The Amazon Strategist Show

Amazon Profits & Exits EXPOSED by an Expert!

• The Amazon Strategist Show • Season 3 • Episode 84

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In this episode of The Amazon Strategist Show, host John Cavendish sits down with Tyler Jefcoat, founder of Seller Accountant and The Seller Roundtable mastermind. Tyler shares his expert insights on maximizing profitability, financial management, and preparing for a successful business exit—crucial knowledge for every Amazon seller.

💡 Key Takeaways:
✔ Most sellers don’t know their true profitability—PAG (Post-Advertising Gross Profit) is the real number that matters.
✔ Cash flow is king! Poor financial management kills more e-commerce businesses than competition ever will.
✔ Inventory management is a silent profit killer—miscalculations can drain your margins fast.
✔ Thinking of selling? Solid financial records and well-documented SOPs make your business way more attractive to buyers.
✔ Not all exits are equal—understanding market trends and timing your exit can mean the difference between a big payday and disappointment.
✔ Product launches aren’t as easy as before—success rates are lower, so strategy and financial planning are more critical than ever.
✔ Selling a business is emotional—many sellers aren’t prepared for the personal side of walking away from their brand.

If you're an Amazon seller looking to scale smarter, avoid costly mistakes, and exit for maximum value, this episode is packed with must-know insights.

🔔 Subscribe for more expert e-commerce strategies!

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Connect with Tyler and The Seller Roundtable
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerjefcoat

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
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sellercandy/
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Speaker 1:

If you are an Amazon-dominant product, we have got to stop accepting really high A costs because we're earning real estate in the marketplace. Here's what I mean by that. If you are gonna be a direct-to-consumer, non-marketplace brand, you can afford, like I said earlier, to have an unusually high CAC, which is the cost to acquire a customer. The reason is that you own that customer and can repurpose, resell, post-purchase intent, that kind of thing. But as brands that are going to be fairly dependent on Amazon, we need to be much, much more disciplined when we launch new products. It doesn't mean we don't run a deficit. We just need to run that deficit for about 60 to 90 days and then we have got to have that product turn profitable or we have to have the courage to kill that product.

Speaker 2:

Hello, I'm your host, john Cavendish, and welcome to the Amazon Strategy Show. The show that's all strategy, with no silver bullets, no hacks, no magic pills, just real, practical strategies to grow your Amazon business. Today, I'm joined by none other than Tyler Jeffcoat. Tyler leads an exclusive mastermind for seven and eight figure e-commerce founders called the Seller Roundtable. He recently completed his second exit so congrats, tyler, exiting seller accountant in 2024. And he now focuses his energy on investing, consulting and coaching. So, tyler, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1:

Thanks, john, appreciate you having me.

Speaker 2:

And I didn't ask you before is it Jeff Cott or Jeff Coat? Jeff Coat Awesome, I did get it right.

Speaker 1:

The English pronunciation Nailed it.

Speaker 2:

Cool, awesome. So I mean congratulations on your exit. That's amazing. Thank you, yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey? I guess how you ended up here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I guess the broad journey is I'm an accountant by trade you know it's kind of like and I was a banker, so I feel like those are the two categories where, almost like being an alcoholic once, once one, you're always one. Yeah, so I'm a recovering banker. I'm a recovering accountant out of grad school. Instead of taking the normal accountant route, I started a. I joined an investment startup to build a healthcare company in 2012. We had a good run, made some mistakes, but ultimately built a nice 100-employee company and got to exit that in 2017 and needed something to do.

Speaker 1:

My wife likes the small-town college vibe where we live here east of Atlanta and so started Seller Accountant because a good friend of mine was in the Amazon world, the founder of a company called Seller Labs. We were sharing a meal and he said, hey, you got to look at this Amazon thing and I was like what's Amazon other than the people that bring me stuff every day that dominate my share of wallet? And so, anyway, I strongly believe, john, that there are riches and niches. Can we find something that we can be? So, daggum, focused on that we can be the best in the world at can be? So, daggum, focused on that we can be the best in the world at, and realizing that there were millions of Amazon sellers out there that really didn't have the financial support they needed and dovetail it with this.

