Firing The Man
THANK YOU TO OUR 25,000+ LISTENERS! We are so thankful to be one of the TOP E-Commerce Podcasts delivering high-quality authentic content to you! Serial Entrepreneur’s David Schomer and Ken Wilson share tips, advice, and insider knowledge about all things Amazon FBA, Walmart WFS, and E-Commerce. Discover how you can create multiple income streams by selling physical products online so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love - whether that is spending more time with family or traveling the world. Ken and David have successfully created several six and seven figure online business ventures. During the journey, they have had major wins, losses, and lessons learned. This podcast will teach you about selling physical products online through platforms such as Fulfillment by Amazon, building a team, outsourcing, listing optimization, pay per click (PPC) advertising, driving traffic to your listings, and productivity tips / life hacks that will provide a path to be successful in building your online business. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts and solo shows from Ken and David you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe, and get ready to change your life.
Firing The Man
The Power of Safety Stock in E-Commerce Success with Randy Thebeau
Ready to scale your Amazon business? Click here to book a strategy call. https://calendly.com/firingtheman/amazon
Tired of guessing your way through stockouts, overstock, and Amazon’s ever-shifting fees? We sat down with Randy Thebeau—programmer, analyst, Amazon seller, and former 3PL owner—who turned years of warehouse chaos into SKU Compass, a practical system for sellers who want clarity, not dashboards for show. Randy shares how he set a hard revenue target and deadline to quit his bank job, then learned the hard way why spreadsheets crumble under daily sales swings, multi-channel expansion, and the hidden math of bundles and kits.
We unpack the habits that protect margins: treating safety stock as non-negotiable insurance, measuring coverage in days (not just units), and setting channel-specific thresholds so FBA stays lean while sales stay steady. Randy breaks down a hybrid approach to AWD and 3PL that speeds replenishment without surrendering your P&L to auto systems, plus a simple rule to cut long-term storage by taking manual control when FBA dips below a 30-day window. We also get tactical on returns triage for higher-ticket products, supplier standards that prevent rework (barcode at the factory or walk away), and why two manufacturers per SKU can save a launch when quality slips.
If multi-channel sales have turned your inventory into a guessing game, you’ll hear how bundling can push up average order value while SKU Compass handles the tricky component math across Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, WooCommerce, and ShipStation-powered channels. The throughline is simple: right-size your stock, protect cash flow, and make fewer—but sharper—decisions that compound over time. Subscribe, share with a seller who’s stuck in spreadsheet hell, and leave a review with your biggest inventory headache—we’ll queue it up for a future deep dive.
Randy Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/randy.thebeau
https://www.linkedin.com/in/randy-thebeau/
SKU Compass Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61566592928758
https://www.youtube.com/@SKUCompass
https://www.linkedin.com/company/sku-compass/
https://skucompass.com/
Ready to scale your Amazon business? Click here to book a strategy call. https://calendly.com/firingtheman/amazon
Welcome everyone to the Firing the Man Podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income stream in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs David Schoma and Ken Wilson.
SPEAKER_02:Welcome back to another episode of Firing the Man Podcast. Today I'm excited to introduce Randy Tebow, the creator of Skew Compass, an inventory management software built to solve one of the biggest headaches in e-commerce, keeping your products in stock, your cash flow healthy, and your business running efficiently. Randy knows firsthand the pain of juggling stock-outs over stocks and the constant guesswork that eats into profit. Instead of settling for outdated tools, he set out to build Skew Compass, a solution designed specifically for entrepreneurs who want clarity, control, and confidence in their inventory decisions. In this conversation, we'll dive into Randy's journey, the key features that set Skew Compass apart, and how it can completely change the way you manage inventory and scale your business. Randy, welcome to the show. Hey, buddy. I'm glad to be here. Absolutely. Absolutely glad to be. I got to share with the audience a lot of the people that I know in e-commerce, I have met in a Zoom meeting or through email. Uh, you're one of the rare people I have met in the wild. Uh we had lunch in person the other day, and and it was refreshing. It was really refreshing. What did you think?
SPEAKER_01:It it is strange. I mean, both of us live in Missouri, so it is strange to think how there's there's people doing real things uh in the same state.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely, absolutely. And of course, the conversation today is going to be geared around Skew Compass, but when we had last talked, you were just go you were about to leave for Amazon Accelerate, is that right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so that was about a week and a half ago at that time. How was it? So it's good, man. I I went to Amazon Accelerate and I went to the month earlier uh to the Walmart seller summit um that they had in San Diego as well. And then it's so interesting. Uh Walmart's trying to keep up with Amazon, but Amazon is still ten times way further ahead of Walmart right now. But man, you meet so many cool people doing the same things. You meet a lot of other agencies that are just um trying to make the world a better place for sellers, and you you meet the spectrum of sellers, the ones that are struggling um and about to lose everything if they don't figure it out, and the ones that are doing billion dollars. So it's it's kind of interesting. I loved it.
