TheMikeODonnell

4th Quarter Madness – Michael O’Donnell

I just outlined the topics for this blog post and holy shit a lot has happened since my last post on November 2. Last year I didn’t get to fully experience what a Q4 was for ecommerce because I only had a grill brush and our grill set had just recently launched and had no traction whatsoever. The last month and a half has been absolutely crazy for the Cave Tools business and just for life in general.

The craziness is what I love about being an Entrepreneur though. Whenever you ask somebody “What’s New?” you normally get the standard response of “Same old, same old.” The fact is, when you have a regular job, you pretty much repeat the same things every day and nothing ever changes. I on the other hand don’t know where to start half the time because once I get talking, I could go on for hours. This blog post only covers the last month and a half, but it might be my longest blog post ever.

Books I’m Reading

Before getting into the meat of things, I want to talk about the books I have been reading. I really feel like the books I’m currently reading have a major impact on my thought processes and how that manifests into results for my business.

Recently, I finished the book Cashvertising by Drew Eric Whitman. This book was recommended to me by my good friend Clayton Bradshaw and his description was that the book was his “Bible” when it comes to advertising. I can honestly say this was one of the best marketing books I ever read. It reminded me a lot of Influence by Robert Cialdini, but thinner, more current, and much more direct.

This book has done wonders for me when it comes to writing ad copy and positioning my products and brand. Drew is from the Philadelphia area as well which is pretty cool because he references things in the book that I can relate to. He also used a local ad agency as one of his examples. I had the opportunity to meet the owner of this company last year when we brought him in to speak to the MDM group.

I knew right away that he was legit and I spent a ton of time talking to him and asking about his influencers. He was a big Glazer Kennedy (GKIC) guy back in the day and I could tell when I read through all of his materials. To see this guy used as an example in “The Bible” on advertising about a year later was really awesome.

Currently, I’m about 75% of the way through “Introducing NLP,” a book that was recommended to me by hypnotist and master internet marketing mentor from Sovereign Man in Lithuania, Cliff Mee. I rarely quit on a book once I get started on it. I like to power through even if it’s not a book I am enjoying. The first 30 or so pages of this book were very dry when they were discussing the Neuro side of Neuro Linguistic Programming. However, I powered through that part and the rest of the book has been fantastic. I’m loving the linguistics side of thing and how they break down true meanings behind words and how people say them.

I have no intentions of putting in the time and effort to become an NLP master right now, but the book has been incredibly insightful. From a psychology standpoint, it’s been a wonderful book.

The next book up on my list is Spin Selling by Neil Rackham. I learned a ton from J Massey in Lithuania and his system for sales was very impressive. This book apparently provides the core foundation on how he structures all of his sales calls so I’m really looking forward to it.

After Spin Selling, I have “The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels” written by Alex Epstein. He was a speaker I helped bring in from the Ayn Rand center back was I was up at Penn State. We really hit it off and I’ve done a below average job of keeping in touch with him since. We exchange emails maybe once per year. Anyways, he has been doing an excellent job building the Center for Industrial Progress and is really starting to make a name for himself so I’m looking forward to reading his book. I also have “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” and “Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language and Never Forget It” coming up in my queue. Very excited for both of these books as well.

Cave Tools Featured on The View?

Shortly after I posted my 3 month follow-up blog post on November 2, I received an email from an Advertising Agency that works with Television stations. Normally when I receive these types of emails they are spammed out, but they were claiming to be able to get me on some big name TV shows so I responded to see what was up. Before she could disclose any information to me, I had to sign an NDA.

I did a little research on the company and they looked legit. The NDA wasn’t crazy, just pretty much saying I can’t disclose who they were because they were a behind the scenes agency and they don’t want random people contacting them. They prefer to reach out to brands that they have already researched. I returned the signed NDA and then a couple days later we jumped on a phone call.

She didn’t really give me too much information at all. It was more of an on the spot interview about my company, our brand values, what separates us, how much inventory we hold in stock, etc. For not really knowing what to expect on the phone call, I thought I did a really good job. She loved the meat claws in particular, but because they only sell for around $12-13 she said she would want to bundle the claws with the digital thermometer and market them on TV shows geared towards women and moms.

Before she could discuss any further with me, I had to sign more documents. They sent me a blank IRS W9 form that I had to fill out and a 9 page contract with crazy regulations in it. I read through the entire contract a few times and wrote down all of my notes. I also sent the contract to my dad and asked him to do the same. Later that night we compared our notes so we could be absolutely certain of every term in the contract. Basically the contract amounted to if anything got messed up in any way, they would take my first born child haha

Some of the terms in the contract included:

• They determine the price they sell my products for on the TV show (Basically would be doing a flash sale similar to QVC but on different networks).
• They won’t pay me until after they have all my inventory and the flash sale is over
• They can return products with no penalty or charges at my expense
• I can’t display any logos or anything showing that Cave Tools appeared on certain TV shows (Basically they own all IP related to the promotion)
• If there are any delays in shipping, I get charged 3% of the total purchase per day late (this was huge considering I needed to front everything and not get paid until the end). In addition, I would get charged a $10 per unit fee that was not delivered on time. When you’re talking 4,000 products, I consider that taking my first born child and destroying my company
• I needed to up my business liability insurance from $1 million to $2 million dollars. This sounds like a lot, but it would only have cost me about another $200 to up the insurance.
• When we shipped them the products there were lots of specifications as to what needed to be shown on the outside of each carton. Missing 1 single element would result in multiple other penalties. FBA warehouses would not be able to do this for me, so I would need to place a certain amount of inventory in a storage facility and have them custom prepare my products for shipment to the Warehouses of this Ad Agency.

After reading through all the regulations and with the understanding they would be purchasing 2,000 units of thermometers and 2,000 units of meat claws, we decided we would do it. My only concern was that I wasn’t going to have enough inventory on the back end to support all of the extra promotion and sales.

I returned the signed documents and was asked to provide my Best Price that I would sell to them for. With wholesale, I normally sell at around a 30% ish profit margin. However, with all of the additional risk associated with this contract, I discussed with my dad and we decided to give them pricing that would secure me a 50% profit margin on the sale.

I was worried that my pricing would be too high for them because their model really is to do a flash sale at deeply discounted prices. It also said multiple times throughout the contract that this is not something we should be expecting to make a lot of money on and that it was more of a chance to get mass exposure for the brand. I gave them the pricing anyways and figured that if they rejected we could always negotiate and see where things went from there.

She got back to me and said that my pricing was a little high, but they could still feature me on The View! The only problem I saw with it was that I literally had about 10 business days to get all of the inventory prepared and shipped to their warehouses.

At the time (and still currently) the longshoreman union in Los Angeles was kicking up a lot of shit because they knew it was the holiday season and they had leverage. Even though the average salary is somewhere in the 150-200K range per man, they wanted more money and were randomly stopping work and congesting up the ports to cause a big stink. I had a shipment of Meat Claws that waited at the port for over 12 days before they even unloaded the carton. I also had a shipment of thermometers on the way which should have been in on time, but as of the time I’m writing this now Dec 14, it still has not been unloaded at the port. The ports were also adding an extra $1,000 fee on top of all containers to account for the congestion.

This extra fee by the way was illegal, but they were trying to force it through anyways the bastards! Eventually the lawyers settled the extra fee dispute and they weren’t able to charge the extra fee on containers that had already been waiting at the port. I did however have to spend an extra $450 out of budget as a proportional fee on my thermometers container.

In the end, I had to back away from the opportunity. I asked if we could follow up and do the promotion in February for a Valentine’s Day style promotion, but have not yet heard back. I’ll follow up again with her in January so I have plenty of time to prepare this time around.

I still think the opportunity will be available and I’m happy I didn’t chase the money/exposure because I never would have been able to handle it. We’ll talk about that later on in the post.

