The Amazon Strategist Show

How to Choose the Right Accountant for Your Amazon Business

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Join host John Cavendish and guest Matt Remuzzi of CapForge as they delve into crucial finance and bookkeeping strategies for Amazon sellers on the new episode of the Amazon Strategist Show.

With over two decades of experience, Matt shares insights from the evolution of his career from consulting to specializing in e-commerce accounting. This episode explores the nuances of finance management, the importance of choosing a customer-centric product strategy over a product-focused one, and practical tips for selecting the right bookkeeping services.

Whether you're an established e-commerce entrepreneur or just starting out, this episode offers valuable strategies to enhance your business's financial health and operational efficiency without resorting to industry hacks.
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Connect With Matt and Capforge
Website: https://capforge.com/
Email: matt@capforge.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/capforge/
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LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/thejohncavendish

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Speaker 1:

When you decide what you want to launch next. A lot of people will go to a tool like Jungle Scout or Helium 10 and they will start with the product in mind, and I feel like that is backwards.

Speaker 2:

Hello, I'm your host, jon Cavendish, and welcome to the Amazon Strategies Show. The show that's all strategy, with no hacks, no silver bullets and no magic pills, just real, practical strategies to grow your Amazon business. So today I'm joined by no other than Matt Ramuzzi from CapForge. So Matt has been in business since the year 2000, which I must make him one of the longest serving, longest surviving, to be honest, businesses that we've ever had on the show. And we're going to be talking about finance and bookkeeping today. But Matt has done it all. He came out of a business in the year 2000, started a consulting business and that's moved further and further across until moving mainly into finance and bookkeeping since 2012. So he's been in the bookkeeping space and finance space before most of these businesses even started. So I'm really excited to have a conversation today diving into finance, bookkeeping, cash flow, wherever we go. But welcome to the show, matt.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thanks for having me and making me feel super old.

Speaker 2:

It's a bit experienced, yes, right Like a fine wine, Cool Matt. So I hear you're in San Diego. How long have you been there?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I grew up in Los Angeles but I moved down to San Diego to go to university and I just never left. It was just too nice. You know a fraction of the people in LA, a fraction of the traffic, much nicer smaller town down here, and it's, it's great. I can't complain. I live in a place where people come to vacation, so you know I must be doing something right.

Speaker 2:

Oh, me too. But yeah, I identify with that and when I was in San Diego, like perfect climate, more of a relaxed vibe than LA and less insane concrete based commuting through just blocks and blocks of concrete Exactly, love it Cool. So how did you get kind of pulled into the e-commerce space after you'd started your business?

Speaker 1:

Well, I can't claim any genius insight into you know what would be a great growing industry to get involved with. We got a call kind of out of the blue, from a guy coincidentally named George Carlin, which is the same name as the famous American comedian. However, it turned out it wasn't that George Carlin which is the same name as the famous American comedian. However, it turned out it wasn't that George Carlin, it was a different George Carlin. But he said hey, you know, I sell stuff on Amazon and I need help with bookkeeping. Can you guys help me? I said, well, we've never done that before, but we'll take a crack at it.

Speaker 1:

And we got into it and realized there was a lot of things that were different and unique about this and we had a big learning curve to kind of get to the point where we could say confidently to him okay, we figured out a good way to do this, we figured out a good way to report your results for you and now you know we can help you out on an ongoing, monthly basis on how to do this. And he was super happy and it gave him clarity he hadn't ever really had before in his business. And he said hey, by the way, I'm in a Facebook group and some other people are asking do you mind if I put your name out there? Of course not. No, please do. And here we are 1,200 e-commerce accounting clients later it's worked out pretty well for us, but I owe it all to George Carlin not that George Carlin back years ago, who asked for our help out of the blue, and it's been a great ride ever since Awesome.

