The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mike Begg, Co-Founder, CEO, Interim COO of AMZ Advisers, Global Ecommerce Brand Accelerators

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Mike Begg, Co-Founder, CEO, Interim COO of AMZ Advisers, Global Ecommerce Brand Accelerators Amzadvisers.com AMZ Advisers is a full-service eCommerce consultancy focused on creating growth opportunities for Brands / Manufacturers / Private labels across the US, Europe, Canada, and Asia. Our team of 45+ talented individuals has come together to drive sales for brands worldwide since 2014. Mike Begg is an eCommerce entrepreneur, and currently, the co-founder of a digital marketing agency focused on the Amazon platform. He made the jump to start his own business and get into eCommerce while he was working in real estate for Sears and could see the writing on the wall that the company was going down. At the same time, Amazon was in its ascendency and he saw a huge opportunity to build a business around it.

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Go to Goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, YouTube.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, and Chris Voss1 on the TikTok channels over there where all the kids are playing. Today, we have an amazing gentleman on the show. Mike Begg joins us on the show. He is an entrepreneur and expert in e-commerce and digital marketing. Today, we have an amazing gentleman on the show. Mike Begg joins us on the show. He is an entrepreneur and expert in e-commerce and digital marketing. He co-founded AMZ Advisors with his two partners in 2015 and has generated over half a billion dollars in sales for its clients. Mike and the AMZ team also operate AMZ Courses, educating Amazon sellers on how to maximize sales on the platform. And Go Advance, Go Advance, Go Avance, which helps brands expand into Latin America.

He loves sharing advice and help on anything related to Amazon and building efficient businesses. Welcome to the show, Mike. How are you? I'm doing very well, Chris. Thank you for having me here, and thank you for that great introduction. There you go, and thank you for coming. It was just your bio, so it was pretty awesome that way. Give us the.coms, wherever people can find you on the interwebs there. Yeah, the websites are amzadvisors.com and goevance.com. amzcourses.com is also there, but you can also find the courses through AMC Advisors, so multiple options. There you go.

So tell us a little bit about 30,000 Overview of what AMC Advisors does. Yeah, so from the extremely high level, what we do is we partner with some of the biggest brands in the world and help them sell more online, specifically on the Amazon platform in the U.S., but we'll also help these brands get into other markets if they're interested in it for example we take a lot of us brands into Europe a lot of European brands into the US and but and and other marketplaces as well and then we have another company specialized for Latin America because Latin America is a whole different beast there you go Latin

America is gonna be pretty growing, opening, things like that. Yeah. I mean, the market. There you go. Looks like we're getting some dropout on the Internet there. Yeah, looks like we're getting some dropout on the Internet there. Yeah, looks like we're getting some dropout on the internet there. Let's see how it goes. So you were saying something about Latin America? Yeah, so Latin America is growing fast. I mean, three of the fastest growing e-commerce markets in the world are located in Latin America.

That's Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina right now. So the opportunity is huge. When we look at the actual size of the market, it's about $350 billion per year in sales happen in Latin America, which is pretty, in e-commerce sales, excuse me, happen in Latin America, which is a really significant number, especially when you start comparing it to some of the other countries and marketplaces worldwide. So it's awesome, but there are a lot of challenges for foreign brands

because in most instances, it's very protectionist. You need a local business. You need local business partners and a whole bunch of other hurdles that you need to jump over. So what is your origin story? How did you get into this business and start this company? So originally, I'm from Connecticut. I don't live in Connecticut anymore. I actually live in Guadalajara, Mexico um so that's a little bit of a detail but uh like i said originally from connecticut

went to university in philadelphia and in uh long island as well and uh when i graduated i went and worked in consulting i really didn't like consulting. I got into real estate development. I worked in real estate development for Sears at the time, which this was about 2014, 2015. Sears was kind of on its way out or we were trying to save the company the best we could. Anyway, I ended up doing a bunch of different real estate deals over there. But one of the interesting deals that really caught my attention was Amazon trying to buy our space at a mall. And I was like, why was Amazon trying to buy our space at a mall? It turns out they wanted to build a fulfillment center or a warehouse to actually do last mile delivery for consumers. And that's really where I started getting my attention on Amazon and e-commerce. And then from there, you know, started launching my own brands, had some success there, realized a lot of other big brands didn't know what they were doing and kind of just evolved into a marketing agency.

