Shownotes
I thought I was busy until I met Jason. Wow he has a lot of irons in the fire. Funny thing is he is excelling at all of them. How is that possible? Strong processes, proven methods tested and refined over years. See once you are sure of your path you need to press harder. Be willing to do more than your competitor. Be so dominant in the field they might not choose to participate. See that’s an offensive approach rather than defensive and that brings growth. (In so many ways!!)
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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)
Stephen: [00:00:00] Better product plan, again, a better product idea, find a better niche to serve.
Cool voice guy: [00:00:04] Welcome to the ecommerce momentum as well. We focus on the people, the products, and the process of incomers selling today. Here’s your host, Steven Peterson.
Stephen: [00:00:18] Want to jump in and talk about two sponsors today? Sellerlabs scope. Uh, you’ve heard me say it, you know, and, and you know, you’re probably sitting there saying, Steve, you say this every episode. I do because I believe in the product. Um, yes, a sellerlabs labs is a sponsor. Michelle, don’t get that wrong. However, it’s a sponsor of a product that I use, so I’m kind of lucky they pay me and yet I pay to use the product. And the reason I pay to use the product is because it allows me to, um, get better listings, right? That’s what you need to do, right? If you’re selling on Amazon, you need to understand keywords and you need to figure out what are the right keywords. And sometimes it’s confusing as heck. Why does a certain keyword work a certain way? Well, the beauty of in scope as you can pull up your competitor who’s really crushing it and see what keywords they’re using, that’s the lesson, and then you can find a similar one and pull them up and you’re going to see a pattern and then you do that pattern for yourself and you can get those same results if you get lucky and figure out what the key word is for your product.
Stephen: [00:01:19] So take some of the luck out of it and use scope. Um, again, go to [inaudible] dot com, forward slash scope. Use the code momentum, save 50 bucks and try it and see if you can improve an existing listing. I think that’s the best thing you can do is take one of your listings that’s performing and then go in and try to enhance it and see if you see an improvement. Give it 30 days or what have you. And if you see an improvement, then there’s a clue that maybe you can see an improvement on all your listings. That’s why I use a scope and I just think it’s such a great product because I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Right. There are much smarter people than I that have done a lot of other cool things to figure out what the keyword is and what people are searching for and using a whole bunch of other techniques and then you get to take advantage of it and it’s really inexpensive and again, you’re going to say 50 bucks.
Stephen: [00:02:04] So solar lamps.com, forward slash scope. Use the momentum, save 50 bucks. Second one is Karen Locker and I talk about her a lot. Right now they’re reconciling of shipment and they’re sending the note. Steve, you have to send in receipts because that’s one of the big hassles. Now I’ve got to send receipts to prove that I bought this stuff so I can get my reimbursement and her team is all over me. Like, Steve, this is your third request. That’s dishonest service. Sometimes I need. I’ve been traveling these last few weeks extensively. I kind of need somebody else. Yes, I could have somebody sitting in my office doing it, but that would be a full time employee and we don’t want any full time employees. Um, this is my wife, my son and I. and so anyway, that’s why I have members of my team in different areas and I don’t want to have to manage them, you know, I know Karen uses some va’s but I don’t want to have to manage that team.
Stephen: [00:02:51] And so she does that and her team does that. Team leaders and stuff and they’d been doing it for me, for many of my wife or I don’t know, two or three years. And we’ve been very, very pleased because the money they save the refunds, they get me the reimbursements, they get me the fixes when I’m on the road and hey, this isn’t correct and they can fix it or I have a question. That depth of knowledge that I get from Karen because of her experience is so worth the price. So it is um, solutions four ecommerce. So the word solutions, the number four e-commerce dot com forward slash momentum. Okay. So use that code solutions four ecommerce.com, forward slash momentum. It’s going to save you $50 and $50 a month is a lot of money. And what’s really cool is she’s going to do that inventory health report that I talk about.
Stephen: [00:03:41] If you’ve not done one, you should, you know, I mean you’re getting a clue every week when they tell you your inventory health report. But if you want to dig deeper and again if you don’t want to do the work, that’s the beauty. She’s going to send you a spreadsheet and then you can parse it and slice and dice and then send it back saying hey, kill this stuff, refund this, donate this Blahblahblahblahblah. That’s what I do and I don’t have to go through and do the work. And you know, it’s just important to have a person on your team you can trust. And again, I’ve been paying for the service for two and a half, three years. I have to ask her how long it’s been. And I’m very, very pleased with think of no one else to be on her team, but Karen and her team, because of what they’ve done.
Stephen: [00:04:19] I look for consistency over time. You’ve heard me say that and I’ve gotten it from Karen. So solutions the number four e-commerce dot com, forward slash momentum. Save the 50 bucks. Get your inventory health report, get 2019 in order and start this new year off. Right? It’s going to be a great. Welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. This is episode 373. Jason Miles. Get ready to be inspired. Get ready to think bigger than what you’ve been thinking. Get ready to say, maybe I can do it too, because guess what? Jason’s going to tell you. You could. You have the tools, you have the knowledge how to do it. It’s really going to be are you going to execute it and when you do execute it, you do have to sit back and think, can I do more? Should I be doing more? Should I take a different approach?
