TRANSCRIPTION

Amazon sellers have different concerns as they advanced their ecommerce journeys. In my last episode, I have talked about the Top 3 Challenges Met by New Amazon Sellers. However, how about sellers who are not complete newbies, but are still trying to become the top-notch performers in the ecommerce industry? What kind of challenges will these sellers meet?


In this episode, I shall reveal what these sellers – or what I called ‘intermediate sellers’ will face as they try to advance their Amazon businesses.


Do take note that this is Part 2 of a three-parts podcast series, and in this episode, I will only be talking about the Top 3 Challenges intermediate Amazon Sellers usually meet. Look out for the remaining parts of this topic on my website, wah-academy.com if you want to know more.


So, the Top 1 Challenges faced by these intermediate sellers would be that they have difficulties trying to find the right people to help them run their business.


Now, as you passed the starting survival stages, it’s natural to want to start selling more products, so you can earn more money. However, here comes the problem: when you start your business, you only need to focus on bringing in sales for 1 or 2 bestselling products. When you have more products to take care of, that means more work. There is no way you can manage your business without some help now, because as we all know, people have limited energy. This is the main reason why so many Amazon businesses fail to survive at this stage – because their owners are spending too much of their time on the tasks that someone else can handle for them.


At this point, sellers should concentrate on WORKING ON their business, instead of WORKING IN their business. By this, I mean to do more strategic tasks – like setting goals for your business, creating viable systems, automating processes, and projecting your business’s finances, etc. This is what I call WORKING ON your business. Meanwhile, WORKING IN your business will refer to any tasks that are involving execution. For example, negotiating with suppliers, answering customers’ queries, doing administrative work like dealing with invoices, etc. These are the tasks that should be delegated to other people.


Therefore, whether or not your business can survive this stage will depend on if you can hire the correct people to help you run your business. Your concerns now should be about how to hire talents into your company, how to interview selected candidates to see if they fit your business’s needs, and how to make sure your employees come up with satisfactory results.


And this will lead us to the Number 2 Challenge faced by intermediate sellers, that is, how to craft and enforce appropriate SOPs (or Standard Operating Procedures) for their businesses.


Now, when you hire people to help you run your business, you need to give very clear instructions to them. Or else, your employees will be clueless as to what they need to do, what are the reasons why they need to do certain steps, and what are the standards of work you expect from them.


How you do this is by setting up the SOPs for your business. And you need to craft them right from when you start your business: observe how you work in your business yourself, and note them down. Reason out the rationales behind every step you took for different processes, and decide if this is the best way to do it. Revise this process regularly, so that your SOPs can keep up with times. For example, it will be a joke if you insist your employees to do up your business’s accounts with traditional paper-and-pen, when they can just churn out your full accounting details efficiently in several clicks with Excel or Google Sheets!


So, this is how you can explain to others why you need them to work in certain ways, and show them that you know what you are doing. At the same time, you also need to keep to your SOPs strictly. Or else, you will lose any credit you have with your employees, and they will be turned off by a boss who ‘do not walk the talk’!


And now, I shall talk about the Number 3 Challenge faced by intermediate sellers, and that is, how to scale their businesses’ profits financially.


Remember, now that you are not just a small startup, you need to plan for your business’s finances wisely. We are talking about how you can increase your perhaps erratic profits of $50 per day, to something more or less stable like $100 per day. Do take note that this increase in profits does not come by just selling more products anyhow – it comes by managing your overall business’s profit-margins diligently. If you have been doing that all along, that will be good. If not, start to understand what’s impacting your business’s profit-margins RIGHT AWAY, before you do anything else.


One thing to note, however, is that when you begin to scale your business, your profit margins will drop. DO NOT PANIC at this point – this situation is only natural, because this is the point when you start to recruit employees, invest in more products, and increase funds for marketing, etc. You spend more money, so of course, your profits get reduced.


What’s important is that you need to keep a mindful eye over your budget, and adjust the proportion of funds you delegate to different aspects of your business respectively. At the same time, you also need to make sure that your business’s accounts are done up properly, or as accurately as you can, so that you know what you are spending the most on, when you should cut costs, and where you are allowed to spend more on, etc.


It will be great if you have different employees to help cover all bases of your business now, i.e, you have people who do up the sourcing process, people who help you do your negotiations with suppliers, and people to help overlook the business operations. This is because thinking about finances is very stressful – those of you who are active about finance-planning, you will know what I mean. The idea here is to outsource most of the nitty-gritty aspects of your business to other people to reduce as much mental stress as you can for yourself.


With that, I shall end my episode on the Top 3 Challenges met by intermediate Amazon sellers. See you in the next episode!