83. From Textbooks to $100M: The Unstoppable Rise of Jasim Eisa's Amazon Empire

83. From Textbooks to $100M: The Unstoppable Rise of Jasim Eisa's Amazon Empire Speaker 1: Hello to all those who are listening or viewing. On this episode, we have Jasim who's joined us. Jasim, thank you so much for taking the time to jump on our podcast. Could you just let everyone know where you're from? Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. I'm based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, originally from Jordan, Palestine. So, but our headquarters are here based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Speaker 1: Awesome. And I'm really excited to be speaking to Jasim today because he's on Amazon and he's got a run rate of 100 million a year brand that he's managing. And we're going to really unpack his history, figure out what he's working on now, some of the common pitfalls, He's facing as well as others, I'm sure. And we're going to learn so much from him, I'm sure. Jasim, I probably just butchered your introduction. So it would be great if you could tell everyone kind of your history and where you are now with the brand. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, great. So basically, we started on Amazon around a decade ago. So around 2016, 2015, I was only like 15, 16 years old. We got really close to basically the college professors. They were giving me their textbooks. So that's kind of how I started dabbling into Amazon. It was through that they were doing some arbitrage buying and selling stuff. And eventually we kind of wanted to switch to something more long-term, building brands, acquiring brands. Based on all the cash flow that we accumulated. So that's where kind of a very quick rundown. So over the past few years, that's what we've been focused on very heavily. The marketing side of things, the building side of things, we've acquired a few brands, we're talking to a few as well. And we're also partnering with brands to grow them on Amazon and other marketplaces. We're on Target, Walmart and a few others. So that's kind of like very, very high level. We're obviously going to jump into different sections. But that's kind of a brief history of where we're at and the team we have and everything along those lines. Speaker 1: And I just want to add as well to those listening, regarding your partnerships, this is quite unusual because I don't hear of many people doing this. You not only help with the management of the entire listing, you actually give the brands money and buy their inventory. Is that right? Speaker 2: Yes, so it's basically a buy-sell-account management partnership. So we're basically buying their inventory up front. We're selling it through our primary account where we obviously have the fixed volume. We have volume advantages and then we basically manage everything end-to-end for those brands. So we have a portfolio of around a couple dozen brands that we're doing end-to-end channel management and responsible for their growth and also distribution across various international and international marketplaces. Speaker 1: Incredible. That's brilliant. And Jasim, I want to kind of just rewind back and talk a bit more about when you started. So you mentioned You were selling textbooks on Amazon, is that how it began? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: It would be great if you could run us through the history and how you saw the opportunity, what are some of the big pitfalls at the beginning you kind of encountered? Speaker 2: So there was a lot of big pitfalls, I'll run through things very briefly. So 2016-2017 I was actually enrolled in something called PSEL, it's Post-Secondary Enrollment, so where you can kind of take college classes in high school. So I was 15-16 years old, I was in a community college and the professors they took a liking to me, so they liked that I was coming to class, so they just started giving their old textbooks to me for free, like let's see if this is worth anything, and I got very excited, the textbooks were worth like 100 bucks, 150 bucks, so I started buying sometimes older textbooks from some of the students. And trying to basically sell them on Amazon. And then once that started working, we started getting into other categories. We were also just basically reselling, just buying some stuff, selling them, seeing where we can advantage. We opened five locations across the United States and we have warehouses in all those locations. So we try to be geographically dispersed to be able to take advantage of that, but also accept inventory. So that's kind of where we went through. I think one of the biggest pitfalls we had was just expanding so rapidly and we opened like three locations in almost six months. So that's where things got up. We lost a lot of money in not getting the best warehouse rates, locking into terms that we didn't like. So that's maybe a bigger lesson for me as we're learning the things, learning which brands to get involved with. So the first year was something that we definitely kind of look back on and wish we did a little bit differently, but also the people that we hired just as we're expanding so quickly, we were doubling almost year over year. The first year we only did like $20,000 on Amazon. So up to two years ago, we were doubling year over year. So just kind of filling people in the seats and just