Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen
[00:00:08]
Welcome to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Everyone. I am your host Arlen Robinson. And today we do have a very special guest Nemo Chu who is a part-time marketing mentor at 500 Startups. Full-time CEO of a digital products company and host of the FBA Allstars eCommerce podcast. Welcome to the podcast Nemo. How’s it going?

Nemo
[00:00:58]
Thanks for having me Arlen fun.

Arlen
[00:01:00]
Yeah, not a problem, not a problem. I appreciate your, your enthusiasm and excitement. And you know, of course, for all the listeners today, we’re gonna be talking about going multi-channel for all of you eCommerce sellers, and all you people that are listening that are marketing for eCommerce businesses are related to that in some fashion, we’re gonna be getting into that, but before we do Nemo, why don’t you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself and how you got started and how you got to where you are today?

Nemo
[00:01:30]
Oh yeah, no problem. So how long do I have two hours?

Arlen
[00:01:34]
Not quite if you can cut that until maybe two minutes. I’d appreciate it. No problem.

Nemo
[00:01:40]
So a little bit like you, you know, my background is also with coding things. Okay. I mean, I don’t, I don’t think I have the, as formal a background as you in that area. For me, it was more of picking up front end, HTML and CSS and back end PHP. My SQL back when I was in high school. Okay. Which was probably yesterday. I was in high school. Yes. Wow. I, I graduated a half year early and for whatever reason, I don’t know why I decided, Hey, I got a half a year I’m done with high school. Let me go learn how to code. This was before coding was cool. I was the kid in high school that brought a Palm pilot to class. Oh, wow. Remember those guys?

Arlen
[00:02:19]
Do I? I had one. I had a couple actually. I had the first generation bomb violent.

Nemo
[00:02:23]
Oh man. That’s nice. So like with the hard cover that flips open. Yep. Oh man. Yep. I had that. And then I was like the first kid to bring a laptop to class. The teachers didn’t know what to do with me. I told ’em I swear, I’m writing notes in this thing. We didn’t have wifi back then. All the man, I feel like I’m sounds like I’m in the darks or something.

Arlen
[00:02:42]
Yeah. Times.

Nemo
[00:02:44]
Yeah. But times have changed. Yeah, definitely. And so I, I learned how to code and that skill has served me really, really well. I quickly realized that my, just me as an individual, I had a hard, hard time coding, especially debugging. I just didn’t have the patience for it. And I got really frustrated. There were moments where I’d spent a whole weekend trying to fix some lousy PHP problem and I couldn’t figure it out. So by the end of that weekend, I, I would eventually figure it out. And yes, there’s a sense of satisfaction, but I also wanted to throw my computer out the window. Right. And I just felt like this is not really what I’m built for. I don’t wanna be angry all the time, every weekend. I just wanna move along and get things done that I know I can get done.

Nemo
[00:03:24]
So in that world, back then, when people still paid good money to build websites, I realized that my kn was more on the front end with graphic design, with user experience with basically trying to design websites where when visitors arrive on the website, they’ll take the action you want them to take right with e-commerce that’s often purchasing. It could be an email list, sign up for, you know, software. It could be getting them to start a free trial, to call in or to provide their information so that they become a lead for your sales team. And that’s where I found my sweet spot. I had a knack for it and to make a long story short, I joined a software company when I was still in college called Bloomfire Bloomfire is an enterprise SA company. So that’s a software company. It was from of the lingo for, for you folks out there.

Nemo
[00:04:13]
And we launched that south by Southwest 20 months later, after launching, I helped launch the company as employee. Number two, we got acquired for, I think it was like a 10 X return for the investors. So it was a pretty good outcome for a 20 month time period. Then I was fired from that company. I think it was within a year when I was fired, I went over to a company called kiss metrics, kiss metrics. At the time it was run by Neil to tell and heat and shop right, which behind crazy eggs. So two wonderful people love them to bits, great people and did my best there as the director of customer acquisition and customer success. Okay. Very long job title, but it made sense. It has to do with lifestyle lifecycle marketing before lifecycle marketing was like a big term, I guess, in the blog of sphere.

