Founder 2 Founder

Rule number one is don't lose money. Rule number two is C. Rule number one. Your first business you started when you were seven. Yeah. We were a [ __ ] rocket ship. It was like the cash register. It's like the jackpot machine just was ringing. What was your best acquisition? What was your worst? Amazon is death by a thousand cuts. We're like holy [ __ ] Are what? Half a billion dollars. What? If you had to start Amazon's like right now, what three products you would do? Which is crazy. I'm probably going to get some crazy comments in this. Welcome to Founder to Founder podcast. Today we have Brian Bird, entrepreneur who have built 13 successful businesses, many of them on Inc. 500. Brian, welcome. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. We're going to be discussing why data beats all the financial uh decisions and how the operational management how to integrate uh the systems on on M&A and why the culture so matter. We're going to be getting to the really details of the agency world of the on M&A the nitty-gritty the nitty-gritty. Let's let's let's do it. I'm happy to break in. [Music] What was your first acquisition? Mine it was um a company called uh Click Ascent. Click Ascent. Yeah. So we were um I talked about this yesterday. I was like okay. Got it. Got it. It's like you bought it for almost like 100,000. Yeah. They were doing 92K um in Ibida. I bought them for 92K in Ibida. Got it. One X. Yeah. Yeah. Just one X. Just one. What was the top top owner? Um they were I think no they weren't they were lower than I what were they at like 700 something topline so they weren't super profitable. It's funny because uh they came to us. I had never bought a business. We had just started in 2018 but we were a [ __ ] rocket ship when we came out of the gate. I had a huge community of like 50,000 Amazon sellers and I I didn't realize at the time in 2018 and 2017 and 2016 uh that you could make money from webinars. I thought it was just to make friends. So, I was bored. I was like on my own in uh in a Chicago apartment, onebedroom, um selling selfie sticks on Amazon. And I I was like, I'm doing so well. I'm doing like 300,000 a month right now. I need friends. I like the middle of the winter. I had board shorts on. I wasn't wearing a shirt. I had my like heat turned up to like 82. I had my beard grown out here. I had showered in like 3 weeks. I was like, I need some friends. So, I'm like, you know what I'll do is I'll start a community. I started a community at the time 2014 uh Facebook groups were like a brand new thing. I started this group and started teaching what I was doing just sharing my results people and people loved it and so they said like can you do um can you do like trainings on this and I'm like how do you do that? They're like webinars. I'm like what's a webinar right? And so I started on Skype doing that and then I eventually moved into webinars and my first 50 or 60 webinars was just me training people for free. So it's all value. All value. What was the how big was the community? We grew at that time. It's hard to say in 20 like that was 2016 maybe. Uh but by 2018 by the time I had launched we were over 50,000 people in the community. 50,000 50,000. Yeah. On Amazon on all Amazon sellers or wannabe Amazon sellers. We just eventually they started asking me to train them and I did the webinars and then they said, "Hey, listen. You've got to do a course. Like if you do a course, we will buy your course." And I was like, "Oh shit." Okay, cool. I was like, I'll do a course. Why not? Of course, I'll do a course, right? And so I did that and um we did 2.6 million in our first six days of the course being live. Well, and then by the seventh day, I shut down the course. And um I'm like I'm a creative guy. I love video. I love like graphic design. I love all that stuff. And so I learned how to do what was at the time called a sideways sales letter. So it's a four-part like highly produced video series. And the first one is like an introduction like here's what we're talking about. The second video is all focused around breaking beliefs. So like internal beliefs that you know limiting beliefs that people don't think they can get through like I don't have the money, I don't have the time, I don't have the knowledge, all that stuff. And then the third one was kind of the setup for the fourth video which is the launch video. So by the time I was on the third video, I did a test and I said, "Hey, listen. Let's see how many people are actually going to buy this thing." So, I put out an email and I was like, "I'll give you $100 off this $2,000 product um if you buy now." And I had so many sales. I like I had never seen my Stripe account just it was like the cash register. It was like the jackpot machine. You just was ringing. I said, "This is incredible." And when we launched um I said, "I'm only keeping it open for 7 days." And so, it was just a mad rush. And we did 2.6 billion. Uh we subsequently launched, it was called Sponsor Products Academy. We launched two and three with my partner. We sold over 10,000 copies of that course since and uh it's been really good. And then people eventually just started asking me, they're like, "Do it for us." Like we don't want to do this [ __ ] Like you're really good at Amazon. Go do Amazon uh for us. And I said, "I'm never going to launch an agency. I don't want to do that again." I had an agency in the past. Total nightmare. And I had really big people coming to me like Discovery Channel and Samsung. And they're like, "This is early days, right?" And they're like, "Will you do this for us?" So, I was like, "You know what I'll do is I'll ask for the largest amount I can conceive at the time." And so, I said, "Well, all right. Here's a number. If they sign that check, I'll launch the agency." And sure enough, they signed the check. So, I said, "Looks like I'm moving from Chicago to Austin uh with my partner at the time uh to launch Canopy." And so, we did. That's like the whole origin story right there. So, you had 60,000 members in that Facebook group, right? Yeah, we had roughly like 4950,000 at the time. And and how many courses you sold? Almost 10,000 to date. Yeah. It was called sponsored products academy and it really became kind of like the cornerstone of uh of like PPC on Amazon. So paid advertising strategies on Amazon. Now basically the whole community still uses a version of what we taught. Your agency does only Amazon or you do like Tik Tok or like TMU or like other platforms as well. Yeah. Now we do it all. Yeah. Right. But at the time it was just paid advertising. That was it. Uh then we realized, you know, if you're only doing paid advertising and your product listing on Amazon looks like, you know, a fourth grader photo chopped together your images, you weren't going to make sales with paid advertising. So eventually kind of grew into like this big creative house where we do the product photography, the videography, all the graphic design, all that fun stuff. Uh really beautiful product detail pages. Uh and that has become a really good profit center for us too. Um, and that helps on the paid advertising side because, you know, once you're paying for ads, you've got to have a listing that converts. And so that grew there. And then we we basically just listen to demand, right? Like, what do your customers want? You ask them and they tell you. I think a lot of founders, and I'm sure you've you've seen this or done this, but you get out there and uh you just go, I think this is what my audience wants, so that's what I'm going to give them. You know, and uh it's the old Henry Ford quote, right? If I asked my uh you know my my customers what they want, they would say a faster horse. And uh and so it's one of those where that's actually in my opinion the wrong way to do things. So we asked what they wanted and they came back and they said, "Hey, listen. We'd love for you to do meta advertising. We'd love for you to do Google. We'd love for you to do DSP, which is another advertising platform on Amazon. We'd love for you to do etc., etc." And so we grew from just paid advertising to a full service. Uh How big is the team now? Uh just over 100 people. 