Shownotes
Chris is such an architect. A Process Architect. A systems builder. His focus on building systems and processes allow the results speak for them selves. Sometimes they speak poorly, and that’s the key to growth, purge the low return efforts. The only way you know though, is to measure, test and do trials. Then let the data drive you forward to unbelievable success.
Mentioned:
Chris’ You Tube channel: Daily Refinement
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Transcript: (note- this is a new tool I am trying out so it is not perfect- it does seem to be getting better)
Chris: [00:00:00] And I feel like people are unmotivated, they’re just unclear and I just, you know, to be honest, I meet so many people that they really want to work and make it work. They just not sure what the, what the tasks are. And that’s what you were saying earlier in the call. Chris, tell me exactly step by step how to do it. But the thing is,
Cool voice guy: [00:00:19] do the ecommerce as well. We focus on the people, the products and the process of ecommerce selling today.
Stephen: [00:00:28] Steven Peterson. Hey, just wanted to talk about a couple of sponsors today. Um, it’s funny as I was coming back from the Philly give show, uh, this week and I was thinking about, um, the way I use sponsors for the wholesale accounts that I got at this event. And it’s like, okay, right under scope from seller labs. And I immediately look up keywords. Again, if you’re looking at products, if you’re, if you’re at a trade show and you’re going to bring some wholesale products to market, right? That this pertains to private label of course too. But even wholesale, you can take an existing product, excuse me, and find better keywords. So it’s on Amazon, it looks okay, you know, obviously the photos need to be improved titles, blah, blah blah. But the title doesn’t just get improved to be poetic genius. It has to get a, uh, improve to be what customers are looking for.
Stephen: [00:01:26] Buyers are looking for certain things and the way you do it is you find what buyers are looking for and that’s what scope is all about. So you take a similar product, the top products, and you see what keywords they’re using and then you go and adjust this title and these new wholesale accounts that I got. That’s how you help a brand improve. And again, if you’re not helping that brand improve, good luck trying to keep it because somebody else is going to come along. Somebody like main, no offense, I’m going to come and say, Hey, I can help fix that. And so again, that’s what I use scope for and we use private label, we use it on bundles, we use it on all these different things. And um, it’s, it’s amazing when you look at what’s working and you do the same thing, that’s the proof.
Stephen: [00:02:10] Okay, so go to sellerlabs.com, forward slash scope. Use the code momentum. Save 50 bucks. Um, and, and try it the way I’m doing it. Again, if you have listings, even if their wholesale accounts improve the photos, right? But you’ve got to get the right keywords, you’ve got to match what people are searching for. And the way to do it is to find your competitor who is really doing it right and that emulate them. That’s what scope allows you to do. So again, so our labs.com forward slash scope, let me know how it goes because it’s, it’s pretty awesome. Second one is, you know, the other thing is karen locker solutions four ecommerce. It’s funny, I was talking to some vendors and we’re talking about different things and I’m like, Oh yeah, I’ll have the photos fixed and I’ll do this and that. And it was an example of one with some gloves and they didn’t have the lifestyle photos, they had pictures of their tags and I’m like, you know, I didn’t want to offend anyone.
Stephen: [00:02:59] You going to be really cautious about that. And so I’m like on their, in their display booth, they have these great lifestyle photos. I’m like, those are the extra photos you should have in there. And they’re looking at me. I’m like, you want to experience your young guys? You want a life isn’t experienced, why do you have them here so people can understand what they are. We should take the same approach and Amazon and we’re all like, Duh, of course, right? Because that’s our world. But for these guys they just didn’t know. And so again, my point here is I’ll just have karen locker fixed that stuff. I send it to Karen, boom, she uploads that stuff for me. She builds all kinds of flat files form and does all that stuff. That’s why I use her surface. That’s why I. I like solutions four ecommerce.com.
Stephen: [00:03:41] So it solutions the number four e-commerce dot com forward slash momentum. And you’re going to save 50 bucks by by using and again, that’s how you scale, that’s adding to our team. We have those members of our team and they’re not located here in my town, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She’s located in way up north in a Tundra. And yet those services are available to you. I don’t care where you are all around the world and that’s why I use her. So save 50 bucks, let her do an inventory health report for you. It’s a great thing to do. A Q one is here, q five, I like to call it as things are still selling, but you’ve got to purge this stuff. You got to get reset. And that’s why I use that. So it’s funny, I was thinking about that on the drive home, how I apply those right directly to accounts that I got immediately. That’s what you can do. Do, do to. So solutions four ecommerce, forward slash momentum, uh, solutions for woocommerce.com. Forward slash momentum. Save the 50 bucks. Tell Karen I sent you. Let’s get into the podcast.
Stephen: [00:04:40] Welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. Episode 370 new year. New Start and man, what a great interview to start it with Chris Lin and what excites me about this episode is he is an I and I, you know, I guess I a fan boy, I’m a little bit about his execution stuff because it’s very exciting to me. I think back to Grad school and I’m teaching you how to think. That’s what my Mba taught me, right? They taught you how to think, right? Breakdown in a, an item, pull out all the seasonality is what the term they used to use back in the old days, what we did it before excel and then rebuild it and put it back together. Right. He does that on every single technique and at the end of the coal we kind of get into some, some real nuts and bolts about how he approaches that and then how he’s using that in pretty much every part of his life.