Stephen: [00:05:10] And just instead of making money, can I make a difference? And I think, um, Jason and his wife cinnamon are good examples of what could be, now they’re at the high level, but man, it just starts small and then he gives a good example at the end and it’s just a great conversation. Phenomenal story. And again, he’ll tell you he’s no different than you and I, let’s get into the podcast. Alright, welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. Very excited about today’s guest because Oh, it’s going to take me 10 minutes to get through what he is. Um, I’m going to define him and see if I’m, how accurate I am. But what I love is that he’s built, he’s built, he’s helped build. I think he would correct me too. I’m an audience off of Amazon or Ebay or etsy. I guess it would be one of the other big dominant players, um, and has really understood what it takes and it’s been able to replicate it into some charitable things that are just phenomenal. And I can’t wait to get to talk about them all. So let me introduce him. He’s a dad, a husband, a giver, trying to go into a decent order here and instructor, an author, a blogger. There’s definitely something about dresses involved, which I’m not quite sure we got to get, get through all that and I’m very, very, very excited to have Jason Miles. Welcome Jason.
Jason: [00:06:25] Thanks man. How did I do? Did I get through that? It’s amazing. How about the order? Did they get the order? I put some thought into it. I’m like, well, I gotta make sure he’s a dad first. I mean that’s got to be up husband. Give her but givers right there. Faith and family are at the top, man. Love it. Love it. So I want to go through
Stephen: [00:06:42] because when I was thinking about, you know, as I was thinking about this interview, when I read some of your stuff, I got thinking about how do you get to the end like where we are today because there’s, there’s, you got your hands tangled up in so many different things. How do you get to the end? Where does it start? What was it? I mean, was it as a kid? I mean, where did he, where did this little light
Jason: [00:07:05] come out? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, and then that’s a great question. Um, you know, obviously like with everybody’s answer, it’s a journey and there’s milestones and touchpoints where we had definitely forks in the road where we made specific decisions. Um, and yeah, well we’ve come to a nice place now. We’ve got a fantastic online business. We consider ourselves digital publishers basically is sort of the core of who we are and what we do now. But you’re right, we have our fingers in a lot of different um, activities. Um, yeah. I’m happy to mention the origin story. I suppose if you want to hear sort of the where, where this started kind of story 100 percent because you know, I mean, you, your degree is in organizational management, is that correct? Undergrad in organizational management, an Undergrad in biblical studies and then an Mba with an emphasis in international nonprofit management. Okay. So, so there’s clearly part of the
Stephen: [00:08:01] explanation of how you’re able to have some your tentacles in so many places. It probably is part of that, but you know, why addresses, why dolls, how
Jason: [00:08:09] do you get there? Sure. Okay. So here’s. So here’s the story. We actually, the story for me and my entrepreneurial journey starts in 1998, believe it or not, but just sort of this context. I had a 20 year nonprofit career, nine to five career, half the whole time was in hr and half the whole time was in marketing and fundraising for multibillion dollar charities. So, so that’s my background. But in 1998 we were, we needed money. I, you know, it was early in my career I was working at two jobs. I was a compensation analyst contractor and that for charity. And then I was also working at Kinko’s, I don’t know if you remember Kinko yeah, yeah. Um, and then, but we still didn’t have enough money to even on. So um, so yeah, so, so I went to our home group on Wednesday night and I said, you know, I just looking for another 10 hours a week or something like that.
Jason: [00:09:03] I have a part time job, if anybody has anything or they could just at least pray for me and I’m somebody said in the whole group, you should talk to this guy named Joe. He, uh, he’s making a thousand dollars a day on the Internet, you know, it was like everybody’s like, what the Internet and um, you know, back then we just had, you know, just the basics. I mean, as the dollars would be, I mean, hey, it’s hours and hours a day, but if that was an hours a week would be huge in 1998. Dude, it was like mesmerizing to me. So I talked to this guy and I didn’t work for him at the, in that moment because he, he only needed somebody for like two hours a week. But his story captivated me. It just literally I had whatever you might call it, gold fever, you know, just the dream was planted in my mind that there’s a, there is a way to make money on the Internet.
Jason: [00:09:54] The answer, you found the answer. Yeah. Yeah. And that was 1998 now. So I didn’t work for him. His story, just as a side note, is he, he got a traffic ticket and he went to all day traffic court school to get out of it being on his record and then he hated it so much he went to the judge afterward and said, if a, isn’t there a website you can use for this kind of thing? And the judge said No. And he said, well, if I made a website, would you send people to it? And the Judd said, maybe I dunno. So he did it. He made a website traffic school. It was like one of the first online traffic school is on the Internet. We took it to the Sonoma county courthouse judge traffic judge. The guy started referring people like mad to his website and they cut a deal and then he just went right down the road to Napa County and then to Marin county.
Jason: [00:10:45] He made this online traffic school biz into this huge thing. And Anyway, that was his story. So there’s a clue there though. He, he built something replicatable, right? And he could wash, rinse, repeat, wash, rinse. Repeat, this is common theme that’s going to come up in this conversation. I know. So