100 people. How do you manage um you know I mean it's a learning thing you know I never thought in my wild I didn't want to run a team that big but you learn how to scale you you obsess about org charts you build uh systems internally you know we started with EOS which is you know the entrepreneurial operating system that was clunky and so we kind of paired that down what we call cos which is canopy operating system so it's very much a conglomerate of all these different methodologies and ethos and philosophies on how to run a company uh and it's been really good we're streamlined. We're very like buttoned up. We've in that process done a bunch of acquisitions and because we've got uh we're more of an aqua hired team. It's a rollup if you will. You know, having that system allows these teams to really get How many direct reports you have? One. One. One. Nice. Yeah. Uh it is my COO. Okay. By design. Yeah. How often do you sync up like how do you communicate? Uh every day. Every day. Yeah. We have a morning stand up. Uh it's 15 minutes. Uh or every other day. Um, my calendar thankfully has become uh pretty empty. You know, I've got my uh lovely executive assistant to thank for that and it gives me time to do these things which uh you know podcasts and and um and speaking engagements and the stuff I'd rather do to be fair. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. How do you plan your day if you plan? If you don't have an executive assistant, uh you know, you need to get one right away. And I think the right time a lot I get this question a lot, right? Like what's the right time to to hire an executive assistant? And I'm like right away, if you're a company of one, that's your first hire. That's always your first hire. It's a great book about this called the uh founder and the force multiplier. Yeah. So, if you haven't read that, I should read that. It's a great one. But it's all about how to work with your executive assistant to become massive and get so much done. I mean, I get more done before noon now than most people do in a week. And I saw yesterday you use disk, right? Before on on high like your team, you use disk the disk assessment. Yeah. Disk assessment, right? Yeah, it's it first it was bought I believe it's been around forever. Tony Robbins bought it, kind of tweaked it, made it a little bit better, more applicable for for companies and whatnot. Um, but it bases off of the D, the I, the S, and the C. So D is dominance. How dominant are you? You're probably dominant, right? I'm a very high I'm off the I have a huge D. All right. Uh, I'm I'm like off the chart. Like it can't measure me. Uh, and then I is influential. like how you know I think people think influence like influencer that's not what it is. Uh I is more around kind of like if you're in a situation can you influence the outcome. Yeah. Right. So like great sales people have really high eyes. Typically when we're hiring for a salesp person it's like a a DI dominant influential. So I'm off the chart on I and D. Um those are my two big strengths, right? And then uh S is stabilizing. So it's it it measures for how stabilizing are you? So if you're looking for a really good operator or an executive assistant, um you you want them to be stabilizing cuz you know entrepreneurs are chaos. Yeah. It's one of those things where um you really need somebody strong and stabilizing around you. And then C uh is calculated, cautious. Yeah. Um so it's probably accounting people, right? Accountants, sure, finance, right? A lot of that. Um so you know, again going back to the executive, quality assurance blog, legal blog probably has to be that 100%. Anything detail oriented. Yeah. Detail oriented. So if you, you know, an executive assistant or a good COO or something like that. Yeah. My favorite is um that I find with a high D and a high I and I find a lot of entrepreneurs and serial killer killers have a very high DI unfortunately. Tell you a quick story. When I first was kind of coming up in in the business world, uh I joined a mastermind and that was Russell Brunson's inner circle. So Russell Brunson funnels. Yeah. and and he's become a really good friend and uh and a great mentor. Uh but the first time he opened the doors, he had only 25 people in this community, a very small tight-knit community. Um and uh we were all learning from Russell. He was like our our savior. Russell, right? Shout out Russell Brunson. Um but I met some amazing people in that community, Alex and Laya Hormosi, and we be subsequently become really good friends for 10 years now. um Brandon and Caitlin Puland who launched Lady Boss and they were doing you know three five million a month at the time Allison Prince Dave Lindenbomb James Fel yada a lot of a lot of really big names came out of that that group uh and Russell as a part of our intake would give us the disc assessment Alex and I Alex Vermosi and I had identicals you could overlay the disc and it was the same Kayn Puland same thing right you could overlay and then we learned later because uh Russell's friends with Tony Robin Tony Robbins came in and he had the exact same disc too. And so it was funny because we all talked about what works really well in in a in a business setting. Yeah. Uh based off of a disc assessment uh and finding for us finding um finding DC's so your C is all the way up here which is is calculated cautious detail oriented and but a driver as well uh has been a phenomenal fit for me. But that's not for everybody. You've kind of kind of you got to find your counterpart, your counterbalance and and and figure out what that is. I mean, I'm not assuming I have the same disc as everyone else, right? But if your audience is entrepreneurs, yeah, entrepreneurs, right? Then I think a lot of people are a lot of people have a lot of people are going, "Yeah, I'm a I'm a psycho. I'm absolutely a maniac. I need that." You know, I started admitting that later lat lately that actually I'm not normal. Don't you feel like that though? Like when you're first starting out, even as a child, did when how old were you when you had your first base? It was old. I was in 2008 like 26 27 I think. 27. Yeah. That's young. Yeah. I moved to US in 2003. Yeah. So 2020 co that was this massive rush to Amazon from private equity VC debt providers. Uh there was a company at the time called Thorazzio was the first and fastest company ever to get to a billion dollar valuation faster than uh Bird which was the scooters. Groupon got there incredibly quickly. Um and so they put out a press release. I remember printing it out and taping it to my wall right in the beginning of CO. They rang the bell and they said, "We are the fastest growing company ever to a billion dollar valuation in history in the United States." And I think private equities ears just went, "What? what happened, right? All the all the money, all the dry powder on the sidelines was like, "Okay, this is a very interesting play right now." And so I think within six months there were something crazy like 50 to 100 aggregators and every week if not multiple times a week, you know, there's another press release, oh, we just raised $110 million, we just raised 50, we just raised $200 million. And you know, at the time I was one of the larger uh agencies and we still are right at Canopy. So, uh, a lot of the private equity NBC came to me. I didn't really have to go out and say, "Hey, should we raise money?" They were knocking at my door. I mean, I would get two or three emails a day, right? Real emails, not spam. We want to start an aggregator with you, Brian. I said, "No, no, no, no. That's I'm very much a I don't know if this is obsessive. Is it an ADHD thing? I'm not sure." Right? But you put on the horse blinders and you just go in one direction and you ignore everything else. And that's largely been a part of my success is just the ability to hyperfocus on things. And so I said, "No, just a lot." And then so many and I saw all these press releases. I said, "I don't want to miss this boat." The FOMO was real. And I said, "But why do I need to um accept money from other people? I can start my own internally." Luckily was good friends with some of the higherups at Amazon. So, the guy that actually started and built the product detail page for Amazon, I think he was employee number 