Boston Coaching Gig Falls Apart

In November I talked about an opportunity I had to become an ecommerce coach with a wholesale company based up in Boston. At the point, I knew that something had to give because I was going to be taking on more work than I could handle. The payment they were offering me was only $40 per phone call, but the upside was that I’d have the opportunity to do 3 events before the end of the year and make about $2,000 per event.

Shortly after hiring me, Chris went on his honeymoon and was out of the picture. While he was gone, his brother Alex was running the operations of the company. My $40 per half hour phone call really turned out to be per 1 hour phone call. They also had absolutely no structure and I was pretty much learning on the fly.  The students they brought into the program were all very suspicious of the company as well and thought the whole thing was a scam. It wasn’t a scam, but they were just growing too quickly to keep everything running smoothly.

I started out doing the coaching calls and was also putting in a lot of extra effort problem solving and doing non coaching call types of things. Then when it came time to do the first event, I spoke to Adam about my flight and he told me they were trying to cut costs so they wouldn’t be bringing me to the event. I explained how that was a condition of my hire, but he really didn’t give a shit and said Chris wasn’t here so he was making the decision.

Alex also got me on an hour phone call and was trying to get me to show him my entire business model and advertising funnels so he could copy it and create a course on my business model that he could sell to his students. He wanted me to pretty much do all of this for free and was pissed off when I told him I wasn’t going to just turn over my entire business for $40 per hour in coaching calls.

The writing was on the wall for me, so after about 1.5 weeks I told him I wasn’t going to work with them anymore. It’s taken me until yesterday to actually get paid for the coaching calls I did. I’m still getting emails from their students now who they took over $10,000 in fees from and haven’t delivered on any of their promises. When I spoke to Justin about it he agreed with me that it was ridiculous and said he thinks they are the kind of guys that bill first and worry about delivering later. Definitely not stand up guys or the type of people I would have any interest in working for.

I guess I’ll chalk this one up to a learning experience. My biggest motivation for doing the coaching was so I could learn the wholesaling business model. I didn’t even get that out of it. I downloaded all of their material before I quit and when I went through it, it was all pretty much bullshit. Their whole company is really built just on a fantastic sales pitch, but there is no substance behind it when it comes time to teaching what they preach. I feel horrible for all of the suckers they get to sign up for their programs.

Developing Marketing Automation Tools and Partnership

Not a ton to report on the development of our Ecommerce Marketing automation tools. We have all been very busy, but Jarod has been managing our Indian programmer and we have so far completed  2 of the tools. A couple more are on the way still and the website itself is starting to look pretty nice.

I created our product listing blueprint and the product launch guide based on all of the strategies Shane, Jarod, and myself use on a regular basis. They came out really nice and we have added those guides and all of our webinar recordings to the website for our students.

We started talking the other day about how January is the time when we will need to finally turn this thing into a legal business structure and give it a name. Right now everything is on a handshake basis so we definitely need to protect ourselves. There’s also a little bit of tension going on between Shane and Jarod because Jarod and myself have been doing more of the work, Jarod especially. I’m hoping it all blows over because even though Shane isn’t a major asset when it comes to marketing and operations side of things, he has all of the personal connections and relationships we need to get our product into the hands of mass customers with little effort.

I think a lot of the tension also has to do with the fact that Shane and I are making a killing over the Christmas holiday with our Amazon businesses and Jarod’s is lagging behind. In the end, I think it just has to do with the seasonality of our products, but anytime you see your partners making 4 times as much as you, there is going to be the fear of missing out.

Shane’s brother Jason, the founder of ASM, is also in the market to purchase tools from people. Lately it seems like all of the successful people in ASM are creating their own tools. It’s a race to the finish line for who can create the best tools and take them to market the fastest because there is the opportunity of a buy out on the table. It would be really cool if we could get this entire business set up and then cash out only 3 months later. That is actually very likely right now!

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Explosion – Tis the Season for Cave Tools

It seems like every time I get some success and start to get ahead of the game I get a bunch of shit dropped on my lap. I think it was the great Sir Isaac Newton who said for every force there is an equal and opposite force. This time around the negative force wasn’t anywhere near equal to the amount of success we had, but we definitely have a lot of shit to deal with as a result of our holiday success. For now though, let’s focus on the positives.

This year I wanted to do things big for the holidays. In September and October I did a lot of research and built a list of big time product review and mommy bloggers that I wanted to review my products. Some of these websites get around 30,000 views a month on regular months of the year and way more during the holidays.

Out of my list of about 50, only about 20 got back to me and said they would do reviews for me. I shipped out free products to every one of them and also requested to be listed in their Holiday Shopping Guides that they put out for their readers every year. One of the ladies got back to me and said she landed a big time advertising spot for free for her blog and wasn’t going to charge me at all. She loved my Meat Claws so she featured the post at the top of her blog. Throughout the entire holidays, her blog was featured as a banner wrap on double decker buses throughout San Diego and Los Angeles and I was the first thing people saw when they went to her website!

From an inventory standpoint, I started preparing back in August and I pretty much doubled all of my inventory for each product. When I ran my projections, I was expecting probably about a 50-80% boost in sales so doubling up would have left me with plenty of extra after the holidays were over. The worst thing I could possibly do was stock out during the biggest shopping month of the year!

Looking back, I probably should have 7 X’d my inventory because sales went absolutely crazy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and I didn’t even discount my products. After those two days I started scrambling to get more inventory on planes as soon as possible because I knew I was going to stock out at Christmas.

At around the same time, the Port Unions started kicking up a lot of stink in Oakland because they wanted to be paid more. Those guys all make around 180K per year plus benefits, but they knew everybody was trying to get shipments in for the holidays so they had leverage.

They all pretty much just stopped working and allowed the ports to get extremely backlogged. One of my Meat Claw shipments sat on the boat for 2 weeks before they even took the container off and processed the inventory. After they finally processed my boxes, they needed to be shipped to my warehouse in California and then shipped out again to go on to Amazon warehouses, so this delay was major.

The Ports then (illegally) tried to impose a congestion fee of $1,000 on every container because of the backlog. Lawyers got involved and ultimately they weren’t able to charge me for my meat claws because they had already been sitting there waiting before the fee was announced. My thermometer shipment however did get knocked and I ended up paying an extra $450 because of the damn unions.

The thermometer shipment left China in October and as of today (12/21) they still haven’t reached my warehouse in California. That shipment in itself has been an absolute nightmare. Normally I ship the thermometers by air. You need extra documentation and testing that costs about $5,000 per shipment for the batteries to be approved for air shipping. What I do is allow my manufacturer to coordinate the shipment because they send them to Hong Kong first and then to the US and get around this ridiculous fee. What I didn’t know was that I can ship them via ocean with no problem and use my own guys. So my manufacturer coordinated the ocean shipment and about 2 days before they left port I realized they only did the shipment, not delivery to my warehouse or customs clearance or anything else.

Basically the thermometers were just going to be dropped off in Oakland and nobody would know what to do with them. I started scrambling to get the back end shipping figured out and my manufacturer said to simplify things they would just let me use their freight forwarder. So now I’m dealing with a Chinese freight forwarder (Dolphin Logistics) and signing power of attorney and other documents for a company I know nothing about. Dolphin was making me incredibly nervous because they were so unorganized and they kept asking me dumb questions like is my warehouse on a military base? They were probably just checking off boxes on the forms and making sure, but come on!

Instead of paying the Chinese freight forwarder, my manufacturer paid them directly and then refunded me the excess money I sent them (about $1,200). The freight forwarder won’t give me an invoice for this shipment because obviously the manufacturer took their own spread on the deal, but I’m just happy they were able to figure it out for me.

So all of this shit is going on and at the same time the holidays are here and people are buying like crazy. At one point, I was selling over 100 Meat Claws per day! (UPDATE: 12/29/14 reviewing sales reports. Before stocking out I had 3 days in a row of 300+ Meat Claw sales) To offset the demand I was increasing my prices like crazy. My grill set normally sells for around $29 and at one point I had it up over $40 and they were still flying off the shelves. I literally stocked out of everything except my grill brushes and now I won’t be back in stock for at least a couple more weeks.

