Jeremy Weisz 16:44
Thanks for sharing that journey. It’s really interesting from a mental standpoint. If anyone’s gone through it. You have this kind of what appears to be stability, right, as you know, and when I know it’s not real stability, because you could get let go, whatever, but it’s like, okay. I can make 80k I can go in. I don’t have to hustle as much. I mean, you still have to, like, do work and hustle, but it’s a different type of hustle in my mind, at least from my experience. And you took a risk, right? Risk? You could have been like, okay, I have a more secure, quote, unquote position. So I’m curious on the services. So you are freelancing, you start your own company. Let’s talk about the evolution of the services that you offer, and what are you offering in the beginning, and then walk me through several of the other things, because I obviously you expanded those services over the years.
Andrew Morgans 17:44
Yeah, so it was just quite a different — the industry didn’t exist. I really do feel like I’m one of the original founders of kind of the services in the Amazon space, whether people knew it or not, there just wasn’t a YouTube channel out there to watch. There was nothing doing it. And a lot of people that start agencies like worked maybe as an account manager or a sales rep at an agency, and then go off and start their own that wasn’t the case with me. I didn’t really have agency background. I didn’t have entrepreneurial background either, other than my dad being a missionary and going into some uncharted countries. I didn’t really have that background either. So I wasn’t coming in from an advertising or an agency background. I really just started creating a business to serve the problems that I was coming across before I even really knew what the framework looked like.
I was finding jobs on Upwork and Elance, and then Upwork swallowed Elance, and when they did that, I shot to the top 10 in the marketing category on Upwork because they like combined the reviews there. And it wasn’t that I was even half as smart as I am now, and I’m still, I get more dumb every day, but it was that, like I just was in the right spot, the right time there, and no one else was doing Amazon or marketplaces on these freelancers sites, much less someone that was in the US. So I just got a couple of jobs, started getting reviews.
Jeremy Weisz 19:11
I want to point something out real quick Drew on that, because I know people, even in the past few years, that have agencies, and people think, oh, you get inexpensive work on Upwork. But there’s a lot of companies that go there and they hire US-based people for large retainers. And I know someone who’s probably doing monthly recurring over $100,000 from the clients that they got on Upwork. And this is recent, fairly recent, right? We’re not talking 10 years ago, so I just want to point that out. It’s still, it happens today.
Andrew Morgans 19:45
Well, just to shout that out, and I’m not sponsored by Upwork, but I should be if they are listening to this, because I’m one of your golden boy stories. I really feel like that, at least in my life, because just like, I mean, it changed my family’s life, it’s changed everything. It really started with Upwork. I read a blog that said, like, check this site out. And I went there, and really just started leaning into it. But I had someone reach out. It’s been 10 years since I worked with them on Upwork. They’re an agency as well in retail, like traditional retail, and they just reached out over the last couple of months. And we’re working on something really big right now about bringing back a couple of house brands that you would know that went bankrupt, that we’re gonna bring them back through e-commerce and Amazon and revive them, rely bring them back to life.
I’m super excited about that, because it’s just something that’s kind of like nostalgic brands, and that is a connection from 10 years ago on Upwork. so it’s still relevant today. And if we ever get super slow, I’m on there just kind of seeing what’s out there, just seeing what’s out there. So back to like, kind of like the service was, I was just solving problems I seen on Upwork one by one, and along the way, someone was saying, I need help with a flat file. I need help with images. I need help with writing SEO descriptions. I need help with taking this 10,000 part catalog and putting it up on Amazon. I need concatenating descriptions. And I was the one that I clean up for now at the time. But I was just taking jobs like that, and slowly, as I would, I would tell them I know how to do three out of four things you’re asking for. I’ll do the three and figure out the fourth, as long as you’re okay with me figuring out the fourth, like, but I got to figure it out.
