EcomCrew Podcast

E105: My 7 Biggest Struggles in 2017

“In general, I think that people spend too much time talking about their wins, and gloating, and how well things are going and never talk about the disarray or things that are going on behind the scenes, or things that they're struggling with. I think it's important to talk about this stuff; I think everyone goes through these types of things.” – Mike Jackness on the business and life struggles he faced this year

This is that time of the year when people talk about “best-of”, “top 10 of the year”, and all those things that highlight the most significant things that happened to them this year. It's a great way to look back on the successes and lessons of the year that is about to end and to get ready for the year that is about to come.

In this podcast I will not do a “best of”. Instead, I will talk about the struggles and the challenges I faced. Too many people talk about the glory of being an entrepreneur and sweep the mess under the rug. Being in ecommerce is not all roses and the bigger your business grows, the more problems you encounter.  So in this episode, I will talk about the hardships, the confusions, the worry and all the uncertainties that we faced head on this year, and what we did to get overcome them.

I elaborate the following challenges my company and I faced head on:

  1. Having to reinvent myself as we adopted a new launch strategy (I talk about our new launch strategy in detail in this episode)
  2. Keeping up with explosive growth and the tough high-level decisions I had to make
  3. Hiring a C-level employee for the first time and how scary that moment was
  4. Trying to get our non-Amazon sales to catch up with our Amazon sales and the constant dread of something terrible happening to our account
  5. Being able to systematize everything
  6. Staying focused and keeping myself away from pet projects
  7. Working with my wife (happy wife, happy life right?)

It definitely has not been an easy year but with all the struggles came the fruits of our labor: explosive business growth, a great team, and happy customers. We don't expect problems to let up anytime soon since we are gearing for more growth next year, but we do know that we will be giving it all we've got. And you should, too.

Resources mentioned:

Stamped.io
AsiaInspection
Our Amazon Product Launch Strategy for 2018
Free 2-hour Webinar

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In connection, we are having a 2-hour coaching webinar on December 21st and attendees can ask anything under the sun and we will give our honest unbridled advice that will be really helpful for your business. Normally I charge $500/hr of my consulting time but this webinar will be for free. The only thing we ask in return is that you leave us an honest review of the podcast. You can check out the details here.

Thanks as always for tuning in. Until next episode, happy selling!

 

Full Audio Transcript

Mike: This is Mike, and welcome to episode number 105 of the EcomCrew Podcast. You can go to EcomCrew.com/105 to get to the show notes and leave any comments you might have about this episode. And this episode is going to be about the struggles that I had in 2017. Yes, even the “masterful Mike Jackness” as some people call me, it's really embarrassing when people say this stuff. It's still — I'm still human and things don't always go perfect in our business.

And I think it's really important to talk about this stuff. I don't believe in being a hypocrite. And one of the things that drives me crazy about a lot of podcasts and information out there on the internet is just all the positive stuff. Like you too can make a million dollars by just sprinkling some pixie dust on a bagel, and it'll grow a magic bean and whatever.

I mean it seems so easy, but those of you out there that have listened to us for a long time know that that's not our thing. And if you have been in business for any length of time, you know that that's not even realistic. Business is not easy, and you need to put in the hard work to get a lot of reward out of it. And it's not always a straight line up. There's definitely struggles sometimes, and it's less fun talking about those things. But I think that it's important to talk about them nonetheless.

So here that episode is the struggles I had in 2017. I don't want to get too verbose about this, because I talk a lot about this obviously. It's a solo podcast in the main meat and potatoes of this episode. So I'm going to break off today and I'll talk to you guys on the other side of my list of struggles for 2017, talk to you guys soon.

In general I think that people spend too much time talking about their wins and gloating and how well things are going, and never talk about the disarray or things that are going on behind the scenes, or things that they're struggling with. And I think that it's important to talk about this stuff. I think everyone goes through these types of things.

