The Brutal Truth About Amazon FBA (And How to Pivot to D2C)

The Brutal Truth About Amazon FBA (And How to Pivot to D2C) Speaker 2: Francis, welcome back to The PPC Den podcast. Great to have you on again. Last time we talked was eight months ago, which I feel like in the digital e-commerce world is a lifetime. How many years have you gained in these past eight months? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been... sea change, some positive, some negative. Eight months ago, we were riding a high. You know, it's changed since then. Not all negative, but it's been time to really make some adjustments because so many changes have been more or less imposed on us, if you will. Speaker 2: Would you say it's harder to run an e-commerce business today in 2026 versus 2025? It's seemingly right now. Speaker 1: It is. You know, we're seasonal and I may be singing a different song when we're in the middle of our season. Everything always feels better when its sales are coming in. You know, we sell fertilizer and not many people buy it in the winter, which we know, of course. And then this January into February, we're really brutal weather. We've noticed over the years every time the weather is bad in part of the country, it affects our sales a little bit. But as you know, we had across the whole country were some really big and prolonged storms. And if you're shoveling snow off the front driveway, you're not really thinking of your garden as much. So, you know, that's a temporary thing. And Up to the gods, not us, we just have to react to it. But it was a bigger impact than normal. More systemic issues are really what I'm concerned with. And that's what we're facing right now. Yeah, in some ways, when you talk about selling e-commerce, our website is gaining a lot of ground. So although it's expensive, because we're in the stage right now where we're Building it up, we've never had paid much attention to it in the past because we were just picking the low-hanging fruit from Amazon. That has changed now with Amazon, and it's made us realize that for a couple of reasons. One, we're ready, but also it's probably imperative to build up our website. And now that's looking more prescient because of how It's been a really challenging Amazon has gotten. I honestly, you know, when I started Amazon, it was 2012. I didn't know anything about anything. And I just made some bottles of my product, home recipe, sold them on eBay and people bought them, made a few more. They bought them. And I said, Hey, let me try this Amazon thing. And I just set it up in my bedroom and account and started sending stuff. So I go, Oh, let me try this FBA thing. It was so easy that even an idiot like I was, could do it and think, wow, I'm pretty good at this. And I look at it now, I joke, it's almost a moat, a barrier to entry. There will be no people like I was 12 years ago, just a guy saying, oh, I've got a cool idea for a new little product that I could make at home and sell on Amazon. It is way too expensive and sophisticated To be able to do that now. I had a brother-in-law who was trying to start a new product and he asked me for advice on selling on Amazon. And you know, I'm always optimistic. I'm very entrepreneurial. But I had a hard time convincing myself that he could replicate what I did without some major investment. You know, you can still do it. Obviously people join Amazon every day and they're successful, but you don't do it for 50 bucks like I did back then. You know, you need to be prepared to kind of like what we're doing with our website. You need to be prepared to put out some money every month on the bet that it's going to pay off. And that bet is no longer as certain as it was. Speaker 2: Speaking about the website versus Amazon, so the Shopify side of the business versus the Amazon side of the business. It's been said before that Amazon is great for cash flow, but a website is a journey that you go on to build true asset value. I think in 2026, ad costs on Meta and Google Ads, they are always going to go up year after year. So some brands generally find that it's easier to get a customer on Amazon. Just like you mentioned, Amazon is almost always like the lower hanging fruit because it's really demand capture. There's people on there searching. They trust Amazon. They know the experience and it's sort of easy for them. On the Shopify side of things, You can do some demand capture, but there's also demand generation too, where you're actively trying to find people who are completely unaware of your solution and acquire them. How has your business, almost from a financial strategic perspective, thought of these two engines of GS Plant? Speaker 1: It's hard. I would hope that it would be easier to, when we first started thinking about, let's really build up the website, I was like, no, I don't really want to just cannibalize my Amazon sales. I want to build new sales. Well, at this point, I'm happy to cannibalize the Amazon sales and convert them because it's so much easier on the website. I don't