Nemo
[00:05:01]
So working there, I built out the customer success team. I hit my targets, generating leads in customer acquisition. Then while I was doing that by day in San Francisco, by night, I was building my own e-commerce company. So that was initially tried a lot of things and what worked was selling on Amazon. Okay. And I put that into a seven figure run rate business, and it’s first year, just by myself, eventually I hired someone part-time to help me pack and ship things, but that I was taking off quite nicely. And at that point, I think around, I forgot the age, but I think I was 26. It’s it’s documented somewhere online from another interview. I, I retired.

speaker 3
[00:05:38]
Oh, wow.

Nemo
[00:05:39]
Semi retirement. I mean, I was working an hour a day on my own business. I decided to resign from kiss metrics, even though I really enjoyed my time there. I built out the team. I, the people I worked with were mostly handpicked from me. So it was more of a, what do I do with my life? You know, do I wanna add to my tombstone here lies Nemo. He helped build some software companies or, you know, something more meaningful to put on my tombstone.

Arlen
[00:06:04]
Sure

Nemo
[00:06:05]
You know, I, I spent some time playing a lot of basketball working on my business a little bit and I quickly found myself spending more and more time building my e-commerce business went from one hour, a day, two hours a day to four hours a day to eight hours a day to 16 hours a day and fast now, you know, I think it’s five, five or six years later, you know, been through number of different situations. The businesses evolve multiple times. I’ve diversified big time. And so it’s, it’s been a fun ride. Okay. Been a really fun ride. And, and, you know, being able to advise companies through 500 startups has been really enriching. That started when I was semi-retired and it has continued until now trying my best to pass along. Lessons learned, hope that the people I talk with, they don’t have to, you know, deal with the same pain that I had to deal with. Hopefully they’ll have an easier journey and they’ll outdo me. Okay.

Arlen
[00:06:54]
Well, yeah. That’s, that’s awesome. Yeah. You have quite a resume. You’ve done, you know, really a lot and yeah, it’s really admirable for you to now want to, you know, impart all the knowledge and the lessons learned to, you know, to others. And, you know, I’m in the same situation, as far as this podcast is concerned, you know, I’ve got about 18 years under my belt with, with OmniSTAR affiliate software and you start as a whole, as a business. And so we’ve, I’ve got a lot of lessons learned and you know, when I talk to new business owners all every day usually, and you know, there’s a lot of things that, you know, they tell me and, you know, just based on my experience and the things that I’ve done, and I know you, you probably feel the same way. You can, you can probably give a lot of advice and kind of point people into the right direction. And that’s, that’s, that’s awesome now it’s, it’s really impressive how you’ve really built the Amazon business and we’re able to do that. And I know a lot of the listeners out there have their own eCommerce businesses they’re selling online and many of them may not have even thought about Amazon or even dabbled into it. And so I guess before we get into that, I mean, how would, how do you really define multichannel eCommerce selling on multiple platforms? I mean, what are some of the, the common platforms outside of, you know, one’s own web presence?

Nemo
[00:08:07]
I’d say multichannel, eCommerce is wrangling with the art and science of selling your stuff on multiple websites, right? Amazon is one website. eBay is another nowadays. There seems like more and more pop up. You have offer up, you have let go. Craiglist is old school, but it still works true. And you have, I think jet.com, Walmart, the list really keeps going RKU as well. And we haven’t even talked about international. You know, if we go international, you can do Amazon, UK, Amazon, JP, like Japan. I advise the company called judo launch as you know, full disclosure. I own a little bit of that company okay. Where they help launch Amazon sellers who sell in the us into the other Amazon marketplaces overseas. And what they quickly realize is there’s, there’s a opportunity where American, you know, products that are popular in the American Amazon marketplace can also be tremendously popular in the EU, like the Europe one, the Japanese one.

Nemo
[00:09:04]
And there’s not as much competition over there. Okay. Plus Amazon is very incentivized right now to dominate the world. So they throw a few more resources, your way to help you get started in these overseas markets on their sites. So you might be able to get a little bit of extra help, you know, here in Amazon, us, they’re so slammed with merchants and merchant inquiries that, you know, I spend a lot of time, or my team spends a lot of time wrangling with their merchant support team. It’s, it’s notoriously difficult to get an answer sometimes, or to get a problem solved. It’s like, you keep adding dead ends. Right. And that can be really painful, right. Especially when you’re trying to figure things out and you have a lot of questions you want to ask. So knowing that if you go overseas with the Amazon marketplaces and knowing that you can get some extra support from Amazon, that can be a godsend for people who may not be as tech savvy as you and I. Right. Or who may want things a little bit easier for themselves.