And then all the other opportunities have come out of that. So you helped kind of resolve your issues with trying to sell stuff and then moved into, well, if my recipes seem to work, I'll help other brands? Exactly. I mean, we, as myself, when I say we, it's the same founders I have named, the advisors. We were selling art supply products. And there were two different things that came out of that. One, we were competing against brands like Crayola. And we were beating Crayola in a lot of categories, which was kind of an eye-opener. Like, how is our small startup able to compete with Crayola, which was wild at the time to think. And it also made us realize

what our strengths and what our weaknesses were. Our strengths are that we're really good at marketing and really good at sales. We're really bad at inventory management. We ran into a whole bunch of inventory management challenges. So it was kind of playing to our strengths, using what was working for us for other companies, and then helping other brands take advantage of the Amazon platform. There you go. Well, that sounds pretty awesome. You were selling e-books to retail arbitrage and private labels, digital marketing, and online education at one point? Oh, yeah.

Lots of different stuff. So originally, we started with publishing, self-publishing on the Kindle platform. That was kind of our first foray into e-commerce on amazon and you know that's a pretty pretty low cost way to start selling products you make a royalty on every book sold from there it was a retail arbitrage where we started uh going to like every walmart target in the tri-state area again like i said i'm from connecticut so uh connecticut new york new jersey buying up everything on clearance and then selling it on amazon uh we made about

ten thousand dollars from that and we flipped that put it into our first private label brand which was the art supply brand and uh you know kind of evolved that way there you go well you're kicking ass and taking names then so uh what what sort what sort of, now evidently you have two of your friends as your business partner. What's it like doing that? partners uh it's always a unique experience but i think for us it's worked really well because we can be super transparent and super honest with each other and no one really gets offended uh so for example like if i come in i'm not gonna say me but if someone else comes in one of my partners comes in swearing at me or complaining about whatever like i'm not gonna get offended like they're obviously bothered by something and we're going to try to resolve it. So yeah, there you go. I think it works for, for what we have. I highly wouldn't recommend it for everyone, but, uh, it really depends on, you know, the types of friendships you have, um, what your

shared or common goals are and what direction you're working in. There you go. It can be challenging sometimes, uh, whether it's a spouse or someone you're in a relationship or friendships, because, you know, it can be a challenge. And it's harder to fire friends than it is to work with them or something like that. So what's your proudest moment as an entrepreneur? That's a good one. I think for me, so like I was pretty particularly involved in this. So when we talked about kind of the origin story a little bit, I didn't go into too much detail with it, but, uh, how I ended up here in Mexico, but as we were starting the agency, we wanted to give

it as much of a runway to take off. So we had all our money saved, everything that we'd been, you know, saving from selling products as well as from, uh, what we had all our money saved, everything that we'd been saving from selling products, as well as from what we were doing in our personal jobs before that. I was doing real estate development, my partner's jobs as well. And we were like, how can we make this money last as long as possible? So we realized that we could move to Mexico and obviously the money would go a lot longer there. So originally we moved to Playa del Carmen while we were really getting the business up and running near Cancun. And as the business started to gain a lot more traction, you know, I was kind of tired of Playa del Carmen, I wanted to go see other parts of Mexico or travel more. I ended up coming to Guadalajara, which is where I live now. And I met

my wife, who was not my wife back then, but I met her here in Guadalajara. Ended up coming back here after traveling for about a year. We started dating then. And ever since then, she pushed me a little bit more to start hiring here in Mexico, instead of hiring in the US or hiring freelancers. And I think building the team that we've built here in Mexico is probably one of the things I'm most proud of. We have a team of about 55 employees in total. And taking it from really scratch to figuring out the hiring processes, the company structure, everything that we needed in Mexico to be successful was a huge accomplishment for us. And I think that's one of the things that I've really enjoyed.