have arbitrary delistings on my own website. I never turn myself off just because I'm having a bad day or a bot crawled my own listing and said, hey, bad boy, you're selling automobiles when in reality I'm selling fertilizer. I mean, Amazon is crazy like that. And we spend so much of our time playing whack-a-mole with problems that just really have nothing to do with us. But communicating with the monolithic bureaucracy that they are, finding though new customers on our website is, it's an all out effort, right? Look, I understand why people buy on Amazon. As a consumer, I buy on Amazon. I mean, it's just, that is what they are good at. They have what you want and they have it now. And, you know, it's really fantastic. And we can't, we offer free shipping. We offer the same product. I can't beat their next day delivery. You know, that's just, that's just the way it is. We're hoping that the nature of our product The PPC Den is usually not as impulsive. People buy fertilizer, organic fertilizer as we sell, because they're usually either hobbyists, they take the environment seriously, they are interested in growing a good yard, and they get excited about it. While it's still snow on the ground, they often start ordering. So they have other motivations. It's not as much as, oh, I need shaving cream tomorrow because I ran out today. But we have to get their attention and there's a lot of experimenting. Now, you guys are handling our buildup of the website and they're doing it. It's kind of out of my league, right? I have ideas and I can give them input on some messaging. But how you do it is much more sophisticated than it used to be. Both on Meta, I had another business and it was a local business. We did bridal shows. I was the king of Facebook advertising at the time. I had it down. I knew the system where I could advertise locally and would build from a few weeks before the event, slowly start putting some ads, building up into a frenzy. And most of my budget went into the last two weeks right before a show and it worked great. I don't know that it would be so easy anymore. Kind of like my Amazon journey. You know, there's just a lot more eyeballs involved with all this. And, you know, quite frankly, I think you can specialize in a couple of things when you run a business, but you can't do everything and you have to find talented people. The jury is out as to whether our investments will pay off. So far, it's working. But you know, we've been trying to build it up in our slow season. And there's only so much ice you can sell in the winter. And in the summer, everybody looks like a master salesman. So I am pretty confident though, based on the numbers that we got, like, for example, In the last 30 days, we sold more on our website, still paltry compared to what we sell on Amazon, but they were about 23, 25% of what I sold on Amazon. In the past, it was like maybe 1%. So if that extrapolates into the summer, I'll be ecstatic. The way Amazon has been going, I'll probably make more money on 25% of sales. I'm exaggerating a bit, but it'll be a lot easier to squeeze some juice out of those lemons than it is on Amazon, but it's harder to find the audience. In our little niche, we have a pretty good brand. I think we have a lot of repeat customers. People know while we're not perfect, we try to do the right thing. You know, I think we have a respectable platform to face the market, if you will. But there's a lot of competition for eyeballs out there. And so now with the AEO coming out, and nobody really knows what's going to work and not work, even though there's a lot of jokers that have the answer for me right now. If I'm only willing to spend X amount of money, they can give me all the answers and untold riches. So it seems like that's the new The new forefront of entrepreneurial marketing. Speaker 2: You know, speaking of AI and, you know, you mentioned AI engine optimization, you know, I prefer to still just call it SEO, like people are still searching on an AI platform. But yes, I agree with you. But I still think it's worth thinking about now. Eight months ago, we were talking about AI and how it's being incorporated into GS Plant. And I guess for you as an e-commerce entrepreneur, how have you personally integrated it into your workflow? Do you use it on a day-to-day to help manage GS Plant? What has it done for you personally? Speaker 1: Probably in comically small ways, it's been really impactful for us. And I say comically small, I'm not a tech guy, although I'm not tech phobic. I love the abilities of, you know, my partner Jeff and I run the whole company. It's just the two of us. So we only can do that because of technology. As far as AI, we have been incorporating small tools that help a tremendous amount. For example, a really easy one, and Clement did this for us. Well, I say relatively easy. It was amazing to me, but it saved us hours. Jeff was, we found a problem last year. Amazon turned us off in the state of Florida. They said we were unlicensed. Now, we've been trying to prove