Speaker 1:

Listen, I mean, I'm an accountant, I have a finance-focused MBA, I worked at a bank for five years and I almost crashed my first business like 10 times because I didn't know how to manage a balance sheet.

Speaker 1:

In other words, having an ethereal understanding of stuff doesn't make you good at it, and I had to learn the hard way because I'm a knucklehead like most of the founders out there. And so when I sold my first company, I think that was an aha for me is that if me, if I couldn't get it right, I'm sure other founders struggle as well and so Seller Accountant was kind of built on the thesis that with a little bit better financial tools we could exit our businesses or we could make more money. Like you kind of alluded to, I had the privilege of selling that company in the past six months, really really, really thankful for that, and see my team kind of safely land in a new organization and kind of see the legacy continue. But now I get to kind of rechart my path again and kind of build something else, and I'm excited about that as well.

Speaker 2:

That's awesome. So on the side you've always. How long have you had seller roundtable for and how long have you been working on that mastermind?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so in 2018, when I launched seller accountant, I, just a few months later, also launched the roundtable, and it was because it was selfish. To be honest with you, john, I knew a lot about coaching and I didn't know a lot about how to actually make money on Amazon, and so I thought to myself, huh, I wonder if I could get a few Amazon sellers together and they would teach me. And it's crazy, the six of us that founded the group are still in the group. It's grown to about 15. I've never really marketed it. I don't have a funnel for it. I'm a terrible marketer, maybe in general, but it's just an intimate group of advisors. We've done a lot of co-ventures together. We've done a lot of investing together and we've exited some companies and we've had a great run. And it's just where's the intersection of the reality that every company the bottleneck is the leader.

Speaker 1:

This isn't about hacks. I think you mentioned this as you're doing your intro. This isn't about some kind of a silver bullet. This is about the reality that if I want to get richer, I've got to get better. And how do I get better? I have to surround myself with people who are also wanting to get better, and so the seller's round table is kind of that thesis. Can we get smart people together that also happen to deal with the same headaches? Where's my logistics issues? Is there another 85th Amazon fee? Yes, there is, and so I think that's where that group came from, and we just have a great time getting together remotely sometimes and live sometimes.

Speaker 2:

Nice. That's very cool. It's always great to have a group of people you've grown with long-term as well. I've had a few masterminds in accountability groups, one of them going since 2016, where we've met every week, and it's amazing the history. We keep notes and we've got 400 pages of this Google Doc. You can just scroll down and see yeah, that's what I was thinking about seven years ago. I was probably losing my mind at that point over something else that doesn't really matter at all right now, that's so true, Okay, awesome.

Speaker 2:

So I think, approaching the Amazon space from your background accountant CFO, you have a different viewpoint than a lot of people we have on the show, which is awesome. So can you kind of share a little bit about how you see e-com businesses and what people should be focusing on in their Amazon business?

Speaker 1:

Yeah well, maybe no surprise hearing the CFO boy here. But we've got to be profitable and I think e-commerce brands in general obviously have to be profitable. But if you're a direct-to-consumer dominant brand, meaning more than half of your sales come off of Amazon, maybe on Shopify, you can afford to pay an outsized price to acquire a new customer because you own that customer and hopefully you can engineer some post-purchase repurchase that kind of thing and drive your lifetime value up. But for an Amazon or marketplace dominant brand, we have to be really, really careful not to overspend to acquire our customers and the easiest way to do that, john, is to prioritize what I call PAG. It's post-advertising gross profit. So kind of think about what's your true gross profit after all your Amazon fees, your cost to get sold and your advertising and for products that can't fetch us 20% PAG on an almost consistent always basis, we have to really ask ourselves some hard questions about whether we're investing in the right products or not.

Speaker 2:

Okay, cool. So when you're calculating PAG, do you do this on a rolling monthly basis? How do you actually do the calculation?

Speaker 1:

Probably look at it maybe like two primary vectors. One is obviously as a catalog, and so to your point, I mean, obviously I just sold a company that did bookkeeping. I'm passionate about good accounting because your numbers need to be true or you'll ignore them. Optimistic, future-focused entrepreneurs like you and me will ignore bad news unless it's crazy unavoidable, and so having good books is important so that you can understand how effective your catalog is. And so, yes, I would look at that monthly. I would look at it year over year. How did this January compare to last January is really interesting data.