Sales were skyrocketing overnight. I went from my best ever of around $1,500 in one day to stringing along multiple 6-$7,000 days in a row!

 

Up until this point I have been completely self funded so there is no way I would have been able to prepare for the holidays the way I actually needed to. Next year I’ll have a line of credit from the bank so I should be in really good shape.  I think I could have probably done a good quarter million dollars in a month if I was fully stocked up. And that’s with only 4 product lines! Next year I’m going to be super aggressive with my bank funding so I’m hoping to have at least 8-10 by that point. For the record…I also received my ASM Affiliate check this month and had Hyacinth Marketing revenue of a couple grand. Can you say first 6 figure month? Boom Baby!

Of course, with every two step forwards I take, I take one big step backwards. We had a customer service nightmare on our hands I ended up over selling the Meat Claws by over 1,000 orders before we realized what was happening and could shut down the listing. We had to cancel all of the orders on Dec 18 and then inform everyone they weren’t getting their products by Christmas time and they weren’t getting them until Jan or Feb now either.

This whole issue was actually Amazon’s fault and they accepted responsibility for it. But at the end of the day, we took the brunt of the hit and people were justifiably extremely pissed off. I had to sit and write a letter to send to everyone explaining the situation. In the span of about 3 days, Caecilia and I probably fielded over 4,000 emails. Just day and night doing email all day long. It was brutal, but the letter helped soften the blow and I don’t think we are going to get a ton of negative press and feedback online as a result. Amazon is set up so you can’t bulk email customers, but Caecilia found an intricate work around to do it so we were at least able to bulk email the letters. She gets paid hourly, so I gave her a bonus of 10 hours worth of money because of the amount of time she saved us!

Sometimes shit just happens that’s out of your control. Here is what I wrote:

Dear Customer,

I’m writing this letter to express how deeply sorry I am that you will not be receiving your Meat Claws order.

Over the past two weeks, both Caecilia and I have been reaching out to provide updates on the delayed shipping situation. We gave you our word that no matter what, we would get your order to you before Christmas.

Today is now December 18^th and unfortunately we are spending our day cancelling/refunding orders instead of shipping them out. This is not a situation we are taking lightly. We pride ourselves on going above and beyond with our customer service and always providing fast shipping for our customers. Today we let you down.

For some of you, this letter will seem unnecessary. For many of you, this letter won’t be enough.

I understand that many of you are angry and if I was in your situation I would be to. I’m not writing this letter to point the finger at Amazon or attempt to justify the actions that were taken. There are always 2 sides to every story.

At Cave Tools, we believe in full transparency. For those of you interested in an explanation, I have laid out all of the facts on page 2 of this letter.

They say that somewhere between 20 and 80 percent of customers will do business with a company once and never again. We sincerely hope that you will give us another chance to earn your business in the future.

Next time you shop for Cave Tools on Amazon, use coupon code QQZJQ3VZ at checkout for a 30% off discount. This coupon code will apply to our Grill Brush, BBQ Tools Set, Meat Claws, Digital Thermometer, and our Meat Tenderizing Hammer (available in February).

Caecilia and I will be working around the clock to make sure we answer any and all questions you may have. You can direct your inquiries to orders@mycavetools.com  and we will do our best to answer as soon as possible.

For the next week, I have redirected our customer service phone line to go directly to my cell phone. If you call (267) 282-1009 you can speak with me personally.

 

Sincerely,

Michael “Medium Rare” O’Donnell

Cave Tools – Owner

How Fulfillment by Amazon Works: Cave Tools (the seller) sends inventory to Amazon warehouses. The warehouses receive the inventory and typically within 48 hours that inventory is available for shipping out to customers. When an order is placed on Amazon, a message is automatically sent to the warehouse and order is shipped to the customer immediately.

Timeline:

• November 24: We stocked out of Meat Claws
• November 26: New Meat Claw inventory shipped to Amazon Warehouse. We set the restock date on Amazon to December 8^th and started accepting pre-orders with the understanding that all orders would be shipped no later than the 8^th
• December 1: Meat Claws received at Amazon warehouse and expected to be processed within 48 hours. Even with holiday delays, we have plenty of time because we set our ship date to December 8
• December 3: We receive notification from Amazon that 100 units have been lost. We shipped the Meat Claws in boxes of 40 each, which means they would have had to lose 2.5 boxes. Investigation ensues. There is still plenty of inventory to satisfy our commitments even if they can’t recover the lost units.
• December 6 – 8: Inventory still showing in “Receiving” status. Phone calls to support every day notifying them of December 8 shipping commitments. We are told that our inventory is being expedited and that it will appear by “The end of the day today”.
• December 9 – 12: Phone calls every day explaining that we are now late on our orders. Amazon assures us they are accepting responsibility and explains that for some unknown reason their computer system decided to ship all of the inventory to another warehouse across the country.
• December 13: Amazon support notifies us that our inventory is now expected to be available on December 17 and we will be able to make delivery in time for Christmas
• December 14-16: Phone calls to support checking on status. No new information
• December 17: Inventory still showing as 0 units. Support launches another investigation. At 7:30pm we are notified that our new inventory, which was supposed to be reserved for customers like yourself, was actually sold and that is why inventory is showing as 0. Amazon accepts responsibility for the error and support does not know why we were previously told that our inventory would be available by December 17.

 

The news we received yesterday came as a complete shock. How could we possibly have sold the inventory without knowing about it? Why were we continually told that our inventory would be available to ship to customers before Christmas?

 

 

 

There are many unanswered questions right now and we are still reviewing all of the information with Amazon to see how we can get to the bottom of this. More importantly, how we can avoid something like this happening again to us and other Amazon Sellers in the future.

While I don’t want to speculate about why we were told certain things about expected delivery dates, I can offer my best explanation as to how I think the inventory was sold without our knowledge.

When inventory is received and processed at Amazon warehouses, we are normally notified that the entire shipment is now available for shipping. For example, if we sent 100 units, after they were processed, 100 units would show as available inventory on our dashboard.

According to my conversations with Amazon Support, this didn’t happen. Instead, small spurts of Meat Claws became available at a time. Using the above example of 100 units, this means that throughout the day 10 units would become available, then 5, then 7, etc.

Before our Seller’s dashboard could update the inventory numbers, those incremental units were being sold already. As far as we knew, Amazon support had been telling us that it would all be received on December 17 and our inventory stayed at 0 on the dashboard.

The next logical question would be how did we not notice the additional sales revenue coming in since these units were in fact being sold? Even though the inventory stayed at 0, our Seller’s dashboard would still be reporting the additional income.

Amazon shows us total sales on a day to day basis. However, this sales number is a top level number that includes all of our product lines together. The specific data, such as how many Meat Claw sales were sold on a given day typically lags behind a good 2-3 days.

Since the Meat Claw sales were coming in incrementally and both us and every Amazon support person we spoke with was under the impression that our inventory was still being transferred from one warehouse to another, we were unable to determine what happened until yesterday.

To Amazon’s credit, their support staff spent a good 3 hours yesterday sorting through all of the information before they could come to this conclusion and let us know what happened.

 

As mentioned previously, we are not trying to point fingers or justify the events that happened. We truly believe that at every step of the way both Cave Tools and Amazon took actions and communicated with customers using the best knowledge that was available at the time.

We are sincerely sorry that you did not receive your order and we hope that the above explanation provides some clarity as to why.

We are continuing to review all of these events in detail to see how we can learn and grow as a company. You are a valued customer and we will do our best to earn back your trust.

Trouble in Wire City

At the same time all of this was going on, I was having some serious wire transfer issues.

