The Amazon Strategist Show

Mastering Amazon PPC: Proven Strategies for Clicks and Conversions

• The Amazon Strategist Show • Season 3 • Episode 73

Share episode

In this episode, John and Chris dive into the power of Amazon PPC, exploring how it’s more than just an advertising tool—it's a game-changer for business growth. As Amazon becomes increasingly competitive, they discuss whether it’s now evolving into a pay-to-play platform.

They break down the key strategies for Amazon PPC success, focusing on deep market research and keyword organization based on shopper intent. Learn how to drive clicks and conversions with tried-and-true techniques, and how to categorize campaigns by buyer groups to gain competitive insights that boost ad performance and optimize product listings.

Plus, Chris shares the unique partnership model of Sophie Society, where their success grows alongside the brands they support.

Tune in and discover actionable insights to help you stay ahead in the ever-evolving Amazon marketplace!

About Chris Rawlings:
After touring as a bass player in a ska band, Chris founded a multi-million dollar home health Amazon brand. This led to the creation of Sophie Society where Chris invests in and partners with 7 and 8-figure brands on Amazon to scale them. He is the host and founder of the most well-attended Amazon PPC-focused digital event on earth: The Profitable PPC Challenge.
________________________________________
Connect with Chris and Sophie Society
Website: https://www.sophiesociety.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophermrawlings/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQWVg5Q0-rsYAuRg5BLv_Sg
-------------------------------------------------------------

Connect with John Cavendish
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jgcuk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejohncavendish
LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/thejohncavendish

Know More About Seller Candy
Website: https://www.sellercandy.com
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/SellerCandyPro
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sellercandyamz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sellercandy/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Never Talk to Seller Support Again.

Seller Candy is the expert operations arm of your Amazon business. We provide outcome-driven support for time-consuming and challenging Seller Central issues so you Never Have to Talk to Seller Support Again! With Agency-Level security practices and an experienced team who’s been through the thick of it, we give sellers bandwidth on demand without the hassle of hiring, training, or managing.

#amazonsellercentral #amazonsupport #ecommerce #amazonbusiness #amazonseller #amazontips #amazonbusiness #AmazonStrategistS...

Speaker 1:

That's the foundational stuff on Amazon getting the clicks and getting the conversions. If you just start there and you think of what would people click on if they search this term and then what would make them buy after they clicked everything else, you just build up to support those two things and hold those two things up really, really high.

Speaker 2:

Hello, I'm your host, Jon Cavendish, and welcome to season three of the Amazon Strategy 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 none other than my friend, Chris Rawlings, no nickname. After touring as a bass player in a ska band, Chris founded a multi-million dollar Amazon health and home brand. This led to the creation of Sophie Society, where Chris invests and partners in seven and eight figure brands to scale them on Amazon. He's host and founder of the most well attended and well themed Amazon PPC focused digital event on earth the Profitable PPC Challenge challenge.

Speaker 1:

So, chris, welcome to the show and please do whip it out I just you said well themed, I just had to dude, I had to bring out the sword.

Speaker 2:

You got anyone watching chris has an amazingly lit studio and a really cool huge, huge sword this is the sword of elderon.

Speaker 1:

I always say the sword that seals the darkness, that's a zelda sword. This is the sword reforged, the sword of.

Speaker 2:

Eldoran is from Lord of the. Rings. Yeah, of course I started re-watching Lord of the Rings a few days ago.

Speaker 1:

There are a lot of special swords out in the lore. But yeah, dude, I'm really glad to be here chatting with you. We always introduce all of our guests as my friend, but I feel like you're really my friend and we need to hang out more, like we were saying before yeah, 10 months ago we were hanging out in person.

Speaker 2:

We were like, we'll hang out, we'll meet up at all the events, we'll do cool stuff, and then nine months passes. Nine months goes by, let's get into it. So what I really like about sophie society and you know our previous conversations is that you guys do look at Amazon from a holistic approach the most overused word ever, holistic but actually, looking at it, you're a PPC agency that actually supports in growth. So can you talk a little bit through about what you were doing with your brand and how that led to Sophie Society?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, actually, the reason it's called Sophie Society is because Sophie is a Greek root for wisdom and the word philosophy. And I've had some epic failures in previous businesses, some of which like nearly ruined me, and the core principle that I learned was that just focusing on the truth, like what really actually produces results, is all you need to do, and everything else will figure itself out. At least in the game we're in, it's really all about that Like what actually works. I'm sure you found this too in Cellar Candy, because people come to you with wanting results and we want to produce results, especially because the structure of our, the way that we work with brands, is we, we partner with them more than serve them. Like we, we actually start with them at a really low level, where we basically make nothing, like we break even, and then we grow with them and we make money as they make money. So we're kind of somewhere between a service and an investor, in a way, because we have to believe in them in order to sign them on and because we have to know that we'll grow them. Otherwise we don't make anything on it. So in order to do that, you really have to believe in what you do and believe that it works. So you can't get strategies like that from like watching YouTube or reading articles. You have to get them by actually discovering them, by experimenting and using the scientific method to determine what works, toss out what doesn't. And what does work, dive deeper into it and try to find out, like, why it works and how to make it work even better. So that's our whole philosophy.

