Jeremy Weisz 15:23
That’s cool. No, that’s good. Talk about tools, software. What do you recommend people use? What do you like to use?
Kamaljit Singh 15:29
We use Helium 10. It’s a really good software for someone who’s just starting out, they also have, like, a free course that you can take. And Data Dive is an up and coming, really good software that sellers are loving. So these are the two tools which are really good. They pretty much have everything.
Jeremy Weisz 15:31
Brandon owns Data Dive?
Kamaljit Singh 15:41
Yeah. Brandon Yeah. Brandon Young.
Jeremy Weisz 15:49
Yeah. Brandon Young, okay, yep, I know Brandon. What else do you use?
Kamaljit Singh 16:01
These are the like, main product research, like bigger tools. The other tools that we normally use for split testing is like, PickFu, intellivi, so that, we can split test like different creatives, Seller Board for bookkeeping purposes. Then there’s like, So Stock for inventory management. There’s, like, specialized tools for like, each and every part of your business that you can use, or you can just use, like, Data Dive or Helium 10 that has like, whole suite of tools in it. Carbon6, there’s another name that has, like, pretty much everything built into it. But if you’re just starting out you don’t need, like all of them, you just start with one, and then slowly add as your needs go up.
Jeremy Weisz 16:50
And I’ll give a Shout out to Yoni from Getida. I know you’ve, you’ve chatted with Yoni too, and they help get some money back from Amazon.
Kamaljit Singh 17:01
How can I miss that one? Yeah, Yoni. Yoni Getida, Rob Stanley, that’s such a powerful software. So, for example, once you’re selling, you know, you’re going to need reimbursement. So, yeah, that’s another tool that’s really good. So there’s, like, so many softwares out there, but these are the top ones.
Jeremy Weisz 17:19
Love it. Well, we were talking about running the business. And for you, you’re thinking of a few things, which, if anyone is a business owner like me, these are definitely things that go through my head. And one of the things you’re thinking about and working on, is finding constraints, managing time and focus. So what are some of the things I don’t know? If you have a process around it, how do you think about managing or finding the constraints in the business?
Kamaljit Singh 17:49
Yeah, so it, I always say that I’m not an experienced entrepreneur. I’m learning, I had a corporate job before this business. I did, like, businesses here and there, but this is, like, actual, real businesses, business which scaled up to multiple seven figures. So I’m still learning. So, you know, when we hit, last year we hit the plateau, right? The revenue was just not growing up. And I found myself like busy all the time. One year later, I found out there has to be something wrong that I doing. Both of these things cannot be true either, business is flat, it’s not going up. And I’m also working like 12 hours a day, something is not correct. So I was listening to podcasts and stuff.
Then I came across Theory of Constraints, right and how a business owner should be focusing on, like, finding the constraint in the business, and just focusing only on that. And once I started doing that, I saw a significant improvement in my productivity, my mental health, like business saw uptake, like, right away, like, people were happy. So, that is the thing that I’m trying to get better on, like, finding constraints and working on that sometimes, I find constraints and which is not really a constraint. So that is the key point where my focus is right now, listening to YouTube videos and podcasts, trying to read books, because I have the understanding already that this stuff really works. So just, just trying to dive deeper into that part.
Jeremy Weisz 19:37
What’s an example Kamal that you could think of where you maybe there’s an example, you found a constraint, what that constraint was, and then also another one maybe found a constraint, or you thought it was, but it actually wasn’t.
Kamaljit Singh 19:49
Okay. So there’s two okay. So in our operations, we have to, let’s say, if we are creating a listing, it goes through like different phases, like, there’s research and planning, then we do photography and videography, then we do, like, the graphic design and, like, all those editing work. Then we do the quality assurance, and then we deliver it to the client, and we do the revisions if changes are required. So until then, we were not tracking everything. So what we first thing we did, we started to track how many projects each stage we complete every single day. We tracked that for about one week, and we found out that our photography, our studios, they’re only doing like two a day, when all others, they can do like, seven to eight a day. We were like, okay, if we want to increase our input, this is where my focus needs to go, right? So that was the constraint, right?