And slowly you just do that long enough you do that for a year of weekends, you know, and you’ve acquired quite a few skills that you didn’t have before, and matching those with what I was kind of doing in the nine to five, I really just started getting kind of a tool, a tool belt, to go to, so to speak. And there was advertising came out slowly after so I was helping brands with advertising on Amazon. I was helping them launch products for the first time, helping them do giveaways and get reviews, and kind of think about those kinds of things, doing end-of-month reports and profitability analysis, and helping them get their shipments into FBA and managing that. At the time, I wasn’t working with sophisticated brands and like brands that understand how all those things work. I was working with entrepreneurs, people that wanted to leave their nine-to-five, people that were trying to source in China, or wholesale product, it was a completely different environment than wasn’t like my nine-to-five, it was really like the Tim Ferriss of the world, people with that mindset, people reading those books, trying to do that thing. And so I really just started solving all those different areas.
And what that transitioned into is like, I am that founder that’s done every, almost every role. And I just realized that there’s a whole lot that goes into marketplace management. You need a sales copywriter, technical copywriter. You need a data analyst. You need a media buyer. You need a brand protection team that’s thinking about those types of things. You need someone that can go with case management, with Amazon, talking to them, communicating with them the way they need to be communicating. You need someone that’s techie that can integrate all your different softwares. You need someone that’s taking control of inventory and demand forecasting and supply chain. The list goes on and on, and most companies have one or two people, maybe an intern, trying to solve for all those things, much less come up with strategy and like, be cutting edge on all of it. They’re doing their best just to keep up. So we really built an agency that kind of bolts alongside maybe that leader inside that company, and then tries to help them solve for all those things.
Jeremy Weisz 23:36
I want to talk about the team, right? Obviously, it’s just you, and then you grow a team around it, but just to piggyback a little bit on the services piece, then you’re kind of doing whatever people need. Now, there’s kind of like a set process, right? And we’re looking at the Marknology effect, where it’s the Amazon audit and store creation, then identifying research, then the product listing optimization, then ignite, then branded Amazon advertising, then data tracking, revise and manage and repeat. So you figure this out, but then you kind of have a set process, and then there’s things along the way, right when we’re talking about each piece of those, there could be, content creation with that, brand identity with that, and just management with that. So obviously you bring on team members throughout, talk about what was the first key hire for you.
Andrew Morgans 24:27
Man, Jeremy, that’s memory lane for me, it was actually my brand manager at the toy company left that company and joined me as a partner. So I was about a year in, and she said, I want to join. I’ve bought her out since then, we still have a good relationship. She wanted to keep more of like a consultancy, and I wanted to build something big. So, different goals. I bought her and yes, sir, but it was actually my oldest sister, Veronica. She has a master’s in engineering, and was in school at the time. As you see, CMO there always been big says to me, she actually moved from Tampa after she finished her master’s degree, and came and was employee number one with me, and just believed in what I was doing and wanted to help her little bro, I guess, at the same time. So no one believed in what we were doing. No one understood what we were doing at the time.
Even down to the way that I explained things, I’d really just try to simplify them for people to understand that it’s some crazy complexity in some regards. But really it’s just we’re trying to do the thing that everyone’s done, branding, storytelling, and getting in front of people in the right way. And it was before the industry came along, before the pandemic sped things up and things like that online, the big brands of the world, they just weren’t focused on the Amazon industry. So it was my sisters early on. After that, it was Brooklyn. She came up, took a job, she saw what me and sis were doing, and kind of wanted to have a part of it. And she was working a nine-to-five and just helping us on the side as we started to grow. And then my sis, my cousin Ro here is the core team. Is family, the true family business, right here.
Yeah, this is true family business, and some of it is because we come from the bottom in a lot of ways. But yet we were the generation of the family really trying to go out there. We were the first to get college degrees. The five of us here, actually, it just happened to be in the line. We were the first get college degrees in our families, and over the years, have just come together. So Ro was in financial sector, but was an amazing photographer at the time. So I think for two years, she just helps us with images, content, social media. Took no money, not a dime, and Brooklyn was working part-time as well, until we could afford to bring her on board. So it’s something I’m actually very proud of. I think for a while I was intimidated about telling people about the family business, but now I just, I don’t know. I don’t know. I think it’s a stigma, maybe about family and but not everybody’s been through a war together or grew up in some of those environments like we have. And I’m just blessed.
