sometimes it's just not working, you're not performing at the metrics that we were hoping for. Other times it's they think, oh, I'm paying them all this money, I can just do this myself. They sorted out my campaigns, they got them all structured properly. I'll just hire Johnny over here, my second cousin that needs a job to just check in and oversee it now that I know what to do. What are some of the reasons that people leave agencies and these serial hoppers, why do they hop? What are they looking for? Do they have unrealistic expectations or why are they hopping? Speaker 2: Most commonly, I don't like to say bad about anybody even if they're anonymous, but there are people who are difficult to work with. They're difficult to work with in every facet of their life. Even the barista at the coffee shop rolls their eyes when they see this guy walking through the door. So there are people who every time they want a thing, it has to be now, no matter the size of the thing or the importance of the thing, they want it now. And there comes a point where We are just spinning so hard and so frequently to get things done that you can't keep up with all the things they ask for and realistically they start being unhappy with those situations. Another situation might be things which are out of our control, where brands get acquired, you know, people who sell their brands, that's it. The acquiring aggregator or whoever they sold it to takes over that account with the process they've built already. There are situations where people have business challenges that have nothing to do with the marketing. I have seen situations where people go through a divorce and they have to sell their business for the assets. I have seen situations where people have a batch of product that is all defective and then all of a sudden the entire account tanks and they have to cut everything out from layoffs to services, etc. And there are, of course, people who want to try something different. Somebody who says, our performance is all right, but this guy is promising me more. I want to see what this other person can do. That certainly happens. Speaker 1: Now, one thing I've never seen you leave is a good cigar. I've never seen you leave a good cigar. And I think that's become a tradition. Every time I see you at an event, it's usually me and you, and sometimes Dana, if Norm's around, Norm's there, and then whoever else wants to join in. And we're smoking cigars for, I think on this cruise we just did back in January, I think every night we're out there four to five hours. Speaker 2: It was a marathon. Speaker 1: The only thing left was a pizza place that was open the whole ship or something. What is it about Amazon or just the cigar culture, you know, it's something that a lot of people like, ah, you're just smoking. It's nasty. It's gross. I don't want to kiss you, you know, your wife or whatever you smell. But there's just something about when people, especially business people, or just they get together. It can be men, women, doesn't matter. And you just sit there and smoke a cigar. And just stories are coming out. Personal stories are coming out. Stories, I mean, you educated me and Norm on this cruise, you know, we got a presentation just at two in the morning, you know, from Abe about, it was a really good, like, here's the steps to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this. I was like, man, I wish I was recording this or taking some notes. But things just come out and I, you know, I sit there and analyze and I think one of the reasons is, you know, if you go drinking alcohol with your buddies, the drinking imbibes you, you know, it actually, It makes you a little bit different opens you up you get a little loosey-goosey a little wild or whatever or you start to feel bad. Um, but when you smoke, it's more chill. It's more, it's not loud music. It's not dancing. It's, you're just sitting there chilling. You're just taking it easy. A good cigar can take an hour, hour and a half, sometimes two hours to go through. Uh, and it gives you a slight buzz, but it just chills you and gives you something to do. So you don't get bored. You're not sitting there, you know, during a board is, you know, 10 minutes of the conversation. Someone's yapping about something that you don't really care about. You're still smoking your cigar, you got something to do. There's something to it and I think it's become a tradition in this space at a lot of events. You know, you even see it on the Billion Dollar Seller Summit website. There's people smoking cigars at the very first one and much of it's on a patio. Talk to me about About this cigar culture and why it's kind of cool and why you're into it. Speaker 2: Oh boy, I could probably talk about this for an hour. But when it comes to, so it's definitely a passion of mine, like you said, we've had cigars at all different continents around the world together. There is definitely something which you need in order to smoke a cigar, which is time and a calm place. So, in order to drink, you can really drink anywhere. In order to smoke a cigarette, you can go out in 15-degree weather, smoke it and come back inside. In order to be at a business conference hopping from place to place to place, you could do that and you don't have to sit still. You can't do any of that with a cigar. In order to smoke a cigar properly, you need to plant yourself down, you need to sit, you need to go through the process of lighting it, you need to be in a place which allows for cigar smoking and those places are typically quieter. And when you're in a place with several people like you, everybody has committed to an hour in a calm place. Or two hours in a calm place. Speaker 1: Or five hours sometimes. Speaker 2: Or five hours, yes. So once you're committed to that block of time and you know you're not getting up in four minutes or you know there isn't a thing that you have to run off to because you got a notification on your phone. Whatever