Arlen
[0:09:56]
Okay. So they have separate support teams for those overseas markets. And you’re saying, they’re the channels sitting in which they reach them. They’re not as slammed as basically the us. And so you can probably get through a little bit easier.

Nemo
[01:10:09]
Yeah. That’s what I’ve heard. So, and it makes sense, right? Like if I’m Amazon and I’m trying to incentivize more merchants to sell overseas so that my overseas marketplaces aren’t empty. Right. Like you need them to be filled products. We better help these us based sellers sell

Arlen
[01:10:24]
Globally. Gotcha. Gotcha. And that, that totally makes sense. I never really thought about that, but yeah, that’s, that’s some, some great piece of advice now, you know, for the businesses out there that are listening that want to kind of really just go ahead and get started. What, what are really the initial steps? I mean, if they have a product line already, they’re selling, let’s say they’re selling on a Shopify store and they’re like, all right, it’s about time for me to, to get this on, get these on Amazon. What are some of the initial things that they need to do or think of before even doing it?

Nemo
[01:10:53]
That’s a great question. Opening up an Amazon account or eBay account or whatever account and posting your products on there. That’s the easy part, the hard part, one of the hard parts, especially if you have limited inventory or you worry about running out of inventory because sometimes if you put a product and this is, I would say, this is on the rare side of things. Like if you get lucky, but if you get lucky and you post your product on Amazon and it takes off, that could true up all your inventory right away. Right. Which is a great problem to have, except that Amazon penalizes people or merchants who have a history of running outta stock. Gotcha.

Arlen
[01:11:29]
Okay.

Nemo
[01:11:29]
So once you start selling on Amazon, you wanna stay in stock all the time forever. And that’s how you ride momentum. That’s how you build your business on Amazon.

Arlen
[01:11:37]
Okay. Yeah. That’s, that’s interesting. Yeah, because you know, like you said, it, it’s a good and bad problem to have you, you definitely want to Excel as quick as possible, but at the same time, you, you do have to be ready. So exactly. I, I would say, yeah, that makes sense. So you don’t want to necessarily jump into it and just say, oh yeah, yeah. I’m gonna go ahead and try it because you never know, like you said, your, your product products could just go ahead and take off. People could just buy it, like, you know, like hots or whatever, and yeah. If you’re not ready. Yeah. That’s you could have a, a kind of a short window out there on, on Amazon. So that makes total sense.

Nemo
[01:12:09]
And can you, I mean, let me, I mean, and I wanna add more to that, you know, can you imagine if it’s not just Amazon, you’re selling on, but you’re also selling on eBay, right? You’re selling on Walmart, jet.com, whatever, all these other marketplaces and your product might take off in any of them, then you have to deal with the challenge of, well, I only have finite inventory. How do I split my inventory across my different marketplaces, right. Across the different channels and some of the channels, for example, Amazon, they really want you, although their policies have changed a little bit with some new programs, but for the most part, they really want to hold your inventory in their Amazon warehouses. Right. So that they can ship really, really quickly. Right. So now I have to make these decisions of, well, how much of my inventory am I gonna shoot off to Amazon?

Nemo
[01:12:50]
And how much are, am I, am I gonna keep, am my own facility to cert my Shopify store, right? Then you have to keep in mind, okay. How do I keep my quantities available across all the different marketplaces in sync? So when one unit sells on Amazon, one unit is deducted from your Shopify inventory balance, right from your Walmart inventory balance, et cetera. Right? So now these are solvable problems. I’m just saying that if you choose to go heavy down this path, these are some of the problems you’ll have to solve. And there are ways to solve it for, for me. And I think one of the products I use was skew vault SKU, U V V a U LT vault. The customer support team has been really good to me over the years. And there is a lot of setup work involved. You know, it’s no joke, especially if, if you have a lot of products, if you don’t have a lot of products, it’s a little bit easier, but I remember skill vault would help me with keeping track of my inventory across multiple channels. And then some of the reports, if I set them up correctly and I can interpret them correctly, which is not that easy, they will tell me, Hey, you probably need to produce more inventory or buy more inventory and you probably need to buy this amount. And you probably ought to split your inventory in these amounts per channel. Right. So that you stay in stock across all of your different channels.