My sisters are honestly geniuses. Brooklyn is an actual genius. The other redhead there, so our youngest sister is an actual genius, and was so lucky to have her join us. She has a question science degrees, and was working with champion horses in Ocala, Florida for a long time before she came to join us. And just like you can’t beat family, like going through the hurdles of entrepreneurships, the ups and downs, and they came in and sat next to me and just watched what I did. I think between the three of us on the left, we have about 65,000-70,000 hours on Amazon.
Jeremy Weisz 27:51
I remember you saying at one point in a video, Drew that when at one point you were just convincing people they need to be on Amazon and then hire you. And now people realize they should, they know they need to be on Amazon, they should hire you. And kind of the evolution of that, it’s probably similar we talk about websites like, the beginning, like, why do I need a website? It’s like, oh, then people realize, yes, I definitely need a website, and now it’s another hurdle you have to get less hurdle you have to get over, right? So selling is different.
Andrew Morgans 28:33
I was one of the only ones educating people on the opportunity that was Amazon. And there were some gurus selling courses and different things like that software founders, but there weren’t really service-based agencies, and it wasn’t like now. So in 2019 is how fast it’s growing in 2019 exponentially, I was added to the Amazon advertising Partnership Program, and there were 60 agencies at the time that qualified, like professional enough to be and included in this group. I was one of two of that 60 that were not software companies. So there was two service based companies in that 60 that were advertising agencies. Now there’s over 300 5 years later.
So that’s the evolution that is the space, you know. And if I’ve been doing this 10 years, it makes sense, like the last five have been growing at a much faster rate. And the only benefit is, we just got five years on a lot of people. But that’s really the and now it’s okay. Everyone knows they need to be on Amazon now. What do they need to be doing there? Who should they be working with? What should the strategy that they be thinking of doing, those kinds of things.
Jeremy Weisz 29:46
Yeah. And, you know, we’ll talk about, there was a case study when we talk about going on Amazon, right? We’ll talk about one case study that’s zero to 55 million in a short period of time. Before we get to that, you’ve mentioned war a few times in missionary a few times. So I do want to let people in, I don’t know if you want to start with getting kidnapped, or where you want to start that story. You have a unique upbringing. Let’s put it that way.
Andrew Morgans 30:13
I always thought that if I was going to tell people, they need to be telling their story as a brand, as founders, as owners like because that’s what people care about. People want to work with people. I need to be doing it myself. And so I just took that to heart, and put my story out there for people to understand who they’re working with, with our company, and why we care and the people behind the company, not just button clickers, but I was raised. I was born in Montreal. My parents were learning French to be missionaries to Africa at the time, and guys, this is before the internet and cell phones and social media and all this kind of stuff.
So, less ways of doing things. And by the time I was, I mean, three days old, I was on a plane, I think, back to Kansas City, and then within a couple of months, we were off to West Africa. Cameroon. My parents were always teaching English in French countries, teaching English in French countries with Christian curriculum, basically teaching at schools and then doing a little bit of extra. There’s schools they worked for. Why did they go to West Africa? So West Africa, West Cameroon, part of the country is French, okay, so there’s like a half is an English side and half is a French side. So that was why we went there. And then we had a little bit of time in Moscow and Botswana a year in each filling in at schools there. And then we went to Congo. They were always trying to be in a French-speaking country. My parents are fluent in French. And so we went to Congo, Zaire Congo the big one. It was post the Rwandan, post the Rwandan war that actually still going on at the time. And those losing armies ran into Congo, if you kind of like, know anything about that kind of turmoil there. And we went to Kinshasa, the capital city. It’s 12 million people, for people that don’t know.
And it’s not vertical, it’s a horizontal city of 12 million so it goes wide. And the Congo River is the second largest river in the world, next to the Amazon, so just a really populous place. And it was in wars. In civil war, there was an assassination on the president. Why we were there? Rebels took the city before that, just like in our first six months of being there, me and my dad got kidnapped and released. They realized we didn’t have money, and they had a preacher, and they are pretty superstitious there, and I think that might have something.