things come and like have you bouncing around all day long. When it comes to the culture of smoking cigars, you are in one place for an extended amount of time, which is not so common in today's society. It used to be we lived in a different world. Now, this is almost a throwback to the time when people spent time together just talking. And the more we talk together, the more we get to know each other. The more different kinds of conversations can happen that wouldn't happen if you only have three or five minutes. Like you said, the kinds of conversations, I can talk about an article that I read about philosophy and we can talk about the moon landing. We can talk about all different things, but if we're in a business environment and I'm saying hi to you, but four other people are also saying hi to you, that really you're very limited in the quality of conversation you can have. The types of conversations that we can have while smoking a cigar are better than anywhere else and that boat that we were on, that online seller cruise that we were on was even beyond whatever I described. It was absolutely unique because a group of like-minded people were almost captive. We were captive for seven or eight days so that really became the thing to do and we were able to build on a conversation of the day before. If we spoke about something on Tuesday night, we could speak about, we could continue the conversation on Wednesday night, as opposed to the rest of our life, where we speak about a thing on Tuesday, by Wednesday, I don't even remember that we spoke the day before. Here, we can talk about it and we can continue to talk about it and we build on it and it deepens the ties. That's it. I mean, the people who we were on that boat with are our family almost. Speaker 1: But so yeah, cigars are something else. Another thing, you know, speaking of events. Events are something that you go to a few, I go to a handful or more. And what is it about events? There's a lot of people listening to this that have never even been out of their house for an Amazon event. And maybe that's okay, but what is the value of actually going to events? And if you're gonna go to an event, how do you choose what to go to? Is it based on whichever one's the cheapest and easiest to get to, or should you choose it different way or how should you choose going to events and what are some good events that you might recommend people actually check out you know that you've been to? Speaker 2: All right, so when it comes to events, there's like a really clear and specific value. And that value is being able to connect with and communicate with people who are in similar positions to you, or maybe even slightly ahead of you. When we run our businesses, wherever we're at, we typically speak with a small group of people every day. We speak with our employees, we speak with our employers, we speak with Family, a few friends, it's a pretty tight group of people we have actual conversations with and that is limiting. There's only so much you can hear or learn from with a person you're speaking to every day. When we go to conferences and we speak to and I see or I meet many people who are either other agency owners or other people who are sellers, whether or not I work with them, I have opportunities to have conversations that I wouldn't have in any other place and it Basically, lets me speak about things that are working for me, things that are challenges for me, things that are working for somebody else, things that are challenges for somebody else. We're able to have conversations that we'll never have just being at home or just seeing each other on social media. It's funny, we were speaking about cigars and the value of spending hours together. But the truth is, at these events, Spending 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes is still a million years ahead of not speaking with other people at all. So, when we're home all week, when we're home all year with that tight group of people, it's really, really tough to understand how we're doing. It's really tough to have a mindset which leads to growth, to focusing on the right perspectives. But when we get to a show where people are like us, we can understand better how we're doing, We can push ourselves, we can have maybe comfort or sympathy knowing that a challenge we have, we're not the only person dealing with that challenge and we can get inspiration and those inspirations are huge. Speaker 1: What's the difference though? Why spend all this money to get on an airplane, go to stay in a hotel and go to an event? I can just do this on Zoom. I just joined a mastermind. I have 20, 30 of us on a Zoom call and can I do the same thing? Speaker 2: It's not the same. I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but being physically next to another human being is still totally different than being on a Zoom call. It's not at all the same. The spontaneous element of having many people around you is definitely different than those 20 or 30 people on a Zoom call. The connections you might make from a person you weren't expecting to see Or from a person you wanted to see but don't have time to schedule a call with. Those things are what lead to the growth in your business. I have made deals. I have made relationships. I have had all kinds of great interactions with people that were not even on my radar. And I'll see somebody at a show, I'll be talking to a friend or to a colleague and somebody that they know will become a three of us speaking about things and all of a sudden I know a new person I would have never known otherwise and that leads to all different places. Speaker 1: What are some of the best events that you've personally been to? I know you haven't been to every event out there so there might be something excluded from the list that's actually good but what are some of the best events that you've been to? Speaker 2: So there's probably three or four. Again, at any event, there can be an amazing