 

Mike:“In general, I think that people spend too much time talking about their wins, and gloating, and how well things are going and never talk about the disarray or things that are going on behind the scenes, or things that they're struggling with. I think it's important to talk about this stuff; I think everyone goes through these types of things.”

 

Hey everybody, welcome to this edition of the EcomCrew Podcast. It's about that time of the year where everyone is doing kind of wrap up posts and best ofs and all these different things. And quite frankly, one of the things that I've had a hard time with this last few weeks since doing the podcast two times a week is just coming up with enough episodes and new topics to constantly be talking about. And so I made a post internally on Basecamp just asking for some ideas of things to be talking about.

And again because it's just kind of the time of year wrapping up things for 2017, we're probably going to do a few of these types of things. I’ll probably do big wins and predictions for 2018 and all these different types of things. But the first thing that came up was struggles for 2017. What were the struggles that you had in 2017?

And I actually wanted to do this one first, because in general I think that people spend too much time talking about their wins and gloating and how well things are going, and never talk about the disarray or things that are going on behind the scenes, or things that they're struggling with. And I think that it's important to talk about this stuff. I think everyone goes through these types of things. And it's just the kind of podcast that we like to do here. We aren’t that kind of fluff and BS and all that.

And I want to talk about some of the things that I struggle with through 2017, things that might be struggles also in 2018. And I put a list of seven things together here I'm going to go over. Many of these are probably not going to be surprises. But again I think it's good to hear this stuff from somebody else because if you're going through it and you're struggling with something or don't feel great about something, sometimes it can be lonely out there. So without further ado, let me get into this list.

The first thing I had on the list was just the struggle of having to reinvent myself when it came to the whole Amazon launch strategy. And I'm not going to get too in-depth with this, because I just did a full length episode about this. And I highly encourage you guys to go check that out, we'll put the link to that in the show notes. But it's definitely frustrating in business when you get to a point where you figure out something you can make money with, and you become very successful with that process and then you can no longer make money with it that way any longer.

And this is something that's happened to me more than once in the past, affiliate marketing, SEO, things of that nature. And Affiliate Marketing was more than one time, SEO more than one time. But this is the first time I really kind of took it on the chin with Amazon. When they came out with their new review policy, it completely flipped my launch strategy on its head. It took something that was incredibly easy that I had refined and worked out almost to a scientific degree, and completely threw it out the window and I had to start all over again.

And it was a big struggle because again it's frustrating when you have something that's working so well, and we were growing so quickly, and then having to go come up with a whole new process. And the reality of that new process being much more difficult and longer term, and not the quick wins that we were used to seeing. And it took the better part of 2017 before we started to really realize the fruits of our labor. And again without getting into just a huge amount of detail on this because we just recently recorded an episode about the strategy for this, but it still was a struggle.

And the other big struggle was people telling me how crazy I was for the first six to nine months as we were developing this new strategy. There's a lot of people that I respect and admire and look up to that are successful in this business. And they all thought I was nuts because most of them quite frankly, I'm not going to name names, it's no need to throw anyone out of the bus here.

But most of them are still in that quick win mindset. They're not necessarily thinking about the long-term business implications, where I've been in business for over fifteen years for myself and I think about those things. And so the thing that we came up with was a much longer term business model that hopefully will be sustainable and doesn't employ any black hat or even gray hat tactics. And we're working more on that whole brand building concept and developing great products.

So that's my first struggle for 2017. The second one is just being able to stay on top of growth. It's — I don't know what the phenomena is. I didn't go to business school. I don't have an MBA or any of those things, but I'm sure that somewhere along the way in there, they talk about this. Because I've seen it happen to multiple businesses that I've owned, at least three if not four at this point, where you hit a crossroads and there's a couple of crossroads.

But the first one is you're kind of the solopreneur, right? You're able to take the business to a certain point all by yourself, half a million, one million dollars, whatever that might be. You hire your first employees, start to grow, and then you hit your next crossroads. You hire more employees, and the other crossroads are you start to lose focus, because you're making money doing this and you start trying to do too many things, and all these different things start to happen.