13, became a friend of mine over time, actually consulted uh for my team, uh, helped me build my own creative services team inside of Canopy. I reached out to him and I said, "Hey man, would you be interested in this idea?" And he goes, "I absolutely would, and I'm going to bring some of my best people from Amazon as well to help you do this." And so immediately, I had some of the top execs from Amazon on my team before we even launched. I said, 'Th that's cool, but I know nothing about private equity. I know nothing about uh I I really didn't at the time, right? I know nothing about big money. Um but I know a guy that does. And so I reached out to a good friend of mine. His name is Tom Shipley. Okay. So yeah, he just launched uh you know, or he he hadn't launched DealCon yet. It's this what we're I was speaking at yesterday, right? And um and I said, "Tom," and I met him in the inner circle with Russell. And I said, "Tom, uh would you be at all open to to partnering up on this? I need your chops in private equity." He said, "Absolutely. Let me call a few people." Uh and he was a client of mine at Canopy for his brand at the time. And I said, "All right, let's do it." Uh and so he within a day had one of the largest private equity firms uh in the country. They're based out of LA. We pitched him. It was a half an hour pitch. What's your idea? What are you thinking you're going to do? Uh, and I I kind of laid it out to him back at the napkin style. And he goes, "Hold on." And this is a Zoom call. And he hits the mute and on video, right? So he's off video, he's he's muted. He's gone for 15 minutes. We're like, "Did this guy forget about us? Like, who puts you on hold for 15 minutes on a Zoom call?" And this is the principal, by the way. This is one of the co-founders of this private equity firm. He comes back and he goes, "Okay, guys." So I talked to my partner. There's only two partners. I'm the other one. And uh we like the idea. How's a half a million dollar or half a billion dollars to start? Half a million. Yeah. He goes, "How's half a billion dollars to start?" And I said, "Hang on one second." And Tom and I go off of the Zoom call. We both put ourselves on mute. We turn off the cameras and we kind of call each other. We're like, "Holy [ __ ] what? Half a billion dollars? What?" Okay. Okay. Okay. Play it cool, Tom. Play it cool. Let's be good. We go. But we come back on, we're like, "Yeah, that sounds like a good deal. That sounds good. Let's work that out." Right? So, we're off to the races at that point. Uh, three months of diligence. They hire Bane Consulting. You know, it's McKenzie and Bane, the two biggest consulting groups. And, uh, they hire Bane to do a full market analysis, which is funny because now Chat GPT can do it in like five minutes, right? But they do this, it takes them a week. They give us this giant market analysis about the state of Amazon selling and FBA sellers and you know how private equity applies to that and and the thesis of building an aggregator. By the way, take a guess on how much that one consulting report cost that equity company. 100,000 $982,000 for that one report that they built. A million. Yeah. A million dollars. Long story short, um they go, "We love it. We're ready to invest." So, I don't know if you've ever tried to um build a bank account that can accept 500 million or $500 million. It's it's insane. It's it's so hard to do. We had to get them involved. And so, we we finally got all that set up. They've got everyone from the company, 13 of their people, my entire team. I think it was eight of us at the time. So, it's a big Zoom call. I've got a six-month-old baby behind me. It's 4:00 a.m. in the morning. I'm like, "Guys, my kid's dying here. I have to I have to go. I I'm thinking it's all good. Um I'm like, "Okay, good." Right. I click and I go take care of the kid. I'm like, "Tom, give me the good news." And he goes, "I don't have good news for you." I said, "What happened?" And he said, "Literally the minute you got off the call, the other partner jumped on from the private equity group and they had an actual battle on the call, like yelling at each other through Zoom and the principal representing us quit on the Zoom call." Whoa. Quit. 17 years at the top of that private equity firm quit. But we lost that deal like that. Low. And so I wake up in the morning thinking this is I'm going to be half a billion dollars richer. we're going to go out and you know this is my sail off into the sunset story and uh it did not happen that way. It did not at all. So we were there in that principle right the partner. Yeah. Yeah. The two principles right one of them was very bullish on natural oil and you you know moving more that direction uh different market entirely natural gas and oil and whatnot. And the principal representing us was more let's move tech. we need to go tech, right? We need And so they had a fundamental disagreement between which direction they were going to take their firm. And I guess it's just been brewing for a while between them. Uh the last couple of quarters they had lost 20 to 30% on the natural gas and oil play. And so he just quit. He just quit like that. But you still end up raising 100 million, right? We did. We did. So we went back to the drawing board, Tom and I and team. What was the play? What was the strategy like? What what were you you were showing to buy equity? Well, luckily we had that report from Bane. Yeah. Um, and we didn't go share it with anybody else, but we did know a lot about the the state of the industry at that point. But your play was what? Buy on whatever the multiplier and exit other was buying Amazon FBA businesses and rolling them up into a conglomerate. So, it was a big Amazon FBA uh rollup conglomerate and it was a multiple arbitrage play. So you buy low, right, and stack IBA on top of them and then eventually exit for a much larger multiple um just basically through growth. And so we went to another private equity firm out of LA again and they offered us 50. We said 50 is not enough. Um and so they're like, "We have an idea. We have a competing private equity firm. We'll see if they're interested for the other 50." So we got these two kind of like mortal enemy private equity firms to co-invest with each other. And so we eventually wound up raising $100 million uh in real cash, which wound up saving our ass because when it all came crumbling down, I don't know if you remember this, but the whole basically the whole aggregator, it's called aggregators, the whole space got wiped out. Everyone went bankrupt. Everyone went just belly up. I mean, within the next 6 months, um because it was a bubble, it was one of the biggest bubbles that's been around in business ever. And uh they all went pop. We survived it. How much you guys invested like phenomena. No, not from the private equity you raised. How much have we invested thus far? Yeah. Of that money? 17 uh companies. I can't tell you exactly how much. Got it. You bought 17 companies. And what was the play? What what multiply you were buying them and what was the exit strategy? So when we first started getting out there, the multiple obviously based on profit, right? Your multiple goes up as you have a higher profit. But at the time it was like two, three, four. uh but some uh you know because there was so much competition from the other aggregators it ballooned to 10 12 14 and so everyone that had an Amazon FBA business like I have gold right now because they did and so you know you couldn't buy at a three or a two anymore you know even people doing $100,000 a year in profit were saying I need a 10 I need a million dollars for this and they were getting it which is crazy that's crazy what does multiply now I mean it's come back down it's normalized So, you're still in the 2, three, four. It's back to that. Um, I mean, if you're doing really well and you're you you've got great profit margins and high uh high yada, yeah, you can still get a nice penny. When you bring up the private equities to invest in your structure of fund, uh what is the normal structure? Like they play 8020 or they have like uh uh they take 80% of the games. Yeah, it's very close. 