Chinese New Year is coming up soon and the entire country pretty much shuts down for a full month. Nobody works or does anything. The problem with this is that if you want to stock up for summer time, you need to place your orders before the holiday and hopefully ship out as soon as they get back to work so you can be ready in time.

After what happened to me last summer with my grill brush stock out, I wanted to load up like crazy. For my first time ever, I’m actually filling an entire ocean container with Cave Tools products. It will be a split between 3,000 grill sets and 3,500 grill brushes. So I spoke with Tracy and just like normal I sent my 30% deposit so we could start manufacturing. About 15 hours later Tracy Skype’s me and she’s upset.

She forgot to tell me that they changed their banking information since my last wire and they couldn’t receive the money I sent them, about $5,000 worth. Not only that, but the company name changed, the bank changed, and the account numbers all changed. Can you imagine the look on my banker’s face when I went down to work out the recall?

I’m not sure how true this is, but this is my understanding of the way it works over in China. Non Chinese people are not allowed to own manufacturing facilities. So they get a Chinese guy to own the place and then a bunch of foreign corporations own various percentages of his company. Throughout the year, they change the banking and business names around so they effectively distribute their income to the various accounts of the actually businesses that own the manufacturing facilities. This is obviously very shady and probably not legal from a tax standpoint in China, but that’s on them. I’m just a paying customer 🙂

The recall took about 7 business days and somewhere along the line intermediary banks took about $150 out in fees. I got my money back and then re-wired the full 100% to Tracy and everything worked out. They even started manufacturing before they received the money so I wouldn’t get hit with any delays. It was an honest mistake and Tracy helps me out so much throughout the year anyways so I wasn’t angry with her. I let her save face and we moved on.

While this wire was under investigation, I had another wire I sent for an order of Meat Claws that my manufacturer claimed they never received. The money had left my account already and we double checked that all the banking info was correct. What the fuck!

So now we started a 2^nd wire investigation to see what happened and determine if the Chinese bank was trying to screw me. Meanwhile, my manufacturer was storing my products in their warehouse and wouldn’t release for shipping until the balance was paid. They ended up storing my products for almost a month before they finally said I needed to pay and get rid of them because they didn’t have room to store them. Now I had to float another $4,000ish so we could move forward with shipping before I received my original money back.

The Chinese bank kept telling my manufacturer and me that we needed to produce what’s called the swift 103 bank copy. I drove down to my bank 2 days in a row asking for the documentation, but the banker I was working with had no clue what it was. She called the wire department a few times, but wasn’t asking the right questions and I was getting pissed off and arguing with her. Basically as soon as she heard the first no she just told me nobody knew what the swift 103 was. Even though this is a universal bank form for wires.

I was being really short with her so finally she just gave me the phone number to the wire department and said call yourself because nobody knows what you are talking about. I was on the phone with them for less than 7 minutes and I was able to get to a manager that knew what they were talking about and they sent the 103 swift to the Chinese bank.

After the investigation was complete, they said the reason the bank didn’t accept the money was because on the beneficiary company’s name we left out the Co, LTD. at the end. What a fucking joke! Of course the intermediaries took out some fees again along the way, but in the end I got most of my money back and the Claws are on the way now.

New Website Finally Launches

About 5 months ago I purchased cavetools.com so I could eventually move away from mycavetools.com. When it comes to web development, I have worked almost exclusively with WordPress throughout my career. WordPress is great, but the platform itself is meant for informational websites, not ecommerce.

I had a pretty damn good ecommerce set up on WordPress, but it was buggy and often times I was getting calls from customers because they couldn’t place orders. I get around 3,000 visitors per month to my website, but at the end of the day it just wasn’t converting into the sales numbers I would expect. I was literally only doing a couple orders per month using that website even with all of that organic traffic.

For my new website, I wanted to use an ecommerce platform that would convert my visitors into buying customers. I did my research and chose Shopify as the platform I was going to go with. I then went through a bunch of ecommerce training materials and started analyzing big ecommerce websites like Amazon and Zappos to see what kind of marketing features I wanted to pull in to my website so I could maximize conversions.

I then took my whiteboard and drew up the website design and wrote up a word document explaining all of the features on the site.

I then contacted my shopify development programmer in India, Nalini. We discussed all of the features and the intricacies of the design. From a coding standpoint it wasn’t going to be easy to do what I wanted to do. I understood that, but I also wasn’t happy with the development time and final price she gave me.

So I started contacting Shopify development agencies in the U.S. to get a comparable rate and see what they could do. In the end, I found an agency up in New York that’s run by 2 brothers that used to be big time ecommerce guys back in the day before starting their agency. It was only going to cost me about $500 more than using Nalini and I would be able to call them and speak with them since they were in New York. Part of me was also interested in how they handled the entire web dev process since I do a lot of that stuff in my marketing agency.

I got a quote from them and also documented all of our conversations so I could use similar processes on future websites we build in Hyacinth Marketing. He also gave me a 2 week turnaround time which was great.

In the end, the website turned out fantastic and I couldn’t be happier with it. In the last 7 days we’ve already done over $1,000 in sales and I have inquiries for 4 rotisserie grills. They were the toughest thing to sell on my old site and now people want to buy them all the time from me. Here’s a screen shot of the new site:

The day after we launched the site (Dec 9) I had an awesome idea. I wanted to see if my graphics guy Ibrahim could photoshop in my tongs on a kickass banner image I found. So I brought out my product light box and took like 30 pictures of the tongs at all sorts of angles and sent it over to him. It only took him about an hour’s worth of work, but he did a fantastic job. Far exceeded my expectations on what the result was going to be. I gave him a 3 hour bonus payment on top because I was so happy.

The new website has all sorts of really cool features such has product zoom when people hover over an image (same as Amazon) and 2-step opt in processes all over the place for lead gen. Instead of normal email capturing like you see for our VIP member’s area In the footer, I have buttons all over the place to give away the free recipe book. When people click on the button, they think they are getting it for free so they mentally commit to it. After they click the button a pop up appears and asks them for their email.

Since they already mentally committed to it, they are way more likely to give their email address. The system I’m using also pre populates their email address in the field if they’ve been cookied on other websites before that also use this system. The result is that they mentally commit and then their email is already typed in so they only have to accept and they get it. Really awesome technology!

I also created semi-automated funnels for retailers who want to carry our products and bloggers that want to do reviews. In the past we did everything on a person by person basis, but now I’m able to build email lists of each type of person. In the future I’ll be able to contact them all at once and provide consistent messaging. I can see us running liquidation deals and things like that for wholesalers when we want to move a lot of inventory at once.

I already received a call from Cigars International because they want to carry our products on their website. Normally wholesalers order like 5-10 units at a time, but they want to purchase an initial order of 500 meat claws. Only problem is I don’t have any left in stock after Christmas, so we’ll follow up in January with them.

On all of our packaging we advertise free recipe book with the purchase. When you offer it for free with the purchase, people get pissed if you then ask them for their email address because technically it’s not free now. So what we do is we insert a business card into every package telling them where on the website they can go to download the book and people don’t have to give their email address.

This insert strategy is great because I can sell products anywhere, including in retail stores, and people still have to come back to our website. On that bonus page, I wanted to devise a special offer that I could give people so I could capture their information. The problem with Amazon is I don’t get people’s email addresses so I can’t build my own customer list. The list is a major asset for the company so I created what’s called a self liquidating offer.

A self liquidating offer is simply an offer that you break even on, but still acquire a customer. I wanted to find something valuable I could give away for extremely cheap that would help me acquire customers and be enticing enough for people to buy.

The two big things people in my industry are always looking for are internal meat temperatures and wood smoking flavors/temps. So I found a guide for each online and told Ibrahim to recreate them exactly but with my branding on it. Then I just went in and changed the suggestions and wording around so we weren’t stealing anything and nobody was going to try and sue for copyright infringement.