Speaker 2:

That's a great story. And 1200 clients is an awesome, awesome story. Just out of interest I mean from my personal interest anyone else listening how do you manage that many individual clients and do you have a huge team? How does that work?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So we do have a large team and I always knew that I wanted to grow the business. I didn't want to just sort of be business. That was only what I could do in 40 hours or me, and you know a handful of people. I knew I wanted to scale large and so one of the very early investments I made was in custom software to be able to manage all these projects. That would tell us where each client was, what we were doing for them, where they were at in this phase of that month's bookkeeping or that year-end bookkeeping.

Speaker 1:

And that goal-oriented, growth-oriented mindset, I think, is what allowed us to do it. Because even with just 10 or 15 clients, trying to manage it with Google Sheets and Post-it notes and a whiteboard in the office was a disaster. So in order to scale and grow, you have to have the tools and the mindset and the desire to get there. That's where I was coming from with wanting to do it. I didn't want to be the hands-on accounting person that was deep in the numbers of one person's books.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to build an accounting firm that could serve a lot of clients, and so that's the way I sort of invested and drew the business and I think the other thing that helped a ton is I'm not an accountant. Most accounting businesses are run by accountants and they have sort of an accounting mindset super conservative and want to have their hands on everything, have a very hard time delegating and I come from an entrepreneurial background where, again, my mindset was growth and I was happy to delegate to people who are smarter than me at the things that we were doing and I'm good at the growth and the vision and the plan for the future. So I did what I was good at and they do what they're good at and as a team, you know, we have a lot of success.

Speaker 2:

I love that and that's an amazing insight for anyone listening to take away. Is that, I think, an E-myth. They call it what's it? Entrepreneur, manager, leader and technician. If you're in the Tony Robbins world, they call it artist and his leader, entrepreneur.

Speaker 2:

They say, like you know, most people get into business because they're a technician or they're an artist, they love the art form and they think I'm gonna be great at this business because I can do the thing and then as soon as you're into it, you realize like, oh, I need to put on an entrepreneur hat if I want to turn this into a real business that doesn't just drive me the technician or the artist to just implode under the amount of work that I suddenly generate for myself. So I think that's an amazing thing to go in as a non-finance well, not non-finance, but non-accountant to run that business. That's awesome. I love that approach.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it was a huge leg up. And the other thing that really helped is in my other. Prior to getting into the accounting side, I think it was a huge leg up. And the other thing that really helped is in my other. You know, prior to getting into the accounting side of things, I'd worked with a lot of small business owners as a consultant on various projects, helping them in different ways. So I was very familiar and comfortable with talking to small business owners about everything about you know what's your goal, what's your vision for the future, where are you trying to get to? How can I help? Big picture, whereas you know they say oh, you're the first person who's asked that.

Speaker 1:

The last four accountants I talked to you know they immediately jump into let's debits and credits and IRS tax rule this and they lost me. They weren't adding any value. They didn't really understand my business. I didn't know what the heck they were talking about. So you're the first person that's kind of connected on this. You know owner to owner, entrepreneur to.

Speaker 1:

So it made the sales process for me very easy because you know people just oh, yeah, you get what I'm trying to do. You understand my business, the struggle of being a business owner. We talked about that for 45 minutes and then I'd finally say you know, you did. Eventually you called me for accounting, so maybe we should talk about that. And they go oh no, you're hired, I don't. Whatever you know, whatever the cost, you're hired, I like you already. So, uh, I think I had a big leg up over the typical accounting person who you know would just go right into. Let's talk about details of accounting, which is kind of the last thing any business owner, for the most part, wants to get into a hundred percent and I've lost.

Speaker 2:

In the first year of the first couple years in business, I lost a bunch of money through listening to my accountant on how to set things up. You know, accounts are great at doing the number traditionally what you accounts are great at doing the numbers, but beyond that, they don't know strategy. They don't know business. They don't understand actually what, how you should be structuring something and if you structure wrong it turns into a massive pain to restructure it. Absolutely. Um, cool, and I love that. Definitely the business owner, business owner part. I mean I see that. You know, when you talk to someone who owns a business, it's just different, isn't it? And that's why it's cool working with entrepreneurs and like small businesses, because you get to sell to the owner, not to some like middle management guy who's nothing wrong with that. But what I heard several years ago which has stuck with me is like the job of middle management is to not get fired. So trying to sell to those people is different from someone who's the owner, who gets excited and like, yeah, let's do this.