7030 8020. Yeah. Yeah. It's there. um you know sometimes it's a seller carry sometimes a lot of the time is uh we'll do rollover equity as well into the the larger um fund itself right so it is a traditional roll up right where you're you're not just selling hey listen we're going to give you a cash consideration up front but we also want you to believe in our vision for what we're doing so your second bite at the apple is even bigger than your first bite right and so but your your play was buying on three multiplier and exiting what 20 or even higher even higher hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the goal. No, what it what was it in that time? That was the goal. That was the goal. That was the goal. That was the thesis. That was the ethos behind the whole thing. And it still is. It still is. I have since um moved away from the aggregator. I still am uh one of the largest equity holders there. But um that's a different ballgame, you know. I mean, the the team now is incredible. I mean, we hired the former CEO of uh eBay uh to run the thing. Uh and um it's been going extremely well uh thankfully because a lot what had happened was a lot of listen not no good story comes after what had happened was whenever somebody starts like that you know it's going to be a [ __ ] story after that. So what had happened was um a lot of these other aggregators they would raise 10 million 5 million from friends and family you know rich uncle John gave them 5 million bucks and then these debt providers out there uh would give you a 10 to1 on that. So if you raise $10 million they would give you a hundred million in a debt facility. And those debt facilities these I I took a look at some of those contracts. They were gnarly. I mean the clawbacks on them were insane. if you missed a payment, it was basically, you know, hard money loan. And so, you know, when they weren't able to perform because the wall that all of these aggregators hit, even though they were founded by, you know, Harvard MBAs and Wharton and Yale and really, really intelligent financial guys, they didn't understand the game of Amazon. Amazon is death by a thousand cuts. There's so many details that if you don't get it all right, you know, it's you lose that game. and it's so competitive, you lose that game. So these guys thought they, oh, it's just Amazon. No problem. We got this, you know. No, that's not the case. It's very difficult. It's very intricate. And so because they didn't have the chops to run Amazon stores at scale, right? They all hit a wall. Nobody could perform to their to their budget, to their projections. Um, and everybody started failing all at the same time. Now you're on more agency, right? On Amazon. I'm Yeah, I'm back to Canopy now. And what are you buying now? What kind of companies you buying? So, we're just about to adopt a Meta and Google advertising agency uh that we love. We get a lot of demand for that. Um and they're tremendous. It's a micro acquire. It's eight people. Um doing very well though. Uh more than anything though, when we're looking for strategic acquisitions, we're looking for results. We're a performance-based agency. So, if we don't perform, we don't profit, right? And so we when I'm looking for acquisitions, I'm looking at the results. Well, first of all, strategically, what do they add for our partners, our clients? Like, is this something that will help them grow? That's the first question, right? You oftent times as a business owner, you start with like, what's good for us? That's the wrong way to think about it. You got to go, what's good for your client? What's good for your partner? Yeah. And so, we heard the demand for meta advertising and Google advertising. And so, we saw So, what is your buy box? Uh yeah, that's kind of what I'm describing, which is um my buy box. You could be a $10 million company or $1 million company. If you're producing [ __ ] results at a $10 million company, I don't want you, right? But if you're amazing and you're only an eight person team, but your results, your ROI, your me is through the roof. I I want you guys and I want you more than the $10 million company. Yeah. Because you have the clients, you have the partners. Correct. Correct. Yeah. So we can filter in from the top, right? There's no marketing expense. It's just a built-in pipeline. Yeah. Hey guys, if you want to join Canopy and you have that kind of business, like reach out. We're going to leave the contacts. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we'd love to have you there. You have 90 days to acquire acquire Amazon agency. Sure. And what do you do day one like how you acquire it? How you going in how you going to integrate it? So, you're saying I'm looking for an Amazon agency. Yeah. And you have to integrate it within 90 days. You have to buy it and integrate it. Sure. uh well without losing an end client. So the the downside of of an acquire a merger is you are uh going to uh eventually see some churn most likely see some churn in the client base. Uh we like to put a peg out there and say you know the retention is going to be around 85%. So that's what we guesstimate uh you know that we're going to keep in terms of the clientele the revenue and the ebad dot. Like if we can beat 85% retention we're real happy. But all of our LOIs, all of our calculations are done based off of an 85% retention rate. Yeah. And I believe you keep 99.1% retention ratio on your clients. Like how you do that? Yeah. I mean, so it's all about performance. You know, I had another agency back in the day that uh we were uh you know based off of spend like a lot of agencies you take 10 20% of whatever you're spending on your ads. In a way that's very unethical. I didn't feel right about it when I had that agency because all we were doing at that point, what a lot of agencies that are built on that model do is they just want you to spend more money. They just want you to get out and like spend more money. Yeah. Not to your own benefit a lot of the time. So I structure now. Yeah. I flipped it on its head. Now actually the entire industry has kind of done the same thing after we did it. Um but we are based on growth. So what we do is, you know, we we set a baseline and then when you grow, we take a percentage of your growth. Typically a small percentage to, you know, anywhere from like 5 to 10%. Just based on the amount of work that needs to go into it. We've got a flat rate retainer. It's very low. Uh shockingly low actually. But what that does is it hedges against uh my downside, right? It keeps my lights on. We don't make money on our retainers. We make money when our clients grow. But that's a much more ethical uh model and the reason to your point or to your question is that the whole team understands that they have to perform. What is it approximately a retainer a month? Uh I mean it really varies, right? So our our minimum is you've got to be doing a million a year which roughly is $50 to $80,000 a month, right? Or just above 83. If you're doing that, uh we can be very very uh successful. But if you're at that What is your retainer price? 5,000 a month like 10. So the flat fee there would be roughly 3 to 5,000 3 to 5,000 and then you know 5% to 10% of growth on that and that is on the IBITA of their IBITA or or gross revenue gross revenue gross revenue so growth on revenue got they have to just build it on their cost that five 10% exactly yeah but what we do internally and a lot of agencies don't do I don't want this to become like an ad for canopy but like what we do that and this is the truth like what a lot of agencies don't do is we focus on we actually provide the reports so I've got an entire analytics team that provides really professionalized, accurate reports on profit, right? So, it's not just like, hey, you grew from $100 to $200,000. Yay. It's like, no, here's where your profit is. We want you to see that we're doing the right thing. So, internally, we're not just focused on growing topline. More than that, we're focused on streamlining and reducing costs, right, through better advertising strategies, higher conversion rates on their product detail pages, right? That's what we focus on. And we want to show our clients the profit growth cuz it's not what you make, it's what you keep, right? Average what percentage year-over-year growth they have approximately? 