Speaker 1:

And then the second vector is I think I would want to look at it on a SKU or product level. So I need some kind of a tool that helps me dig into my Amazon marketplace. I want to make sure I have an accurate picture of cost of goods sold per unit, and I want to really understand every time I hear the cha-ching on product A. Am I happier or am I sadder? Because almost every catalog I've ever looked at as a CFO, there's at least one or maybe more than 10 products. If you're one product brand, you probably aren't ignoring this, but if you're even a moderate sized catalog, almost every catalog you've looked at, there's at least one product that is killing us. Why do we have a negative profitability on the green one? Oh well, we just thought we had to launch the green one. And so looking at the catalog over time and then looking at product by product to make sure you're profitable.

Speaker 2:

Cool. So actually, I mean that's a big question is how do you actually monitor this? I mean, how do you monitor your real rolling cost of goods and how do you actually track that as your business gets more complex? It's a question I've been asked before by clients.

Speaker 1:

No, it's good, it's actually like, probably. So if anyone does struggle with that, like with that like, how do you really define? You know what was my actual landed cost to get sold for the widget?

Speaker 2:

I'm telling you know changes throughout the year, also changes through shipping costs and it's really complicated.

Speaker 1:

so, like I think again, if you have, I love the idea of keeping things really simple when you're small. So if I have five products, I'm probably going to have a google sheet or an excel spreadsheet. I'm going to kind of okay, I bought 10,000 units in January. My freight forwarding cost was exactly X amount and I'm just going to do the simple math to say how much of the duties and tariffs and other kinds of things need to be loaded into each unit and I'm not going to be too worried about it. I'm going to update that twice a year every time I make an order.

Speaker 1:

I think to your point, john, as your catalog gets more sophisticated. Now you've got 30 products. You've kind of got two choices. You can either invest and, by the way, both choices require you to invest money and energy. So choice one is you hire people to continue blunt force trauma managing your inventory. You can hire some talent and have them manage a more complicated spreadsheet. I've seen eight-figure companies get away with this or you can invest money and time to build an inventory management system and just know that every inventory management software has its downsides. And you may try hiring a VA first, because sometimes just having somebody blunt force trauma kind of manage it by pure grit will last you a while. But just know I mean to your point, john the hardest thing to get right is inventory slash cost of goods sold. And the hardest thing to get through due diligence if you're going to sell your company is inventory landed cost of goods sold. So just know that the effort's worth it in terms of getting that documented properly.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So how can you better like measure ROI on the inventory once you've got the cost? How can you better do that? And now a very quick message from our sponsor, seller Candy. Are you dealing with support issues, cases, flat files, suspensions or even account suspensions? Then Seller Candy is there for you. We take the pain away so you never need to talk to seller support again. If that sounds interesting, head to sellercandycom to check us out and book a call with our team today. That's it from us. Now back to the episode.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So how do you measure ROI as an Amazon seller or an e-commerce brand? I mean, the biggest thing is to realize that this is a thing. It isn't enough. Listen, I'm preaching over here. We have to have PAG, we have to have profit. It has to be higher. But at the end of the day and this is going to sound crazy but if you have a lower profit margin but your velocity of inventory is really really fast, you actually might be happier than the guy that has a higher profit margin but is sitting on two years of inventory.

Speaker 1:

And so how do I know which one I am? The only way you can know is to measure return on investment and what this means, and this is an entire conference speech that I could give on. How to return on working capital, how do you actually measure it? But just know this that there are two levers that determine success. How good is my batting average? In America we love baseball. Sorry about this, john, but how potent am I every time I turn my inventory? That's a profit margin question. Second question is how many at-bats do I get per year? How many times do I get to take that dollar or pound or yen or whatever my currency is and use it over and over and over again. And just know this is like literally game theory the more at-bats I get times, my batting average gives me my expected outcome, and so that's a way to articulate return on investment.

Speaker 1:

And what I want to know is for every unit of value whether it's a dollar or pound or euro, whatever it is for every unit of value that I invest in this machine, how happy am I at the end of 12 months?