moment or an amazing hour or something. But if we want to talk about what the full best events are, there's a few clear standouts. So number one is ASGTG. I still am not sure what the letters stand for, but there's a show in Brooklyn, New York, every January called ASGTG. And that show has the highest concentration of strong sellers in one room that you'll get anywhere. I mean it's the level is beyond the the things that are happening in that room are really really powerful. It's a one-day event which makes it unusual in the event space. It's in Brooklyn which is definitely it might be close to New York City but it's not exactly a mecca of tourism or a magnet for people to come to and yet people come. I've spoken to people who would come from Europe for one day and fly right back out afterwards. It's a testament to the fact that this show is so powerful that people are coming in for it. So, ASGTG is one of them. Speaker 1: What would be another good one? Speaker 2: The next one and this might be one where we have a little bit of a difference of opinion in is The Prosper Show. The Prosper Show is held in Las Vegas, which is a magnet for people from all around the world. It's held for a few days. It has other events that bookend onto it, which MDS Inspire is another show, which just started last year, but it's a great show and they connect themselves on the calendar to But really, a lot of people are coming for Prosper and adding onto their trip for MDS Inspire. So those two are sort of together. But Prosper has been around for close to a decade now. It is a magnet for many, many sellers for people who are in the business of Amazon. It still is that they've had ups and downs. I think that the actual show was purchased by a company that specializes in shows. So there may be getting a little bit more by the book in how they run it. And that shows itself in all different ways. But putting those aside, it is still as of now one of the shows to go to if you have to limit yourself to a few. I know people who are coming from all over that don't go to many other shows. That's it. If we move past Prosper, the next one on, which I haven't been to, but it is forever on my list, is actually yours, the BDSS, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. What makes BDSS an amazing place to go to is the quality of content is off the charts. Every other event is mostly about networking, mostly about the city the event happens to be in. The quality of the content will be very much hit or miss. Some years better, some years not as great, some years the speakers are off the charts, some years none of the content applies to anybody. But BDSS is every single year, every speech, every presentation is actionable. You can walk out of that specific speech and make a change in your business that makes you extra money. Every single one. Although I haven't attended it in person, I have seen a bunch of the presentations afterwards on video, and every single one of them is like, wow. And I'm saying that as a person who has a lot of experience on Amazon, who has a lot of experience in business. I see people speaking about do A, B, C, and we're observing that when you do it in this order, it works differently than what you might think. Really actionable all the way through. And of course, I know that besides all of the content, the people who are attending are very strong people within the Amazon ecosystem. They are the people you want to be around for sure. A to Z, it's great. Speaker 1: There's another event that's not an Amazon event that you've been to that Norm and I do called CMS or Collective Mind Society. And you came to the very first one we did at the F1 race in Austin. And we're doing another one. It's a trip across the Canadian Rockies on a train from Vancouver to Calgary, stops in Lake Louise and a couple other places. It's going to be a really cool trip in August. You were on the first one. And the idea behind this was not to have an Amazon event with presentations. It's to bring people with similar minds. This goes back to that cigar smoking, sitting around people with similar minds, they're entrepreneurs that have Similar goals and get together and hang out and do something fun, you know, almost like a bucket list item or a cool trip or something fun where you're, you're doing fun stuff by the day and you're experiencing some sort of experience you wouldn't have otherwise experienced. And then by night you're, you're hanging and chilling and getting to know each other and maybe it's talking some business, talking life, talking, you know, I learned more about the Jewish faith I think one night during that event, uh, you know, that I've ever learned out of any book or, Any other documentary or something you know you were explaining stuff in detail and which was very fascinating very cool but so it's not just business it's it's it's other stuff too but how was that event for you? Speaker 2: I speak about it's two years now at this point almost a year and a half a year and a half and we still actively speak about it. So, that event, when I heard about it and when I made the commitment to go, a big part of it was what the event is going to be. You took us to an F1 race in Austin. I had never been to an F1 race and it was very much a thing I was interested in doing. I knew you had the way that you described what the event was going to be like. It was like the way to do it. If you have to do a thing you haven't done before, I'm very much of the opinion to do it. The best way you can and the description sounded like it was going to be the best way. I brought my son. I say my son, but he's a full-blown adult and I brought him because he's an F1 fan and I brought him because I wanted to expose him to or have him meet and see and speak to people in a different business than his own and see what it takes to get to an established place in life. For that weekend that we spent, it wasn't a one-day event. It was technically a two or three-day event. And