Speaker 1:

Right and they're not as excited because whatever benefit you bring doesn't really come to them. Their salary doesn't change much and if you screw it up, the blame does come to them. So they've just got a whole different perspective on things. So I definitely like working with entrepreneurs and business owners. You know I feel like those are my people, I'm them. You know we connect much better than you know when it gets to a certain size where it just yeah, you're talking to somebody who's got a boss and got an org chart, and they're not the same person as I'm used to talking to.

Speaker 2:

Well, yeah, as they said, you never get fired for buying IBM. Was that the slogan in the past? That was how you sell the level management? Yes, All right. So, as you said, let's talk about finance and bookkeeping, because we also went off track because of me. So why should people use an income specific accountant? I mean, why should they be looking for somebody specific rather than talking to? You know Jenny around the corner who's got an accounting practice and they can just walk in and say hello.

Speaker 1:

Right, I mean, you don't know what you don't know, and it's easy to go and talk to somebody who says, oh sure, you know I can help you out. Your business is probably the same as the dentist office that I do and the restaurant that I do and the gas station that I do the books for what's the big deal? But in truth, accounting for e-commerce is quite different than most traditional businesses in that you're buying the inventory months and months ahead of when you get to sell it and there's a whole supply chain. Usually people are buying from overseas suppliers and getting it to where the warehouse, where it's going to eventually be shipped from, and then, even after you sell it, there's, you know, a two week wait to get paid and all these deductions that come out of it, for, you know, various fees and shipping and referrals and everything else, and it's very hard to kind of line up when I make the sale. But I got paid later and I bought the inventory way before. To well, did I end up making any money on that? Right? Because these events all happen in these very different timeframes. So how do I tie it all together and make sure that I made money when I sold this product after factoring everything in.

Speaker 1:

And if you go to the down the street bookkeeper or the down the street accountant, they might not recognize the importance of that timing. So they just say, well, let's start with your bank account. And I see you've got these deposits. And this month you got a bunch of deposits from Amazon. You didn't buy any inventory, so great, you had a great month. Oh wait, a minute. Next month you spent $40,000 on inventory. You've got the same deposits as you got the month before. Now you lost all this money. Uh-oh, now you're well. So they're really not well-versed in the importance of getting that timing right, doing on an accrual basis and understanding the flow of e-commerce. And then you've got Prime Day, and then you've got Q4, and the fees change and the volume can triple or quadruple depending on what kind of products you're selling it.

Speaker 1:

It's just not something that the average person doing it for the first time can pick up, and I can testify to that because the very first time we did it, you know about four of us spent a month solid trying to figure out what reports do we run? How do we figure this out? How do we go back and make sure you get even something simple like returns right, you get a return, does it go back in inventory so it's not a cost anymore, you can resell it? Or is it an unsellable return where you lost the value of the product? You didn't make the sale right and now you've got to account for that, and then you've got lost inventory and then you've got refunds and you've got firms that go and capture those lost reimbursements for you.

Speaker 1:

It's just, you know it's not something that is easy. It's like going to your general practitioner for eye surgery. I mean, they know the eye right, they studied it a bit in med school but that doesn't mean they can do eye surgery. So if you have an eye problem, you want to go to an eye doctor. And for us, if you have an e-commerce business, you really need to go to an e-commerce accountant to get the best results.

Speaker 2:

Otherwise you're just going to have somebody poking your eye with a stick and you don't want that. There's something you went over there which just I'd love for you to expand on for anyone who's not familiar with accounting terms, which is accrual accounting. So I know you know you're describing cash accounting and accrual. Can you kind of do a bit brief overview for people so they understand what they should be asking around that?

Speaker 1:

Sure, yeah. So cash accounting is basically just what happened in my bank statement. I got some deposits and I spent some money, and the timing of when those things come in is just real time. I got a big deposit on Monday, I wrote a big check or sent a big wire out on Wednesday and over the course of the month maybe more came in than went out or vice versa. And although that tells you exactly what happened with your cash, it doesn't tell you anything about whether or not you ended up making money. If you closed the business down at that point, sold the rest of your inventory at the end of it, would you be ahead or behind? You really can't tell of your inventory at the end of it. Would you be ahead or behind? You really can't tell.