Speaker 1:

That KPI is called return on working capital, and it really has helped, and I'll give you a quick side note here when I was the CFO for a bunch of exits over the last five years meaning like companies that sold for really good multiples all of the top multiples had elite levels of return on working capital. So just to give you something to kind of benchmark in your mind, if you're listening to this, a typical Amazon return on capital might be like 2X. So for every dollar I invest, I expect to get my dollar back plus $2 profit over the course of a 12-month period. But every single top multiple exit had at least a 4x return on capital. And so just if you're trying to internalize that, delete the nerd part. Don't worry about that. Just know that if I can improve my profit margins or improve the velocity of my cash, either of those makes me more money and makes my business more valuable.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So do a lot of the businesses you work with. Do most of them have raised money, borrow money? Where do they actually get this capital from, or do they just grow slowly into it?

Speaker 1:

I would say 90% of the brands that I represented over the seven or eight years as a seller accountant were companies that started as some kind of bootstrap I'm a founder getting my product off the ground and then use personal debt. Maybe they're using credit cards or home equity line or something like that and then as they get into the seven and eight figures, they try to pivot into SBA loans if they're in America or one of these more friendly business debt ventures. I didn't have many. I mean, I was on the board and still am of one private equity group where we were actually using PE private equity to do it. But to be honest with you, that's the exception. Most of the sellers and founders I worked with were kind of trying to figure out okay, I've raised 10K in my savings account, how can I turn that 10K into a seven-figure business? Let's see if I can figure it out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, that was me back in the day, back in 2014, 2015, starting out, I think a lot of us start out. I don't know how your experience is, but a lot of Amazon is a first-time business for a lot of people, so you start out with that much cash and then you roll it forward into more cash in the future. Yeah, so you've had a couple of exits. What's the best way to prepare a business for exit? Especially now when the market's all over the place.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, right, especially now. I mean, I think the biggest thing is you have some things because you mentioned the market there some things you have control over and some things you don't. If you were an Amazon seller with half a million dollars or half a million, whatever your currency is in profit, you kind of couldn't screw it up five years ago, john, because the market was so frothy to buy these businesses and, to your point, interest rates are higher, there's less capital flowing in to buy, and so it's interest rates are higher, there's less capital flowing in to buy, and so it's a little bit harder now. Nothing you can do about that. All you can do is be ready so that when the next floodgate or kind of big acquisition moment happens, you're ready to go. I would personally forecast that'll be in the next few years. I think there's going to be another kind of flow to our ebb.

Speaker 1:

And so to the question what do I do in preparation? The first thing is you do have to have good records. I mean, again, I'm an accountant here. I don't even sell bookkeeping anymore, but, guys, the ease with which a deal gets done is very much proportionate to the quality of the accounting and the quality of the documentation, and so having at least three years of accrual basis great bookkeeping. That's bulletproof. It's almost like if you were to go to a car lot to buy a new vehicle and it looks shady and the grass isn't cut and the guy looks like he's just rolled out of bed and he's greasy. You're going to have an immediate lack of trust to purchase money into a car there. And so think about it that way. Think about it if somebody's going to look at your business, I'm going to make sure that their first impression is very honest and is very accurate, and so having good books is that.

Speaker 1:

The second thing is to actually go through the process of documenting your best, most important standard operating procedures, sops. Don't do them all. Do like the top 20%. What are the procedures and practices and processes that are going to? If I were to get hit by a bus, we're going to give somebody else the best leverage to run my business. Make sure you document those. By the way, a quick hack on that, and this worked really well for us at Seller Account before I exited I would just pull up Loom or one of these, like recording things on my desktop and just record myself blabbering about whatever it is I want to blabber about. And then you can literally take the transcript, toss it into chat, gbt or whatever your favorite you know AI tool is, and say, hey, create me a one page SOP out of what I just said, and so don't make this harder than it has to be.

Speaker 1:

And then the third thing is just put together a product roadmap. So if you think you're going to exit next year, I want to have three years worth of my future vision that I can sell, because people don't really buy what you did last year. They buy what you think, what they think is going to happen next year. We all use last year's financials to make our valuation, but if you and I are really being honest, we would never buy anything just because it made money last year. We would only buy something if we were convinced it was going to make more money next year than it did this year.