Since then, that we are licensed, oh master Amazon, and we've even had to state personally, we've developed such a strong relationship with the guys in the Florida licensing department that they actually contacted Amazon on our behalf to tell them, yeah, this is licensed. And we're still fighting us on it. Nonetheless, they turned it off in Florida and Florida is one of our biggest markets and they didn't tell us they turned it off. And we found out inadvertently after, I don't know how much time had passed. Speaker 2: Analyzing sales data? Speaker 1: Well, no, actually it came to our attention when customers told us they, you know, Hey, why won't you ship this in Florida anymore? We're like, what are you talking about? Of course we do. And we go in, we do look at our listings. This had started on a couple of listings that we didn't notice it at first anyway, until it had already taken place. All right, we found out and then it took, you know, now it's been months and we're still trying to fix it. So then we decided, gee whiz, there's 50 states. If Amazon plays this game with us, we want to know right away if we're turned off, not only for licensing, but for any other reason. So Jeff was hiring somebody, you know, it was going to be a Fiverr guy or somebody for a few dollars an hour to physically go in with different zip codes, go to an Amazon listing and type in ship to this zip code. Speaker 2: Change the shipping location. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, you can imagine that's going to take a lot of time and it was going to take him many hours each. We had decided, well, we're not going to do all 50 states. That's not feasible, but we can do the top 10 states and see if there's a red flag for the top two or three products. And then Clement said, now he could build something that would do that in a few seconds. And so now we do it for all 50 states for all products or top 20 products anyway, in seconds. And so it's those little things. The biggest challenge for somebody like Jeff and I is to, and this is where we're training ourselves, is Dude, what can we throw to AI? You know, which one of our problems? Because that's really, it's not a question of what AI can do. It's like, what can I turn over to? I mean, it's amazing. It's kind of freakish how much fun it is. Now on the website, in looking into, you know, what the LLMs, how they're going to maybe recommend people and, you know, part of it's a guess, it actually is I'm forcing my hand on improvements to the website because it is looking, as I understand it, it's looking for credibility, validity on products and answers to questions that customers have. Well, the more of that I can put, I don't want to turn our website into just a, I don't know, a giant Wikipedia on fertilizer, but there is a need. We're going to be talking about a lot of clearer explanations and more detailed information than, frankly, than we've given. Now, why have we not been as in-depth on that? It's not intentional neglect. It was always on the corner of my desk as something to get to. And the pile on the other side of the desk was more demanding, more urgently right now. And this is kind of forcing it. But I think it will actually be a very much a positive thing for our website, even if AI doesn't use it as their locator, if you will. So it's kind of a positive Uh, development regardless. Now it's, it's more work in the short term, but like everything with AI, it seems, gee whiz, you get it set up and then it kind of exponentially takes advantage of it. It's, I wish I was a young guy and I could, uh, really invest more of my future into it. Cause it's just kind of amazing how profound it really is for everything, but for a small business operation. Speaker 2: It's been really interesting to see that evolution where you can now ask, okay, I could hire person A to do this thing for five hours a week, or is there a way to engineer this talking to AI, getting it going with AI? Internally, we call that project a Buy Box Checker, which is we're going to go check the buy box for Francis in all 50 states for a variety of products. And I think I'm just checking the stats here. We run about 3,000 checks a day for you. And we're able to basically say, search this Look at this product in this zip code and tell me what it says. And then do this daily and then give us a summary each day. And that's been one major thing for Clamont and I to figure out. I think we're actually going to release that as a little tool that even other people can check against Amazon. So I'm excited to see on my end, when that happens, we actually spin up a little computer to actually make that search in that zip code. So it's actually been really cool to navigate that and see. I have to laugh because if Clement said it will only take a minute to set up, it took a little bit longer than a minute to set up. But the end result was It makes technical digital marketing, which is how I would classify that task of like geo checks. I would put that in the bucket of like technical