83. We got that number. 83%. We track it every month. Uh and uh last month was 83% year-over-year. That's huge. Yeah. Yeah. That's huge. It's it's massive. That's mass. Now, you have to take into account so there's, you know, a theory of wind resistance, right? So, if you're doing 30 $50 million a year on Amazon, you know, growing 83% year-over-year is a much harder lift, right? But if you're doing a million a year, you know, to get you to $5 million the next year for us is is not that difficult. We've done it repeatably. I've seen that movie a thousand times, right? What kind of uh gross profit uh and eBay do they run? Uh well, it's it's varies on Amazon. It varies per category. What percentage Amazon takes? Roughly 30% though 30%. Yeah. And plus ads spend, right? Uh that is not including ad spend. That's not including ad spend. So like what percentage on ad spend? They have approximate I mean what you want is you want 70 to 80% of your uh sales to come from your organic right. Got it. Got it. Searching organic. On the other side the 30 to 20% should be from your paid advertising. Got it. Got it. Not all pure 100% unpaid like the organics. Paid is a tool to increase your organic ranking. Yeah. So when when you do paid advertising the right way, one, it should be profitable first and foremost. Rule number one is don't lose money. Rule number two is see rule number one. How do you do with your team? I mean it's again comes back to the model, right? So everything's gamified, everything's incentivized, right? Because we we we build on growth, we pay on growth, right? So everything is streamlined and gify. I mean, we gamify everything. I mean, you know me, I'm I like to have fun, you know? I like I think the journey is the fun part, right? Like if I sold for $200 million today, I'd be like, what do I do next? Like I'm not going off sailing off to the Caribbean. I mean, well, and I believe you 50% of your time you spend there, right? I was just going to say, yeah, I I spend half the time in the Virgin Islands anyway. Virgin Islands. Yeah. Next podcast we should there. Let's do it on a boat, brother. Let's get on the catamaran and shoot a pod on the cat. Yeah. Yeah. [Music] How do you scale on acquisition while keeping the same culture? Like I think on acquiring is the culture is one of the main things. You're buying people's heart, right? Like Yeah. Yeah. You're buying their their business, their dreams. Dreams. Yeah. I mean that's part of what I love about acquiring is you're making someone's dream either come true or even better and bigger. That's a fun moment and it's a privilege to be able to do that to be in a position to to do that and that's why every you know acquisition we do or aqua hire or merger it's um we treat it very very gently. I realize that I love entrepreneurs and I want to yeah I know the struggles intimately. I want to I want to treat them very well and and one of the things we look for is good people. You know, Harvard uh business review did a study and do you know what the number one reason uh acquisitions fail is? No. What? The seauite the culture. Yeah. So, you're really if it's a merger, if it's an acquire, if it's a full-on buyout, it's the it's really the seauite and the leaders that determine the culture. And so, when we're going in to acquire, I'm I'm less focused on the financials. Of course we are, but I I'm more focused on the humans. Yeah. Right. And uh and the tech, but the humans really are the ones that um create the culture. And so it has to be a culture fit. You know, if it's not a culture fit and you plan to merge or aqua hire, uh you can take down the whole ship. One hole in your boat can sink your ship. So, you know, we're very careful and cautious about that. Uh I think the disc assessment, we talked about that, right? We give that to everybody. We want to know who they are uh you know interpersonally but also on paper. Who are you? Right? Like what's your disc? It's systematized. We've kind of uh built an equation on how to figure out culture. Um we also like to date before we get married. So often times if we're going to aqua hire somebody, we will use their services with the aqua hire in mind and see if they produce results without letting them know we're actually looking to acquire them. Right? So, you know, if I hire your agency to do something for me, just know you might get bought. Definitely. And how many of the aqua hires or like when you bought a company, what percentage of the seauit or the founders stay and what percentage don't stay? Yeah. So, if it's an aqua hire, we give them the, you know, quote unquote golden handcuffs, right? So, we want them to stay, we encourage them to stay, but we make sure that's in alignment with what they want. That's a part of the conversation. We don't produce an LOI until I get to a point where I'm like, "Okay, they really believe in what we're doing. They see my vision and they want to be a part of this team." Uh, if they don't see it, if they don't believe in it more, uh, it's just the LOI never shows up. You normally buy 100% or you buy like 80% 20%, they like roll in. I buy 100%. But what I like to do is um, so for example, you know, if we were to buy a team right now, let's say an email marketing team, um, which we are looking for currently, right? uh that would become what we call a pod inside of our org chart. It' be our email marketing pod and we individualize the financials per pod whether it's you know we've got you know lots of Amazon pods. Yeah. Right. And so we per pod we have a separate P&Ls. They're all separate P&Ls. Yeah. Yep. Right. And that's actually back to your question on how we keep people incentivized and they're paid off of their profit per pod. Yeah. Mouthful but yes. And so if we bought that email company, we would individualize their financials. Yeah. And pay them off of that. And what I like to do when we acquire acquire is to give them a percentage of the profit in their pod just like we do with any other pod. Typically though, if we're acquiring, that's a higher percentage. Yeah. And we leave them with, you know, I call it a a a profit to equity um parallel. So if we leave them with 10% of their company, they get 10% margin. But it's never of their company. That company gets dissolved immediately and then absorbed into the new pod. And so they'll have 10% of their pod and then in a larger exit, let's say the rollup exits. It's just an equation. How much you know of your evida is related to our ultimate exit at what multiple and then that gets paid down. Yeah. Through the line. Wow. It's really interesting because I have I run like 20 different pots as well. Yeah. Projects. A lot of pots. And each one has the same way incentivized. Yeah. First uh in the beginning of venture studio uh I can incentivize them on the top line growth. Uh later it goes to gross profit then it goes to EBIDA once they get to like bigger size like now they manage EBIDA and they have access to bank accounts and they have a whole clip P&L uh accessibility for their own pots. Interesting. You're actually giving them access. I'm giving them access to the bank account. To the bank account. And is it a bank account per pod? Per pod. Oh wow. Okay. Blowing my mind. Perod. Yes. And they have a access in the beginning. They have a full access. They can transfer send money to anywhere except themselves. They cannot pay themselves. Oh wow. Okay. their salary get approved by their manager and accounting will send the money to their pay but they can pay everybody else the vendors like yes they have a full control it's so it's actually a company inside of a company correct yes that is so interesting I love that later once the revenue goes to high like let's say million plus they have a double protection on accounting like they they can submit someone else has approve that. So they cannot How do you then train your pod? What is it? Do you call them pod leaders or Yeah, project managers. Project managers. Project managers. Then they become business unit managers and eventually CEOs and my managing partners. Hang on, I'm taking notes over here. Man, that is brilliant. That is I love that. I I think that's uh that's canopy 3.0 for us maybe. Yeah, that's great. We don't we don't take it