Speaker 1:

What accrual accounting tries to do is line up when you make a sale with all the costs involved in that sale. So then you can say okay, I sold a product for $39.95. After I take out Amazon fees, the cost of the product, the ad spend on that product and everything else the cost of the product, the ad spend on that product and everything else I'm left with $675. And then, okay, now I have to pay some rent and a VA and insurance and everything else, and at the end of all that, I'm left with two bucks but at least it's a positive two instead of a minus two, in which case, for every one I sell, I'm losing $2. So why would I try to sell more than I sold last month? That's what accrual accounting can give you is understanding that profitability month to month to month, even though the inventory you sold you might have bought six months ago, and the day you make the sale, you're not going to get paid for another two weeks. And then, if you have an Amazon loan, you know they're not going to give you the whole reimbursement. They're going to work towards paying off your Amazon loan, and there's just a million things that go into it.

Speaker 1:

What you want to know, as an Amazon seller, or e-commerce seller in general, is that every time you sell a product, you're making some money, because if you're not, you're spending a lot, you're using a lot of time, you're benefiting other people, including your customers, who you're subsidizing. Essentially, right, the business isn't going to go anywhere. In fact, it's going to dig a big hole for you the more you sell at a loss. So you really want to be confident that every single time you sell a product, at the end of it you made some money on that product Ideally more than less right. The higher the profit margin, the more cushion you have, the more you can invest in more inventory, more product launches, but it's got to be a positive number. If it's not a positive number, then really the whole exercise was for naught and that's frustrating to feel like you're spending all that time and effort and money to end up with nothing to show for it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I've experienced that as well. So, yeah, I made a lot of money in e-commerce. I've lost a small amount of money doing the same thing as well, and it sucks when you have inventory. I've lost a small amount of money doing the same thing as well, and it sucks when you have inventory. And, as you said, if the economics don't work and you can't sell it, then people sometimes just end up actually going lower than if they just liquidated or done something else with it, just because they want to sell through it, and I've seen that many, many times. Just to change slightly, we kind of touched a little bit there on cash flow, and one thing I've heard many times I don't know if it's true or not is that many businesses fail through lack of cash flow, not lack of profitability. Is that something that CapForge can help with or any resources you can share on that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's definitely a key component of your business. It's definitely a key component of your business and it's very possible to have a profitable product that you still run out of money with and cannot continue the business. This is something that can happen where, especially if you get large orders and you move let's say, you're successful in the e-commerce and online space and then you decide you want to go to a big box retailer or something, put your product in Costco or on the shelves at Walmart and they go great. We need you to send 100,000 products to 400 different stores and it's going to be a million dollars worth of inventory and you may be able to make a dollar on every unit, but it takes every cent. You have to ship those products and they're like well, we'll pay you in 90 to 120 days and in the meantime, you're stuff selling like hotcakes. You need to send another or another million dollar purchase or I'm out of money, I don't have it and then you have to see if you can possibly, you know factor that order. There's some, there's some possible outs If you have truly, you know, a purchase order from Walmart for a million dollars or something.

Speaker 1:

But that's what can happen is you get to the point where you have no more cash to spend to fund the business while you're waiting to get paid, even though once you finally everything's settled out, you would have something left over positive to show for it. But you just can't wait the clock out. You don't have enough cash to get you through to the point where you're finally positive, and that is absolutely a problem that we have clients that run into. And it usually happens when you start borrowing and then you start borrowing to pay the earlier loan payments and you kind of just get in this debt spiral that it can be very hard to pull out of. So, absolutely, working with us, we can help make sure that you never kind of go below that line where you won't be able to continue to fund operations until you get more cash in, and that is definitely something to keep an eye on.