Jeremy Weisz 31:29
How long were you captured? Like, how long did they hold you for?
Andrew Morgans 32:50
It was a day. Me and my dad used to go on, like, a walk, kind of just exploring, kind of like, in different directions, around wherever we were staying. And we went walking one day and walked by a police station with some idle officers there, and a couple of blocks later, they picked us up in a car, and that was rare for one, for them to just have petrol.
Jeremy Weisz 33:11
Was it like a gunpoint situation? Like, how? How did?
Andrew Morgans 33:14
Yes, it was a gunpoint. They kind of just, they had handguns, which is also rare because they always carry much larger guns there, but these officers had handguns, and just put guns to our head and put us in the back seat of the car. There was two of them, and they drove us outside the city to an abandoned warehouse. And when I say outside of the city, that might have taken a couple hours because of the roads and the…
Jeremy Weisz 33:36
Are you thinking, I’m not gonna live? I mean, what’s going through your head?
Andrew Morgans 33:40
I was really just watching my dad and my dad, he’s arguing in French. They’re speaking so fast at that time that I can understand French, but it was like, fast, you know. And he was really arguing to not give up our passport. They had taken, like, our money and our phone, and he just, he refused to give them our passports. And so they were arguing, and I could just tell that he was stressed. And my dad is a very calm man, and so I couldn’t really tell what was going on. Mind you, I grew up in Africa, so while we’re being kidnapped at the time, I’ve been in a lot of sticky situations before that, like checkpoints and different things going on, right?
There’s a time in Moscow where the airport burned down, and yet there’s nothing of it in the news. But I can remember being in that airport when it was burning down, just different situations. So I’m guess I’m saying I wasn’t panicking at the time. I was probably 12 or 13. I’m in the back seat with dad, kind of hearing him. My dad is a very smart man.
Jeremy Weisz 33:40
If you were like a tourist and you were there for the first time. You would have been freaking out.
Andrew Morgans 33:52
But chaos has turned me into a good entrepreneur, because I think that I didn’t really realize it. But like, what was normal for me growing up there is not normal for everyone else. And it basically took us to this industrial facility outside the city and abandoned facility, kind of like the West Bottoms here in Kansas City. And we sat outside, and they’d come, talk to us, come back, talk to us, come back. We weren’t handcuffed or tied up, but we were definitely.
They had guns and they told us to sit there, right so. And it got dark, and then they came, this was an all-day thing, from morning till night, and they came up to us, and then just like, let us go. And I’ve never really shared this, but like, my dad broke down pretty much, and I had never seen him break down before, so I’m like, now I knew how serious it was. He wasn’t telling me much. I think he was trying to figure it out. And he thinks that they spared us because of me, having me with him, but we had no money.
Jeremy Weisz 35:49
You weren’t freaking out that much at the time. You’re looking at your dad, and you’re like.
Andrew Morgans 35:54
It wasn’t my job to freak out. It’s my job to not get us in more trouble. Like, you know, I mean, like, I knew enough. How old were you at the time? I was probably 13, yeah. And the next part was, honestly some of the scary part too, because now it’s dark in Africa.
Jeremy Weisz 36:10
And you’re several hours from, I don’t know. I mean, did you walk home?
Andrew Morgans 36:17
We’re past the cops, but we’re not out of danger yet. And so petrol was extremely expensive, like you would stand in line with your car for two days to get gas at a time of war. And we had no money, and so we had to come across a taxi driver or a person that we could convince to take us to our place. And we would pay when we got there, not pay ahead, which is like unheard of. But we finally met someone, after walking for a while, that decided to take us. I guess they felt sorry for us, and the rest is history.
Jeremy Weisz 36:53
That’s truly wild.
Andrew Morgans 36:57
These are things that like, when you’re able to tap into them and not just avoid them. They can be like two superpowers, like, I really do feel like, if you can turn some of this, you know, our situations, like divorce or something, being afraid, like that, I have tattoos that talk about fear. And if you’re a religious person, the Bible has a lot of scriptures about fear that I recant as well, just because I think overcoming them is the true feeling the fear and doing it anyway, having courage in the side of fear, just like leaving, just like saying no to that job with the 100% salary increase and saying no, I’m afraid, but I’m going to bet on me this time, and the part of that was that I had nothing to lose.