SPEAKER_02:Well, very good, very good. That was one of those conferences that was on my radar. I wasn't quite sure, but hearing the positive experience you had, I think definitely gonna have to add it to the calendar next year.
SPEAKER_01:So it's uh it's kind of a no-miss thing if you want to meet people in your space.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, well, let's get into the interview. So, Randy, you you've worn many hats. You were a senior analyst at some major banks, you've been an entrepreneur, you've been an Amazon seller, a 3PL operator. Can you walk us through that journey and how those experiences shape the creation of Skew Compass?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it's funny that uh in most people's journey, it is a stepping stone to where you're at. Uh, you can trace back how you got there fairly easy, and and that's kind of my story. It's it's just all along the way, every little job you did kind of led into what you're doing now. Um, it's just very helpful. Uh I I've been a programmer since I I remember uh my dad taking the computer out of the box when I was 13 from Walmart, and this was in the 90s. And I I actually think about this quite a bit because it was so interesting. Like he took this computer out of the box and I wasn't allowed to touch it until my older brother got to do what he wanted to do, and then I could touch it, and it just felt good. It just felt like it was right. So I've been programming since I was 13. Like it's a thing that I I love doing. Uh I don't know uh I'm self-proclaimed good at it. Like I think I'm good at it. So but it's been doing it ever since. Um, had a knack for it, had a knack for spreadsheets and formulas, um, and that led into some just jobs with um uh MCI, which was the largest bankruptcy in the the country, or maybe world, um, and then into uh a couple of the big banks. I worked for them for 15 years doing programming, analytics, um, statistics, um, data analysis. And then I just like really kind of got tired of doing it. Like basically, as your podcast says, working for the man. It was straining my brain to do this all day long for um an entity that wasn't contributing to me. Like they contributed to me hourly wage, but it it was different. It wasn't fulfilling. So that's how I jumped into Amazon. I created several brands, um, some big ones that we're doing in the millions and some of them. And then a lot of the stuff we're doing led into having a 3PL for myself and um and all the people I met at these conferences. That's why conferences are great. I met some of my closest friends in the space I've met at these conferences. They were like, hey, I need help with warehousing. So here we go. Now we have a warehouse. We have 30 clients and 30,000 square feet, and doing these Amazon brands, doing a warehouse. Uh, I had to write software uh for the warehouse to um help with billing and and track all the inventories and push stock numbers back to all these platforms. And uh there wasn't a great one-stop solution at the time for software for that. So all that, and I exited out of the uh warehouse after five years. Uh I have one brand on Amazon, I just use it for testing, but I kept my software because it was kind of my baby, my thing I made and a thing I really loved, and wind up I still have an original client on the software from seven years ago. They're still using it today.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome.
SPEAKER_01:That's that's what led into Skew Compass.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, okay. And I'm excited to dive into that a little bit more. However, this is the Firing the Man podcast, and I do want to dig into your Firing the Man story. So you were working for some major banks, you had put in 15 years. Can you tell me about the day that you decided this is it? I'm going out on my own and I I'm firing the man. Can you talk a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_01:Uh yeah, because this actually led from another business. Uh, my wife had a restaurant catering company, and when we sold that, uh she was looking for something to do uh on the side, and we're like, well, let's try selling on eBay. And we tried several different things, and one of the things we sold on eBay were uh camouflage wedding rings of all things. But the very first month we did this, we made like$7,000, and we're like, there's something to this. And it was a struggle because we started doing bundling, and we can talk about bundling later. It's actually the reason for the software too. But when you started matching multiple sizes with multiple men's sizes, ladies' sizes, it got complicated. Inventory was a mess. But that led into, hey, let's try selling on Amazon. And then as soon as that picked up and we started creating a brand, it took me six months from that time to say I'm gonna quit my job in February after bonuses get paid out. And then so I gave myself a six-month timeline to make it make it or break it. So I have to get this up and going by February so I can fire the man and do my own journey. So that was that was the progress, and we hit we hit the goal. The goal was to do$25,000 in sales by February, and we we were right there. And then after that, I mean it was actually a lot easier when you're full-time.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, well, I I I love that story and and you know, to our listeners, one thing I really like about it is you you gave yourself a deadline. You you drew a line in the sand and said, This is this is when I want to accomplish this goal. And and you also defined the dollar amount. Uh, this is the hurdle that we need to reach uh before I am comfortable going out on my own. And so very uh there's a very methodical way of going about it, and there's some good lessons there that we all can pull from that. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01:As a as an former accountant for you, I'm sure you really love that. Get some numbers nailed down.
SPEAKER_02:I do. I, and it's been well documented on this podcast. My my decision to fire the man originated in a spreadsheet and was executed uh by decisions made from that spreadsheet. And so uh it was definitely definitely helpful and and definitely having something measurable is helpful. What I found is waiting to leave until you don't have discomfort isn't a good criteria because the discomfort of what if this doesn't work never really goes away. And I'm several years into firing the man, and I still some days have that that question of what if this doesn't work. And so had that been my criteria, I would still be working for the man.