choosing anyone anywhere was also something that definitely took a hit on our culture and something that we're being Way more picking out with who joins basically the organization and the team and all that kind of stuff. Interesting. Speaker 1: And kind of when you're moving at that pace of growth, what are some of the Things that you wouldn't you would do differently now knowing what you know now? Speaker 2: Yes, in that pace of growth and even till today a lot of people like described the first you can I heard this somewhere else too is like they're drinking out of a water hose that's going at a hundred miles an hour so it's like a lot of a lot of a lot of velocity coming at people so that's That's kind of what we keep in mind. But now that we're obviously at the stage right now, we're standardizing things. So we have an onboarding checklist for new personnel that they have to go through to make sure that they're up to date with around 130, 140 people. Issues even with a remote environment, it makes it much, much harder. Where, yes, we have our headquarters in Minneapolis. We have around 30 people here. And we have also an office in Jordan that has around 70 or 80 people. But then we also have people Across the United States, so sometimes getting the communication, making sure that we do introductory calls between managers, we had a lot of siloing between different departments. So that's something we're working on. We're enhancing our project management tools to make sure there's more communication between various departments. Obviously, the ERP will help with that too, but that's our biggest downfall was each department, they didn't talk to each other enough. The communication was very sparse and it was very limited. Speaker 1: I'm quite interested to know, Jasim, what made you transition from selling on Amazon to then buying brands to now partnering with brands? Can you run me through those two shifts? Speaker 2: Yes, so up until even like right until the end of the COVID period, we're mostly involved in arbitrage. So we're just buying and selling different various products, various categories from various stores. And as we started buying from these stores, they actually wanted to expand their relationship. So they suggested us buying wholesale. So then when we started buying wholesale, they started giving us exclusive access to some of their SKUs. We're like, if we're going to have this SKU for the long term, we might as well make it better. So we can increase the overall sales of the SKU because as you're buying and selling, you really don't You're not that invested in the health of the brand or the product. Because it's a one-off purchase, you're just going to sell through it. But once we started getting into more longer-term purchases at the end of COVID, that's when we started seeing like, listen, let's build something that's long-term viable. Instead of always buying a purchase, having to look for the next purchase, having to look for the next purchase, and it's a repeating cycle, let's build something that grows exponentially, basically. So that's where you partner with a brand, We're partnering with them with a year to three years, depending on the type of relationship, what type of services they need. And then we get to basically enjoy the fruits of building the listing and making things better and making sure we're cleaning up their channel for over the next one to three years to increase overall sales and we get to enjoy the fruits of that. So that's kind of the end of COVID is when we started. We also started acquiring brands. Around a year or two ago, once we saw that we're pretty good at growing the revenue, then we're like, might as well see if we can acquire some brands. And even especially in today's market, actually, what's interesting, This is a very much a buyer's market. Before when there was aggregators, I think you're familiar with that period three, four years ago. It was crazy valuations. It was like 7, 8x, 6x for Amazon-only brands. Now things have come down to the earth and we're seeing a lot of very good deals that we're finding for brands we're actually talking to right now. They're hoping to be closed over the next week. They were bidding on a conglomerate of three or four brands at like a two multiple. Before the same one would be like five or six multiple. We know that because we've seen the selling history. So it's just crazy the shift in the market and where things are at today. Speaker 1: Okay, so Jasim, I'd love you to run through with me what would be an attractive offer. So if a brand came to you now, what are some of the boxes that would need to be ticked for you to be interested to consider purchasing that brand? Speaker 2: Yes, so for us, we obviously have a, right now, the sweet spot, I would say, is 1 to 20 million dollar brands that are aggressively looking for growth. Because if they're just looking for buying and selling, then it's not that interesting for us. We're looking to deploy what we want, so they're willing to invest in, obviously, the marketing aspect of things. And they want to invest in a long-term viability of their brand. They're not just coming in to just kind of for a cash grab. We're not interested in that. And obviously, when we first started, just like every business, we had to make money. But thankfully now we're looking for something a little bit more sustainable, a little bit more long-term. And that's kind of the main things that we're looking for in the brands that come to us that are interested in the holistic management. They're also interested in growing on various marketplaces and they're looking at, they're considering Walmart, they're considering Amazon internationally and that kind of stuff as they're looking at. Speaker 1: Okay, great. And because you've got so many brands under your belt and so many products that you're looking after managing and growing, what would you say is Some of the biggest hurdles you're facing right now? Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's actually a great question. At one point, we had around 30,000 SKUs. Thankfully, now it's much more manageable. I think it was 21,300 SKUs the last time I checked. What we're doing to manage that is obviously we're cutting illegitimate SKUs if we can. We recognize the Pareto principle. We double down on the great ones and we make sure that they're market winners. So that's one of the Things that we always check in the brand, what are the best performing ones, let's double down on those and make sure that we eat as much market share and then we can check out other products. But the challenges we face and that's why we're actually investigating it in ERP and implementing one and continuously using it. Is basically the management of those queues, like reordering rates. You have to make sure that you're always in stock and it's our responsibility since we're buying it to give the POs to the brands. So we like to be around 97-98% in stock rate for all the brands. Things happen like a sudden spike for social media and what inventory was wiped out where that's the one or two percent that we miss out on. But that's the very serious one. And then obviously just managing things in bulk and holistically when we can, like let's say we eat market share, we can put SKUs on maintenance mode. So we put that like on, we check the, for example, the SEO quarterly, we check the images quarterly, we check the ads quarterly. But then as we're growing it, we have like various buckets of types of inventory, which one is in which bucket and has various like teams on it, if that makes sense. Speaker 1: Interesting. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: As well as those challenges, what are some of the big opportunities that you see now that most people might not be privy to because you've got so many accounts under you? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. One of the opportunities we have is obviously with logistics. That's something that we've been Tinkering a lot with this year is supply chain and making that more efficient. We reduced our supply chain costs around 40% year-over-year just for using per unit because it's not the best measurement because obviously the items are very different dimension, but just using that as a rule of thumb, we were at approximately $2 a unit. This year, we're at approximately $0.90 per unit shipped. So we're trying to even bring that down further. We're talking to the VP of Amazon Freight. But using our warehouses and our locations to our advantage and the volume we ship in to continue reducing the supply chain costs, whether that's international or domestic. Like, for example, if we're getting internationally, we have two or three partners getting something from China, we consolidate it into one cube, like container, and then we're saving so much money there. And we're also saving the processing fees if we're shipping them into a certain 3PL or our warehouse. So trying to take advantage of the economies of scale with our various stuff, but also measuring data. So that's the other big one is like, we know that we started getting benchmarks for CPCs and categories. So like this category is supposed to be there based on other brands' performance. So we know like what good looks like, what bad looks like with a larger data set and measuring that across. So that's two things that we're focusing on really heavily, especially as we're building like a data warehouse to measure a lot of that stuff. Speaker 1: And because you're dealing with so many different people coming into the business, whether they've partnered up or you've purchased the brands, how are you able to manage the different factories? Speaker 2: So that's where you actually have a department that's our purchasing departments composed of six, seven people. They're responsible for managing like direct relations to factories, submitting POs, ensuring that we're in stock. And that's where we're putting KPIs that like for that department, they're in stock rate, they're days on hand. They're turnover rate to make sure they're there. It's very tough. You have to obviously include automation in it as well. They're using automation to measure it and they're also checking it manually to make sure there's no red flags. But that's one of the primary things. And then obviously we have partner managers that are also talking and checking to make sure because that's where we have two points of context. Like the partner managers also checking the stock, making sure nothing looks obviously bad, even though it's not his direct responsibility. But because it's so sensitive, we have two eyes on the same thing kind of. Speaker 1: Now, someone like yourself who is kind of the head of the company, where do you find your time goes? Where is it that you've placed your time to move the biggest levers in the company? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. So a lot of it now, it's, I would say, primarily two buckets. So it's a product, So people that involves like my direct reports, managing them, I have one-on-ones, hourly one-on-ones, feedback, I read feedback throughout the week, I talk to them about it, I follow. Dan Martell has a good system on this, I actually like it for feedback and the one-on-ones and some of that stuff. So and then obviously within people you have culture, so the overall company culture, enforcing company values, top down, and then we obviously have hiring. So I'm still involved in hiring, especially last stage. I like to review even if someone's at an entry-level position, I still like to review the resume, review the references, make sure that whoever we're letting into our company, it's kind of like our house, that we take it very seriously, we're letting in the right people. And then the other bucket is obviously product. So always improving your product. Making sure that we're aggregate measuring CTR, CVR, and always improving those day over day. So looking at the KPIs, and then obviously other stuff would be ROAS and tacos and how we're improving that. Like one thing that I've been doing lately for the product, and obviously this is like a safe product generally, but then there's spreads. So right now what I'm focusing on is the appropriate, for example, SNS coupon to get the most LTV over a long time. And I'm using one of my friend's softwares. He built it internally. He's just now starting to kind of give access to it. So it kind of measures CAC to LTV. So like what subscriber SNS coupon, is it a percentage, a dollar amount? So then when that's done, I focus on another aspect, like maybe it's creative and jump into that and get very hands-on with the quality of the product and what that's going on there. Speaker 1: Interesting. Okay. And what part has AI played within your company, if it has played anything right now, or are you able to kind of continue running? Speaker 2: No, it's actually played a large role. So, it's made a lot of our personnel much more potent. So, when like either producing more volume or even producing better volume. So, for example, we're having international offices, we had issues with translation communication. So, AI does a much better job of translating to get the proper communication to one individual from another. So, just at a very basic level communication within our company has improved. Understanding what the other person is truly trying to convey That's obviously improved. But then a lot of aspects we're using it in, obviously SEO, it's really nice, but creative is where we've been able to make really cool things. I think Google just came up with something recently too with SEO and videos. But even just generally, we've had a lot of benefits for using AI for creative uses. That's been the biggest lift for us because it kind of gives you a lot of iterations and variations to use manager experience to test out the new work. So that's where it's like we can produce way more tests against the control with AI. Speaker 1: Amazing. I actually watched the Google AI update that happened just a few days ago where now they've introduced Google Meet Where they will translate your conversation in whatever language you want in real time. So that's going to have a huge improvement in how you communicate. Speaker 2: Oh wow, I didn't even know about that. Speaker 1: Yeah, so they've just allowed the Spanish language. They're going to roll it out to other languages. Speaker 2: And it's also in Arabic language soon. Speaker 1: Yeah, hopefully one day it will come. I'm sure it will come. But yeah, so that's amazing. So I also wanted to ask you. Speaker 2: Selfishly, what have you guys, obviously you guys are doing ads at a high scale and very focused on that, along with obviously other aspects. What are you guys using AI for, basically? Where have you seen that? Speaker 1: I've been image creative, it's been really good. So giving us ideas of how we can spit test, that's been kind of heavily engraved in that and that's been a kind of an obvious move. Also given ideas for titles, even with kind of some Google Ads I was building earlier today, it's been very good at like building out Kind of building out creative ideas. We're also messing around with Lovable, which is kind of a platform that allows you to create websites. And we're looking to build out a web app that integrates quite a lot of reporting all into one. So there's just a few of the areas that we've been messing with, but it's still quite overwhelming. There's still so much going. I've never been at this stage in a business where There's just so many things you could look at. Now, before, there was one or two things you could really sink your teeth into. Speaker 2: There's more factors. Speaker 1: There's so many more. So many more factors. And it seems that there's another one being introduced each day. I wanted to ask you as well, Jasim, you've obviously got a lot of people under you in terms of team members. What are some of the symptoms that you know the person that you hired is going to be a great fit with your company? Speaker 2: Yes, that's great. That's actually a great question. We've been looking into more lately. The biggest, like