But you also kind of hit a limit to where you need to, then hire that C-level person. And the next thing also on my list is that as well, we'll talk about that. But it's definitely a struggle just staying on top of growth. I know from previous experiences, you always when you're younger and you think you're as you're growing, okay, I'm just going to tackle this next thing, and then it'll get better, and I'm going to tackle this next thing and then it'll get better.

And you end up in this mindset of you're so close to getting ahead of the curve when you're growing quickly. But the reality is, is that you're never going to be ahead of the curve. And the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely an oncoming train, just the next thing that you're going to have to deal with. Not necessarily in a bad way, you can let those things ruin you or you can figure out ways to get ahead of that curve until you get to the next level.

Now, if you're growing at 10% per year or 20% per year, which is an amazing growth rate for large companies, it's a lot easier to stay on top of this. But when you're growing at 200 to 300% per year like we have, it's tough, because a company that's one million dollars looks a lot different than one that's two million, and a lot different than one that's at four million, or one that's at eight million or sixteen million.

As you do those doubling growth curves every year, each step along the way, you come into new challenges that you're having to solve a lot quicker than a company that's growing at 10 or 20% per year because they get five to ten years before they double. And I guess it's more like four years or whatever that would be at 20% per year if you're compounding it. But you get four years to kind of deal with those things, and we're having to deal with that in existentially in one year. It's insane.

So yeah I mean that's definitely been a big struggle just staying on top of that. And quite frankly we hit a plateau earlier this year when I realized that this was a big problem was early in the year when we went to Asia back in March, April, May, whenever that was for the Canton Fair and found all these great products that we wanted to develop. And three to six months later none of them had been ordered. We'd like literally didn’t order one new product out of that fair.

We went to the fair, took the time to go there, found a bunch of great stuff, made a lot of really good contacts, and were never able to actually ultimately develop the products, because of manpower. We just — our little company had grown to a point where it was kind of busting at the seams. And we had to kind of hit the reset button, and make some changes to be able to handle that growth moving forward, which we have now.

And we just came back from the Canton Fair in October and November. If you listen to this podcast you know about that trip. And already there's like a ton of samples in this office from that trip. We've already gotten samples both from the manufacturers, and competitors were already getting reiterations of the samples in here. And we're very close to placing our first couple orders to get those in before Chinese New Year, and have products here in the first quarter of next year to start launching new products again.

It's very exciting, like I'm really excited at the prospect of that. But it was definitely a struggle to be able to get to that point again this year, because of just staying on top of growth. So if you have a high growth company, I guess the point here is that you're not alone. This is a very typical problem. This is the same problem that I had in the online poker affiliate space as we were growing at that speed back in the SEO days when we were growing at that speed.

And eventually you're going to become the biggest roadblock in your company, and you'll have to make that change. And that is an evolution that we had this year. And it certainly was humbling, because you never want to admit that you're the problem, that you're the big roadblock and you're the problem. But I was, and that leads to problem number three, the struggle number three which was hiring that person to help with that, that C-level person.

It's a big moment. We hired a director of e-commerce, who is eventually going to probably officially be called our COO. She's really already taken on that role realistically anyway. And it means that I need to bail out of all these things that I have identified myself with in this company over the last three to four years and not do them anymore, and let someone else take the reins of those things. Things like ordering product, and reordering products from manufacturers or being a part of the design process of new products from start to scratch, and running Facebook ads, and in picking all the different marketing campaigns that we're doing, and just being involved in things on an intimate level versus being involved in the business at a high level.

It's a big transition and it's hard even for someone like myself who's been through that more than once, and embraces the change and wants to be able to do that. But you're still emotionally attached to certain things especially things that you perceive that you're good at. But the reality is that you can be doing more, and bigger and better and greater things for your company if you can remove yourself from that stuff. And I've already been doing that since we've hired her about three months ago.