that far. I guess the question for me, if you use Airwalk, you can actually create like sub accounts. Oh, interesting. Like within few minutes, you can actually print a new bank account. No kidding. What's the name of it? Airwalks. Okay. And Wallocks. And you can actually print digital v virtual cards. So for each vendor, we have a separate virtual cards. Like if you would use like Canopy, we would basically print a new virtual card and we would give it to you. If whatever we also know like who has that virtual card and if something happens we know that access was given only to that vendor. That is granular on the most granular level I've ever heard. I love that. I love that. Yeah. I mean I thought we were very granular but that's that's brilliant. I love I'm telling I'm taking notes over here. Yeah. I would really recommend and we also use a time doctor is said. Yeah. Time doctor. Time doctor. Yeah. Brilliant. Did you let me ask you a question when when you did you have time doctor from the beginning or did you have to install that? We installed it in after co. Okay. After co like uh I was fighting a lot. Uh I was showing up to office as a leader to shows up and I was asking everyone to like work from office. Everyone was against and I lost a lot of my leadership team. Some of my leadership team because I was pushing them work from office. But now I pushed them away. It's like no one works from office. Everybody's out virtual. Everybody works from home. Uh the first reason was when the crisis uh when the Ukraine war started like I lost 50 people there like we had to like move out of Ukraine. We did the same thing working. Yeah. And then tsunami happened uh in Philippines office. We had office in Philippine then I lost them like we could they couldn't stay in office and then we adapt to the virtual uh office structure. And actually we believe it or not I like the virtual structure more because organization structure they follow the command lines on virtual structure more than the tribes in local places. Yeah. If you have a local offices they will break the organization structure. They will go to their own tribes right? They will they don't follow the organization structure. But when you have a pure virtual office they kind of follow the structure. The dividing lines are stronger. Yeah. you don't have water cooler talks and all that. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, uh so when you went virtual like a lot of companies, right, in 2020, it was just an immediate time doctor issue. You just went boom, we're doing this. This is something we're going through actually right now, right? So we've had clockify, which is a different system. I don't like it as much as time doctor, but when you're running a virtual company, the downside is people are working in their pajamas and you can't avoid that. But we they must be on the video cameras always, right? Right. Yeah. We've kind of got the same thing. But you know the work from home business on the top, pajamas on the bottom, right? Or or no pants at all, right? We've had situations I could tell you about that are pretty funny. Uh but uh long story short, um you know, installing Time Doctor, we're getting a lot of push back on that. You know, it's because it goes on their computer, right? It gets installed on their computer. Do you provide your entire team with their laptops? Yeah, we don't provide them at all. Yeah. Yeah. And so we're getting we're getting push back on that, but uh it's been good so far. No, we only allow some team members not if they overproduce the results. They get that like a player plus if you achieve your results better than the plan you have the freedom of work whatever. Sure. Not is that based on KPIs, KPIs? OKRs and KPIs. OKRs and KPIs. But if you see it's not working right away they go back to time doctor and we have a weekly planning like it's granular like they have to follow every day they have to write down uh what they did the VFPs value final products of each meeting they have to report a lot if they start missing deadlines or KPIs OKRs we put a really strict rules if they achieve they're free gotcha that's that's an interesting so when let's say it's an A player and they achieve their their mark their KPIs they don't have to use time do anymore correct they can get you see decline in KPIs ever right away they go back if you see that they go back on it correct that's an interesting move because by the default rule they have to have it sure if you are giving them like okay closing your eyes we can always bring them back and one more thing we have when people want to go to vacation the first thing they have to do they have to write all of the SOPs and they have to delegate it to the next person. They're not going to vacation without doing that. I'm loving this. Can we hug? These are great. You're great. Okay. It's where I they come on the podcast and I'm and I'm getting so much good information, you know. That's amazing. That's amazing. Thank you so much. I'm literally like, "Okay, you're you're solving my problems." Like, I'm literally facing these problems right now, you know. And they have also four a 4 forex rule. Uh, in order to take one day off, you have to let us know your manager four days before. If you're taking like five days, you have to let them know 20 days before. Yeah. And do you do unlimited paid time off? No. Oh, they have only two weeks a year. Okay. Yeah, we have unlimited five and five, but uh they can only take first week on their whatever they want, but the second week they can take it whenever the company or the manager wants. Okay. So it's a imbalance interesting. Yeah, we moved to unlimited paid time off. The reason being we had uh people not taking any time off and that had occurred and all their PTO would stack and stack and stack and it stacked for years sometimes where people wouldn't and they did that and then it built this um nest egg for some of the team. It's like rollover minutes, right? But we pay them off at the end of the year. If they don't take their vacation, you pay them off. We pay them off. Yeah, we we made that mistake. We did not. And so we had people that, you know, they were not necessarily unhappy at the company, but because they saw this Well, no, I think they saw the the paid time off nest egg growing and maybe they hit a little burnout, maybe they get a little unhappy, but in a normal situation, they would just push through, right? But when you've got a nest egg of, you know, I think at one point we paid somebody out like $40,000, right? And that's a lot of money, right? And so when you're working and you're making 80 grand a year and you see half of your salary is in your nest egg and you get a little unhappy in your position, you go, you know what? [ __ ] it. I'm quitting and I'm going to take this and go to the Virgin Islands, right? Or something, right? And so we found that that was happening. And so we moved to uh to unlimited paid time off. And what we realized, people take less time off. They are more apt to push through burnout or unhappiness which is always I find just a a minute in time people do burn out. What is what is unlimited like can someone take two months off? In theory they can take two months off. However um you know they've got we measure by KPIs just like you. Yeah of course actually if they connected to P&L of that pod right what is your motivation? Yeah, I mean there's there's social pressure right from your pod, from your larger team. We call it the tribe. Canopy is a tribe. Everything we do is like Amazon related. All my pods have names of Amazonian jungle cats or like you know lizards or spiders or frogs. Um but you know the tribe if is creates a lot of social pressure, a lot of peer pressure to perform and so we find people take a lot less time off. been again it kind of comes back to this unified, incentivized, gamified uh culture. People want to be there. We have a lot of fun. You know, we bring in guest speakers uh on our huddles. You know, we have um uh on Mondays we have a a half an hour huddle and we'll bring in guest speakers. James Freel just spoke for us. Um everyone's like, "You got to bring in Oramoszi." And I'm like, "He's not going to come on our huddle." But I asked him anyway, so he might. It's