Speaker 1:

And I was saying we were talking earlier. E-commerce is a tough business from a margin standpoint. You've got to put a lot of money out before any comes in, and if you're doing well, you got to put even more out to keep that growth going. And so if you don't know your numbers and you're not managing that and really making sure that again, every unit you sell is profitable and profitable enough to keep funding things. You can find yourself in a pretty bad spot, even though ultimately the business could be profitable, but from a cash flow standpoint you ran out of money.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, I've seen that personally when we were running a full service agency. We had a client go from 30,000 a month to 900,000 a month in like a four month period, and where they were cash wise, then was negative two or 300,000 in the hole from trying to expand so quickly. And that's when founders get up to take on things like, you know, high interest, personal debt and all sorts of stuff which is not a healthy way to finance in the long term, especially if something goes wrong, and then suddenly you're personally liable for all of that, which is nuts.

Speaker 1:

Right. If you get the point where you're borrowing money from a guy in a trench coat, it's gone too far, that's not a good place to be, or those guys in the Amazon industry you can borrow from.

Speaker 2:

Who are nicer trench coats than that Right, Awesome, Cool. So are there any questions that people should be asking a bookkeeper that you could share so they could validate Well a bookkeeper and accountant before working with them? What would be some good questions that someone could take away as some value?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, I think the fundamental first question to ask, if you're in the e-commerce space, is to ask how many other e-commerce clients do you work with? Can you give me some references of e-commerce clients that you currently work with, just so that you know that they understand that space and that they're in it? And then, of course, I would ask them you know, do you recommend cash basis or accrual basis accounting for my e-commerce business? And if they say it doesn't matter or cash basis is fine, then you know, okay, that's a pretty big red flag. That means, again, they probably don't really understand the nuances of it. And then you can ask them how they do inventory and cost of goods sold. How do they track that?

Speaker 1:

And if they're telling you, well, every month you have to go count every stock keeping unit you've got and give me an ending out balance and all you know, that's absolutely not ideal, right? You want somebody who can go in, grab the report, see what SKUs are sold, see what the returns were sellable and unsellable and really do an accurate calculation. If they're getting your cogs wrong by 15 or 20% because they don't really know what they're doing or how to calculate that, they could be giving you an absolutely false reading hey, things are great, you're making lots of money. Yes, take out that loan, buy more inventory, you're in great shape, and then you go. That seems strange because there's like nothing in the bank.

Speaker 1:

I don't know how I'm going to make this work Like, oh, don't worry about it, the numbers say you're doing fine. Well, if the numbers are wrong, you could be making bad decisions if you're getting bad data. So I would definitely. You know current e-commerce experience and references, a cash versus accrual question and the inventory and COGS questions. If they can answer those three things competently and confidently, then you, you know you might be on to somebody good. But if not, if they're giving you kind of the blank stare or the wrong answers on those, it's probably best looking love it.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. They're super useful and anyone should write those down and take them away when they're talking to accountants. Yeah, one final question, actually before we go into our next part of the show, is I heard from what a business seminar at some point that you should be changing accountants every three or five years so that they can check the previous accountants work. There's something you can go back several years is Is that a thing, or am I just making that up from the back of my head.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I would say, if you're getting good results and everything's working, then it probably doesn't make sense to change, because you're maybe changing for the worse. But what I would suggest is a lot of people, you know they hire an accounting firm, including some of our clients, you know they hire us and they expect kind of, we're going to do it all and then they're out of it. Right, I've got an accountant, they do the stuff I don't need to. But really it needs to be a two-way street. We need to communicate. And these numbers, I'm not doing them for my health, right, I'm doing them so you, as the business owner, can pull useful data from it to make decisions. So you want to be involved in the process and you want to be able to look at your own financials and say, hey, this doesn't seem right. I know, you know I try to keep my cost of goods sold at around 30%. And I look at these numbers. You're telling me it's 50%, so either I'm doing something wrong or there's something wrong in the numbers. But you want to be able to be able to have that conversation. And then, yes, if the bookkeeping firm is like, oh yeah, we screwed this up, sorry, okay, then maybe you do shop for another one If they can show you. Well, you know, here's why it is right, and actually it's higher than you thought and you probably should have brought that to your attention sooner. But you as the business owner, then take that and take action on it.