And then seeing the culture evolve within the company and how much our employees love working for us has been another awesome thing that I've been able to experience. There you go. And per your website, it says you accelerate seven-figure brands on Amazon, Walmart, and MercadoLibre? Yes. There you go.

Yep. So what we do is we take brands essentially from $1 million in online sales and we get them over $10 million. Wow. We have an entire program to help them get there and everything that we focus on. And we have, at this point, hundreds of success stories doing that. Obviously, Amazon in the U.S. is the most well-known and the easiest platform to make that happen on. But we've also worked with a lot of brands at Walmart, MercadoLibre.

We work with brands that are looking to get into Latin America. Again, that's mainly the big platform down here. So we do a lot of focus on that as well. There you go. Where do most brands fail when it comes to selling on Amazon or those other platforms? I would say that most brands fail by not investing enough into the platform and not really understanding where the platform fits within their larger sales funnel or within their company as a whole. You're never going to make a ton of money on Amazon. There's a ton of fees. There's a ton of costs. It's very your advertising costs are higher if you are going to amazon trying to make it a profit center for you you're approaching it the wrong way and it's it it's different for every business but in general if you have uh i think it's i think the number is

like 70 of all consumers are going to Amazon to start a product search online now. If you're not on Amazon and not being discoverable, consumers are not going to find your brand. Your brand is not going to grow. You're not going to get sales lift on any of the platforms. And those are all the problems that most brands don't realize when they go to the platform. They're like, oh, well, I want to make this margin. I want to make this. I'm not going to spend this bunch of ads. I'm not going to invest on it. They don't see the growth they want. They don't acquire the platform, they're like, oh, well, I want to make this margin. I want to make this. I'm not going to spend this bunch of ads. I'm not going to invest on it.

They don't see the growth they want. They don't acquire the new customers they want. And then they don't really build out the rest of their sales funnel. With Amazon as the main piece for consumers to find their brand and then get everyone in and push them into whatever other platforms they can. There you go. So how important is it to use Amazon FBA, which I will need to identify what this that is. I think I know what it is when selling on Amazon as opposed to shipping yourself, I think. Yeah. So there's two different models to fulfill customer orders. One is for,

you know, to have your own warehouse and send orders from there. You use a 3PL and send orders from their third party logistics company. Or you can use the 3PL and send orders from there, a third-party logistics company. Or you can use Fulfillment by Amazon, which is Amazon's own in-house warehouse network. And the warehouses are everywhere in the US now. The network's crazy. It's one of the largest logistics companies in the world right now. But essentially what they do is that

they will store your inventory for you. And then every time you get an order on the platform, they automatically ship it out from the warehouse. So it's pretty much store your inventory for you. And then every time you get an order on the platform, they automatically ship it out from the warehouse. So it's pretty much hands off for you. When you are in Amazon FBA, you get the Amazon Prime badge, which is a huge selling point on Amazon, if your product is prime, much more likely to convert when consumers are shopping for it. So by being able to have that Prime badge using the FBA program is giving you

a leg up on the rest of the competition. It also seems to be that Amazon tends to feature products that have the Prime badge and are in FBA over other products when it comes to the search results page. So it is extremely important to use the Fulfillment by Amazon network. There you go. Yeah, that's what I've heard. And having that Prime badge, I mean, when I'm ever buying something on Amazon, I'll be like, oh, Prime, hey, I can get that quicker. You know, I don't have to worry about it maybe coming from someplace else. So that makes all the difference in the world. How do you optimize or I guess you help people optimize for Amazon SEO? I guess I didn't even know that was a thing. Yeah. So at the end of the day, Amazon's just a giant search engine. It's really not

much different than Google. It's just that the ranking factors are different. So when we look at traditional SEO, you're looking at things like keywords, blogs, backlinks, all that type of stuff. When you're looking at Amazon, you're looking at metrics like conversion rate, sales velocity, or the number of units you're selling per day over a time period. And when you start optimizing for those factors is really when you start seeing the growth. So it starts by looking at your product, figuring out what the most relevant keywords are, and then rewriting the copy on your product listings to make sure that the most relevant keywords are showing up. You're also going to want to optimize your images, highlighting some of those most relevant keywords.