Arlen
[01:14:12]
Yeah. That’s, it’s interesting that you mentioned that I was actually thinking you were gonna mention another product, cuz I, I actually had a few episodes back. I had a gentleman from a company called Skubana. He was a, one of the founders of that company and they provide an inventory management solution for multichannel sellers. And you, before I had ’em on, I didn’t really realize how important it is to make sure that you have all of that in sync, especially if you’re selling across multiple channels. You know, if you do not have a solid inventory system, like you said, you, you have to have something in place that when somebody purchases from your Shopify store, that inventory mind, you know, gets deducted from what you have available across all of those platforms. Cuz if not, you know, if you’re just looking at just one of those platforms and you know, not paying attention, you know, you could have somebody trying to purchase from, you know, Amazon and it’s not available and you know, oh yeah. You keep run into kind of a, a nightmare scenario. So yeah. That’s, that’s interesting. And I’m, I’m glad you, you mentioned that

Nemo
[01:15:10]
Well, well, can you also imagine the pressure that puts on your cash? Yeah. You know, right. You have to make a decision with your cash of how much inventory you’re going to buy. Right. And if you make the wrong decision, you might send inventory way too much inventory to one channel. Right. And that’s cash. Yeah. Right. That’s basically cash sitting in the form of inventory somewhere. And if that’s not selling fast enough, your cash is locked up. Yeah. Unless you decide to transport it back. Right. And, and then you have to redistribute it all over again. Exactly. And every time you touch your inventory, every single time you touch it, it costs you money. Yeah. For sure. You might touch it as little as possible.

Arlen
[01:15:49]
That that is true.

Nemo
[01:15:50]
If you’re, if you don’t have a huge cash balance, you make some wrong moves. You could suddenly find yourself in a cash flow situation. Right. A cash flow challenge. There’s some kind of gap. And I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Yeah.

Arlen
[01:16:03]
Not, not at

Nemo
[01:16:04]
All. Especially if you’re bootstrapping you, haven’t raised money from investors, you’re really redeploying your profits back into your business and plowing it back into grow your business. Your cash is usually tight. So one of my favorite products that has helped me on a cash on the cash front has been the American express plum card because that gives you 60 days of float. Okay. Or rather to use non-financial terminology. It’s it’s like being able to purchase almost an unlimited amount. Although American express calls it, no like they have their term to make it sound like it’s no limit.

Arlen
[01:16:37]
Right, right.

Nemo
[01:16:38]
But there really is a limit. It’s just that they give you more and more and more. Gotcha. And you can work your way up to like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Okay. But you can, you can buy on that card and maybe you can buy inventory on that card and you don’t have to pay American express back for 60 days interest free.

Arlen
[01:16:54]
Okay. That’s really

Nemo
[01:16:55]
For that for 30 days. Yeah. That’s a big difference.

Arlen
[01:16:57]
That is, that’s a, that’s a huge difference. And I know many sellers, like you said, being cash strapped is not, not a good position to be in, especially if you’ve got orders to fulfill and then, you know, you’ve gotta keep, keep your inventory. It’s interesting that you mentioned that the whole inventory management, I actually thought about how it’s a little bit similar to restaurants because I I’ve talked to different restaurant owners and, and managers and inventory and restaurants is also a, a very critical thing. They have to know how much to buy. They have to know and they have to anticipate their demand. And because if they over it’s perishable. Yeah. If they over buy, it’s a little different, they can’t sense stuff back. Like, you know, you can with nonperishable products, you have to just deal with it and eat the cost. If, if people, no pun intended, you have to eat the cost. If people don’t don’t purchase or, or die out. So it’s a, it’s unfortunate now. Oh yeah. You know, now there’s a lot of, of course advantages and, and you know, maybe there are some disadvantages to multis selling. I know we talked about, of course, it’s it really opens it up, you know, opens up your product service line to a variety of different customers that you may not have ever touched. But what, what would you say are some disadvantages to multichannel e-commerce

Nemo
[01:18:08]
Well, I would say, I mean, if you’re not comfortable with math and if you aren’t comfortable with logistics and the details around logistics yeah.