Speaker 1:

But I don't know that. I would just arbitrarily change accountants every three to five years. But what I would do is make sure that you know your own business well enough. You don't have to be an accountant, you have to put all the entries in. But you ought to look at the numbers on a regular basis and have a feel for what they should look like and then, if they don't look right, ask questions and then understand what the answers are. And then if you consistently are getting oops, sorry. Well then, ok, it's time to change. But if everything looks good and you're consistently getting good results, good service, then I'd say switching probably is riskier than not.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I would also agree with that. I've had the same suppliers for a long time. It was just something I heard that in the US you can or basically to audit your previous accountants work, because if you can change it, you can go back a certain number of years, and it made sense to me at the time when I heard it.

Speaker 1:

You, if you I mean yes if you say, hey, you know what this seems screwed up and somehow you didn't notice it for three years, you can go back and audit your tax returns and recapture some of the lost money if you overpay taxes or whatever else. But again I would say don't wait three years, look at it all the time and if it's wrong, then fix it then.

Speaker 2:

And you know that would be the smarter play. Yeah, I mean we uh, we use one of those vat return services for europe back in the day where you have to, they file your returns for you and you have to pay them, and then two years later we realized they'd been filing the wrong percentage for us because we should have had a discounted percentage and we had to go and claim back a hundred and something thousand from governments. And trying to get money out of governments is like, uh, german government gave it straight back to us, of course, because they were very organized, but trying to get it out of somewhere like spain or france, where they just have it on paper and they're trying to stamp it somewhere around the country was the most ridiculous thing in the world.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, matt. So now we have a controversial take, so something for you to share. We have what's your most controversial or debatable opinion around amazon or the e-commerce industry.

Speaker 1:

So here's something I say all the time, but I don't think the message has gotten out as much as I think it should have yet and I think there's still lots of people who are teaching it the reverse way. And that is, I feel like and I can point to clients who have found success with this and clients who have failed to find success doing it the traditional way, which is this when you decide what you want to launch next, a lot of competition or products with generally negative reviews, but a lot of demand and whatever, and they're product focused and they're looking to fill a gap or find a product that meets a certain needs. It has to be a certain price point. I want to have a certain margin, but the whole idea, the whole angle that they're coming from, is the product. The whole angle that they're coming from is the product, and I feel like that is backwards. I think the successful, the most successful e-commerce sellers that I see start with the customer. Who am I going to be selling to? And maybe you're in the kitchen product space, but it's not just people who go to the kitchen, right, because that's nearly all of us right. It's people who cook at home but want to be at a kind of professional level. Those people are going to be my target, and beyond that it's going to be in the US, and beyond that it's going to be women.

Speaker 1:

Okay, now that I know kind of who the customer is, well, what TV shows are they watching? What magazines and websites and blogs and podcasts are they reading and what interest do they have? Maybe it's high-end cast iron cookware, okay, and now in the cast iron cookware space, what do they not have? You know, maybe there's and again, I'm just making this up, this example doesn't come from real, right? This is the garlic press of 2024. I'm just throwing this example out. Right, the idea is to identify the customer and then from that, pick the product. Because when you know who the customer is, you can tailor what you're selling them to what they want and you know where to find them and you know what their interest is and you know what gaps you're filling. And you can not just be successful on Amazon, but you can be off Amazon. You can develop an email list, you can develop content and you can have a holistic strategy around a brand and you can add products to that same consumer group that fit further.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I sold you the high-end cast iron pot and now the pot holders and the pot and the covers and the tongs and the recipe book and whatever. And now you're my customer and you love my brand and I speak to you and there's 400,000 of you out there and I know exactly where you are. I know how to find you and my cost per click gets low and my brand strength is good and people are searching for my brand because I understand the customer. I'm focused on who I'm selling to. I could sell any product to this customer group because I know what the customers want. Instead of I'm looking for a product but I don't know who's going to buy it. Necessarily, I'm just trying to slot it in somewhere where I think there's a gap, but I don't know how to find the customers or what specifically speaks to them or anything else.