I then had both guides turned into magnets. The internal meat temperature guide is for the refrigerator and the meat smoking guide is an outdoor magnet for the grill. The beauty of this all is I’m acquiring customers for break even AND I’m getting branding in their households. Every time they have a party or people over, they see Cave Tools front and center. Brilliant!

I actually thought up this strategy randomly about 6 months ago as I was driving into Philly for a lacrosse game. I was so excited and knew I was going to forget it so I made an audio recording on my phone and just talked for 30 minutes straight about all the details so I had it down. I also spoke with Justin about it and he helped me finalize my strategy. I think originally I was going to give the magnets away for free, but he mentioned that would kill me from a cash flow standpoint and that I’d much rather break even instead of taking a loss.

Just like everything else I do in my business, the magnets had to be scalable. I wasn’t going to be manually shipping all of these things out to each customer. That would take forever! I did a little bit of searching and found a local mailing fulfillment center that could print and ship all of the magnets for me. To keep the costs down on the offer, we only ship them once at the end of the month and use USPS.

I just got all of this together and finalized 2 days ago. Just in time for everyone to open their Christmas presents and go download their recipe books. I also shot a video of me personally thanking every customer for their purchase and put that on the bonus page and also ask for people to leave a review right there on the spot.

This is perfect because we are getting them right when they are the happiest and just opened their product. We are giving them a free recipe book and some other really valuable and cool offers. They can’t possibly be unhappy because we have given them what I like to call a Customer Experience.

Corporate Structuring and Taxes

We’re coming up on the end of the year. While it’s great that we made a huge chunk of cash here at the end of the year, I need to watch out for the tax man. Since I started Hyacinth Marketing in 2012, I’ve been using my Dad’s accountant Bobby Trauffer for all of my stuff. Bob is good, but at the end of the day I have no relationship with him and he has messed up a couple times on me before.

Over the past 2 years I have been a part of a local business group in Doylestown and had the opportunity to meet and become very close with an awesome accountant. So starting January 1, I’m going to be moving everything over to Doug. I’m also hoping he can help me out with tax planning next year because this year I am screwed.

I decided to reinvest almost all of the money into new inventory and product lines. If I could do this much money with 4 product lines, imagine how much I could do when I add more. So In the past month I’ve spent probably about $60,000 ish between inventory, fulfillment, new product samples, paying off my loan to my dad, etc. Then I come to find out that when you reinvest money in inventory, it doesn’t count as an expense on the books. What that means is that even though I no longer have that money and I did the right thing and invested in my company, it will all be taxed as a profit to the business.

I haven’t gone through everything to prepare for taxes yet, but I’m not looking forward to it. I have a feeling Uncle Sam is going to put me through the ringer.

Currently Hyacinth Marketing is an LLC and is the only business I have. Cave Tools is just a brand name that Hyacinth Marketing owns. Eventually down the road I’d like to sell Cave Tools so I need to have separate books and corporate structures for each company.

I met with my attorney Ron last week and starting January 1, we are going to do a downstream merger and asset purchase. Basically that’s a legal way of saying I’m starting another company and it’s going to buy all the Cave Tools stuff off Hyacinth for free.

We’re also going to change Hyacinth Marketing into an S-Corp so I can pay as little as possible in taxes. The new company is also going to be an S-Corp as well. The way I understand it is that as the owner of an S-Corp I have to pay myself a “Reasonable” salary. Reasonable is not defined by the IRS, but if we made 100K I would probably have to pay myself 50 or something like that to pass through without any flags. That first 50 would be taxable, but then I could do a shareholder distribution for the other 50K and that wouldn’t be taxed. I like the sound of that 🙂

The new company is going to need a name and I don’t want to call it Cave Tools. The reason for that is because people can do an importer record lookup and figure out exactly where I source my products if the name was Cave Tools. Nobody is ever going to know the name of the company because Cave Tools will be the DBA name, so I’ve decided to have fun with it. We’re going to call the new company Medium Rare Industries!

One of the other really cool things with having 2 companies now is that I can bill Cave Tools from Hyacinth Marketing. Basically throughout the year I can allocate expenses to certain books and that way I can keep them both under certain tax brackets.

We’re also going to be adding a 3^rd company in there for the partnership with Shane and Jarod, so Doug is definitely going to have his hands full with me for accounting.

Hiring a Full Time Marketing Employee

Remember Karen? The full time marketing girl I hired and was really excited about? Well she strung me along for about a month with excuse after excuse and I finally had to fire her. I tried giving her the benefit of the doubt so many times, but at the end of the day she really set me back.

So now we have Dorothy on board and she is doing awesome so far! She costs more money, but she also has way more experience and she can think for herself on a lot of things which is good. She’s a single mother of two and I have her working my hours, which is her night shift. Hopefully once she is fully trained we can work out a better arrangement for her so she can work regular hours and still have enough communication with me.

Right now I have her trained on Blogging, Press Release writing and Social Media. This week we will be adding in Video Marketing and then some other specific marketing strategies. My plan is to just keep teaching her stuff until I can fill a full 40 work week for her of just straight marketing. After that, I’ll hire another person and cross train them. With all the different strategies I have in my head from over the years, I think I could easily have 2 people working 40 hours a week just on marketing Cave Tools.

The thing I love the most about having Dorothy on board is that it is forcing me to create operating procedures for every aspect of the business. I read and learn so many strategies every year that I never have a chance to implement. When I train Dorothy, I create a detailed word document explaining all of the instructions. Then I shoot a video of me following the instructions to a T and demonstrating the strategy.

I probably have about 20 operating procedures right now. My goal is to build out operating procedures for everything in marketing and then start doing operating procedures for operational tasks as well. This is exactly what I did for Caecilia too. She has a 15 page Customer Service Representative manual with instructions and videos on how to do everything she ever needs to do.

When I’m done, I’ll pretty much just have like a monster book on how to run my company. I’ve talked before about my online resource training center I set up called Hyacinth Connect. Each employee gets their own area they have access to and then inside the area is all of their training materials. Instead of just giving them pdf operating procedures, I added in a wiki so everything is editable.

Whenever the wiki is edited I actually get an email about the updates. So at this point I know for a fact they haven’t been using it the way I want them to. But my goal is to start to train them to update operating procedures and add new operating procedures on their own when they discover new ways of doing things. I’ll work more on this aspect once Dorothy is fully trained and can manage her own work week. Since I get email notifications when the wiki is updated, I plan to start giving small bonuses to incentivize the behavior.

Considering Credit Cards

Up until now, I always just used my bank credit card for the business. However, my dad suggested I start getting airline credit cards and rewards cards. I spend a lot of money every year for business expenses, so I might as well start getting free flights from it all!

Looking into the various cards now, but hoping to rack up some serious points in 2015

Mentoring Matt Greenwood

I met my friend Matt Greenwood while I was in Lithuania. At the time he was developing an app and running a nightlife company in Madrid. The company was still pretty young, but it seemed like they were on the right track.

We were speaking the other day on Skype and Matt told me about how his company went under and he moved back home and had to get a job. Shitty situation, but something almost every entrepreneur has to face. I’ve been speaking with Matt pretty regularly now and helping to mentor and coach him along.

He has a job now, but he’s working on a couple different ventures on the side. I’m teaching him a good bit about outsourcing and really just being there for advice when he needs it. It feels great to be able to give back to people in the Lithuania group.

Meeting up with Tim Murdoch

Tim Murdoch (Head Coach for Montreal Lacrosse Team) was in town the other day and I got to meet up with him and grab a couple beers. His son Max had a lacrosse tournament in Feasterville, which is only about 20 minutes away from me. Unfortunately 2 teams canceled last minute, so the tournament was over after only a couple games. A lot of the parents were pissed off because they traveled from 9 different states to get there and their kids only played 2 games.