I actually made a, I did a presentation on this for like a mini mastermind we had just two weeks ago on kind of green flags for hiring someone. And maybe I can just reference that very quickly. But basically, one of the things that I like to mention is how much stuff are they taking off your plate? So is it like, if ideally that you're hiring someone that directly reports to you, they're taking on responsibility that you're doing. So if you feel That you're spending like, especially obviously the first month or two, it's still early. But the after that one, like you should start seeing the subordinates that you have. Giving you more time back. They're actually prone to take on challenges. They're excited to take things off your plate. They're excited to, they're excited to, they're not running away from issues. That's kind of the, the main thing that we see is, and they're also assessing them and doing them properly. They're not just basically just, just doing them. So that actually found this slide here, sorry, but basically they run towards challenges. They're and they're also like they do they work on output based areas. They're not checking in checking out. They're kind of not looking at the time and they act as leaders in their department in the company in general, especially at a high level. You don't want someone just looking at their department specifically. You kind of want it to have an overall view like if I'm in sales, if I bring on a bad customer that doesn't match your partner, it's going to hurt our top management team. So they understand that they're not just looking to improve their own KPIs. And not concerned with the overall department of the health and they're always challenging themselves and growing. They're not just complacent in their spot or trying to, that's some of the kind of the stuff that we see. We see someone just kind of sitting back, kind of flying under the radar, like, all right, this guy is not looking to grow and advance and work with us. I don't know what you think if you see something similar, but that's some of the stuff that we've noticed. Speaker 1: Jasim, how long does it take you before you know, okay, This person is going to be a great fit for us, or we're not sure yet. How long is it before you kind of... Speaker 2: So it depends on the positions. There's various positions. There's kind of knowledge-based positions, and there's more output-based positions. So we have warehouses, like I said. With warehouses, it's kind of quick. We know that the output of the individual warehouse workers, let's say 15 units an hour, and the task relevant maturity, so it's very low. It's fairly easy to learn the job really quickly. So if someone comes in in a week or two, they're at like six, seven, eight, we know that, listen, we obviously give them the training, we give them the requirements, they not know what they're supposed to do, we walk through the checklist. But if it's, it should be like a week or two or three weeks to kind of figure out whether someone can get to it, or they're just absolutely there's no chance. But then there's higher level rewards, especially with leadership, it's much, much tougher, like when they're managing departments, because you're then you're looking at the output of the team. Has it improved? Have they had a chance? Maybe they're building the foundation. So it's maybe two three months out that you're gonna see the change so that's where it's very it's much tougher, but I would say Like anywhere from the lower level rules that are output based once two weeks to the higher levels, it could be three to four months because if it's a complete mess when you brought them in, especially in startups, it could be they're building the foundation and sometimes you don't see the results of that work unless a few months later. But even worse, if you don't understand the technicalities, let's say, for example, hiring a developer, I don't understand coding. So then it takes even longer, like, because maybe he's building a foundation and suddenly the website comes live. Oh, like, I didn't know this guy was doing all this in the back end. So just kind of, it could take a few months depending on your lack of expertise in the position and depending on the size of the role, is what I would say. Speaker 1: Whenever we take on an account to audit, there's always quick wins that we find on a number of accounts and there's always the same, there's a theme of the same things that keep coming up, account per account, in terms of issues. When you onboard a brand, whether it's to acquire or to partner up with, what are some of the mistakes you see again and again that You're able to sort out. Speaker 2: Yes, that's actually a great question. So I will kind of go into the various ends that we manage. So I'll start with supply chain. Supply chain usually, I found that their packaging or their case packs are relevant. So something that we do, a lot of people don't know about this, is Amazon sometimes categorizes your product into their own fulfillment tier. So they're charging you for a large oversize, and I actually just made a video about this, when your product's a large standard. So you're paying a two or three dollar difference because Amazon has their own classification or you could condense your product packaging and make it more efficient. So that's where we're looking at the product packaging, the