And what happened, even though our one constraint can create multiple bottlenecks, right? Which can confuse the whole picture? So you have to make, you have to understand what’s the bottleneck and what is the constraint? So, that one week of tracking really helped me find that constraint, and that’s one example second that I thought it was not a constraint which I thought it was a constraint which it wasn’t. For example, getting more leads, or working on, like, more leads is a constraint. Lot of sellers, or a lot of like people think that, but that’s not really a constraint. You’re only moving constraint from one point to another. Let’s say you do get more leads. You do close more deals. What does that happen? That constraint goes to the next phase, then it goes to the next phase. So you’re just moving the constraint, which is not really a constraint, right?
Jeremy Weisz 21:50
It’s not bottlenecking the process, like in the case the photos and images were bottlenecking the process, if you put 100 people in, they would get bottlenecked at that the photo for photography phase. But if you put 100 people in the client as a client, they would just go to the next stage, and they’ll get bottlenecked to the constraint is where it really like backs up, is what you’re saying. Yeah, thank you for sharing that that helps. I’d love to hear some of your favorite books and resources. One of my favorites is exactly what you’re talking about. Is it probably one of your favorites to the goal. The book called The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. So that is amazing. I think they’ve sold over 10 million copies of this book, and it’s a fantastic book. So I love to hear some of your favorites. I don’t know if that’s one of yours too.
Kamaljit Singh 22:44
Yeah. So it’s something similar. It’s called The Great CEOs are Lazy, by Jim Schleckser. So that is the book where I got this idea of working on constraints and fixing them. So that book has been very close to me.
Jeremy Weisz 22:59
I had Jim on the podcast, so I’ll message him that that’s one of your favorites. That’s awesome.
Kamaljit Singh 23:04
That’s amazing. Yeah. So he’s got to be one of the top experts, you know, out there on constraints especially. So, yeah, it’s his book that I’ve been loving that one.
Jeremy Weisz 23:18
Any other I don’t know, resources, podcasts stick out to you, and it could be about constraints or about whatever.
Kamaljit Singh 23:27
Yeah, Alex Hormozi and Leila Hormozi, both of them, have been putting out, like, phenomenal content out there. And I do find lots of things relevant, which we can learn and implement from them, like right away, especially Leila Hormozi, like she is the operational person into the leadership role. And whenever I watch her videos, and you can pretty much sense that it’s coming from a legitimate person and with experience. So that has been helping a lot, and I’ve been following both of them. And there’s one more guy called Ravi Abuwala.
He’s been a systems guy, really good guy at, he has systemized pretty much everything in his business, like, he’s got, like, house manager going eventually, like, even if you want to go on a date with your girlfriend, like, everything is, like, scheduled and systemized. So, which, I was like, Oh, wow, that’s really cool. Which allows, you know, you to get back time, and, you know, the time that you can spend on, like, doing things that you really love, and that time can be bought back by the system.
Jeremy Weisz 24:46
Does he have a book come on or what resource do you recommend people checking out for him?
Kamaljit Singh 24:52
I think he’s on podcast like YouTube channel. Ravi Abuwala, I think he’s been putting phenomenal content out there like, actionable items.
Jeremy Weisz 25:01
Cool, and then Kamal, here’s the one people can check this one out with Jim, where he talks about his book, and one of them is the five. He has effective CEOs where to succeed, and he’s got some great resources there. So thanks for sharing that. So that’s one thing you’re thinking about, right? You’re thinking about finding constraints and managing your time and what to focus on. And the next thing we were talking about was, which is the next step, which is systemizing the operations, right? So solving the actual bottlenecks, once you identify them. So talk about what you’re doing around that, and some of the playbooks that you’re creating because of the looking at in working on operations.