And again there's no time like this last couple of months. It's been more evident as she's come in the door and started to suggest things and take the reins on all these new products that we're ordering and taking over the whole ordering and forecasting part of the company, something that she's going to be quite frankly better at than I am anyway. She does have an MBA. She does have an experience in a large Fortune five hundred company doing this stuff. Of course she's going to be better than me in doing this. And it's exciting to see where things go from here in that regard.

But it still was a struggle picking the right person to do this, and ultimately making the hire. It was a scary moment, and I told her and everyone else in the interview process. The thing that's scary about it is I know that once I make the hire, a year down the road if we would look back, or look at where we're at, either we’ll be bankrupt, basically completely out of business because there's so much faith put in this person, or we will have doubled again.

And going from five million to ten million next year will be a lot harder than it was to go from two and a half to five million. It gets harder every time you double because you're just – everything, yes you're scaling linearly, but you're doubling the touch points every single time, and it gets harder and harder. We have to double the number of products we sell next year basically to stick with that. That's a pretty daunting task when you go from ten products to 20, not too hard to launch ten new products.

But in this situation we're in, we need to be launching approximately one new product a week next year, and that is definitely a struggle. It's a hard thing to get your head around. So we've been working on systematizing that and making it something that we can scale. And hopefully in 2018, we’ll see the rewards for that. But it definitely was a struggle in 2017, but it's something that we've turned into a positive as well.

And Jacqueline will be on a future episode here shortly of the EcomCrew Podcast. I want you guys to have insight into what I've been seeing, and just like how quickly she's been able to identify problems and other things that she's identified. And I have a fun way of approaching that episode here in the next few weeks when we do get her on, because we're not going to talk about stuff in advance. I want her open an honest opinion on things, and I also want to react in real time to what she says. So when we get to that episode I think it'll be exciting.

So the next thing here on my list is number four which is the fact that no matter how hard that we work on our non-Amazon business, Amazon still grows quicker than everything else. And we're in this predicament where internally we spend all this time, like almost all of our staff focuses all their time on building non-Amazon business, Shopify, eBay, ClickFunnels, Groupon, whatever it might be, things off Amazon, but yeah Amazon grows quicker than everything else.

And not only does it grow quicker, but it has a better profit margin. Even taking the 15% off the table that they take from us, it's still better to sell on Amazon than it is on Shopify, just because when you start to add up all the additional expenses of the Facebook ads to get that traffic, the manpower behind the social media marketing, and the email marketing, and shipping and taking phone calls and e-mail support, and all these other things and the list goes on and on, that really eats into the margin.

But at the same time I know that all that off Amazon work that we do also contributes to our Amazon success. So I know that there's an ecosystem there, but you can't quantify it. And that's another big struggle because Amazon doesn't give you the reporting that you would want. You don't get any pixelled information, you don't know exactly who your customers are, you don't know who is reordering what. It's definitely a lot tougher to measure.

So we've had a completely shift our mindset from individual channel performance and individual ad performance to looking at the company as a whole, and looking at our efforts that we're putting in off of Amazon and doing just in general as general marketing tactics, and looking at things more as a percentage of sales basis rather than on an individual ad campaign. So yeah that's definitely for me a big struggle.

And the reason I struggle with it is because Amazon still is two thirds of our business, where I think that we're in a better position than a lot of people that are Amazon centric sellers. Some people that have 100% on Amazon are particularly at risk because Amazon controls the purse strings, and they control the puppet. And you're out there begging mercy every moment, and you never know what could possibly happen. And hopefully your interests are somewhat aligned with theirs, and those things will happen.

But at the same time it can be scary. And we've had businesses in the past that have had this type of thing happen, and we want to protect ourselves against that. But having two thirds of our business on Amazon is a struggle, and we can't seem to flip that. I would love for it to be two thirds of non-Amazon business and one third Amazon business if we could, but we just can't seem to get there no matter how hard we try. And that is a struggle because it isn't a profitability thing for me as much as just a safety net thing.