Speaker 1:

Like you said, the word holistic is kind of overused in our industry maybe every industry but the way we view it, we used Amazon PPC as like the center hub of everything. So people come to us to take over their Amazon PPC because that's one of the hardest parts of this business to understand. And we do that. We do that well because it's all we focus on, and we went really, really deep on that. Instead of trying to do everything, we just focused, honed in on that, and in doing that we found that the data that you get from PPC allows you to improve so much more about the rest of your business. So we're able to use PPC and the data from PPC as a lever to not just improve like ads and ad performance, but the business as a whole, whereas where the holistic word comes into play, cliche as it is.

Speaker 2:

You're a holistic guy, so what data points do you start with, like where do you start? And then what data points do you start to look at as you move forward with an account?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So one of the first things that we normally do with a brand and this is like anyone who's listening to this has an Amazon brand, like, I'd recommend that you do this yourself. This is where, like people say that Amazon's getting harder and harder and more and more competitive and is anyone really making money on Amazon anymore? And lots of people are making lots of money on Amazon and still making great exits from brands that build equity value from growth in their sales on Amazon. But those ones are the ones that actually go deep enough to really be effective, and by go deep enough, I mean into the data. So, in order to get good data, you have to track it and you have to know what data is most important and you have to organize it. So one of the things that we do that's unique, depending on your perspective, is when we set up, like Amazon, ppc campaigns. We set them up by doing intensive research ahead of time on the market, on the niche, on all the keywords, and we organize our campaigns in groupings by the different shopper needs or shopper intents. Shopper needs or shopper intents. So you might have a product that people search for it for a particular use case or for a particular problem they have, or for someone else, or they're really concerned about the size, or they're really concerned about the material. All of these are different buyer groupings. So I might have one grouping that's all about wood, and in that grouping it's not just including the keywords that say wood, it might also include maple or hardwood, everything that has to do with the fact that it's that material, because that's what those people care about. Or, as I have another campaign, that's all the keywords that are about travel, because what they really want is to take the product on the go. You're also going to have keywords that don't fit into any of that, or super main keywords that are just a single word, and that's fine too. You can manage those independently.

Speaker 1:

But when you look at the actual buyer groupings and you pull data based on the buyer intent, you can get insights that allow you to get a completely unfair competitive edge with not just your ads but your whole product's performance, because you can see what particular buyer intents are not vibing with your primary image and therefore your click-through rate is lower than average.

Speaker 1:

Even if your conversion rate is above average, maybe your click-through rate is below average, so when they do land on your listing. They buy it, but they're not landing on your listing that much because something's not being communicated in your main image. So when you go that deep into the data, that's when you get the X factor totally unfair advantage, and that's where most of the common wisdom when it comes to like Amazon optimization is. Look at the top page. One competitors see what they're doing, copy it, or see what they're doing, do your own version of it, and that's you know. When you do what I said, you become the ones that other people copy, but you'll always be a step ahead because you'll always get the insights that allow you to split, test, change to your primary image to see if you can get more clicks, or one more change to your listing to see if you can get more sales, and everyone else will always be a step behind if you operate that way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, I love that, rather than any traditional other way, not necessarily for better PPC results, but for actually better data and insights into how you can optimize the listing and change things and understand who's actually buying the product. Yeah, exactly, yeah, that's exactly right. Cool, I like that and I mean that sounds to me like a unique approach that I haven't heard before. But you're telling everyone, you're putting it out there, I know yeah, I shouldn't, maybe I shouldn't be edit that part out.