Kamaljit Singh 25:50
Yeah, absolutely right. So this realization came about six months ago when I had to, when I was managers, they had to hire, like, couple of peoples and the managers, they spent entire 30 days on training the new hire. And that became a bottleneck. I was like, why did you spend like, 30 days training the new hire? Like, he’s like, yeah. But if not me, then who? Right? I was like, wow. And then that was the moment I was like, okay, you know what? We need to systemize, document everything, you know, create playbooks, so that this problem never comes. And also it just makes your business more valuable. For example, if you want to sell your company, right? So it just helps you out that way. So from that moment, I bought a course. It’s by Zen Pilot.
They help you with systemizing stuff. And then I also watch some videos. So, just basically started with the workflow, right? What exactly you do? What is the each step? And then, you know, started to break it down in SOPs and templates and training, and then you make org chart, or every org chart, like, see which, which is the missing key hire that you need to hire on? What are the things that you need to let go, and stuff like that. So those are the things that I’ve been working on. So I think it’s going to take about, we’re already, like two months into it, but I think it’s six months old. It’s six months old. I think six-month process that will take us to fully systemize.
Jeremy Weisz 27:31
You could see here, come on showing here’s Gray Mackenzie from Zen Pilot. I wonder if you listen to my podcast, although, but he talked about on the episode, how to create a smooth onboard for your company. And here’s the episode with great. Gray’s awesome, Zen Pilots, great and it goes in. I was going to ask, what kind of softwares do you use internally?
Obviously, they basically help you, and they helped us, actually. They help you implement and use ClickUp as your project management tool. So we moved from Asana to ClickUp. I’m wondering what things that you use internally and from a process standpoint, we use SweetProcess. I had Owen McGavon to talk about SweetProcess. We use that from like our centralized database of SOPs and ClickUp, what are some of the things that you use for your company.
Kamaljit Singh 28:21
Okay? So for project management, we were using Trello before, then we moved to ClickUp now. So ClickUp has been working really well after buying their course, we can do like, you know, 100 times more what we’re doing right now with ClickUp. So we’re gonna, you know, spend a lot of time there. That’s our main project management software. But with our sales management software where we use Close CRM, which has been working really, really well for us and these are the primary you know, softwares that we’re using. Other than that, they’re all everything you know else is just common, like in a Slack, Zapier, Gmail, like bunch of that’s a very common softwares, but, but these are the two main ones that we use.
Jeremy Weisz 29:12
Yeah, I want to give a shout to Owen from SweetProcess, this has been game-changing for us. From like, put our all our processes on SweetProcess, then we link them in ClickUp, or obviously the pm tasks there. So thanks Owen for creating sweet process. We’re power users of them, for sure. Any other favorite, from a, I guess, systemizing perspective, you mentioned, you know, Zen Pilot and Gray anything, any other books or resources that you like from helping systematize,
Kamaljit Singh 29:49
Yeah, so there’s one thing we installed in our business which helped me, like, significantly, you know, it’s called the CEO dashboard. Some people call it. Company scorecard. It’s a simple Google Sheet. Maybe I can send you the template where you have all your managers come on a weekly call and they would talk about, like, all those KPIs that you have set. For example, the number one, the main KPIs that we track, is the new sales, then repeat and reoccurring sales. And number three, like, the back end offer sales, right? So these are the three different types of cash flows that we track. So all three managers would come and talk about, like, how they’re doing week by week.
See if they’re on track to hit the target, if they’re falling behind. Like, are they going to cover it up, or do they need additional support to meet that target? And then again, the fulfillment, what’s our turnaround time? How many five-star reviews we got? How many days we take normally to complete a project. How many projects we completed? That’s like fulfillment. Then photography, how many samples we received, how many shoots we completed, whatsoever, reshoot percentage. Then every department we have, like the main KPIs that we have defined. So we jump on a weekly call, and we talk about that. It’s a one hour long call, but it just helps you so much. Number one, as a CEO, you only need to do that call technically, in a week, and your business will run on its own if you have managers in place, and you will have the word’s eye view of what exactly is happening within the company.