I was already embarrassed, kind of, in front of the family. In my mind, like, I think they, they love me through everything, but I felt like, ashamed and embarrassed, and lost my wife, and was just figuring things out. And I was like, what else do I have to lose? Like, let’s just, they can’t make matters worse. Let’s go all in. And I encourage anyone like, if that’s helpful for anyone of just like, stuff happens, but it’s just about getting your reasons together and being able to bet on yourself, and then my sisters at the time bet on me a couple years later, and continued to bet on me and helped us get here.
Jeremy Weisz 38:20
Drew thanks for sharing that. It’s really eye-opening. And I think at least for me, it puts things in perspective, right? We live in this world that we’re used to, and least most people in my circle haven’t lived in Africa and been kidnapped and things like that. So it definitely puts things in perspective. And I could spend the next two hours hearing your missionary stories, but I do want to hear about the zero to 55 million.
Andrew Morgans 38:46
Yeah. Okay, so in the last couple of minutes we have here, I was talking, you asked me to just think of a couple of success stories. And I like to think of ones that are like current or recent, and not just like referencing ones that are almost like pass and done. And I’m like, I speak around the world on different things Amazon, trying to tell people where I think the industry is going, and what the best brands in the world are focusing on, and so I’m always trying to come up with, there’s so much to talk about in regards to fear. Honestly, we’re talking about entrepreneurship, but I could talk about, oh, TikTok might get shut down, and Amazon’s raising fees, and China’s encroaching on all of our products.
And like I could hit all these areas that have truth in them as well, or I can focus on brands that are winning and success stories and where we’re finding opportunities and ways that we’re winning and all that. So I generally try to keep something that’s current, not something from the past, and something that’s relevant. That’s where this one comes in. For anyone that knows the Amazon space, there’s kind of two ways of selling on Amazon. One is selling to Amazon direct, and one is selling like yourself. They call it 1p and 3p so almost like they call it the retail team, and you’re selling at wholesale prices. If you’re doing the 3p approach, because Amazon hasn’t approached you to sell your products. What happened was a lot of brands weren’t ready. They didn’t have e-commerce managers, they didn’t have infrastructure internally to be able to solve for Amazon.
So these other companies popped up, similar to mine, that were like, we’ll do all things. We’ll do everything for you on Amazon. But they weren’t teaching the teams. They weren’t doing it for the brands themselves. They weren’t educating the brands. It was more brands. It was more so just like Amazon’s buying product from you wholesale, we will too, or we’ll even take it on consignment, and we will have a two-year, three-year, four-year deal with you, or we will run your brand on Amazon. People call them brand-direct deals. People call these resellers any number of things, for a lot of different reasons. There’s problems. But as the industry, as the brands have gotten, as it’s the industry’s matured, and now these brands are hiring e-commerce managers and digital marketing experts and actually getting some true expertise in their companies.
Those leaders are now getting into the company, looking at how things are done, seeing that they’re outsourcing a lot of their content and data and everything to these outsourced partners. There’s flaws in that and saying, we need to bring this in-house. Well, that’s a big undertaking. If you’ve already got a million or 2 million in sales going through one of these partners, these channels. So how do you transition that to in-house? Like, meaning, like where you’re running the advertising, and you know what keywords are bringing in your sales, and you know it was zip codes your sales are going to and you’re getting the chance to do post purchase follow up by inserts in your boxes, and you’re able to bring them in under warranties and subscribe emails, and you’re able to talk to your customers, and you’re able to launch new collections ahead of time and be prepared instead of them only focusing on the 80-20 all these reasons.
But how do you do that without losing 2 million in sales during a transition like that. So that’s really where we came in in this success story I’m talking about it was a private equity company of like, four brands. We started with one, and now we’ve got two of them for context. So it’s two brands at the 55 million mark, just for honesty and transparency. But they were doing like, couple million through this reseller. We’re now approaching 55 million so, but we transitioned stock. We launched our own Seller Central, we started back. We launched a product there. We started backfilling stock there. We sold out through inventory over there. We managed inventory with that partner, and started educating this team on how to prep their warehouse was always piled in, piled out. They had an internal warehouse. We had to prep them.