digital marketing, which is where I put PPC. It's where I put SEO. And AI has definitely made technical marketers like myself and Clement more accessible to access some of that data, to access some more of those actions. And I will say too, We have another automation client at Search Scientists, like an AI automation client, just doing AI, just doing automation work. And actually, it's really interesting trying to, what I found is that you can't approach it from a, hey, what can we AI for you? Instead, it's more like you need to look at it from a, you know, old-fashioned business organizational chart, task responsibilities, like who's doing what? What are they doing? How can we offload some of these things to a computer? And that's been the way to, I found, get more value out of AI. Instead of like, what can AI do? And it's like, well, AI can literally do anything. Instead of asking, what are we currently doing manually? How do we spend our time? How do we spend our days? What can a computer do to offload some of this work to make it more efficient or effective? That's been a cool way to approach AI, looking at the business context first, instead of just plucking something out of AI that you can do. I spent a lot of time just Tinkering around with AI, which was good. At the same time, I built things that I don't use because it's like, I just, you know, I invented a need. I was like, oh, let me maybe do this. And then I realized, oh, I don't actually use this on a day-to-day basis. What do I use? Speaker 1: For somebody like me, who is used to, from previous experiences, having employees to put responsibilities on. And I always recognize that as whatever leadership position I'm in, I need to be able to be free To make, actually just to think often times and visit with new opportunities. And so you would have an employee. And so I would always be in the mode of, well, this is what I do. I can show him or her how to do this, whether it was a physical thing or it was something on my computer. Now you do it. And I, and that's it off my desk. The challenging part is like, okay, how do I do that process now? But instead of putting it onto an employee, I put it onto AI because I've come to accept that. Yeah. There probably is a way to transfer that to an AI. If an employee could do it, then an AI could do it. That's been kind of a mental block on my part. The hesitation, if you will, is just like, look, dude, just Just record it and turn it over, so to speak. And, you know, I think that's kind of the biggest block for me right now is figuring all that out as simple as it is. For those of you who do it all the time, it's easier. So it's kind of a mindset change. Very exciting. But every time we do it successfully, it's like, holy cow, why didn't I do that earlier? You know, that's There's a learning curve. Even as good as AI is, there is a learning curve to understand even how to turn it over, if you will. I suspect there's probably a lot of other entrepreneurs in the same boat where they're like, yeah, I know this is a thing, but how do I turn my daily reality into a machine where I can just turn it over to an AI to handle real actual. Speaker 2: So speaking of org charts, you have a basically two-employee business. It's you and your business partner, essentially. So two owners. I don't know if you consider yourself an employee of the business too, but I guess if someone were out there, and I would say that you have a successful business certainly, What does your organizational chart look like? What tasks are you doing? What tasks have you decided to outsource and why? Speaker 1: Well, we learned early on, when I first started, I made everything. Every single bottle I made, I invested in a little bit of bottling equipment and I realized real fast that, boy, if this thing works, this sucks. So, I have been good about whenever I look at a business or even a, let's say a vertical within a business, I always extrapolate it. Like, let's assume this is successful. What's that going to look like? And bottling and incorporating that into our business. Did not look good. It's the equipment, it can be very expensive. And you need to probably hire somebody just to take care of the equipment. And I certainly didn't want to be bottling, physically bottling this stuff. And there are other companies that can handle it. And they can do it way more efficiently, because they're just plugging you into their The PPC Den is a global ecosystem, whereas if you buy all that, let's say I spent a quarter million dollars on equipment, I would utilize it 5% of its capability, where I'd rather pay for that 5% capability from a bigger company. It's much more efficient. So the first things to turn over were always the physical things, the shipping. You know, we used to do the individual shipping. And of course, that gets very unrealistic. It was amazing how inefficient we were. I would ship out, if we had a great day and I had 80 packages to ship out, it would be an all-day thing. That meant nothing else got done. And it's not