Second thing, your team will be held accountable, because they sometimes, just by installing this some of the departments we saw like, from flat or declining to an uptick, just because the managers they will be held, they know they were, like, being self, you know, accountable, because they had to come and present their numbers. That was number one, number three, it was super, the alignment of vision like that was like that worked out so well because everybody knew, like, what are some of the KPIs that I hear, and what are some of the KPIs they will be judged on? And they are, everybody is just working towards making that KPI, right? And lastly, it just helps you so much, emotionally, like mentally, because sometimes you have slow days, right? Slow day of sales, high day of sales, you get a bad review. You get a good review. So there’s like now you don’t go into the roller coaster of emotions, because you know next week you’re going to have the entire picture in front of you, right?
So you start to look at little bit bigger picture than day-to-day life. So which helps you stay more stable and you know what I’m missing? The important part in that dashboard, every KPI is either a green, yellow or red, right? If there’s a red, that’s where your focus is going. So you’re trying to turn reds into yellows and yellows into greens. Now you know where exactly you need to work. You know where, what is the health of your overall company? That was like, it’s a simple Google Sheet, but a game changer at least for me, like, personally and also, like business price.
Jeremy Weisz 33:16
Was that key to revamping the sales team? Was that something different.
Kamaljit Singh 33:23
There was something different about the sales team. Okay, so we are all organic, like all the leads that we get, you know, they’re either coming from SEO or business partners or, like, influencer marketing, stuff like that. So they’re very warm leads. So I always believed that we could sell. Our conversion rate is low. Like, 100 people sign up, and we were only 100 people like, they submit the form to request a code, and we were only closing them 25% of the time. And there was like, big change in the top closer and the bottom closer. Like, the difference was, like, huge. And I always thought that there is a better way, and we’re doing something wrong. That’s like, in my head.
And one day I came across, there’s a company called closers.io. So it’s cold, golden. So one of my friends, introduced me to them. We jumped on a call, and what they do is, they help you out with scripting your sales, right? You they help you, like, build a sales script, find a train, you know, closer then they help you train that closer. And that was like a new horizon, like the talent pool that they had was like, really, really good, and we hired a closer from them. And then now we know, like before that we did not even have a sales script. So once we had the sales script, we had like, really good people who were, like, willing to work commission-based who are hungry. And then we implemented few things. For example, every morning we’re going to do a sales call, okay?
We’re going to take a look at your daily meetings which are scheduled, and do some preparation on that, and talk about your previous day. So that was one thing we implemented. Second thing, hey, before you go home, like, end of the day, report needs to be sent. Like, how did all those meetings go? What did you learn? What was the challenge, and stuff like that. That was the second thing. Third thing, we implemented that you need to fill out like your tracker every single day, which will give us, like, the true picture of the sales team, like, whatsoever, show up rate whatsoever, like, set percentage, what’s our close rate. And you can break it down per, you know, close it as well. So by just doing that, our sales doubled like new sales, because previously we had, like, no structure and everything. And from, like, having a no structure to hiring closers.io, which trains like world-class closers, we were like, wow, there’s a big J curve in those sales that we saw like that month. So that’s the story behind revamping the sales team.
Jeremy Weisz 36:17
That’s really valuable. Well, thanks for sharing that I know for you, networking is huge. I mean, you run events all over Canada, even the US and Masterminds as well. What are some of the ones that maybe, you’ve been a part of, or you hear are good as far as masterminds or groups go?
Kamaljit Singh 36:37
Okay, masterminds that have been working really well for me, there’s like, three, I can name. One is, The Cole Gordon’s Mastermind. So after the first like, you know, the closers and sales process, they were like, they sold us the back end. They were like, hey, you will meet, like, eight-figure entrepreneurs at one place. You can ask questions and stuff like that. So they do, like, in-person events. So it’s called Eight Figure Boardroom. That mastermind has been absolutely super valuable, like, we’re loving that. That’s one. And the second one is, it’s called Offer Mafia. It’s the secret mastermind of, like, Amazon agency owners. So, we’re part of that, and we do, like, monthly call share or, like, top wins from the past 12 months.