And as we get bigger, that continues to become more and more extrapolated. I mean what's at risk continues to grow every year. When we had $50,000 in inventory that's basically what our risk was. Now it's closer to a million dollars in inventory. That's a big number, a life changing amount of money, a swing that can go one way or the other if something bad happened with Amazon. So that is definitely something I struggle with in 2017.

The next one, number five here is being able to systematize everything. As we get more and more complicated, as our business gets more sophisticated, I want to be able to systematize everything and make it so as we hire more people, we can just hand them a procedure, and let them just do it. But that is tough because every day that goes by, you're trying to just get through the things that you're trying to do today. And we've been able to develop a lot of procedures.

We've been able to also get on Basecamp, and now have an internal communication system. But it's still been difficult to generate procedures and SOPs at the rate that I would love to do it at. I mean in my mind, we should have an SOP for basically everything that happens within the company, and we should have the time to be able to do that. But the reality is that we're always understaffed. We haven’t been able to get ahead of the curve. We're trying to, we we've got a bunch of job ads out especially of Philippines right now.

We're trying to get ahead of that curve, get people trained so they're in a position to already know the job before the job gets to that 110% mark of throughput where people are struggling to keep up. And it's been tough because we want to keep our standards high on the types of people that we're hiring, because I've been through that before. We let that kind of drop, and you're only as strong as your weakest link. I know these cliché sayings are used so much, but it's true.

If you have someone that's a complainer or not doing a great job or hates their job or whatever on the team, everyone else is going to start to feel that way whether they want to or not. Or you have someone that works at speed seven and most of the team already is working at speed ten, everyone will kind of drop down to that. And we don't want that to happen. We want people that are high performers, that enjoy what they're doing, have a great attitude. And to continue that infrastructure going that way, that team to be that way.

And as you get bigger and bigger, it obviously gets harder and harder, because it's hard to have the same focus with every individual as you get bigger than you did when you had just one person working for you. So that's another struggle that we've worked with dealing with in 2017 as well.

The next one is staying focused. This is something that I've had a problem with my whole life in entrepreneurship. I’ve realized that this is a disease like alcoholism or gambling or something like that. It's really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs to stay focused on one thing for a long period time, because for an entrepreneur like the thing that's exciting is the new thing, right? It's building something from nothing. And it's very easy to want to go try the next thing. And we've done a really good job this year, I'm actually proud of this.

But it doesn't mean that it wasn't a struggle. It was definitely a struggle all year long to stick with the same for brands that we planned on working on from day one, and not launching some new product or some new pet project along the way. The thought process in January of last year was Ice Wraps, ColorIt, Wild Baby, and Tactical. And those are the exact things that we did this year along with the EcomCrew stuff, and did not get into all the other opportunities that we could have gone into.

It would have been very easy to say yes to a lot of things this year, or jump off to something else, because I see a lot of business broker dealings coming through, and I want to do something else. I'm kind of ready, I'm ready to do something new we need and exciting, but I know that we're not ready for it. We just can't do it. And hopefully we'll get to a point where we can start acquiring one or two businesses a year, or even get to a point where it's three or four, and start doing new things.

But until we have everything that's in-house 100% working as smooth as we possibly can, it doesn't make sense. Like all you're doing — I have a saying, if you choose two rabbits, both will get away. And I know it seems that way to some people that were already doing that, but the rabbit that I'm chasing in my mind is e-commerce. And as long as we're constantly developing new products and SKUs, and we're staying with our business plan, we're chasing one rabbit.

And the reason we've had to develop these other brands is not because of the shiny objects syndrome, but because I've already calculated out and backed out the number of products we need to launch in 2018 and 2019 to stay on this growth trajectory. We should again, we should be somewhere probably between ten and twelve million dollars in sales in 2018. And if we double that again or triple that the following year, it's going to be mid eight figures.