Had to make a whole new department for picking orders for Amazon, prepping them, labeling them. They sell fragile stuff. So we had to really think about that as well, instead of it just sitting on a retail shelf. But a huge success in my mind. In the first year, we not only maintain the sales that they were doing before, but we grew it by like 100% and then it’s just grown exponentially since then. And that’s been like, to me, that’s like, almost advanced. That’s a very advanced type of engagement with us, but it’s one that people get. They feel stuck in these scenarios, and what they really just need is a partner with expertise that can help them navigate all that nuance.
Jeremy Weisz 43:10
And I know we’re right at time. I don’t know if you — I want you to touch upon the 3PL piece. If you do have a minute, yes, because it’s interesting, you have the service, but then you’ve expanded that from the 3PL side, so just talk about that piece with the company.
Andrew Morgans 43:25
Yeah. So 15 years in, what I’ve learned is that 3PLs come and go.
Jeremy Weisz 43:31
And when people feel what 3PLs are?
Andrew Morgans 43:33
3PL is a third-party logistics. Think of it as a company that’s warehousing your product and shipping your website orders, or shipping your pallets out to a retail store, or prepping products for Amazon, any number of the above. Tracking your inventory is a huge essential piece of any e-commerce or Amazon brand, where most of the profitability is made or lost. When you really look at a P&L sheet for a business, a lot of it is made or lost in the warehouse, and as my long-term goals are to use Marknology as kind of the digital construction crew to go out and acquire brands, or build D2C brands, or flip D2C brands, which is really where I’m at now. And having a lot of fun, I wanted to be able to control the fulfillment piece. I, you know, small brands, a lot of times, will get kicked out of a big 3PL or they just won’t even take you think about the pandemic if you weren’t in a warehouse and you’re only using FBA Fulfillment by Amazon, and then all of a sudden, Amazon’s like essentials, only, they were screwed.
They couldn’t find a warehouse that would pick them up and fulfill their products. So I was building this since 2019 I actually went to Boston with the Goldman Sachs program with Babson College. I did that too. 10 KSB, yep. Really, okay, cool. We’re 10 KSB alumni now, and my growth initiative was the warehouse. That’s kind of what I brought. And so I really got to work on it that year, which was really a blessing for me doing a bunch of things, but this warehouse has turned into much more than that. It’s not something that I’m ever intending on having a nationwide, you know, warehouse system. We’re here in the Midwest, but I’m able to try variety packs and add inserts, and try 100 with this special offer inside of them. And if something’s not working, I’m able to change it quickly and fastly and innovate like we innovated a new connection for our TikTok Shop that saves us almost half a day in syncing time, which wasn’t out when I started on TikTok Shop.
So give my team back 12 hours to fulfill. That’s crazy, right? So I wanted control of that, and what’s really turned into is, in addition to my own brands, we’ve been able to work with a lot of brands that kind of feel stuck, or sellers that feel stuck. Their warehouse has these inadequacies or it’s a huge that, you know, these relationship things are happening internally, and they’re like, if I do this, if I take on this initiative, I’m going to get bark back or bite from this side of the company, or this or that, and we’re able to step in kind of help them get product ready for Amazon, and give them time to figure out, do they want to do that internally? Do they want to pick a different partner? Do they want to stay with us? We’re Amazon. We eat, sleep, drink, smoke, Amazon, like, that’s all we do. And so like having a warehouse that’s thinking of ecommerce and Amazon first, I think is absolutely pivotal for brands when they’re thinking about really winning on Amazon or ecommerce.
Jeremy Weisz 46:26
Drew, first of all, I want to be the first one to thank you. This has been fantastic. I want to encourage people to check out marknology.com to learn more, check out more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Drew, thanks so much.
Andrew Morgans 46:40
This has been amazing. Thank you, Jeremy.