fun doing that all day while your mind is racing about, oh, I got to do this, I got to do that. And I look at some of these bigger companies and they can do thousands of packages every hour, every few minutes, because they're just set up properly for it, right? And so you have to be very conscientious of not building yourself just a job, but building a business. And to build a business, you have to be free of most individual responsibilities. Even financial reporting, we had to build it out so that we better understood what was going on. But once we got it built out, then we hire a bookkeeper to handle the monotony of doing it all the time because it was taking too much of Jeff's individual time. When it takes his individual time, That takes him away from the bigger picture. Jeff is real good at deep diving. It's just his personality. Sometimes he dives so deep I got to pull him back out, you know, but he has a mindset for it better than me and an aptitude and so it works well that he does those kind of things. By that I mean The legal registrations, the inventories and all these kinds of things. I concentrate more on the marketing and the imagery, if you will. I come up with the funny names of the products. I get a good feel for what products I think the market could use. I'm not a biologist or a botanist by any We're going to talk a little bit about what Amazon PPC means, but I know what's out there, what's selling. I have learned over the years quite a bit about why these products work. I knew how to sell. And so we've kind of divided our responsibilities into those two, but we overlap a lot. You know, we, with the two of us, we share responsibilities, but we have disciplined ourselves where he concentrated on those things. I concentrate on these things and we get a lot more done like that. And then when we find ourselves doing repeat tasks, of any kind that start swelling to take up more and more of your time in order to be done right, then we're like, okay, how can we unload this? You know, when I first started, I designed our own labels, such as they were. And then I was like, man, this thing Fiverr is cool. I can get these Outstanding. I couldn't afford American graphic firms, right? And I also found, ironically, working with a lot of American graphics firms was very involved, mostly because they're so risk adverse. So they're always checking with you every, every day. What do you think of this? What do you think of that? Decisions, decisions, decisions. When I was like, look, man, you should know what looks good. Just give me something that looks good. I don't care. I thought I was a pretty easy client, but it was agonizing. Then I would find a guy online, a fiver, and I would say, look, this is what I need. Make it look good. Comes back six days later for a tenth the price and it would look better than anything I could have imagined. And if I didn't like it, he would change it. But I always liked it. Is that because I'm a simpleton or because he's just good at what he does and came up with really attractive packaging that was way better than what I had been using? And it was so easy. When we find somebody like that, I lock in on that. Now that issue is no longer a concern for me. I know AI is getting into serious graphic capabilities. But I don't care to learn it right now for that kind of thing because I got an answer already and it cost me so little in comparison to the value that I'll worry about it at another time. I've got other more pressing, more expensive concerns to turn over to AI or any other source. And plus AI, honestly, is in the scheme of things. It's pretty new with what you can delegate to it. So we're just always looking at what can we, I try to look at it like, look, I used to run country clubs in a previous life. And I had as many as 100 employees. So there was always people to delegate to. And I always found that every time I took over a club, I had to work like hell for the first six months because usually I got hired because the place was a mess. They hired me because I was young and bold. Because they had to get stuff done. And I had to work extremely hard because the first six months I was training everybody around me what they were responsible for and how to do what they had to do. And then after everybody started doing their job, it was pretty easy for me. And I would actually get bored because everything was running so well. That's always my goal now when it's just Jeff and I. How can I I get back to working when I feel like and not working when I don't feel like. The only way that happens effectively, unless you're just willing to leave a lot of money on the table, is to find ways to get it done. And there's a lot of companies out there that can take over, but there's also now with AI, a lot of different tools that we as individuals can utilize. And so that's really the task going forward is how better to do that. Speaker 2: As we begin to wrap up here, I want to ask another question because hopefully we talk again in another year on the show. Last