Running an Amazon FBA business using SOPS

I’ve had 6 figure businesses.

And I’ve had 7 figure ones.

Personally, I find that going from 6 to 7 figures is about 1 main thing:

Scaling beyond yourself.

For example…

Say your business does $300k/year in topline rev. It’s still small enough where you can do everything yourself.

You’re customer support.

You’re the product development aficionado.

You’re the top salesperson.

You’re the webmaster (my personal favorite… not! :🤞).

But then:

You wake up one day and realize you’re working IN the business, not ON the business. And you’re trapped. In my own career, I spent 1 full calendar year grinding it out at a Starbucks until I realized “dude, don’t do it alone!” The dopamine from getting things done is great, but there comes a point where it doesn’t move the needle.

Yes, you’re doing everything.

But you’re also the bottleneck.

Because you’re so busy, you have no time for high-level strategic thinking. No time to think about growth.

The path to 7 figures means delegating stuff to other people. So you can get your time back.

And, you might be thinking:

I barely make take-home profit as-is. How do I hire?

I thought the same thing.

But, it’s not so binary (hire vs. not hire). To be or not to be.

Before hiring full-time staff, you can hire part-time contractors from websites like Upwork. Or, use agencies. The point is: get some help and free your time. Thankfully, you’ve been filling every single role yourself, so you understand every function and you know what to hire for! That’s the silver lining of the grind.

The safest first hires are “more hands on deck” hires. These are likely Virtual Assistants (VAs) who learn and execute your pre-made written instructions called SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures).

Some common SOPs for Amazon FBA businesses are:

– handling Buyer-Seller Messaging

– checking Account Health; checking and addressing A-Z claims

– raising tickets with Amazon Seller Support

– checking inventory levels; restocking inventory

– Amazon PPC: positive keywords

– Amazon PPC: negative keywords

– Amazon PPC: bid adjustments

– and many more! But those are a few

You can use this framework to create each SOP:

1. Do

2. Document

3. Delegate

Building on that:

1. Do: do it yourself. If you’re running the business, you’re doing this already. You now have subject matter expertise. You know how to complete the task at hand (e.g. answer that Amazon customer question, raise that ticket, write that new listing, etc.)

2. Document: write down how you do the task in insane detail. Imagine you have to write the instructions for a middle school kid with ZERO prior Amazon FBA knowledge. Your SOPs should be that clear. Google Docs works fine. Nothing fancy required. Screenshots are a bonus, but are harder to scale/alter afterwards vs. text-only instructions.

3. Delegate: hire online, starting with part-time folks. Give them your written SOPs. If there’s something they mess up on, consider it your fault. Fix the SOP, give it to them again, and get it working. I find that sharing a video recording of you doing the SOP (using something like Loom or Vidyard) fills in a lot of gaps that may get lost in writing.

And then, one fine day…

…you’ll find your calendar is clear.

And your business is running without your direct, active involvement. It needs your oversight, sure. But not active involvement.

What do you do with this newfound free time?

Go on vacation?

Heck no.

Now is NOT the time to relax.

It’s time to drive growth. Either in the form of new product (e.g. new ASINs, new variations). Or in the form of new distribution (e.g. more ad units, ad spend, or more marketplaces). Product and distribution. The 2 levers.

On that note, I have an offer for you.

And that is to (maybe) take the entire Amazon “distribution” side off your plate.

My team and I have developed a set of in-depth processes for Amazon PPC ads that works well in most cases. We use a combination of human expertise and software to manage and scale Amazon Ads. If you want to see if the system will work your business, sign up to talk to my team this coming week and explore it:

https://calendly.com/asteroidx-chat/eval

To make sure this call is worth your time, we will also show you how much ad spend is being wasted on non-productive PPC terms, and show you how to stop that bleeding. Our last 3 audits showed sellers $3400/mo in wasted spend, on average. Imagine finding $1000+ in the sofa cushions!

https://calendly.com/asteroidx-chat/eval?from=slack