Speaker 2:

The secret stuff that we do is we do something in the groupings that no one else does if you want. That's why I should have said probably click here and pay us this. This one amazon pbc manager has this one. You know you need one of those clickbait headlines. This, yeah, this amazon pbc agency owner is getting insane results from this one. You know you need one of those clickbait headlines. This, yeah, this amazon pbc agency owner is getting insane results from this. One simple hack.

Speaker 1:

This one simple yeah, yeah, that he learned from an ancient japanese man while traveling the world.

Speaker 2:

He was the last one ever in the mountains yeah, it's great, love it. So you mentioned about amazon becoming more competitive and you're thinking that people make less money. Is that because it's becoming more like pay-to-play? You think everyone has to be buying all that traffic or is it that people are still organically be able to rank and just do what they used to do?

Speaker 1:

yeah, that's definitely part of it, because when you search page one, like anyone right now that just pulls up Amazon and searches any keyword that has significant search volume, if you scroll the page I mean if you don't scroll anything all you see is ads. Like, if you just search Amazon, most keywords, if you search it, press enter and you don't scroll, 100% of your screen is ads, 100%. So there's some keywords where you might see one or two organic results, but for the most part first you're going to see a headline sponsored ad and then below that you're going to see a full line of sponsored product ads and possibly even some more. And then sometimes they squeeze in a sponsor display ad, like on the side or a very thin banner on the top, but that's it. You're not going to see any organic results. They need the next full scroll. It's probably going to be about half and half. The next full scroll it might be half and half or it might be 70-30 paid to organic. So a ton of the first four scrolls of page one search results are paid and that's why people complain that Amazon has become pay to play.

Speaker 1:

I just had a call with a brand owner recently who's been selling this consumable product in the baking category, but it's very niche in the baking category and they'd been selling for a very long time, like I think it was like 15 years or something like that. His son was about to take over the business and he just was so cynical and burnt out by Amazon, like the state of Amazon now in the past, like one or two years, especially because of the fact that he never ran ads before. That's why we were talking in the first place, uh, but I think he also just wanted someone to complain to about his, his gripes on Amazon. But yeah, and you know he's not wrong, he's not wrong. It just became this thing where you don't have the option to advertise.

Speaker 1:

When I started selling in 2015, amazon PBC was like this new thing and we were like I maxed out my budget. You couldn't even spend more than $10 per day. It's like, oh, I maxed out my budget and I just let an auto campaign run. If you try to do that now with a serious brand, you just wouldn't grow. Unless you had some crazy other channel like a huge nationwide or worldwide influencer that was driving a ton of traffic or something like that. You just wouldn't be seen.

Speaker 1:

So it feels like it's pay to play, but in reality, all that happened is it got more sophisticated in order to succeed well, or like to grow and profit, and that means that it's just harder, that you have to think more deeply. But if you think about it, that actually makes sense, because when you look at the graph of, like, actual total Amazon gross sales, it's still going up parabolically. It has these little dips once in a while, but the whole graph is going like this, so the total amount of money moving through the platform is dramatically increased. So there's more dollars to be made and hence more smart, entrepreneurial people getting involved in trying to take part in that opportunity. So hence you have to be more strategic and sophisticated in order to succeed well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean it makes sense as things mature. I mean, do you see that there are some brands just come in, blast through all their budgets and disappear, or are the actual cemented brands still managing to compete in most of these categories, even when they're paying to play?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean I've, honestly I've seen it all at this point. We've partnered with and taken over the PPC for many hundreds. I think at a certain point later this year, earlier next year, it'll be above a thousand of brands. So I've seen every category. And it's true, if you're not careful and you, you know, say, just let Amazon do it for you by putting in auto campaigns or just doing broad campaigns, you know, with a couple seed ideas, then you can blast through your budget really fast and you can just bleed me if you don't know what you're doing.

Speaker 1:

And that's scary, especially for certain brands, because there are some brands where the cost per clicks are dramatically higher, especially consumables brands.

Speaker 1:

So supplements, anything that gets used up, supplements, wipes, powders, stuff like that that you use it and then you buy it again, stuff like that that you use it and then you buy it again.