Like, what is the most profitable thing you have done in the last 12 months? Everybody just shares. Like, one thing that was most profitable, and that’s been a very valuable for me, but it’s so much focus that it’s also helping us with the partnering, new partnerships and referrals and everything like we have partnered with like, many agencies from that group, which is helping and exact same thing from the Eight Figure Boardroom, like top Amazon coaches in this space, they were also part of that Eight Figure Boardroom. We signed up a deal. So now they refer clients to us. So like, we had, like, direct ROI, positive ROI, not from the course, but from partnering, from people inside the course.
Jeremy Weisz 38:13
Love it. You helped the company triple sales, but you took an 80/20, approach. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Kamaljit Singh 38:21
Yeah, so on Amazon, what really, everybody is, like, spending so much money on PPC making their ads appear on, like, the keywords that they want to be appeared on. And they’re investing a lot on the, like, videos and on creatives and everything, but there is one area in your Amazon business which can triple your sales without doing much work and without spending a lot of money. If you change your main image, that can double or triple your traffic. Because if somebody is searching for, let’s say, garlic press on Amazon, right? So you see, like, you know, 50 results in the search results. Which one are you going to click on? Right?
There’s only a few factors that are like, people will click on either listings that appear on top or listings which are cheaper or listings that got better reviews, or something which is a best seller or Amazon choice badge, right? These are the factors which decide which list where people would click on. But as a seller, you don’t control those factors, reviews given by the clients, badges given by the Amazon, price is dictated by the market, right? And as a seller, what you really control is your main image and the title. So if you try to come up with a picture which stands out from those 50 results, your likelihood of people clicking on your listing goes up. If it goes up, that means, even if your conversion rate stays the same, your sales would double and triple. So what we really focused on with that brand, and now we’re doing it with, like pretty much all the brands that we work with, is just create three to four different main images, we split test them, and then we upload it on Amazon.
And sometimes they see an uptick in traffic, like right away, and then they see sales boost. Sometimes, you know, they see an uptick in traffic, but not in sales. That means we are driving irrelevant traffic. So the purpose of the main image is to increase traffic on your listing, but also to decrease the irrelevant traffic, which means if relevant traffic is coming to your Amazon listing, your conversion rate would go up because more of those people are going to buy. If your conversion rate goes up, your ranking in this search result will go up, which ultimately means more sales. And it’s a loop, right? You’re just fixing one little thing, and that just fixes everything. Now your PPC is more profitable, right? So, yeah, it’s just the 80/20 rule, and that 20% also has 80/20 in it, I find that the main image is, the 4% which brings the 96% results.
Jeremy Weisz 38:21
I love it. I love how you think 80/20. I’m trying to teach my kids that principle, because I think just in life, it applies to anything. Right? What made you decide to acquire a company?
Kamaljit Singh 41:34
Okay? When I started AMZ One Step, when I was building the website, the initial days, I copied, I took inspiration from Kenji ROI, like that company existed before us, and I’ve been like monitoring and following them very closely. If they would write a blog, we would write a blog. If they would do a YouTube video, we would do exactly the same thing, right? And we did it so well that our company got bigger. And one day, and then we got friends with Denny, the former CEO of Kenji ROI, like we got friends, and then he just messaged me one day. He was like, okay, hey, I think I’m burnt out. I want to do some other things in my life, and I think you would be a great fit to buy this company. And I think it was more of an emotional decision.
I was like, okay, sounds good and logical too, but more of an emotional because I really wanted to acquire the company, which I took inspiration from in the beginning stages of my business. And I thought it would be super cool to just own that. And then the second reason, obviously, we can blend the best of both worlds and create something very valuable. So that’s exactly what we did. And it was like, super easy for us to understand, like their clients, their business, the synergy was there, and it was very smooth transition. I did not even feel like we did something big. It was just like, oh, okay, sounds good. Just do the introduction meetings and everything. And there’s things just happen very smoothly.
Jeremy Weisz 43:29
Well, talk about, how do you decide to structure the deal? Right? Is this your first acquisition? What are some of the ways you decide to structure it?
Kamaljit Singh 43:37
Okay, so it was human in the payment, like, how did we pay or?
Jeremy Weisz 43:42
Yeah, did you just, I mean, there’s probably a lot of ways to slice it, right. He could have kept equity in it. And he could have seller financed it. A lot of different ways. How do you decide to structure a deal like that.