one of these things where if you gamify and you and you create incentivizations and peer pressure, I feel like unlimited paid time off is a really great benefit. And people see that when they're applying and they go, "That's amazing. I'm going to take two months off." It's like you could in theory, but you won't when you're in Caterpie because you won't want to. You won't want to. And their motivation structure is like monthly, quarterly, yearly, or like LTI like longterm. like do they have like pantom or like exit? Yeah. Yeah. So we do um provide uh equity um you know to really key players. You don't even have to be in the seauite. If you make it to the seauite you're obviously get equity on it. So we've got a number of players in the seauite that have equity but we've had pod leaders that have been with us um or project managers as you would call them um been with us since the beginning and they all have equity too right and they're somewhere in the middle of the arc chart right? So, we're not um we're not a hierarchy, right? We're a performance-based team and you pay it on performance. And so, if you perform amazingly well, you can have equity. You know, we have a a guy Benji that's been with us for day one, you know, uh and he's still an account specialist. He doesn't want to go any higher, right? He's just an account specialist. He's real happy with it, right? He's got equity. So you know that's like giving uh you know one of the lower org chart players um a little love and I think that gives a lot to the culture too when people yeah I yeah the I used to think like when someone will ask equity I would feel threatened like like why you asking but now actually it's good thing because it means someone wants to be with you for long term right it's actually like positive yeah and I've also found uh you know we've had a lot of offers on canopy and when the ones that we've walked down the line. You know, the most recent one was just shy of shy of 200 million, right? The one that that one got furthest down the line. Uh and I told that story on stage yesterday, right? But they loved when we were giving equity. You know, these private equity guys, uh they love to see Yeah. Uh that your team is is committed, involved. Um because flight risk is real. When you're buying a company, the biggest risk is the team just evacuating and getting out, right? What percentage of the company normally allocate for the equity of employees? Uh I don't I really don't I don't have a pool where it's hey, you know, here's the equity. It's really just a earn it pay, you know, pay performance, right? All the way through. It's an ethos through the whole company, right? So, you know, if you really become an A player and you shine in your position, you know, you get equity. And I've I've told everyone publicly, and I say it a lot actually on our all hands huddles in the in-person leadership meetings, I say, I want everyone on this huddle or on in this room to have equity in my company. You attach it to the base pay or like you bonus. Yeah, it's bonus. So, it's paid out on bonus bas and you connect it to valuation and profit share though. If you've got equity, it's it's profit share motive. Who manage that cap table or structure? Yourself or your assistant or who has I've got a finance team. Finance team. Yeah. That does that internally? Yeah. Yeah. And And how often do you manage that? Yearly. Yearly. Yeah. We annually. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's an annual I've heard you could do it quarterly, but that is Yeah. It's too much management. Too much heavy lifting. It's cumbersome. It's clunky. And it's, you know, often times in business, I I find that a lot of the business owners I talk to or coach or or um even myself, you know, uh you're optimizing for the wrong thing. Yeah. You know, you're putting a 10x effort into a 2x problem, right? Where you should be putting, you know, a a 2x effort into a 2x problem, right? Or, you know, the other way around, right? You you've got to optimize for the right things. It's correct. Yeah. Instead of like a local KPI, it's better to focus on global one. Mhm. Exactly. But if you know, as does with business or life, a huge problem comes in. That's okay. Think of it like a Gant chart, it just pushes this project and this initiative that way a little bit, right? So, you got to you got to have enough flexibility in your operating system to be able to put out the the level 10 problem with a level 10 effort, right? Um, and if you don't, then you can only put a level two effort into a level 10 problem, you know, and you don't have the flexibility to do to your that level 10 problem can sync that entire business. So, you got to have that flexibility. What roles do you have on the seat? Uh, got a CPO, chief partnership officer. She's tremendous. She runs our entire um partner success team. So, that's a team of 14 people. Each one of them handle I think 25 clients. That's been a great addition. very expensive but huge ROI on on having the point guards uh that communicate really well with your clients. Um huge EQ, right? Very st's, very stabilizing. Um our tenure uh has gone through the roof. So our the the amount of time that a partner stays with Canopy went from about 13 months to now we're at close to 30 months. How many partners we have? Close to 300. Check it. That's been great. So, she manages that team and she manages the business development team. Iram is tremendous. So many people try to steal her from us and she she ain't going anywhere. She's an equity holder. Uh we made sure of that. Yeah, I just learned from you. So, I'm actually I'm opening a new position now because we have contractors, technician contractors. They are partners. So, I don't have really anyone like attached to them on that relationship base. So like we have over a few hundred also like partners technician contractors like who brings the money like they serve we serve our homeowners through our contractors right through our technician network. So we don't have actually that CPO you just said like partner relationship manager. Yeah. Or just you know a director of business development or something like that. You might not even have to go all the way to the seauite with that. you just get a really hungry one or two really hungry sales people that are great at so for us there's two separate sales positions there's the AE and that's more transactional right like hey you've applied to become a canopy client right let's get you closed let's get you in on board let's get you started and that's the life cycle and that's like 31 days roughly and that's a different skill set that's your high B high I but in the business development world where you're looking for strategic partnerships that person needs to have a huge uh relationship building uh capability like a characteristic among them. It's different on the disc, right? So you want them to be relationship builders because that's a longterm sale. Some of our strategic partners have sent us over 50 clients, right? And because they're getting a kickback, we used to give them 10% of the topline that we would bill every month. Nobody really cared about that. It's kind of like when you win the lottery, like it's some unusually huge number of people take the lump sum compared to like the monthly payout. It's like 98% take the lump sum. We just said, "Hey, listen. We'll give you $1,000 every time you refer over a client." Whereas that's a smaller number than the 10% for life. Everyone started referring business. They were like, "Oh, left and right, left and right." So, we give and then we move that to our sales team, too. Hey, you make a much bigger nut off of the first the first sale like the first three months and then it goes down to almost nothing. So you have a COO, you have a CPO, CPO, COO, fractional CFO, fractional CFO. Mhm. And that's it. And the seauite right now. That's got it. Yeah. We uh CTO is my next move or what we're really actually calling a CIO. So chief AI officer. Yeah. Aos, right? Rather than a a CTO. So that's our next move. We've got a couple of internal candidates for that. We promote from within all the time. I'm like we've tried to hire externally and it's been I mean I told that story again yesterday on stage right I don't know if you saw that but we hired a CRO to revenue officer for 600,000 a year [ __ ] the bed within three months nothing had happened we had declined uh so every time we hire externally uh it's been a fail so I love promoting internally internally right yeah how AI is affecting your industry I mean it's affecting every industry tremendously right uh a a large number of searches now on Amazon are starting with Rufus, which is their internal AI. Um, and so we've had to refocus our own strategies on how to serve our clients, our partners based on that. Uh, but internally too, uh, we're we're building tools and we're about to have one completely rolled out that'll, um, take our margins from, you know, roughly 30% hopefully back up to where we were when we were first starting, right? 