And in order to get to that point, we have to be developing those brands now. We have to be doing the baby stuff and the Tactical stuff now to be at a point where we can continue that growth rate. This year was our slowest growth rate of existence in e-commerce. We were growing at 300% per year. This year was that 200% number because of the struggles I mentioned earlier, because we weren't able to launch enough new products this year. We didn't have the manpower to do that.

So the goal moving forward is to stay ahead of that manpower curve, and not let that kind of bite us in the butt. And I definitely think that we should be able to be closer to 250 to 300% growth next year. And our biggest struggle I hope that we're talking about next year is just cash flow, just being able to keep the wheels on the bus as we're developing more and more products, and more and more money is moving throughout the system staying on top of that.

So focus was number six. And the last one here number seven is something else that's been a struggle for a while, it's working with my wife. My wife is an integral part of this business, and it's tough. It is definitely a struggle mixing business with pleasure. It's interesting when we were doing affiliate marketing or SEO. It never seemed to be a problem. So the problems have kind of crept up on this in e-commerce was something that I wasn't really fully prepared for. And I think it's probably because she relates to this business more than anything else that we've done. She's a more integral part of the business than anything else that we've done.

We don't have the same like business partners that we had in previous businesses, although we obviously have Eric and AJ with ColorIt and Julia with Wild Baby. It's different in a lot of ways than it was when we were doing the online poker affiliate marketing and SEO stuff where we had people that owned entire parts of the business.

And it was — even though she was working in the business at the time, it was more in a clerical role in a lot of ways, because we were — and it wasn't because that's all she could do by any stretch of imagination. But it was she was really one of the only people we trusted to do that particular job, because we were moving around large amounts of money. We had this thing called Laid Back program and she was in charge of moving quite frankly six figures mid to high six figures of money around every month for payments and stuff that that's just something that's hard to trust someone else to be able to do.

And that was really her role within the company there. But here it's at a much higher level. And it's been tough because at home I always say she's the boss. I mean a happy wife, happy life, and would want to side with her for the most part in the personal side especially since there’s so much at stake on the business side. But yeah it's been difficult because it's hard to have two CEOs. I feel like I'm the CEO, and while I want to be able to do the things that she suggests, if I don't agree with it, then what do you do?

It's a big struggle, and I'm sure a lot of people listening have their spouse involved in the business and can relate to this. But it certainly was a big struggle and in 2017. And as a part of this, I had this combined; it's the work life balance part of that, because our business is our life in a lot of ways although I don't look at that that way. I think it's important to not have the business be your life, but it is a huge part of our life. It's where an average person goes to work; work is a huge part of their life. It's a third of your life where you spend a third of your day in your life pretty much at work.

But it isn't just as simple as that. When you own your own business, there's so much more at stake. It's your entire future and your financial well being and everything. And the reason that we even do this to begin with is because it's also part hobby. We're all sick and twisted entrepreneurs. I mean I thoroughly enjoy what I do; I do not look at what I do as a job. I don't struggle coming to work every day. I mean there's parts of the business that are definitely tougher than others. A lot of things I always talk about here on this podcast, the struggles part is obviously tough.

But for me, that's like actually the fun part. To me the fun part is like overcoming those struggles and figuring out a way to make problems an opportunity. Again I know it sounds weird, because I know most people don't think that way, but I really truly think that way. I look at it as, okay, we have this problem, how are we going to fix it? Someone's upset about something, how are we going to make them happy, how can we make things better? And so obviously like there's creep of that. When you go home, you're talking about that, thinking about that.

And it's tough because like — and also now because just the way that the world is, just kind of this globalized world, we're basically on the clock if you will 24/7. There is never a time when I'm not willing to work in our business, and that's probably not the healthiest thing in the world. And it becomes exacerbated by the fact that we have a team in the Philippines that is working from 3pm to midnight basically our time or 2am or whatever it works out to. And we're also dealing with people in China, manufacturers in China that are working similar hours.