Kamaljit Singh 43:58
So we bought entire, like, 100% of the company, and then it was all cash. Like we were like, okay, we’re gonna pay you in four months. Like we divided that up so, so, yeah, it was all cash deal, four months payment plan. We bought 100% of everything. We kept their team. We kept their Bali studio, that team is still with us. Yeah, so it was like, as I mentioned, it was very smooth. There’s nothing like a M&A, you know thing that happened. So, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 44:35
How did you come up with the valuation?
Kamaljit Singh 44:37
The valuation, they were not making much profit. Creative companies, they’re difficult to make like lot of profit, right? So we operate at like 33% at AMG One Step. But Danny was like struggling to make it profitable. You. He did make a lot of money, but there was, like, ups and downs. So we bought it when there was no profit. So we were like, how do we value a company which does not have a profit, right?
Jeremy Weisz 45:11
Because a lot of people will value it off of EBITDA, right? So there’s no profit, how do you come to the valuation?
Kamaljit Singh 45:18
So two things we did. We were like, okay, if we are profitable, we can make Kenji ROI profitable from month one. Because it’s the same company, exact same service, exact same process. If we are profitable, we can make that profitable, right? That was our belief system. And the second thing was, like, they were really good on SEO, right? So what we did, we looked at the leads that they got, like, from the past 12 months, and we saw the duplicates, like, how many leads they contacted AMZ One Step, and they also contacted Kenji ROI. We minus that number, and we saw like, Okay, how many leads you’re getting per month. And we did our numbers, okay?
If we get these many leads, these many closes, these many sets, this is how much money we would make. And Denny is a smart guy. He knew that just because it’s not profitable right now does not mean it does not have any worth. So we calculated our numbers and there was no benchmark or multiplier. It’s like, hey, this is how much we can pay. But then he was like, hey, I know you want it, and this is my price. As I mentioned, it’s a very emotional — it was a very emotional decision as well. And I was like, sounds good, man. Like, it’s okay. That’s kind of how this deal went.
Jeremy Weisz 45:27
It’s interesting. No thanks for sharing, because I know a lot of times I’m talking to people they’re not making huge M&A deals. They’re dealing with another company that maybe they’re not like, hugely profitable sometimes, sometimes they are. But it’s always the question of, how do we evaluate this thing when there, you know there’s value, but maybe it’s not showing the same value on the spreadsheet, so to speak.
Kamaljit Singh 47:13
Exactly. I think value is something where both parties think that it’s a win-win situation, and you agree to make a transaction, right? So that’s how we came up with that number.
Jeremy Weisz 47:27
Kamal, I have one last question before I ask it, I just want to thank you for sharing your journey, your stories, your lessons have been really valuable, and I want to encourage people to check out amzonestep.com to learn more. My last question is just on you know mentors. We talked a lot about resources. I don’t know if there’s any mentors in your journey that have helped you along the way. Could be colleagues that became mentors, or just mentors that have guided you through this business journey?
Kamaljit Singh 48:00
There’s two different kinds of mentors that I’ve worked with. One is, just being part of masterminds and taking their courses and taking their advice. That’s one, and the other one is, like, the top personalities out there, like, I’m a big fan of, there’s a guy named Mahinder Singh Dhoni. He is a legendary cricket player in India. And he talks about, you focus on your process, focus on your actions, not on the outcome. That kind of really stuck with me. He won the World Cup like three times.
I basically look up to the achievers, high achievers in life, and try to just get something out from them and implement in my life. But I never really had, you know, a one on one kind of mentor who’s helped me out a day. But I do think I may get one in the near future, but as of now, these are the two kind, only two kinds of mentors that I had in life.
Jeremy Weisz 49:07
I love it. I mean, I think masterminds, they have a bunch of mentors kind of baked into them. And then you have your kind of, your distant mentors who are have achieved amazing things. So I really appreciate. Everyone, check out amzonestep.com more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Kamal, thanks so much.
Kamaljit Singh 49:25
Thank you so much.