Speaker 1:

The brands all brands that are legit, that have been selling for a while, know now that a certain portion of their customers are going to buy more, so they're all willing to spend way more on the first purchase. So starting a consumables brand is very difficult if you aren't really careful about how you allocate your ad spend in the beginning and if you're not having a long-term mindset because you need months and ideally quarters and really eventually even years, for that repeat purchase rate to even kick in and start affecting your economics, kick in and start affecting your economics so it can totally happen. You can come in and just blow your whole budget on Amazon. But if you're really smart and if you know your budget and you're like all right, this is how much I can spend at this tacos or this ACOS, you can do really well by just being smart about what placements you know you can afford and planning that ahead of time, instead of running out of budget for the month on the 11th and now you can't spend any more on ads.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you just mentioned about new sellers coming in. I mean, do you still see that? You know, is Amazon still a thing for new sellers when you become sellers?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it definitely is. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. That's kind of a question that always comes up, either with people who have been around the space but never really dipped into it, or sellers who were in the space in the the like 2018, 2019, 2020 era and, uh, the sold their brand or got out of it and they thought it was competitive then. Now they think there's no possible way. But you know, I can just tell you from running brand launches every week that it's 100 possible. It's just really about product quality, product selection and knowing how to effectively play the amazon game through amazon pbc, knowing how to do review management, effectively play the Amazon game through Amazon PPC, knowing how to do review management, proper stock management, stock forecasting and product quality and customer experience.

Speaker 2:

If you nail all those things, you can create a great brand on Amazon, even in really competitive categories. I would agree there. And do you think it's an easy? You know it was the gold rush back in the day, it was easy money. Do you still think Amazon's like the lowest hanging fruit or an easy business model to get into?

Speaker 1:

No, I wouldn't call it easy. Yeah, I think you're right that back in the day like I remember my first promotion in 2015 and um, what we would do is create 300 discount codes that take the price price of the product down to 99 cents or free, and we would distribute those codes on these services that give them out to people that get your product for free, and you don't even care if they leave a review or not, you just had them use a super URL that went to a search terms results page that had your product on it. Then they would find it and click it and you'd send them all at once in a single day. 300 orders one day and you rank page one top of page one for a big keyword that day. It was that crazy back then and there was no rules about it either. It was fine to do it. I don't think Amazon was even knowing what people were doing with their algorithm back then. Hey, it's not like that anymore. You can't do that and, especially if you don't have a good product quality or a good product experience, it eventually will knock you down, and Amazon got a lot better at cracking down on black hat or gray hat strategies, which is the same thing that every platform does.

Speaker 1:

If you look at Google's updates, what works to rank on Google Now? Creating really great content that people stick around to read, that's actually valuable to them, that they should find when they're searching a given term, not like a million backlinks and like 400 articles that you paid a $3 VA to write. That won't work anymore and it makes sense because Google wants good quality content to show up to give a good experience to their users. Amazon's the same thing and they're getting better and better at it. But the good thing is it's really predictable that a good customer experience will always win on Amazon. It's not enough. That's the foundation on Amazon. It's not enough. That's like the foundation. Like. If you have that, you have a chance to like succeed on Amazon. If you don't have it, you have no shot.

Speaker 1:

But if you have a good customer experience and good branding and that will allow you to keep good ratings and get ratings, then now you're in the game. And then it comes down to your ability to play the game. How do you make sure you get more clicks than everyone else on page one? How do you make sure that you get more conversions than everyone else, and amazon will tell you this. Now, with brand analytics, product opportunity explorer, search query report, they'll tell you if you're getting more clicks than your page one competitors and they'll tell you if you're getting more conversions than your page one competitors, and they'll tell you if you're getting more conversions than your page one competitors and even tell you that per search term. So you literally know if you're ahead or behind. And if you do that, paired with really sophisticated PPC strategies that work to rank you organically, now you've got a good business on Amazon.

Speaker 1:

Now I wouldn't call that whole thing easy. I know. If you compare it to another whatever cashflow type of business, like real estate, buying a property, renting it out, that might be a little more straightforward. Honestly, that's got its own issues, but yeah, so not easy, but 100% possible.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think you just see it as you said. But 100% possible. Yeah, I agree with that. I think you just see it as you said. The level of sophistication needs to be so much higher. You know like I also started in 2014, 2015. And, yeah, I was lucky. You know my first business. I feel like you know a good place, good time. I was an idiot and I still made money.

Speaker 1:

I feel the same. I say that all the time. At least half of it was luck with my first brand and I think a lot of that is for a lot of us to start out, but that's also, you know, that jettisons you, because then when the luck runs out, then you have to learn how to actually plow through those brick walls that come up you know, yeah, that was, I'm sure we both done that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, mine was in 2019 when I realized I had to learn how to actually do sales and marketing and all of that stuff which you, thankfully, didn't really need to know on Amazon, outside of how to use the Amazon algorithm and how to optimize for this. One channel, one feedback mechanism, and you can kind of get away without leading people, mostly until you've got a small team.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's interesting because you see the same thing in other ecosystems too. Right, like YouTubers. You know YouTubers are like Amazon sellers. It's so funny.