So when a consumer is looking for whatever the product is, it says it in your first image or your second image. It says, Oh, this is exactly what I do, or this is exactly what it is. That's going to lead to a higher conversion rate. A higher conversion rate is going to lead to more visibility on the platform. It's going to lead to a higher conversion rate. A higher conversion rate is going to lead to more visibility on the platform. It's going to lead to a higher sales velocity. And it just creates a positive feedback loop. So from that point, you start moving further and further up the rankings on Amazon.

There you go. That makes sense. I mean, it's a highly competitive environment. I mean, anytime I go on there, there's lots of things going, hey, you want to buy this? And it kind of knows what you're searching for. And sometimes the things it advises are better than the product you're looking at, too, or seem better. You know, I don't know. It's a crapshoot.

What about reviews and stuff? Those seem to be fairly important in people's buying decisions. I know mine are when I look at stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's the truth for anything when you're buying online. I mean, if you don't have good social proof, like why is someone going to have the trust of your brand? So Amazon's recently made some changes to the way that they actually show reviews on the platform. But in general, having the social proof is a huge factor in actually getting people to purchase the product.

Typically, if you're under, you know, four stars on Amazon, you're gonna have a harder time converting people. And you really need to look at what the causes of those reviews are to try to address the problems. Sometimes it can be a problem with your product. Sometimes it can be with the manufacturing, the packaging, it could be with the way Amazon storing it, it could be arriving damage, there could be a whole range of reasons that you really need to dive into these reviews. And that's also the really critical feedback that's going to help you improve as a company. So it has two benefits in that it helps you sell more, but it also gives you, I don't want to say real time, but it gives you feedback from consumers at a fairly quick turnaround on how you

can improve. And I think those are the two key aspects. The way Amazon's doing it now, instead of before, was like before you would see products that have like 10,000 or 20,000 reviews or whatever. And now they're saying that, for example, if I have a 4.7 average, it's going to say 4.7 and it's going to say, you know, 70% of reviews ranked as 4.7. So you won't see the whole number now the whole uh the total number now you'll see like how many of the total numbers come out to this average i've been seeing that because i was like why did they change it and uh you know sometimes i have found that even though if it shows they have a lot of reviews you've got to look at the stack of the reviews yeah and sometimes you have to look at the ones and then you kind of find out some stuff there yeah uh and

and hopefully they're getting rid of you know they it seems like they had a lot of bots or cheaters somehow that were making fake reviews um because i've seen a lot of them like that product sucks uh you guys have three different programs that you guys utilize i see on your website new to amazon accelerator program and global expansion tell us how those Yeah. So each program is serving different purposes. The main program is the accelerator and that's the one I mentioned a little earlier where we take brands from doing 1 million a year on Amazon to doing 10 million plus. With that program, we're doing all the content, all the creation, all the SEO, all the strategy

behind your marketing positioning and your merchandising on the platform and the actual advertising management and building out your sales funnel on Amazon. The new to Amazon is for brands that are looking, that are already doing sales online. They're usually doing about a million, maybe on other platforms, maybe through their own DTC website, but they have some type of brand recognition and they're looking to really get onto the Amazon platform the correct way.

And we will essentially do all their setup, help start scaling from from zero and then we depending on the progress we move them into the accelerator program to help them keep growing on the platform and finally as i mentioned like global expansion is another big aspect especially this year uh there's been a lot more interest in brands getting into the other markets and we essentially will help them figure out all their logistics, all their compliance, all the fiscal aspects they need. And we have all the partners to help with all of this to make sure that their transition into the new marketplace goes smoothly.

And then we'll help them manage the advertising and the marketing from there. There you go. I guess that I see that in the resources with your partners and different people that can help people do all the different aspects they need to do to do business on Amazon on top of what you guys do for them. Yeah. I mean, we have over 40 partners that help us with all different aspects of what we're doing. But specifically on the global expansion piece, there's a lot of collaboration that needs to happen between different types of service providers. I mean, it's like anything.