Nemo
[01:18:17]
Multichannel could be a, a nightmare for you, right. It’s back to splitting inventory across channels, right. Forecasting, how much inventory should put in each of these channels. There’s no guarantee that each channel is going to continue performing in the future as it has in the past. So what are you gonna do if inventory is stranded in a channel there’s there’s these like logistic cause, cause you’re often moving actual physical items right now. Now keep in mind. That depends on channel too. Right? Some channels, they can let you store your inventory in your own facility. They don’t need it in their facility, but other channels like Amazon need it in their facility. Right. So once you deal with channels, which literally wanna hold onto your inventory somewhere, you can put yourself in a riskier situation. If you are not comfortable with math and logistics. Yeah.

Arlen
[01:19:04]
Yeah. That’s, that’s totally true. Yeah. There’s the logistic management and you know, like you said, you, you really got to know, know the numbers, know what you’re doing. And especially if, you know, especially if you’re looking to do, you know, kind of go large scale with it and go across a variety of different platforms that, you know, that makes total sense. You don’t wanna, you definitely don’t want bite off, you know, more that you can shoot now, you know, the bottom,

Nemo
[01:19:28]
Hey, let me add one more thing. I mean, for those of you out there who, who might be asking, Hey, you know, how bad can it get? Like how does it really feel to go through that kind of pressure? Check out the, I think it’s a new book, Phil Knight’s book, shoe, dog. I mean the story of Nike and the trouble that to deal with with cash. Right. And inventory is nuts.

Arlen
[01:19:52]
Okay.

Nemo
[01:19:53]
Like reading about Phil Knight, talking about how you sweating bullets, you know, the, the, the pressure that puts on him and his family it’s, it’s unreal. I mean, it, it, very few people have the grit to make it through that kind of experience when you’re bootstrapping. Right. Right. And he bootstrapped a lot of Nike, which is incredible to think about nowadays. Right. Nike is how big, you know what I mean? Yeah. But at, but at one point, you know, not that long ago, only what, 40, 50 years ago, really, not that long ago, you know, Adidas, rain, Supreme, Puma, rain, Supreme, and Nike was just the new kid on the block. Crazy to think. Cuz now Nike’s, you know, eating everyone’s lunch.

Arlen
[02:20:34]
Yeah. Pretty, pretty much. Yeah. That, that is amazing. How, like you said, they he’s really gone a long way and I appreciate you mentioning that book. I hadn’t read it. I’ve heard about it, but that’s, I know that’s a, a great resource for, for people that want to get some, some good lessons from, you know, one of the guys that’s been through it, you know, he’s been through the whole, the whole nine

Nemo
[02:20:53]
Unreal for sure.

Arlen
[02:20:54]
Unreal percent. Yeah. Oh yeah. Most, most definitely. Now the, one of the things that a lot of business owners are pretty much every business owner is concerned about is, is profit. You know, they don’t want to do something that, you know, is just gonna spend, you know, waste a lot of time and then not really have too much profit. What are, what are some ways that you’ve experienced to maximize profit selling across multiple channels? Or what are some key things? I know there’s a lot of different things you can do, but what are some key things based on your experience to maximize profit across multiple channels?

Nemo
[02:21:29]
Well, there there’s, you know, e-commerce is interesting, especially when you’re at scale, you’re talking about unit profit, we’re talking about profit that shows on your profit and loss statement every single month. Right. Cause you could show, you could show, there’s like, oh yeah. Unit economics, you know, every single unit that we sell our profit is blank. Right. Well that might be true. However, you might not realize that profit or receive that profit in your bank account. Right. Due to a number of things such as the fact that you have to spend a lot of money up front to acquire a whole bunch of inventory. Gotcha. And then you have to recoup that investment over time. Right. And that time could be the difference of one month or one year. Gotcha. And I mean, you run outta business cuz you run outta cash.