Speaker 1:

Like this I'm I. I I'm saying this because I have a YouTube channel that I'm starting to grow now it's very early days and very young, um, but I've been looking into YouTube content and man, the amount of like parallel problems that YouTubers and Amazon sellers have. They're all worried about click through rate. You know that click through rate is the exact same game on Amazon and YouTube. It's a primary image and a title and then for Amazon it's conversion rate, for YouTube it's your average view time, uh, or view percentage, and so YouTubers are trying to figure out and game YouTube's algorithm, just like Amazon sellers are trying to game Amazon's algorithm, and I think it's the same.

Speaker 1:

And you know we live in this online world now with these different little ecosystems and each one has its own rules, and learning the rules and being able to win in the, the game that's set up via those rules, is kind of like the one of like the core skills of being an entrepreneur or like a person involved in business in in this age of humanity and I think, yeah, you'll have a massive advantage on youtube as well, because I know several youtubers and I know guys with like 7 000 subs who make a million bucks a year and like anywhere from 300k to a million or 1.2 million subs who make low six figures a year, because they're not business people mostly they're.

Speaker 2:

You know. They enjoy the content, they enjoy the. Whether they enjoy the making content or the influence part, it depends on the person. You know. Yeah, um attracts interesting people, but I think it's really cool going in there with a business mindset and being like, okay, well, what am I gonna do to drive actual traffic and sales and stuff from this content, rather than just for the joy of making the content, which is which is fine?

Speaker 1:

that's so true. Yeah, I haven't it yet. I don't really have many subscribers or views on my videos. There's a lot of views on the videos that I'm in on YouTube, on other people's channels, but not my own channel yet. So we'll see. I'm serious about it and I'm committed to it. You know I upload every week, so, yeah, we'll see where that goes. That's a that's an interesting journey too, but I love seeing all the parallels.

Speaker 1:

It's so funny how you know YouTubers. Even you know. You know how Amazon sellers like every Amazon seller they they love Amazon and they kind of hate Amazon. You know there's this love hate relationship. Youtubers have the same thing. You know they're afraid that they might get banned if they say the wrong thing. Do you curse in the first three seconds? It'll be suppressed. You know there. You know. And there's all these a lot of complaints with man. You know it's there's. There's a lot of parallels. There's a man in YouTube who's the baseless of YouTube. I don't know. I mean, it's owned by Google, but I don't know who the YouTube person is. That's a good question who's?

Speaker 1:

the jeff at amazoncom for YouTube. You at tubecom.

Speaker 2:

Um, yeah, I mean just if you're on a lot of other videos, though, what can you do to plug it? Plug it, plug it. I mean, like this one as well, but like, get a t-shirt that's got your YouTube thing on it, get a tattoo on your forehead, like, whatever, whatever. Like get gets the word out committed. Yeah, because there must be, there has to be a reason, isn't that a reason for people to go immediately and follow you? I mean, I love listening to you speak, so that could be a reason, but whatever the reason is on specific videos, there must be some compelling reason to take action right now yeah, I'm down to get a neck tat.

Speaker 1:

What would it be? It would just say check out at chris rawlings on youtube, and then it would be a sword right over here that was be good.

Speaker 2:

You know, knights, the knights tattoos. All right, should we? Should we move on to our controversial take? So we're getting towards the end of the and in this part we ask you what your controversial or debatable opinion I think in America you'd call it a hot take related to the Amazon industry is.

Speaker 1:

Yeah well, so, like you said in the beginning of this podcast, I really loved that you started it out with by saying it's no hacks, this is like real stuff, fundamental stuff, and that's kind of. It's no hacks, this is like real stuff, fundamental stuff, and that's kind of it's strange that you had to say that. But, uh, that's my controversial take is that being really really good at the stuff that you know you need to be good at is is orders of magnitude more important than this or that hack this is. This is one thing that's like. It's one like key part of our intake with new brands that we kind of have to clear out. They're like negative framing around this because they're really looking for like this type of deal or this type of promotion or this type of ranking hack or whatever, and that stuff really just doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:

If you look at the biggest brands, I worked with uh AJ Patel long time ago on a brand of his called Insta natural, and uh AJ Patel is the founder of Zesty Paws, which is the which experienced the biggest exit that I'm aware of in Amazon first brand history. It was a $610 million exit and AJ was great at just doing the stuff that achieves results on Amazon really well. It wasn't about hacks and stuff like that. If you look at Zestypaws, they're just clearly going to get all the clicks. They started with click-through rate and then designed all the products around that. They didn't design the product and then try to figure out how to make an image that gets clicks. They figured out what image would get clicks and they designed the product, just like a YouTuber figures out what YouTube thumbnail to create and title and then they create a video around it because they know that title and thumbnail will get the clicks. Now all they have left to do is create the freaking video.