We dropped Max off at the hotel and went out for a two hours to catch up on life, business, and lacrosse. I don’t know how much I’ve talked about Tim on here in the past, but he’s a beast when it comes to business. He makes a very good living doing consulting for large companies. He only has about 5 clients and tries to work a maximum of a couple hours per day. The rest of his time he uses to coach lacrosse and enjoy life.

It was about a year ago he told me how he knew the founder of this new company and the guy was giving him an equity stake in it. The company pretty much hired Oxford Linguistics experts and developed an algorithm that aggregates public tweets and based on public sentiment they can very accurately predict what will happen with certain stock prices.

Tim went to Princeton and Harvard and sits on the US and Canada businesses board, so he knows everybody. I pretty much just look at him like The Great Connector. He was telling me how in after only a year already, the company is growing like mad. They expect it to be worth around 600 Million in about 2-3 years. Pretty much everybody in the financial sector is trying to license their software from them. They launched  with Bloomberg as their big whale and now they are almost at the point where they could fully stand on their own without Bloomberg just because everybody wants in now.

This was about 2 weeks ago so my raw facts might be a little off, but out of say 14 of the big wall street investors in the company, Tim has introduced the founder to 6 or 7 of them.

It’s always great speaking with Tim because he gives some outside advice on how I’m doing in my company. Somewhere down the line I can totally see him recommending a big client or important person to me. Definitely one of my best personal relationships that I try to keep warm and check in with every couple of months.

Webinars with Ricky

Last week my friend Ricky from Lithuania reached out to me with an idea. It had been a little while since we last talked, but he wanted to run a partnership idea by me and also catch up on life. We haven’t had a chance to speak yet in detail, but here is a synopsis of what’s going on.

I kind of forget Ricky’s entire background, but I’m pretty sure he worked at Goldman for a while and then quit to start his internet business. He’s a year or two older than me and has lived all over the place. He also hates digital footprints so he has almost no public presence on the internet. In 2015 he finally wants to come out of the shadows and stop being a behind the scenes guy.

Ricky is big on info products and webinars. Between his businesses they did about 2 Million last year in webinar sales. He’s also a workaholic similar to myself but on a different level. If you take everything at face value, it seems like he works about 12 hours a day 7 days a week all year round. I don’t think necessarily because he has to, but he wants to. Just like me, but on a more extreme level, he really enjoys everything he is learning and is passionate about his business.

So anyways, Ricky is a great guy and he was also the one who started our monthly Blacksmith webinar training series where we all teach each other different strategies we know. He tried launching an Amazon business last year in the adult niche (Aka Dildo Store haha) and completely failed and had to liquidate his inventory.

His idea is to partner with me on a webinar series that will teach people more about the physical products business model. He has all the webinar systems in place so he’s thinking that if I put in some up front work with him, he can probably do a good 5 figures with it and I would get a new passive income stream out of it.

If this was anyone else contacting me for this opportunity I probably wouldn’t do it. Ricky is such a smart guy though and in exchange for my knowledge he’ll pretty much teach me the entire ins and outs of the webinar business. Like I said, we haven’t had our full catch up conversation yet, but this could be a really good opportunity moving forward into next year.

I’m also thinking of eventually turning my outsource work into an online course. If this works well, Ricky would be my go to partner to help me launch it. When I’m done, I’ll pretty much have a turnkey content marketing outsourcing course that people can just hand off to outsourcers and blow up their businesses.

Objectives for new year

We’re already at 25 pages of content, so I’ll wrap this up quickly. Some of the work goals I’m setting for next year include:

• Adding in digital cooking courses that I can upsell to all of my physical products customers. These would be almost 100% margin and my product sales already prequalify everyone so it’s the perfect money making storm. I have Chef Carmen lined up for some conversations in January. I’m not sure if I really need to bring him in on this though or if his credibility would be worth it. In the end, he has the expertise, but I’d be writing the course content anyways. He would just be the guy to cook it all up.
• This is an entire blog post in itself, but Estonia just released a business E-Residency program where people from anywhere in the world can easily set up an Estonian corporation and take advantage of the tax breaks and be outside the reach of the US Government and US Dollar. I’m just going to say that for now this is on my radar and could be a real possibility a few years down the road
• 2015 will be the year of email marketing for me. My people received probably 4 or 5 emails all year last year. That’s horrible! With my new expertise in funnels, I plan to start developing really intricate relationship building sequences and use email to generate a lot of additional revenue
• Money Goals? I have no clue what I want to make in money. I just want to keep driving on because I love what I do and what I’m learning. The 4^th quarter this year was fantastic. With the different businesses I have going on and the addition of a bank line of credit this year, I think there is a real chance that I can do $1 million next year. For all I know I can either far undershoot this goal or crush it. Regardless, it’s all about the ride

Michael O’Donnell Establishes a Wholesale Program For Cave Tools

The idea of selling Cave Tools through retail locations was something that I immediately wrote off when I started the company. In my mind, I had all of these preconceptions that there wouldn’t be any money in it for me and that the only way for me to build the business was through ecommerce. The stories of people trying to sell through Walmart and getting negotiated down to break even profit margins is what I expected would happen if I tried to go through retail. I never even considered the fact that it’s a totally different game with small retailers and hardware shops. When I take away my Amazon referral fees, I can sell at a lower price wholesale and still make almost the same profit margin.

On July 12^th I received a Facebook message from the owner of a hearth retailer in Virginia. Hearth retailers sell fireplaces and fire pits and from my understanding, they typically work with architects and construction companies. Many of them however, have a show room where they can display their products and they do get normal consumers coming in. The owner, Jonathan (Not Jon, he must be called Jonathan at all times) was searching for a Grill Brush that was safe for porcelain grill grates on Google. Of course, one of my Youtube videos shows up on the 1^st position on the 1^st page for that search term, so I hooked him.

As soon as I saw the message, I responded pretending to be Caecilia my social media manger and I asked him some more questions about his business and what he was looking for. We exchanged some messages and “Caecilia” set up a phone call between him and the owner of our company, Michael O’Donnell, for the following week to discuss further. “She” also threw in a couple comments about how Mike liked the fact that they are a small family owned business and that customer service was a huge deal for him. I had no clue what to do to prepare for my phone call, so I reached out to my network of other ecommerce sellers to see who had wholesale experience.

The feedback and advice I received was priceless and helped point me in the right direction for my research so I was well prepared for our call. Most retailers look for a 50% profit margin (2 times markup) so they can double their money. It is also standard for the retailer to pay for the shipping of the products. I built some excel formulas and started playing around with the numbers to see what my high and low offers would be when we negotiated and it helped me view the transaction from how Jonathan was going to see it.

I decided to be very up front with Jonathan on our phone call. I explained that we had distribution on Amazon and Sears, but that we hadn’t explored retail yet and didn’t have a system in place yet for it. I did my best to get him to name a asking price first, but he was very good at angling and eventually I just bit the bullet and told him that from my research the industry standard was to give him a 50% profit margin. Big slip! He was very surprised because in the grilling industry the standard profit margin is around 30-40% on the high end. I had already given up my position, so I turned it around and said that we wanted to ensure his success and build a long term relationship. If he could make more money on the brushes then he would buy more and we were fine with making less on our end, yada yada yada. I had done a good job of building rapport with him, so at that point we started discussing how he could help us grow our wholesale program by recommending us to other hearth retailers he has connections with. As soon as my next shipment comes in (400 by plane in 2 weeks and 1,600 by boat in 1 month) he is going to be passing us on to his list of a couple 100 other hearth retailers. Sweet!

Before we finished our conversation, I also set up an introduction with him and my Uncle Mark as a potential fire pit supplier. Mark owns a precast concrete manufacturing facility in North Carolina and they make fire pits with their excess concrete. He’s a concrete guy, not a business guy, so he had been looking for help to sell his pits. Win-Win.