Speaker 1:

And so building a story and then maybe one final nugget I'll mention there, john is anything you can do to develop a relationship with your customer where you have an email list, you have an audience that you can send with the company. We're just seeing better multiples getting paid for companies that own a little bit more of their traffic, even if you're still selling on Amazon primarily, having something where you can retarget or subscribe and save. If you're going to be purely on Amazon, just have a recurring relationship with the customer. That makes the product a lot stickier.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And how does that reflect on you selling your business with Seller Accountant? So how does you know that's e-com but, like with seller accountant, you know why did you sell, and could you tell us a little bit about that process?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so the like why I sold John was I think we just got to a moment of conviction it was about a year ago, early 2024, where we're like all right, we've optimized the parts of our business and the parts that are not growing are parts that I think we need to bring in help, like we need another key leader. There was about 12 of us on our team, so we were not a big team, and I just think honestly, we use a process. There's a thing called EOS Traction. Eos, it's kind of a way to build systems in your business. We're having a quarterly meeting and my leadership team we're like ooh, we know what needs to happen to take this thing from low seven figures to much bigger, and nobody in this room really wants to do those things. That's an easy moment of conviction. It's also a great market for selling.

Speaker 1:

To the point I made earlier, I can't control the market, but last year's market was actually kind of good for service companies, weirdly enough, and so because of that we decided to sell. And then the process it was actually great and, by the way, if anyone's ever sold a business, you know what I'm talking about here. It's really kind of emotional to come to the point where you are okay selling kind of your baby. It doesn't matter how objectively you view it right. This was my second exit of a seven figure company in and yet it's still hard to be like, oh man, I built this thing, I care about it, I care about these people. And for me that was much harder than actually selling it. Like once we came to the moment where like okay, we're go, we've made the choice, um, I opted to kind of try to broker the deal myself. I really enjoyed that process, probably because I'm kind of an M&A finance guy.

Speaker 1:

But yeah, we got our ducks in a row. We made sure our records were great. We had been through enough deals with other founders that we were just brutally honest If there was a wart in our business. Our first phone call with a potential buyer exposed every wart. Because I didn't want any BS, we wanted actionable LOIs only and I think people appreciated how authentic we were. We ultimately got a couple offers. One was the really good one. We were happy to go with it. And then the slowest part is getting through the financing for the buyer. In America we use the SBA for a lot of that financing. It's just a slow process. It has nothing to do with either side of the transaction, just the SBA works slow. So I can go into so much more detail there. If you have any questions, I'm happy to dig into it.

Speaker 2:

I guess so the buyer, even though they were another company. They did SBA as well. And there's SBA, because I always thought SBA was like a personally guaranteed loan from the person buying the business. Is that how it works?

Speaker 1:

It does. I think it may depend on how large the SBA loan is, but basically the Small Business Administration here in America you know it required. I would not be surprised at all if he had to sign a personal guarantee for the loan, which is still pretty common for most smaller businesses, like sub $20 million revenue kind of businesses here in the States. But listen, if you're trying to get cash here and you're in the United States, getting anything backed by the federal government with an SBA tag is going to give you the most number of years to pay it back and the lowest interest rate. So it's kind of worth it because it really helps you have the most capital available to actually grow the business. And so many other debt vehicles out there crush you with the interest rates. You got to pay it back in three years and it ends up in a situation where you can't get. Even my business was really well run, His business was really well run, but there's still been a process of him merging these two teams and you think about that for your company, right? You're going to have to like get your leadership team to play nice together and you're going to have to merge your tech stack and you're going to have to get everything on the same page, Like if he only had one or two or three years before he had to pay back this debt. That would be troublesome for him, and so the fact that it's more like a 10 year runway, I think, is a thing that Awesome. Yeah, so that was that was.

Speaker 1:

The other point of anxiety is, I think during the due diligence period I was like, oh man, I'm going to wake up. You know, once this thing is sold, I'm going to, I'm going to hate myself when I hate my life, and it really wasn't like that at all. Honestly, like I'm I'm learning more about myself, John, that my core internal driver is to achieve. I really am driven to build, and so doing a sabbatical was that part was kind of hard in Q4. Um, I'm, but in terms of like feeling like I messed up or having regrets about selling it, I had none of those.