45 50 52% because it's going to optimize the number of partners that can be served by pod right so partner we call it PPP which is partners per pod and that's a real measurement right and so when we can have more partners per pod based on better technology and less humans right then you know it's it's what we call vertically liquid we can grow at any scale and our margins will uh improve drastically so we're getting very close to how other platforms work and what percentage of the sale comes from different platforms like Tik Tok, uh Timu, AliExpress, Walmart, eBay, I guess, like what else? Yeah, I mean it varies in um region to region, right? So in the states, Timu is a nothing. AliExpress is a nothing. Um the big ones here obviously are Amazon and Walmart has grown tremendously as well. Tik Tok took off like a rocket, right? But now there's been a lot of wobbling happening over at Tik Tok. Tik Tok probably for the smaller items, right? Yeah. It's really great for the less expensive items. But what we use Tik Tok for is um TopFunnel, right? Awareness of ours. It's an awareness campaign. So we've represented a brand named Goalie. Uh they're the supplement brand, you know, the apple cider gummy vinegar or vinegar gummies and and they are a billion plus dollar annual revenue company. We've represented them for seven years now on Amazon. Tremendous. one of the top 10 selling products on Amazon. They've got more searches on Amazon for Apple uh cider gummies than Apple Cider has searches. That's how big they are. They went to Tik Tok and they ran this massive campaign on Tik Tok. The affiliate campaign was beautiful. We didn't manage it for them. This is before we did Tik Tok. And they were giving away condos in Miami, BMWs, Rolex, you know, it was for their top affiliates. And it made so much noise on Tik Tok that they shot out of the gate and I think they were doing like 12 or 18 million a year. Wild or a month I should say. Um but what was really interesting was watching what we call the halo effect back on Amazon. We saw their revenue and I can't give you real numbers on this obviously but their revenue shot through the roof and that's where the profit center was was back on Amazon not necessarily on Tik Tok. So, that's a strategy that we've seen, we've learned that works very, very well, especially when launching a product. If you have a new product and you're trying to get it out there, Tik Tok is a great platform. It's a really good one to get um found, observed, not necessarily for buying through the Tik Tok platform. And not a lot of people, you know, what happens? You go, you see a product on Tik Tok, what's the first thing you do? You go to Amazon. You go, "Hey, is this on Amazon?" Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, that's that's very usual. Like the bounce rate from Tik Tok to Amazon is enormous for products, for physical products, right? Yeah. Because I guess people feel more comfortable and more secured on Amazon, right? And the returns, I mean, the delivery is guaranteed. It'll be some I mean, here in Austin, which is beautiful compared to the Virgin Islands, it takes 3 weeks, right? But here, I push a button and I'll have it by 5:00 p.m. That's same day. Think about how w take it for granted, but that's so wild. Yeah. Um, you push a button, you get food. you push a button, you get a product, you know, like it's why I don't have toothpaste. It'll be here in an hour. You know, I I just I think that's tremendous. And people have learned to rely on Amazon for that here in the States. And uh and so yeah, when you when they're on TikTok, they go right to Amazon. If you are new to Amazon, how much money you need to get into Amazon, sell it? Yeah, it depends. And that's a asking me to build a watch. We recommend if you're launching a brand on Amazon, um, don't just launch on Amazon, right? Launch on Tik Tok, launch on Meta Ads, launch on your own DTOC. Uh, leverage email lists. Hopefully, you've you have your own. If you don't have your own email list, you know, you can rent email lists, right? You can do eines and all kinds of fun things like that. If you had to start Amazon store like what three products you would do? First of all, I' I'd start with at least 50 grand for all the for the launch. You know, it's the more money you could put into the launch, the better. Um, Amazon has a uh what we call the honeymoon period. The first 30 to 90 days on Amazon. They are artificially inflating your rankings, giving you more traffic than they should to see if you're a viable product that will make them more money, right? So, that's the first thing I would do. I'd start with 50 to 100K. You could make it happen with 25 and some creativity. I would say, you know, the the products I like most are the boring ones on Amazon. There's another one, tie downs for your a truck bed, right? Uh these are like automatic grips for your truck bed. They're doing incredibly well. Uh gun holster, right? You wouldn't you wouldn't these are all things that are not like cool and flashy and oh my gosh, look at this air fryer. Look at you know, look at this fidget spinner. Like they're like very basic. You wouldn't think about parts. Another one we have is um like the table uh stop like uh your what is it called? Furniture gliders. So if you want to move your furniture, you put these gliders underneath you and you push the furniture around. They're doing really well. So you know, for me it's boring products um that are are great, but I also love to have um subscribe and save products, right? So products that you need over and over and over so you get that recurring revenue. Recurring revenue. Yeah. Interesting, Brian. It has been incredible for the founder to founder listeners, if they want to find you, uh they want to reach out to you or the canopy, uh how they should contact you. If you're an Amazon seller or you're an e-commerce seller and you uh need some help there, go to canopy management.com. Uh if you want to chat with me, I love talking to almost everybody that wants to talk to me. Uh you can find me at Brian Bert. It's b r i nbt.com. I'd love to have a chat with you. If you're looking to sell on Amazon, if you're looking to sell more on Amazon, or if you just want to talk to me, uh please reach out. By the way, Ryan, uh for the listeners and whoever is watching this on YouTube video, uh whoever is going to be commenting and liking and subscribing, we normally the the guest gives gives a gift. What gift is it? Like it can be like your consultation or maybe Zoom call with you for 15 minutes. Like I said, I'm happy to jump on uh we shoot us an email uh and we'll get a call going uh together. I'm happy to consult with anybody that's selling physical products. If you want to sell more of that, if you're interested in M&A, if you have an agency and you want to grow that agency, uh let's jump on. I'm happy to deliver value. It is uh my ethos. It's my philosophy to give results in advance. Uh and hopefully that builds relationships and it always has in my career. Um led to much bigger and better things. So submit application and let's jump on. I'd love to talk to you. Thank you Brian. Thank you everyone. Uh today uh this episode was about Brian Bird about the canopy management. We discussed about how to build and scale and uh do mergers and acquisitions M&A on the Amazon agency world. Uh and if you liked it, please subscribe and like and share with uh with your friends. Thank you. Thanks so