Now that I had my initial success with a retailer, it was time to build out a wholesale program so I could target retailers and hardware shops nationally with my offer. I also needed to get legal protection in place and make everything look super professional. As I started delving into this project, I realized I needed to be collecting a singed reseller certificate from each person which exempts me from charging them sales tax because it would be charged on the back end to the final customer. I had to go back to Wooden Sun to get them to send me a certificate so big brother wouldn’t get me.

My next step was to build a legal contract to cover my ass and establish the terms for my agreements. This was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. I just pulled about 5 different wholesale agreements from the internet and then pieced together paragraphs from each. Customized it to my needs and then formatted everything so it looked professional and was branded as Cave Tools. The biggest clause for me was designing the agreement so people couldn’t back door me with internet sales by purchasing at wholesale rates and then under cutting my price online. With my agreement, they are only allowed to sell via brick and mortar unless written permission is given to them and they can only run discounts as low as 15% under the minimum advertised price.

Then I created my wholesale page on my website. I did some keyword research and then completely optimized the page for “Wholesale Grilling Accessories in US” and a bunch of other variations of that search term. Now I am ranking in the 1^st position on Google for a bunch of variations for that term which gives me increased exposure. The entire page is written as a sales letter too, so it is very benefit oriented and focuses on the massive 50% profit margins we offer. Of course, my products are manufactured in China, so the way I wrote the page says that they are shipped to the retailer from the US and that way the retailer doesn’t have to worry about importing or anything like that.

I’ve only been live for the wholesale program for about a week now, but I already have 3 press releases out and the 1^st page of google ranking for the webpage (will have video up there soon as well). No sales yet, but that’s a good thing because I don’t have any inventory to fulfill them. I have been running scrapers for about 4 days now pulling the contact information for almost every hearth retailer on the east coast and building an email list. As soon as I get my inventory in, I am going to do a blast email campaign and see what type of response I can get.  That would be really cool to sell say 500 brushes in one day via wholesale instead of relying primarily on my 7-15 per day on Amazon. The more inventory I move the better my brand recognition is going to be and I’ll start to get more organic traffic on the internet.

Wow! I can’t believe I have finally reached my 30 day mark for selling physical products online. I remember back in March when I was winding things down with Wayne and trying to regroup so I could focus on Hyacinth Marketing again. I was thinking of importing some cell phone batteries and selling them on the side so I could learn the ropes of physical products and working with China. Then my idea transformed into making Fat Head style wall stickers and selling them because the unit price was so low and I could form a white label relationship with a domestic printer. One thing led to another and I spent about 2 months learning and building up the infrastructure for Cave Tools to get ready for the big launch on May 28, 2013.

Before I get to the results for the first 30 days, I’d like to talk a little bit about what’s going on behind the scenes. Everything in this business revolves around driving qualified traffic to the product page. Right now my product page is converting at around 10-11%, which is really good considering that ecommerce conversions are typically around the 3-5% range. My goal is to be making 15 sales per day on average by the end of month 5 because that would put me on track for 100K per year revenue with just this one product. Based on my math, that means I need to get about 150 people to the product page every single day. This assumes people only purchase 1 at a time, which in my case I’m selling 1.14 brushes per purchase. I’m working on a couple strategies to increase that number so people start buying multiple brushes and giving them away as gifts.

In one of my updates a couple posts ago, I talked about the excel dashboard I was creating to manage the entire marketing of the business. I didn’t really know what I was building when I first started on it, but every time I go into it I upgrade it. This dashboard is ridiculously awesome and is allowing me to track and manage literally every aspect of my marketing strategy. Right now I’m executing 15 different marketing strategies to drive traffic and build SEO value of my various websites. In SEO terms, I’m using a nice mix of White hat on the front end, a little bit of Grey hat to boost them up, and then a couple sneaky Black hat strategies to promote my promotions.

Without going into the details for each strategy, this is what we are doing for promotion right now: Press Releases, Blogs, Squidoo Lenses, Videos, Social Media, Reviews promotions, Amazon ads, Facebook Ads, Coupons Code Websites, Article directories, Wikis, Pdf Directories, RSS syndication, Commenting, and Autoresponders. Getting all of these strategies up and running was difficult because they all needed to be interconnected and congruent across the board. Without my dashboard, it would all fall apart. Lately, I’ve been focusing on going back to each individual strategy and making them more efficient and powerful. I still have a few more strategies I need to add to my list. Building an Email List is at the top of the priority list right now because it opens the doors for so much more customer contact.

I’ve also mentioned about hiring people and “Silo-ing” the business. I haven’t really been doing much of that yet. My assistant Caecilia has 9 jobs she is doing for me on a weekly basis right now. This is a huge help because it frees up tons of my time to focus on strategy and managing the business. I also just hired a new person a few days ago named Anj. It’s taking a little longer than expected to get her up to speed, but once she gets rolling I’m planning on giving her close to 25-30 hours per week worth of work. I’m super excited to get her to that point because that will kick all of my SEO and traffic efforts into overdrive.

Pretty soon, I will also be selling in the Sears marketplace. My application is still under review right now, but I am expecting to hear back by tomorrow afternoon. Once I get approved, I will be sending a small batch of 150 brushes over to the Sears fulfillment centers and then the rest will go out to my Amazon warehouses. I was able to get my inventory limit raised by 30% this week, which is cool because it gives me more flexibility. The Unlimit3d website is set to begin within the week, so I’m planning on taking some of the profit from the first milestone payment and placing another order for grill brushes. Since I need to project out at least a month in advance, I think I’m actually behind schedule for my next order. The worst thing that can happen right now is to stock out of inventory, so if I need to I’ll just have to put them on a plane again instead of a boat.

I’ve also been doing a lot of research trying to figure out what my next product is going to be. Right now, I’m thinking it will be a 3 piece grill set with a Spatula, Tongs, and Grill Fork. My only concern is that right now I want to spend as much money as possible getting the grill brushes into a top position. If I start splitting my resources between the 2 products I will spread myself too thin. By the time the set releases it will also be winter time so I won’t be selling as much volume in the northern states. Definitely still have a lot of thinking to do before going down this road.

Now for the first month’s results…In the first 30 days, we sold 192 grill brushes for total revenue of $2,847.69. I’m happy with these numbers for the first month, but they are definitely not where I would like them to be. I’m still well in the hole for my investment and it might take another 2 months before the business goes positive. My next mini goal is to do 5K in revenue in one month. Everything I’m doing is building on itself, so I’m hoping to be able to reach this goal by the end of month 3 at the latest!

From Unpaid Virtual Intern to Owner of an International Marketing Company in 14 Months

          Its spring semester of my junior year at Penn State and internship season is in full swing. I just came back from a semester abroad in Ireland so I’m already behind the ball after missing the fall career fairs. After many interviews and many rejections I have finally narrowed my internship selection down to 3 companies. The first 2 companies are offering standard paid Marketing internships. The work responsibilities don’t look very challenging, but on the brighter side: (1), they are paid job opportunities in my industry, (2) if I take either internship I will probably get hired right out of school and (3), they will be reputable names to add to my resume for future jobs. The 3rd internship opportunity is an unpaid virtual internship working for an entrepreneur named Justin Lee and his wife Dreama. To be completely honest, one of the reasons why I applied for this internship was because it was unpaid and I figured there wouldn’t be much competition if I wanted to use it as a fall back. Like many internship-hungry students, I didn’t even research the opportunity until I received an email about a phone interview. In my research, I learned that Justin and Dreama were successful entrepreneurs who owned multiple businesses. I always dreamed of owning my own business, so I figured working directly with someone who has already accomplished this goal would be a good start.
My internship started during the first couple weeks of summer. It was a virtual internship, which meant that I would be working on the computer from my house. It was also unpaid, which meant that I wouldn’t be spending a ton of money that summer. At least my meals were free and I didn’t have to pay for gas to go to work. I told Justin that I would work 7 hours a day and made a commitment to myself that I would stick to my promise. We decided to correspond daily by email and weekly on the phone to track my progress. During the course of the summer, I would be helping Justin build an information product called InternProfits. InternProfits was going to “provide entrepreneurs the tools and resources to find, hire and manage interns to help grow and expand their business while creating educational opportunities for tomorrow’s talent today.” My first responsibility was to help build the internship database. This included calling every college in the United States with 3,000 students or more and collecting data on their internship programs.