Speaker 1:

I literally and if anyone who's ever sold a business or got a big check for something knows this, like you, it's a little bit anticlimactic. You go through this huge process of diligence and then you like wake up one day and sign a bunch of docu signs and then you like look in your app on your phone and you're like, oh, there's a big deposit, Thank God, I'm happy, I'm grateful for that. And then you kind of just go back to playing cards with your kids and like, cook dinner and you know, go celebrate with your friends, and so it's just not. It's not um, exiting in and of itself was not a life-defining moment for me. I think getting to create impact for people is what I want my life to be about. But just to be honest with you, John, just to your question actually doing nothing was really hard for me the first month of chilling. I was not very good at it and I'm much happier now, kind of back a little bit of my flow, just kind of getting to help other companies as much as I can. Mad.

Speaker 2:

Fientist, that's awesome. I mean I've experienced the same thing, you know, with the exit, and do you think it's different? If it's I mean you've worked with other people who've had bigger exits Do you think it's different if it's like an eight-figure exit? It's a lot, you know. For me I've, you know, a couple of smaller x's, like low seven, and do you think when you get higher than that, you're like, oh well, this is now life-changing money. I can do different things with this amount of money. Doing that change, that's such a good question.

Speaker 1:

So I would, I would. My instinct would be to say yes, absolutely. You have your kind of having me through smaller numbers.

Speaker 2:

Does it? Does it change at all? You know bigger numbers yeah I.

Speaker 1:

I had the chance to go with some investor friends of mine about a year ago. Just to tell you a quick story about this, john. We were hanging out in a city going to a conference for investors, and the four of us just shared an Airbnb and we had a great time. And the thing that struck me was that over the course of this weekend, each of us had had exits and my two seven-figure exits, I think, were the smallest in this group and a couple of the guys had had really large 30, 40, $50 million exits. And the thing that was true for all of us is that anybody can be stressed out about money. That's the thing that I thought that was so interesting is, it doesn't matter how big the check is or how many commas are in there. You can choose to be stressed out about cash if you want to. And the other thing I learned is it doesn't matter how big the check is or how big it was. It's a little bit unnerving to have negative cashflow each month. What I mean by that is like, like, my wife and I got a pretty good sum of money here, right, and yet November was a month where, like, our expenses were more than our income and, for whatever reason, the psychology of running a deficit sucks, regardless of how much cash is sitting in a savings account. And so I think my big aha.

Speaker 1:

Oh, in this same weekend we actually were in Omaha and we got to see Warren Buffett talk. The great investor guys in his upper nineties clearly has more money than he could ever spend. And, john, the fascinating thing was hearing him go through a Q and a and him say you know what, guys, I'm going to be honest with you. Okay, we're probably not going to outspend our wealth at this point. Right, we've got too much money, he's like.

Speaker 1:

But what keeps me up at night is how will money impact my grandkids and will I destroy my family with this money? And so, kind of back to the point at any point on the food chain, so to speak, you can choose to be consumed by cash or you can choose to have wealth be a tool for you to build you know your lifestyle and have an impact on the world. And so that was helpful for me to see, because I think it would have been kind of depressing, um, if I hadn't seen other people kind of like have to navigate this and realize I've got to have more meaning in my life than just money, or I'm going to be pretty sad.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a great realization. Yeah, thank you for sharing Awesome. So let's move on to the next part of the podcast, into the controversial take. So this is the part where you can share your debatable or controversial opinion related to Amazon or the e-commerce industry in general. What have you got for us?

Speaker 1:

I think the controversial take is I'll kind of dovetail it with what I said earlier in the show here, john is if you are an Amazon dominant product, we have got to stop accepting really high A costs because we're earning real estate in the marketplace. Here's what I mean by that. If you are going to be a direct-to-consumer, non-marketplace brand, you can afford, like I said earlier, to have an unusually high CAC, which is the cost to acquire a customer. The reason is that you own that customer and can repurpose, resell, post-purchase intent, that kind of thing. But as brands that are going to be fairly dependent on Amazon, we need to be much, much more disciplined when we launch new products. It doesn't mean we don't run a deficit. We just need to run that deficit for about 60 to 90 days and then we have got to have that product turn profitable or we have to have the courage to kill that product.