And so it becomes like this 24 hour clock of things are always moving within your business. And it is definitely a struggle, and it's something I think about a lot because I don't want to necessarily be defined by my work. I think that one day you will regret that if that's the case. So I try to leave plenty of time for family and vacations, and for me, and all those things. But it's definitely a struggle.

And for some people, it might not be a struggle. Some people that I know are really disciplined about this. Their working hours are X to Y or Y to Z, and their family time is A to B, or their personal time is C to D, or whatever it might be. And they're really disciplined about it and they can turn off their phone and just walk away from it. I know other entrepreneurs that can do this, like we will go out to dinner as a group of entrepreneurs, and when my phone buzzes, I can't help but look at it. I know I got an email and it could be important. It's that dopamine hit that I know that I'm going to get when I look at it, where I lot of people that I know just don't care.

And it isn't because they're not successful entrepreneurs or business people, it's because they have a better work life balance, the mental place that they're in that they can do that. Or I'm a little bit higher on stress and just have a harder time mentally letting go with that. And again I think that that's just as much of a disease as alcoholism might be, or gambling where this particular disease is deemed to be success, which is kind of weird, right?

I think that a lot people would look at someone that works harder is really into their business and is successful, where the reality is, that probably isn't the case. And it's something that I struggle with, and it's something that I will continue to work on in 2018 as we get into the next year. So, that is my list guys of things that I've struggled with in 2017. I hope that you found this helpful and could relate to it, and we'll see you in the next episode.

And that's a wrap. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the EcomCrew Podcast. Again you can go to EcomCrew.com/105 to get to the show notes. And don't forget the webinar that we have coming up. It's going to be completely free, it's a $500 value. We normally charge $500 an hour for our coaching time. So putting a value of this $500 on it, because it's not one on one, it's a Q&A, but it is two hours. And I think that it can be invaluable for you. If you have a chance, go to EcomCrew.com/review, you can get instructions of everything there. It'll let you leave a review of the podcast and register for the webinar.

We really need reviews guys. It's one of the most important things for ranking for podcast, and we just can't thank you enough for your effort for going to do it. It's actually a pain in the butt. iTunes doesn't make it super easy to leave a review, which is probably why we don't have a ton of them. And to thank you for taking your time to leave that review, I'm going to donate two hours of my time to do this webinar.

It's a completely open Q&A webinar. You can ask any questions you have, as many questions as you have. I'm going to get to as many questions as I possibly can. I don't think that there's going to be a particular huge amount of people on the webinar. It has been tough for us to get people from the podcast to any other medium. So I would expect probably 20 or 30 people at the most in the webinar, and you have two hours of my time to ask any questions you want. Like I said, you guys know how open and honest and eager we are to help people.

So it's a great opportunity for you to get a bunch of free advice. And hopefully that can take your business the next level in 2018, and also participate with the other people there, right? You'll hear the questions that they're asking, and get the answers that are given to other people, and hopefully that will be helpful to you as well. And you'll also get the recording of the webinar, but you have to leave a review.

So go to EcomCrew.com/review to leave a review of the EcomCrew Podcast, and sign up for that webinar, which is going to take place later in December. So until the next episode guys, happy selling, and we will talk to you then.

Thanks for listening to the EcomCrew Podcast. Follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/ecomcrew for weekly live recordings of the EcomCrew Podcast every Monday. And please, do us a favor, and leave an honest review on iTunes, it would really help us out. Again, thanks for listening, and until next week, happy selling.

Michael Jackness

Michael started his first business when he was 18 and is a serial entrepreneur. He got his start in the online world way back in 2004 as an affiliate marketer. From there he grew as an SEO expert and has transitioned into ecommerce, running several sites that bring in a total of 7-figures of revenue each year.

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