Arlen
[02:22:03]
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I, I would say the profit at the end of the day on your, on your, you know, profit and loss statement after, you know, everything, everything is said and done.

Nemo
[02:22:12]
And by far it’s, it’s being able to handle or being able to create as much float as possible. Okay. For yourself as float. So what do I mean by cash float? You know that term, well, Warren buffet loves float and he loves float because of insurance companies. So, you know, for those of you who, who want to crash course on that, I can definitely Google it. I’ll give you the short version right now. You know, buffet owns Geico and Geico for all y’all out there. You know that they sell auto insurance, amongst many other things. So the math behind it is, you know, you pay every single month to Geico and you might not have any accidents in your car. So you’re just sending money to Geico. And Geico knows this. Eventually at some point, at some point it could be a month later. It could be a year later, something happens to your car where you file a claim.

Nemo
[02:22:57]
And at that point, Geico will take percentage of all the money you’ve sent them. And if it’s a small accident, they’ll take a chunk of it. They’ll send it over to you to, to pay for whatever it is that happened to your car. So that period of time between when you first started paying Geico and when Geico actually sent you some money, that that period could be, let’s say seven months, that’s seven months of float for Geico. It means that they don’t have to apply any of the cash they’re receiving for any type of business function. For the most part for seven months. I know there’s some administrative stuff and whatever, but you know, at scale it’s minuscule, right? So seven months of float now in e-commerce you don’t really have float usually, unless you’ve gotten really good at negotiating terms with your manufacturer. I’ll just give you an example.

Nemo
[02:23:43]
Right? Most makers of products, let’s say you’re an e-commerce merchant and you make your products. All right. That’s most people in e-commerce do that. The typical expectation is you send a bunch of money cash, usually in a wire transfer to the manufacturer. They take a month, two months, three months to not only make your goods, but to ship it over to you. So now you’ve set the cash and you’re not receiving any money back. So it’s like the opposite. You’re you’re the opposite of Geico, right? It’s like, it’s like Geico sends the money to the driver first for some kind of future accident. Right? And then the driver sends money back to Geico month, over month. Right,

Arlen
[02:24:23]
Exactly. Right. Which

Nemo
[02:24:25]
Is not good. And so at, at the end of all, all of that, you, you hope of course that you will receive the product in good condition. If it’s not in good condition, then there’s another few months where you have to get a new shipment in and that’s a pain in the butt, but provides some good condition you can finally sell. And of course, even to get yourself to sell, you might have to move inventory around, which takes more time. All that said you’re running, what’s called cash behind, okay. Cash behind you’ve deployed the cash and you’re behind. And you’re trying to catch up to recoup the cash. That’s the quickest way to explain cash behind, right? Ideally you wanna be cash ahead. And if you have float your, your cash ahead. So how do you do that as an e-commerce merchant? One way is you would approach the people who are your manufacturers and you would negotiate net 30 net, 60 net, 90 terms, net one to one net, as much as you humanly can because what’s happening here is it’s almost like the manufacturer is giving you a loan. You can think about it that way. I mean, it’s not really, but you can think about it that way. They’re basically lending you money for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. And that money is the equivalent of what you ought to be paying them for that manufacturing run. Now that’s pretty good, right? Yeah. If they’re learning you money, that means you don’t have to dip into your own bank account to pay the manufacturer. And that cash is precious. That will keep you alive. It’s like oxygen.

Arlen
[02:25:39]
Right? Right.

Nemo
[02:25:40]
So negotiating terms like that can help. In addition to negotiating terms like that, if you can negotiate terms where they allow you to pay with American express, which is rare, but Hey, I’ll never doubt your negotiating ability. Right? Then you, you can add another 60 days on top of the net terms that your manufacturer is giving you. Right. Which is pretty good. So ideally you can even receive the inventory before even paying the manufacturer start selling. Now that’s good now cuz because cash is now arriving, new cash is arriving in your bank account. If you are selling and that’s and ideally there’s so much new cash arriving that when the manufacturer finally asks for their money, because the net 90 or net, whatever terms are due and the American express bill is due, you can just take a percentage of your profits from selling that inventory. Take that percentage, pay everyone back and keep the remainder.