for those two or three days we spent together, it was experience after experience. Every single hour or every single two hours was memory-worthy on its own. You know, we would go to a restaurant, it would be like, wow, this restaurant was unbelievable, what an experience, it was fantastic. Just literally, just picking us up and bringing us to the event was a whole story of its own in a good way. You know, like every single piece of it The vibe, the energy, the electricity, the connections, the communications, all of it was really, really, you know, I sound almost like somebody is paying me to say it, but really, it's not. It was really, really fantastic. Being in having like almost a front row seat to the event, we actually technically did have a front row seat to the event, was unbelievable. I'm remembering it now and I'm My brain is moving faster than my mouth because I can't remember all of the things that we just that we did during this weekend. But what I could say is it was powerful. It was a lot. We saw concerts. We had meals. We saw a race. We had, you know, A to Z experiences and not just experiences, but we made connections. I think that we became friends more than we ever were at that event. I became friends with Norm. I became friends with other people who were at that event more than I had ever been before. And now when I see those people at places, we have a bond. Remember that? Yes, we're hugging, we are talking, we are laughing, we are friends. And there are not many experiences where you walk away from something like that. Speaker 1: And the best one, right, was at the very end, the last day, you had an extra day and what do we do? We like found a cigar lounge in Austin and they had supply. As a smoker, you've been to a few lounges, you've been around, you know a lot more about it than I do. And you're like, this lounge has, Kevin, they have like seven boxes of this 21 here. Those are rare, hard to get and I think me and you bought the whole, I think you bought one or two and I bought the rest of them or something like that when you told me that. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, but everything, that was like a hidden treasure. It was not part of the agenda, but like we walked in and as a smoker, it was like going to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. They had every rare thing, they had like a few of them and they had limited editions and they had brands you don't run into in other places. And I'm just like, oh, this, oh my God, I can't believe they had this. I can't believe they have three of those. And it was amazing. I remember that you signed up to be part of their membership club and then we both got the discounts based on it. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Well, we've been talking here for a while and we could probably keep talking for a while just like we do on cigar nights, on cruises and at events and stuff. And I know I'll be having another cigar night with you probably at some point pretty soon at another event. But if people want to reach out, find out more about the agency or follow you or reach out to you, how do they do that? Speaker 2: You can find me on all the social media. LinkedIn is a place where I post frequently. I'm also on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram. All of the places you can just look for me by my name, Abe Chomali. Speaker 1: How can you spell the last name for people? Speaker 2: Last name is C-H-O-M-A-L-I. And the first name is Abe, A-B-E. There's actually two Abe Chomalis. So, you want to look for the one with the big white beard. But yeah, you can find me everywhere. I think I just told you something you didn't know. Speaker 1: I didn't know there's another one. No, there's two Kevin Kings. There's a Kevin King that's a football player, NFL football player too. So, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: You should do Kevin King Amazon to actually find me instead of just Kevin King. Otherwise, this other fellow comes up and doesn't look like me. Speaker 2: At this point, I think I've pushed my cousin out of the Google results just from being present on Amazon. But yes, if you get both results, look for the person with the beard. If you want to connect with me on an advertising basis or on a brand building basis, one of the things I do is I am happy to audit your account. I am happy to discuss an account with any brand. So you can go right to my website. There are contact us forms and there are also free audit forms. So I'll be happy to take a look at your account and to suggest places where you can do better. Even if you don't, even if you just take it and use it within your own company, I'm happy to, I'm happy to use the experience I've built to grow businesses everywhere, to pay it forward. Speaker 1: Awesome, Abe. Hey, it's great chatting with you again and we'll have to do it again soon. Appreciate you coming on, man. So, check that off the list. On to the next thing on your vision board. Speaker 2: Yes, it was amazing. I really appreciate you having me today. Speaker 1: That's it for this week. Great guest with Abe. If you missed my Billion Dollar Seller Summit last week, Billion Dollar Seller Summit number nine, the virtual edition, You might be able to still grab a copy of the replay if you go to BillionDollarSellerSummit.com forward slash virtual. There's about 50 of them available. I only make 50 available just to keep this content exclusive. Abe was at the event, was raving about it. If you haven't ever been to a BDSS, you're missing out, but you can catch copies of the replay if they're still available. Depends on when you're listening to this. BillionDollarSellerSummit.com forward slash replay. We'll be back again next week with another great guest. But before we leave, I've got some words of wisdom for you. Don't touch somebody's wallet before touching their heart. Don't touch somebody's wallet before touching their heart. Back at you next week. See you then.