Speaker 2:

It makes a lot of sense, and what kind of percentage of products succeed in your experience.

Speaker 1:

What kind of what products succeed?

Speaker 2:

Forgive me, Percentage of products, like with the companies you work with. You're probably pretty good at launching products these days. Like how many is it? One in 10? That's a dud. One in 10 that succeeds. Like what are their kind of metrics that you've seen?

Speaker 1:

It's definitely gotten worse, I think I think back to your point when you were doing it in 15, 16, 17, you know, maybe six out of ten were really viable products. It was a really good batting average. It's gotten harder, some categories have gotten more crowded, but, to your point, I still think there's a success rate. I think what I'm hearing is somewhere between three and four out of ten new launches are going to be really good products and something like one out of ten or one out of 11 are going to be a new hero product, and so I'm going to have to launch 10 to 15 products to get another hero, and by hero I mean a product that could potentially, you know, be more than half a million on its own right, like a product that really has teeth on its own.

Speaker 1:

But there's also products that are that are kind of still wins, that are just not going to be heroes, and then there's going to that are that are kind of still wins, that are just not going to be heroes. And then there's going to be products that guess what? You launch them and now dang upwards of half of my launches are going to be so small that when I really look at the roi a year from now, I'm going to probably choose to liquidate or simplify the product, and so that's a much lower average than it was five years ago, you know, yeah, I mean, I'm just curious years ago.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I'm just curious is that what you're saying? I'm just like I'm kind of pulling that out of thin air, that's just kind of anecdote. But are you seeing something similar or maybe a different take?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, honestly, if someone asked me that question, I would tell them how long is a piece of string, how good is the person identifying a market opportunity and how good is their brand. I wouldn't be able to answer it. Yeah, so I put you on the spot. Um, yeah, I mean, I think people who are good at amazon and good at product launches can still can still launch good products and make good money. Um, it's not the end of the end of you know people beyond launch products, but it's definitely well past the end of. It's an easy make money online opportunity that you can just put $10,000 into and then you'll cash out from being a millionaire in three to five years.

Speaker 1:

And maybe to that point. So if you're listening to this and you're kind of aligning with roughly those wild percentages that I gave you, then don't give up because you might be more average than you think you are. And then the other thing is, if you're doing better than that, kind of to John's point, if you have found, if I've just told you that one out of 11 products will become a hero and you're having a hero happen every three products or every four, you need to do what you're doing on jet fuel, because you have found a formula that allows you to really scale and you probably are onto something, maybe an eight-figure company.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, or time to launch your make money online scheme.

Speaker 1:

Good point, yeah, good point.

Speaker 2:

Love it. Thanks, tyler. So what? Well? Not what are you promoting, but what would you? How would you like people to follow you? What's the best place to follow you now that seller accountant is no longer yours?

Speaker 1:

Yeah Well, thank you. This is like. This is like one of the most awkward questions right now, Cause I was doing the podcast. I'm not doing that anymore because I sold it. I don't have the YouTube channel as of right now. So the great thing is that Jeffcoat with one F is there. Aren't many of us in the world. Somebody misspelled it 200 years ago. Guys, it's easy to find me, and LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. I'd love to have anybody that wants to connect. Find me on LinkedIn. If you're a seven or eight figure, you know, founder of an e-commerce brand and are looking for a recurring mastermind experience, um, that'd be a worthy you know. Shoot, shoot me a message on LinkedIn or, um, you know, find me. I'm happy to chat and kind of talk shop and if anyone's looking for a fractional CFO kind of need some consulting, Um, I find myself gainfully unemployed right now and have a little bit of capacity, so I'm happy to serve anyone in the industry if you need help.

Speaker 2:

That's awesome, yeah, so I would encourage you reach out to Tyler. Tyler T-Y-L-E-R. Jeffcoat with one F. So, yeah, easy to find on LinkedIn, as you said. Amazing. So, tyler, thanks so much for being here, thanks for sharing with everyone, and if you're watching on a video platform, click the like. If you're on spotify, give us a rating ratings, help us go up the ratings and, um, yeah, see you next week. Thanks so much for being here, tyler.

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