Arlen
[02:26:35]
Okay. Wow. I mean that, that makes sense. I mean, I appreciate that breakdown because yeah, if you do not have terms like that, it’s really, I mean, paying for your goods up front. I mean, you’re really, you know, you’re really in a situation where you could be, you know, like you said, you could definitely be, you know,

Nemo
[02:26:54]
Cash balance is, is being eaten into yeah. It can factor and run and ideally, ideally, and you know, this all has to do with profit and loss because profit and loss, depending on how you do your accounting, right. It’s gonna show differences in cash balances. Right. So what, what you’re trying to do instead of dipping into your cash balance first is you’re trying to add money to your bank account by selling and then out of the sum, total that you’ve added, you take a percentage that you dip into. Gotcha. So look at your bank account, right. Instead of it looking like a roller coaster, right. If you’re to chart it out, it’s gonna look like a gradual climb with some, with some occasional dips here and there. But if you zoom out, it’s still a climb.

Arlen
[02:27:36]
Right. Right. In your experience are most manufacturers, are they amenable to these types of net terms? Is that typical or is it, are they really expect that? What do you, what do you see?

Nemo
[02:27:48]
Well, I’ve heard some crazy stories. Look, if you ask someone to lend you money, how willing are they to do it?

Arlen
[02:27:54]
Right, right. Right.

Nemo
[02:27:56]
Now they’ll still do it. But do you think they just say, oh yeah, no problem. Right. Unless they’re, you know, people that, you know, really, really well or whatever that might be. Okay. So expect the same type of resistance.

Arlen
[02:28:07]
Gotcha.

Nemo
[02:28:08]
There are ways. And I’ve heard of some very interesting maneuvers to protect the names and the reputations of the companies from these private conversations I’ve had. I’ll just say that there is one company that grew to multiple tens of millions in revenue, annual rev, annualized revenue. So run rate, be it really right in seven months.

Arlen
[02:28:32]
Okay.

Nemo
[02:28:32]
Which is crazy fast. Yeah.

Nemo
[02:28:34]
You start from nothing. And then seven months later, your run rate is multiple tens of millions to get kind of terms they wanted from the manufacturers which were overseas. They actually figured out the driving routes that the executives of these companies would take on their way to work. They bought billboards overseas on those driving routes declaring that there’s some new Alliance of sorts where their company plus these other big brands are like banding together to sell and, and, and it’s, it’s all true. First of all, it’s all true. Okay. It’s just and framed very cleverly.

Arlen
[02:29:15]
Wow.

Nemo
[02:29:16]
Okay. And so what happened was they made themselves look way bigger than they were. It’s called, you know, it’s it’s authority by association, right. Psychological. They can Google that. Right. And so when the manufacturers started noticing this company that this new company that had been working with them associated all these big brands and declaring some kind of Alliance, they, they could see the dollar signs. They were thinking, oh, this is gonna be big. Right. And we’re part of, of this. Oh man. You know? And so when they were asked for these terms, in fact, not only were they more than willing, some of them were jumping at the opportunity to offer terms.

Arlen
[02:29:53]
Okay. Wow.

Nemo
[02:29:54]
They, they want to be the exclusive manufacturer. They’re part of this, this run that they were gonna make. And by run, I don’t mean manufacturing run. I mean like a, like a, like a sprint in, in marketing and sales strategy. Wow. That they were part of that part of that launch or whatever.

Arlen
[03:30:10]
Yeah. That is definitely something you do not see. And I think really kind of the lesson there. And, and one of the things that really echoed in my head that I heard is that, I mean, they, they really took it to the next level as far as being creative to get those particular terms because you, you, you really just can’t, you know, come up to a manufacturer that you’ve had no contact with. There’s no referral, anything like that. And then just expect them to honor your request like that. You really, you, you’ve gotta be a little bit different. You’ve gotta do something that’s going to incentivize them in a way or, or make them feel that there’s an incentive for them to give you those particular terms. So that’s no, that’s a definitely a true lesson, but I don’t think, I don’t think most businesses listening out there can, can afford to go that the route that they took, but it’s food for thought. For sure.