Stephen: [00:05:32] I think there’s so much value if you’re overweight me trying to lose weight. Right? So you go on a diet. Well, no, there’s more. I call it now a recipe. My life is a recipe and so I’ve got to continue to fine tune it, right? Adding and subtracting different things in certain quantities, measured quantities. Well, I think Chris is a perfect example of somebody who’s done it not right every single time and he’ll say that. Right, and that’s part of it. Being willing to say, you know what? This isn’t working. I’m going to change what I’m doing. That’s what a Keto diet for me for a good example when I was doing wasn’t working, so I’m going to try this other thing and so far it’s connected with me. Okay. Is it for everybody? No, but again, being willing to look at yourself, being honest with yourself, I think it’s.
Stephen: [00:06:18] I think it’s healthy and I think Chris is a great example to start us out this new year to really start working on your business. You know that he meant model. Really start working on your business by working on yourself and yourself sometimes isn’t the easiest to work with, at least myself, Steve. So let’s get into podcast. Alright, welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. We’re excited about today’s return guests and it’s funny, it’s been a year and a half since I’ve had him on the show, so it’s a guy. I would narrow it down that way and back then I called him, I looked back at my notes, a process engineer because at that time I saw somebody who could take, you could, uh, you know, I think back to Grad school, the way you could take something, pull it apart, figure it out and then reassemble it, um, to make sense.
Stephen: [00:07:07] That’s what he was doing a year and a half ago and it’s scaled so much and he’s gotten so much better at it. It’s phenomenal. And I just think this is the way we start off 2019 with Crystalyn. Welcome back, Chris. Thank you so much for having me again. Well, I mean everything I said there, um, and, and we’ve communicated a couple times in between then and it’s, it’s the God’s honest truth. I watched you on your show daily refinement, a youtube show. That’s the correct term, right? Daily refinement. Yes. I watch you because you want to refine yourself every single day, right? You want to refine your process. You want to refine your life every single day and that continuous improvement. It’s so noticeable and it’s just so cool to sit back and watch because I think you’re probably the best execution or I have seen by far by far.
Stephen: [00:07:56] Well, that’s fair. I think anybody else would agree with me. I think that’s absolutely fair. How? I mean, do you think about this? I have a good friend who said this to me. He said about himself. He’s like, look, if I had to clean bathrooms for a living, I would be so good at it because I would take so much pride because that’s what I have to do. I always take pride in my work. Do you think that’s one of the things that you have because this skill could be transferable to any, any business. I mean you. Do. You think that’s your best skill?
Chris: [00:08:24] I think if I have a set of constraints, that’s my best skill that someone can give me. If someone can present a set of constraints and what they have to work with, I think it’s easier for me to process and figure out how to optimize that. Like being a great janitor for an example. I think personally I run into trouble because there are so few parameters when you’re doing online ecommerce, there are so many people making money, so many different ways. It’s very difficult to just one thing to optimize. So I find myself being a janitor and um, you know, a life guard, they’re not related at all and um, you know, it’s distracting and so that’s been my challenge. But I definitely think that if I had some constraints, that’s why I find it easier to help other people than myself because usually they have a set of parameters are working with.
Stephen: [00:09:20] Yeah. No, I agree with you there. Um, I’m my biggest challenge in our business, there’s no doubt in mine is it’s not so much a shiny object syndrome. It’s just that when I watch you, for example, I just see so many other opportunities. I’m like, Oh yeah. And my knowledge or my vision gets expanded and I don’t know that that’s a bad thing, but it does then distract me from all that I was, you know what I mean? Absolutely. How do you, how do you handle that then? I mean, do you have to step away from, you know, getting information? Sometimes Gary v says that sometimes he’s like, look, I’m not listening to anybody else. I’m doing my own thing.
Chris: [00:10:00] How about you? I have noticed that the wealthiest person I know raise the same book over and over again until he’s convinced there are no more concepts left in the book to integrate. Um, and sometimes it’s a book a year and then you hear other people reading two books a week or this, this overflow of information and all the time you hear. So for me, I think the key is the, the essentialism, which is the art of I’m doing less but more meaningful work. And I have noticed this as I meet a lot of Amazon Ebay sellers and I find a lot of disillusioned. I’m Amazon sellers who get so deep into the numbers and um, excel spreadsheets that they don’t have any sense of meaning. They don’t, they are not producing the product, they’re not selling their product on Amazon is doing that. They don’t know any of their customers and now they don’t know anyone because they lock themselves in a, in a room for a year and a half to figure it out and they pop out and they’re just like very confused where they are even if they come out financially ahead. So I think for me, I’m just trying to think the hierarchy has to be people first and that changes a lot of how you work because if you optimize for people and spare time with people, you have to change your business. That’s been what’s affected me the most, the, the most, the fastest ways to earn money, directly conflict with having a, a happy, balanced life. That’s why they say there’s not really a balance if you want to succeed to the highest degree because it’s so time consuming.
Stephen: [00:11:47] I have a friend who always says there’s a cost to everything, always a cost, no matter what it might be. Time might, money,
Chris: [00:11:54] might be relationships. So, so if you had to pick your order of priority, relationship is higher than your business. Yeah,