I made phone calls every day for roughly 2 months to help build the InternProfits’ one-of-a-kind College and University Database. At this point, many interns probably would have quit because they weren’t seeing the immediate returns they expected. When friends and family asked me how my internship was going, it was hard to explain to them that I was making phone calls 7 hours a day for free. They didn’t see the value in it and at times neither did I, especially when I compared myself to friends with big time internships at companies like Proctor and Gamble. I would be lying if I told you that the thought of quitting never crossed my mind, but my phone skills were getting better and better and I knew that if I could prove myself to Justin, I would be able to take on more responsibility.

Eventually, I proved myself to be the most hardworking and productive intern and I was able to move on to bigger and better things. As Justin hired more interns, he allowed me to manage/train them on the most efficient ways to build the database. At this point each intern had his or her own roles, some focused on learning to write press releases while others learned social media. We all contributed a portion of our time to build the database. The next few months were extremely exciting for me because Justin brought in industry experts to create his famous Easy Intern Assignments. As top dog intern, I was given the privilege to learn internet marketing techniques and strategies from gurus such as Sam Bell, Sean Malarkey, Yaro Starak, Brian Horn, and Michael Taggart, to name a few. Google their names real quick to get an idea of the opportunity that was in front of me. It was HUGE, and I was sucking it all in like a sponge! After each training session, Justin gave me a set of goals that he wanted me to accomplish and then he set me loose. Instead of telling me exactly what to do, he allowed me to learn through trial and error. I quickly mastered article and video marketing, search engine optimization, blogging and link wheel creation, social media integration, and many other important strategies.
At the end of the summer, Justin presented me with the opportunity to stay on until the end of the first semester. It was my senior year and I already had a full schedule with school, club lacrosse, and making time to go out partying with my friends. However, we were building up for the InternProfits soft launch and I was learning so much about internet marketing and business in general that I couldn’t possibly decline. I became a time management expert and was able to work about 3 hours a day for InternProfits without any significant changes to my schedule. As the soft launch approached, we gained momentum and were excited to finally see the result of all of our hard work and effort. The launch week came and went, and when the post launch numbers were calculated, our high expectations were crushed. InternProfits didn’t do nearly as well as we all expected it to do. We were all pretty depressed for the first few weeks following the soft launch after seeing what looked to be a lot of hard work go to waste. However, after the Thanksgiving holiday, Justin and Dreama realized that InternProfits was still an amazing product and they decided to restrategize.
While Justin and Dreama focused on changing the InternProfits service offerings and price points, I set a goal to start my own business during the spring semester. I was no longer working on InternProfits, but I was still speaking with Justin on a regular basis. He became my mentor and offered me as much training and guidance as he could to help me get my business off the ground. He still included me in high-level decisions with InternProfits, like redesigning the sales funnel and planning out prospect communications because he knew it would benefit me. He also offered me more free trainings on Local and Mobile Marketing from Laura Betterly and Adam Horwitz. I took all of this training and tried to launch my own local and mobile search marketing company at Penn State. With Justin on my side to keep me focused, I was able to land multiple meetings with prospective clients. However, I quickly learned that all of the techniques and strategies in the world wouldn’t help me if I didn’t know how to sell them. By the time graduation came around, I didn’t have a single client and I lacked the confidence I needed to start my own business. Time for the real world.

Three weeks after graduation, I started working in sales for a fortune 500 company. I set conservative goals of learning about business for 2-3 years and then one day setting out again to start my own business. With no short-term plan to get me there in 3 years, I fell into the 8-5 rat race and became a bum. I went from overflowing with ambition, to coming home from work to take a nap on the couch and watch television. I may have given up on myself…but Justin didn’t. Every time we talked on the phone he asked me what ideas I was working on and when I was starting my own business. It’s pretty hard telling your mentor, who has provided you all the tools you need to succeed, that you are wasting away on the couch every day when you come home from work. Eventually it wears on you and you have to snap out of your funk. I had to either set a plan to achieve my goals or stop pretending and get some new goals. The thought of working towards my first promotion 3 years down the road didn’t appeal to me, so I whipped myself into shape.

In mid September, 2011 Laura Betterly was hosting a conference in San Antonio on the topic of Local Search Optimization. This was exactly the type of business I wanted to start and the perfect opportunity for me to get focused again, but I wasn’t planning on going. I was paying my student loans and trying to put some money into savings and the idea of spending money on a plane ticket to go to a conference on something I already failed at wasn’t at the top of my priority list. That is until I had to face Justin on the phone again. I attended that conference and it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. Within 40 days of returning from the conference I had my first paying client, a used car dealer in Philadelphia named Millevoi Bros. Auto Sales. Not only did I return from the conference super focused, but I also had the chance to network with people who were interested in the same business as me. My relationship with one of those people in particular, Benjamin Beauregard from Convernet, has helped launch me into the position I am in today.

So how did I go from having a single client in October to being the owner of an international marketing company by February? First, I started my company called Hyacinth Marketing, LLC and began offering local search engine optimization services to companies in Philadelphia. I was finally able to put to use all of the knowledge that I had been learning for the past year and half and apply it to my own business. As I started to see outstanding results, I communicated them with my friend Ben who already had a successful local search marketing business. When the time came for Ben to expand his business into working with clients all across Canada, my business was the first business he approached to partner with.

Unfortunately, my story has to end here because I am still living it! I’m building my client base here in Philadelphia and we are on-boarding over 100 clients throughout Canada within the next 2 months. I wrote this article because I wanted to reflect back on where it all began, with an unpaid virtual internship. Unpaid internships are a very controversial topic in the news these days and every time I turn around I hear another horror story. Yes, I agree, there are some terrible unpaid internships out there that offer no value whatsoever to the intern. The sad thing is that these are the only stories that make the headlines. There are plenty of unpaid internship success stories, and if designed correctly, they can provide immeasurable benefits to the intern. I went through the InternProfits system and I am living proof that an unpaid internship can be a win-win for both the intern and the company.

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On Thursday, September 22, 2011,  I approached my first potential client for my Local Marketing company idea. I haven’t signed the customer up yet, but I am fairly confident that my sales hook will make my offer irresistible. The  company I approached was Millevoi Tire and Service Center because I know the owners personally. My family has been using the Millevois for years because they are honest people and they get to know every customer personally. I got to know them on a personal level during high school when I worked as a clean up guy for the mechanics.

Now just because I am friendly with the owner doesn’t mean they’re just going to throw business my way. I simply picked them because it was a warm sales call instead of going in cold. As someone just starting out, I needed a way to build credibility fast because I don’t have any past customer success stories or testimonials to back me up. I decided to incorporate the principle of free work (Yes FREE!) to build my credibility before even asking for a dime.

I approached the situation by asking if I could try an experiment with their company. Once they inquired about the experiment, I gave a short history about how I have worked in internet marketing for over a year and how I just got back from a high level internet marketing conference called LMASS. This instantly gave me some credibility, but here is the kicker. I told them I learned a couple of tricks at this conference and I wanted to try an experiment to see if I could get a customer testimonial video of them on the first page of Google in less than a week. Oh, and by the way, the search term “Philadelphia mechanics” gets 1900 local searches per month. What business owner in their right mind would turn down this opportunity? That’s what I thought!

So now I’m in the door and if my little experiment works out (which it has for a couple search terms already) then I have a really good chance of making the sale. So without further ado, here is my customer testimonial video:

 

I’ll follow up next week after I review the results with the Millevois and hopefully I have my first client under my belt!

 

 

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