time we talked, or I'll say it this way, the saying is, what got you here won't get you there. So how do you define, how do you map out those steps? What do you think The next level of growth is what do you need to add to GS Plant? What do you feel like maybe you need to take away from GS Plant? How do you view the next year of growth for you guys? Speaker 1: You know, it's an interesting thing. Again, I've been doing all this entrepreneurial life for a long time. And on one hand, everything seems so different. But on the other hand, nothing changed. It was the old saying, everything old is new again. There are new ways of doing it, but it doesn't change just like we were just talking about you have to find Responsible partners if you will whether they're subordinates or AI or outside companies Outsourcers to handle those tasks. Yeah that free you up to continue with the big picture thinking because nobody is I can hire will be able to do the big picture thinking of where to bring GS Plant Foods in the future. And so that never changes. But all the tools have changed radically. And it's actually in some ways a lot easier. Now, AI is hard for a guy like me only now because it's a The concept isn't hard, but I'm still wrapping my head on how to incorporate it with me. And I know that gets easier. I had a friend the other day tell me, he goes, look, man, it's going to be like a cell phone. Who needs directions for a cell phone? They're so intuitive. You just pick it up and you start using it. He goes, that's what AI is going to be. And I thought, you know what? That's interesting. That is how it's going to be, but it's not there yet. Right now, it still takes somebody like me talking to somebody like you, hey, this is what I wish it could do. And then you translate it for me, if you will, because I'm still learning. Although that's changing really fast, that's going to make it even easier. Then the value always comes back to Who can position themselves best and who can, and this is the intangible part. Look, when I started GS Plant Foods, the reason I started was because I knew I was a hobbyist. I like gardening. I grew stuff, but I knew, I just felt that we were moving from a period of the only people who are interested in organics were granolas and hippies and that kind of thing. And it was becoming more mainstream. And it was becoming like, you know what? I think a lot of people care what they put in their yard. They may not be consumed. They're not like, oh, I'm a vegan. I'm this, I'm that, making a statement. But they are more comfortable with the idea that, yeah, it just makes sense to use healthy products into my garden. So that was an intuitive feel, right? Well, AI can't do that. Other businesses can't do that for me. I have to be free. To do that, and that's really where the value comes in. And right now we're facing a, you know, some, some immediate concerns having to do with Amazon's greed and all this other stuff. So we fix that. So then I can get back to more of that big picture visualization, but that's the, you know, problems are not, that's what I enjoy about business as being able to roll, being able to pivot. Take advantage of these new tools and leverage ourselves in a way that just a little two person company like us can, can be, provide a A great product that the marketplace appreciates and make a nice living doing it. That's a win-win, you know. Speaker 2: It almost seems like what you mentioned there, I think fundamentals almost never change, right? The foundation of what makes a great business is the same as today as it was a hundred years ago. So I think that's very true. And I mean, the takeaways that I just got from there is like, you focus on your market, you focus on your customers. What do they want? What do they need? There's maybe new tools to access some of that information or potentially, but you mentioned something earlier, which was you realized an issue in Florida just by talking to customers, right? You see that a lot where it's like, oh, I talked to a lot of people who are really deep into AI and really big into automation and they often say, oh man, how do I get clients for this? And it's like you have some incredible tools at your disposal, but you need to talk to your market. What are you actually building for? So I think that's an interesting point too. So intense focus on the market, which is great. I see that a lot in the Amazon world where sometimes companies don't iterate We're going to talk about products over time. And you mentioned that you sprinkled that in a couple of times in this episode, which was, you're listening to your market. What new products can we develop? Like, what does the market need? I will find the answer for them and deliver the answer for them. And I see that sometimes on Amazon where companies don't iterate on their product line. You know, they're sort of fixed. It's like, I have this product. I know it's good. It's the best. And I need marketing to convince people that it's good. So I think that's a cool lesson there. And