Speaker 1:

So that's the foundational stuff on Amazon getting the clicks and getting the conversions. So if you just start there and you think of okay, what would people click on if they search this term, and then what would make them buy after they clicked, and then everything else, you just build up to support those two things and hold those two things up really, really high. And that's basically our foundational principle at Sophie Societies. Foundational principle at Sophie Societies and that's what we do with the data with PPC is we're constantly looking at the data to find out what will produce more clicks, what will produce more conversion, and if you have those two things, that's the whole package.

Speaker 1:

There's nothing else than clicks and conversions. If you're getting clicks and you're getting conversions, then you have a business, and the more clicks and the more conversions you get, the bigger the business is. Period, that's all it's about. So just focusing on those things instead of looking for the new strategy or the new market or opening your TikTok shop or getting on Walmart or whatever. That's all great stuff, but you can go way further by just going really deep on the boring ass stuff that you already know will work. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I totally agree. We are in agreement, chris, and yeah, thank you for sharing that, because I think a lot of people need to hear that who are currently probably halfway through opening their TikTok shop and trying to bribe influencers to pump their products, which can work as well. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the knocking, yeah, that could work. But I think you've probably experienced this too, john. But I think it tends to be our type of person that's entrepreneurial, that starts businesses. We are also very prone more so than the general public to what a lot of people would call shiny object syndrome. But really just being excitable, like you hear of an opportunity or you hear this strategy somebody used that worked, and you get so excited about it and you forget about everything else and you just focus on that because you're excited and there's a newness to it and a novelty to it and it ignites that part in you that caused you to start your business in the first place. Because that's who you are You're a willful person and those willful people that get excited about stuff are more likely to be entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1:

So you really have to watch out for that and like psychologically, like check yourself and be like okay. So this willful excitableness got me into this. But it's also what could ruin this if I don't engender a more stoic. Engender a more stoic, calm, dedicated focus on the boring stuff that doesn't excite me and get myself excited about that just through discipline and calm execution yeah, I mean, I totally agree with that.

Speaker 2:

You know, we see opportunity everywhere and you're like there's so much opportunity here, I would love to build this thing because this seems cool and it's going to make loads of money. And then you realize after you've done it 10 times that, yeah, growth and big success comes from consistency. And it takes a while to get to that point of realizing that, as opposed to, I can see easily how I can make a million dollars spinning up this thing, which will probably only take a few months. And then, as soon as you start building a business, you're like you know, one in 10 will, or one in five will grow parabolically and go super well, and the other ones. It's just as much of a slog as if you're doing the thing you're currently doing. It's just a different kind of slog.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that's the thing. What you said about the parabolicness too, is that if you're trying to grow five different things at once, you're slowing all of them down, which means you're spending way more time on the flat part of the parabolic curve, so they all will grow slower, whereas if you grow one, that one, you can focus on getting into that curve, and then, once you're at the top of the curve like in the middle, closer to the top of the curve every incremental element of effort leads to an exponentially higher reward. So that's why digging one hole deep is so much more valuable than digging 10 shallow holes, because you just get momentum.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, totally agreed. All right, I think that's the end of the episode, chris. Thank you so much for being here. If people want to contact you, join your challenge. Check out the challenge. Um, what's the best way to follow you?

Speaker 1:

yeah, you can just search chris rawlings on linkedin, uh, but you can also go to sophie societycom and we have a link to the challenge there on our site and, uh, linkedin and sophie societycom. You can interact with me on LinkedIn. I answer most of my comments. So, yeah, see you guys over there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, see you there and anyone who is listening now, if you are, wherever you are watching, listening, if you could rate us, that's the main thing, whether it's the thumbs up, whether it's a star rating on Spotify. That's what gets us more reach for the podcast and hope you got value out of this episode. So, if you're listening, see you next week and thanks so much for being part of the family. Thanks everybody. Thanks.

Speaker 1:

John.

People on this episode

Head Shot

John Cavendish

Host