If you're starting a new business, it's like anything, if you're starting a new business, it's essentially starting a new business. You need to make sure you have your tax IDs. You need to make sure you have the entity. You need to make sure that you have all the compliance you need for your products. It's a whole range of things. And that's really where we help a lot of brands navigate. Like, you know, I'm from the US. How do I do this in the UK? Or how do I do this in France? And that's really where we get them to. There we go. That's awesome, man. What are some things we haven't talked about, about your company and how you guys do it and work with clients? Any success stories you want to,

you can talk about? Oh yeah. I mean, we've had tons of success stories. Some of the more recent ones that we can think of. There was actually a brand that we took from uh about zero to about i think there were about 1.2 million and then they were able to get on to shark tank from there they actually turned out an investment yeah yeah they turned out an investment from mark cuban uh who hasn't right yeah exactly and now they're on uh 11 million dollar a year run rate so we took them from to 11 million um there's other brands we've taken from 30,000 a month to doing 150, $160,000 a month in the course of a year. So these are the types of results that we can see, especially when our clients really engage with us and really listen to our

recommendations. For example, we recently made a change with the $11 million run rate company, where we started implementing a new type of marketing. And overnight, they went from doing about $15,000 a day in sales to doing $45,000 a day in sales. Wow. That's pretty huge, man. Threefold increase. Yeah. I mean, that's really what we enjoy doing.

We love working with brands, finding what they want to achieve, understanding their goals, and then figuring out the best ways to help them reach those. That's really what we're all about as a company. And it's all about dialing in the search results and getting in front of that consumer when they're ready to buy, right? When they've got to spend their money. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge part of it. If you can't be found, if your products don't look good, people aren't going to pay attention to you. And then it's a matter of building out the advertising funnel in the correct way and then leveraging outside traffic sources like social media like uh email whatever it may be to to have more and more people come

to your product listings and actually buy the product there you go uh what's sort of big what what is how big of a threat are disruptor brands on Amazon to establish brands? I guess what are disruptor brands and what are they a threat? Yeah. So I mentioned my art supply brand from back in the day that was essentially a disruptor brand. I was coming in stealing market share from Crayola. That is not, it's not as easy anymore.

It's still doable at the end of the day. When you, when you go to Amazon, most of the time you're not looking for a specific brand. You know know you might be looking for a water bottle or you might be looking for a phone case or i don't know a microphone and whatever's showing up at the top of search results is more than likely what you're going to buy i think uh i think the number is like the first three products is like 70 of all purchases in any search results page so uh the opportunity for a brand that understands

advertising and understands marketing the correct way and how to get their products positioned in those top spots allows them to steal more and more market share so there's a lot of native amazon brands that have been able to continually steal share from other brands there's a really good example out there of a company called Liquid Death, and they do mineral water. And they essentially came out of nowhere. They entirely rely on Amazon. The brand was completely built on the Amazon platform. Even on their DTC website, they push people to Amazon to purchase the product. And all of this feeds back into that positive feedback loop that I talked about before about getting more traffic more conversions more sales velocity and then continuing to move higher and higher up the ranks and that's allowing them to take market share from companies like uh like nestle dannon um you know topo chico other other mineral water brands wow that is crazy man

i was wondering how that company got built and It's just amazing. So final thoughts as we go out and you want to continue to grow your company, it's the perfect time to talk to us. I mean, we're coming into Q4 now. We still have a few, a little bit of time to help you get set up ahead of time. But if growth is on the roadmap for you in 2024, it's a great opportunity to reach out to us. If you're also interested in expanding to Latin America and reaching a whole new consumer base, we can also help a lot with that. So I'm excited to talk about excited to talk with anyone that's interested in either of those services. You can reach me on my email, mike at amzadvisors.com, or you can also reach us directly through the website, amzadvisors.com. There you go. Well, Mike, it's been very insightful and eye-opening, and we learned a lot

about what you guys do in Amazon. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you very much for having me, Chris. And I hope I was able to provide some great insights to your listeners. There you go. People will be inspired to start their own companies. And if not, call yours and have you guys do all the hard work for them. There you go. Thanks, guys, for tuning in. Go to GoodReese.com, 4ChessCrispFoss, YouTube.com, 4ChessCrispFoss, LinkedIn.com, 4ChessCrispFoss, and ChrisFoss1 on the TikTok.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have it.