Speaker 1:

And I talk to clients all the time, who've you know, the strategy was find a product to sell. And then they tell me oh, I'm selling bungee cords. What's different or special about your bungee cord? Nothing, like literally nothing. Are you okay? Are you the manufacturer of the bungee cords? And that's why?

Speaker 1:

Nope, I'm buying them on Alibaba, same as 40,000 other people, and you're surprised that you can't make money. There's no differentiation and there's no reason for somebody to pick yours over all the other options. And you can't compete on price because you're not the manufacturer and you can't live on 15 cents a day because you're not, you know, in a country where that's possible. So it just doesn't make sense. But if you start with the customer and develop what you're going to sell in your brand around the customer that you're going to target and find a need and fill it there, I think you're going to have much more long term success and build a much more robust business than just picking products. But still, I see all the time gurus and courses and YouTube videos and TikToks that say start by picking a product. I think that's backwards.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love that. I haven't actually heard about it. You know, put in, put in that way, and I really liked the fact that if you start from that you'd end up probably with a different range. So if you started with, you know, for example, cast iron pans, maybe you'd get think, if you were just doing product, that you now sell pants.

Speaker 1:

But if you're after customer.

Speaker 2:

Maybe they need like tea towels, oven gloves, anything that fits the yeah, so it fits the client, fits the brand and, um, I think if you ever launched that, I think cap forged pans could be a a great name. Your forged cast iron pans could go really, really well yeah, yes, I could, we can pick a brand we can get out. We can get out chat gbt. We can get images. I think in about 10 minutes we can. We can build the whole thing out. That That'd be great Easily easily.

Speaker 1:

Yes, so that's my that's. My hot take is find a niche customer group and ideally it's something that you're a group member right. So me creating a product for lactating women, like I'm going to have a real tough time with that because I'm just don't fit that category at all. But if it was me and it's Southern California surfers and I surf and I'm in southern california and I'm in the well, you know what we need.

Speaker 1:

We need wetsuits that are a little bit thicker but with more elasticity in the shoulders for when you paddle and you know like I know the space and I know the language and I know where to look for these guys and and I know what they're and then if I sell them, that I sell leash, I sell them a board, I sell them a hat, I sell them merch.

Speaker 1:

You know because I I get who they are. So I think if you want to build a high profit, long term, defensible business that isn't just going to be knocked off by a Chinese company 15 minutes after you launch and have your market just eaten, where you can develop a rapport with the customer and a relationship where they will buy from you even if you're not the cheapest, you're not the first one that comes up on page one of Google you have to start with who the customer is and build that relationship.

Speaker 2:

Love it. Thank you for sharing that. That's super cool. Okay, so I mean, this is pretty much the end of the show, so thank you so much for being here. It's been an amazing discussion and I've learned a lot and I hope everyone who's listening along enjoyed our conversation, wide ranging from business to bookkeeping. If anyone wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to connect, follow, stalk you on the internet, that type of thing?

Speaker 1:

Yes, definitely. The best way to find us is just go to the website capforgecom. You can find out more about us, our services, our pricing, read more about me, read our blog, see our videos and then ultimately you know. If it seems like a good fit, you're interested, reach out and connect via email, on the phone, whatever you like, or LinkedIn it's got all of our social stuff on there too but reach out. I'm always happy to talk to anybody. If we can be of service, great. If you just want to chat or you're not ready, no problem, no pressure, I just like talking to entrepreneurs. I hopefully that's come across in this, but I'm just happy to chat awesome.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that link will be below this episode to check out catforgecom and a great website and, um, yeah, thank you so much for being here. So this brings us the end of the episode, matt, thank you so much for being here. We hope, hope you, as the audience listening, enjoyed tonight's episode or today's episode, depending on where you are in the world and thank you, as always, for turning into the Amazon Stratus Show. If you do want to follow us on, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts, if you click the follow and like button, it helps us go up in the rankings, and if it's on YouTube, same same. So thanks so much for being here, matt, and see all of you next time.

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