efficiency of their supply chain. See if there's any cost savings there and just like this is actually huge one because you're saving like 30 cents of fulfillment fees or what was known as click and pack fees just off the top. Then creative, we're looking at like the main image that has just unbelievable leverage. Like getting the right main image is just we've seen sales like if you're talking about like exponential improvement, that's where we see a lot of times. And then if we're getting into ads, I would say like branded, non-branded, having the data granularity and not having it all blended into one where they're like, it's a jumbo mumbo kind of type of thing. And it's ridiculous, like just getting granular with that. But that's at a very, very, very high level. That's some of the big stuff that we see. Does that kind of match what you're seeing as well? Yeah, exactly. Speaker 1: And actually what I want to do, Jasim, is I want to hone in on what you said about images, the first image. So you said that you sort that out and you can see a great amount of return back. Now, what's kind of the process you would go through to changing that image? Because I know a lot of people are scared to. Speaker 2: Yes, so that's why obviously I So if an image is obviously working, then you have to be really careful. Obviously, it depends how successful the product is. If they're already ranked organically number one, I don't know how incentivized we're going to obviously be to change a main image or something. But obviously, brands come for help. We still would like to test, but we kind of do slight variations rather than if something completely new as a start. And we also like using the testing tools. So we go through, for example, Televoo, Pickforward, that's pre-launch, and then Post, we're looking at Jungle Ace, Manager Experiments. To see how the new result is doing. If we see significant drops immediately, we obviously don't let it go through the entire testing period, but we kind of manage it very, very closely depending on how sensitive the product is or how well it's doing now. It's a case-by-case basis on that kind of stuff. Speaker 1: Amazing, Jasim, there's been so much value in this 25 minutes already. I just want to make sure we don't miss anything crucial. Is there any questions you think I should have asked you that's on top of mind for you right now that you think those who have e-com brands shouldn't be aware of? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the big thing, I mean, there's nothing necessarily missed, but it's an interesting dynamic of Amazon going directly to manufacturers, speak to someone at a very, very high level, it's like L9 or L10. But basically, with the understanding the fundamentals of Amazon marketplaces in general, they care mainly about price selection and trust. So how does Amazon view brands or aggregators, resellers? If they're going to start going directly dealing with manufacturers that offer them a bigger selection and the market like that, that's something that I want to actually see your thoughts on because it's just something that we're thinking about turning like, well, how does Amazon view our roles as agencies, even private label brands, because are they wanting to go like, for example, Anchor, where Anchor is a manufacturer themselves and they're ...dealing directly or how do they view those agencies and if you're not a factory, what's the role that you play? Just something that we're definitely considering, seeing how it could be more valuable to navigate that platform. But that's something that's top of mind for us and that we're thinking about. Speaker 1: What we've noticed, Jasim, in that sense, is when it's about the really big brands, the household names, they tend to be given someone on Amazon that has a lot more levers they can pull to manage their account. But most of the accounts that we're looking at, I think they've probably worked out at some point it's just easier to outsource that to someone like us. Just like they can't sell every product on Amazon and their ability to just give sellers that ability to do that themselves. So that's kind of something we've seen. And we hope that continues because it's been great for us business-wise. Awesome. Okay. We've covered a lot here. I really appreciate your time, Jasim. If someone was interested in potentially partnering up with you or just selling their brand to you and they are in that $1 to $20 million a year range, what would be the best way for them to reach out to you? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I would say that a few, we obviously have our website vodera.com and even if outside of that, if you're not, we also are posting videos on YouTube so you can find me at like youtube.com slash Jasim Eisa or LinkedIn. I'm probably posting stuff there for just kind of generally just to get a feel on the market. So that's overall where I spend most of my time and feel free to reach out to me on those platforms and as we kind of hopefully get better and work things out further. Awesome. Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for your time, Jasim. I hope everyone listening got something out of it. I'll make sure that I'll include the links below if it's YouTube you're watching or somewhere within the description on the podcast streaming services that we'll be putting it on. Thank you, Jasim.