Nemo
[03:30:58]
Yeah. Yeah. Think, think about it. Right. It’s kind of like, you know, you meet a girl for the first time. Think she’s cute. And, and the first thing is, you know, hi, my name is Nemo. We’ll go on a date with me and can I borrow like $5,000?

Arlen
[03:31:11]
Right. Right. Exactly.

Nemo
[03:31:13]
Right. How, how do you pull that off properly?

Arlen
[03:31:16]
Yeah.

Nemo
[03:31:17]
And maybe, maybe some whining and dining, maybe some whining and dining will get you a little bit closer to that $5,000 goal. Yeah. They gotta get real CRAs.

Arlen
[03:31:24]
It’s gonna be a lot, actually a lot of whining and dining. I think a lot of, a few over overseas trips, maybe stuff like that. Well, you’re clever AR something like that, but yeah. It’s gonna take quite a bit to, to try to pull that off. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. Nemo. I really appreciate all of the, the advice and the information that you’ve provided about multichannel selling. I know it’s gonna go go far amongst the listeners that are, that are hearing this. And what I always like to do lately to kind of close things out is to kind of shift gears here. So we can kind of dig into your brain a little bit other than what you may be doing day to day. But what’s one thing that our audience really would be surprised to know about you.

Nemo
[03:32:04]
Something fun or something businessy, some

Arlen
[03:32:07]
Something fun. Yeah. Let’s kinda switch gears.

Nemo
[03:32:09]
Oh yeah. Well I love basketball. Okay. I absolutely love basketball. I’ve been playing since I was three years old. Wow. NBA pro pro ball. I’m not really into college ball as much, but pro ball. Okay. And I have three bunny rabbits. Yep. Three pet bunny, rabbits. One’s called muffin. One’s called XL. And one’s called Winston George. And they’re like little dog all with their own personality. It’s pretty great.

Arlen
[03:32:30]
That is cool. So you love to play basketball and you have three pet bunny rabbits. Okay. That’s, that’s something I think people may not have guessed that you, that you actually have that that’s. That’s awesome. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t know too many people that actually have pet monies, but they are adorable. That’s that is for sure.

Nemo
[03:32:45]
Oh yeah. They’re great. Adorable. They’re super fun.

Arlen
[03:32:47]
Adorable animals. So that’s awesome. I appreciate you sharing that fun fact, whether those fun facts with us, you know, if any of the listeners out there want to get in touch with you and find out more about you, how do they do it?

Nemo
[03:32:58]
The best route is, you know, I’m gonna assume that if they’re reaching out to talk to me, it’s, it’s for some kind of advice. That’s what I’ve noticed. It’s if you wanna send the thanks or, or hello or something like that, I’m easy to find. Just Google me. Okay. And you can find me if you’re looking for advice, you know, an in-depth conversation, a phone call. I do a little bit of that, you know, just like Googlers have their 10% time. I try to carve out a little bit of time and partly it’s because I find it meaningful. You know, I’ve been coaching companies for a long time. I do it through 500 startups. Okay. And before I was doing it through 500, I was doing it on my own, just the folks at 500 caught wind of it. And they kinda loop me in and it’s been a great ride. Okay. But on my own, I still do a little bit and I do it through a platform called clarity.fm. Okay. So my URL, there is clarity.fm/nemo, pretty straightforward. And you can jump on there. You can see all these reviews from all these different calls and you can book a call with me if you want.

Arlen
[03:33:49]
Okay. That, that’s awesome. Thanks a lot Nemo. I appreciate that. And I’m, I’m familiar with clarity as well, and I think that’s an awesome platform. Oh yeah. For, for the listeners that aren’t familiar with it where you can go on there and, and, and literally book some time with some really top experts in a, in a variety of different areas. And, and, and you’ll get some time with them, you know, one on one on a call, which can ver, can definitely be invaluable to, you know, the most businesses. So, oh yeah. So, yep. Thanks again for joining us today on the, the eCommerce marketing podcast, Nemo, you appreciate it. And you know, you’ve a great rest of your day.

Nemo
[03:34:21]
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Arlen
[03:34:25]
Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast. 

Podcast Guest Info

Nemo Chu
Managing Partner at IPO Architects