the other thing you mentioned too was just, I think you mentioned that you're wrestling with Amazon, but in some ways that's really, I think underneath the surface there is like margin control, understanding, you know, And we're here to talk about the cost that it takes to sell on any marketplace, in this case, Amazon. So I think just to your point, the fundamentals don't change. Speaker 1: They don't. And it's funny because I know when I talk to Newer entrepreneurs, they always think there's a new hip way of doing it. And I'm like, nah, man. In the essence, it's all the same. Advertising is a classic one. I went through a period, I used to do advertising specifically for people in the wedding industry. And we had different tools back then. We published a magazine, for example. We did bridal shows. Very, let's say, physical things compared to what it's morphed into, which is now mostly digital. But that you know, if you remember years ago, there was a what did he call it? Seth Golden. I can't think of that. Speaker 2: He had a books about Seth Godin. Speaker 1: Yeah, how you can't, you know, shout at your customers permission marketing. Yeah, and I thought you know, what a bunch of bullshit. Because no good salesperson was screaming at their customers in the first place. I mean, he took the ugliest car salesman approach and said, that's what everybody's doing. So we weren't doing that. But fundamentally, nothing changed. You still have to get your message out in front of people that may want your product. So because the tools changed, Now you're not doing a TV ad, let's say, or you're not doing radio or billboards or print like we used to. It doesn't change the fact that you still have to somehow interrupt their stream of consciousness if you want to sell your product. And you do that by your ads showing up in places that are relative, but you do that not because you're so worried about disrupting them, because you have to disrupt them, but you do it so that it disrupts somebody who's actually interested in your product, you know, because it doesn't make any sense. You're selling boats and you live in the Andes Mountains or your customer lives, you know, he's not going to buy a boat. It's stupid. So that's not rude advertising. That's just stupid. On the other hand, if you can find a way to direct your advertising for your boats only to people who live on waterfront, well, that's smart. But you still have to get in front of them and say, hey, here I am. I'm trying to sell a boat and I know you might be looking for one. Wouldn't that be smart? So I don't think the point was ever. I know it was with some companies, but it's never really to be rude and obnoxious, but you have to interrupt people and that hasn't changed. I mean, I sell, look, let's face it, I sell organic fertilizer. That is a pretty mellow vibe. We're not punching people in the face, but we have to let them know that what we have is good for them, good for the environment, good for their plants, and we want to sell it to them. There's nothing wrong with that. That's business. That has not changed and that never will change, regardless of the tools that we use. You can tell by my reaction, I get a little irritated by that whole pretense that It's all different now. No, it's not all different now. It's just different tools to do the same thing. And I think that serves me well to remain clear with that. What is your mission? I mean, no matter what product you make, it can be the... I've met people that make great products and they don't know how to get in front of anybody and they go out of business. And yet I've met people that make inferior products and they get in front of the right people often enough that But they win. And now the best thing is be good at both. Give a good product, an ethical product. But you've got to get that in front of people that care about that product. And if you can do that, then, you know, you do what we did. You build a nice little business. Speaker 2: Very well said. Very well said. And I think that's a perfect point to leave people with. We have links to GS Plant in the description, and hopefully that helps boost the AEO presence, right? But thank you so much, Francis. Thank you so much for being a great client all throughout these years. I always learn so much, not only about I think you have a lot of years of business experience, which I find really valuable, and hopefully the listeners do too. Also, bonsai enthusiast, former chef, and then today I learned you also ran Country Club. So I can't wait to find out what other professions you've had over the years, maybe a year from now on the next episode. But Francis, thank you so much. Have a good one. And everyone else, I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: And pick keywords. I've got my bids. Some placements too. No bad mistakes. I've made a few. I've had my share of rankings. We are the creepy city, my friends And we'll keep on damaging You are the PPC Den. We talk about Amazon. No time for medicons, cause we fix the game.