SPEAKER_01:And so there's guarantees of working for the man, but there's there's only limited upside. And I like the unlimited upside.
SPEAKER_02:As do I. As do I, and and I I could probably speak for our listeners that they they do as well. So let's talk about the early days of the 3PL and what were some of the issues that you were running into that led to the decision, hey, we need to build something in-house to address this, which eventually became Skew Compass.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Early on, you kind of do what if you're a products person, what everybody does. What stock do I have? Well, let's go count it. And that's the stock I have. And that's okay at a small level, small SKU level. You can do that. You can go and just let me look at the warehouse, let me look in my garage and see what I've got. And it's easy. You that's you plug those numbers into something, the spreadsheet, and that's what it is. But as far as a warehouse or anybody that's scaling their brand on multiple channels, like it's it's every day you're shipping things out. So every day the numbers are changing. So if you're not accounting for the numbers changing, you can't do a once-month count or once a week count. You need to know daily where you're at. So in the 3PL world, so I can tell my clients, they need to know where they're at. They need to know how much they have on the shelf and how much they're selling to understand what to order. So it was it was a little chaotic. Like any business, like you see the end result, and you're like, hey, that's a system. They got some systems, they got forklifts, they're running around with pallets, they know what they're doing. At first, you're just like, where do I stick this box? How do I know it's here? How am I going to find it again? And especially when you start getting clients that have high SKU count, you need to know where everything's at. And we quickly grew out of our 5,000 square foot warehouse. We were adding a container a week before we moved to a 30,000 square foot warehouse. It was getting it was getting a little crazy. It was we were spending more time rearranging stock versus actually doing what we needed to do as a 3PL. So there was so much coming in that we had to have a system. And we found that the other systems were either outside of the reach of what we wanted to do for a 3PL. We didn't want to spend$10,000 a month on software. The ones that were in our reach, they didn't account accurately for like returns or bundling, and there was a lot of manipulation that needed to happen that couldn't happen. So there came the need for the software and then billing and tracking the boxes. Like if a customer's got a large item, we you know, this box cost$1.50 versus that 10 cent box. So we had to push that cost back.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Absolutely. And so at some point during this journey, you made the decision that this is this internal tool that we've built could have some benefits to people outside of the 3PL. And and you use that as the foundation for what is now SKU Compass. So can you can you talk about that aha moment?
SPEAKER_01:It wasn't too far into the 3PL that we realized this, or I realized this. And um I was even on another podcast with another software that does what we do. Um you know them well, your your audience probably knows him well. And I was building the warehouse there, building the software at the same time. We kind of tandemly were doing this, and I was just thinking, I know my software can do this, but it's not my focus. It's it's really hard when you start dividing focuses. And I ran into this problem with Amazon earlier on. Like I started a brand, successful, another brand is successful, another brand. I'm like, okay, all my other brands start struggling because I kept starting things. So I really got into with the 3PL. I'm not going to start going into this process of let's just start something because I can. So I put it on the shelf. Then at some point when we exited that software, um, or not software, but we exited that 3PL, then it became a something I have time to do this now. Let's let's we still had a client on it. Um the warehouse was using it for a while. They switched to something different uh for support reasons, and my original client was paying for basically the server. So we had a free product and we had some ground to work with it.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Absolutely. So I it has been my experience that oftentimes inventory management starts in a spreadsheet. And there's a a certain point where you outgrow that. And you know, to our listeners, what are some signs that you are outgrowing the spreadsheet and what are some of the shortcomings of managing inventory in that way?
SPEAKER_01:There's there's times where a spreadsheet just makes sense, um, especially when you're trying to figure out what is the what is the thing I want to track. You don't want to go out and find software to figure out what you want to track sometimes because that can get expensive, time consuming, the setup process, all that stuff. It's kind of good to understand what am I looking for and I'm looking at in a spreadsheet. And there's nothing wrong with that. Almost everybody starts in a spreadsheet because they start with one skew. And at one skew, you can almost do the math in your head on at early volume. It's when you start, there's there's almost this level of when you start looking at your inventory every day or three times a week, it's probably time for something different because you're spending as an entrepreneur, as a person that knows how to build a business, you're spending your time on things that aren't growing the business, they're maintaining the business. So therein lies the time for a system. So I'm not three times a week, four times a week, whatever it is stopping what I should be doing, growing the business. I'm going back to look at my inventory to make sure I have enough to order. I I always say to my clients, if you are spending more than an hour a week on inventory, you don't have the right systems. Or if if you're spending more than an hour a week, that means you're growing at a fast pace.
SPEAKER_02:That is a good, easy criteria to apply. And I I really like that. I I I really like that. In the in the physical products business, you're you're in the business selling inventory. It it is arguably one of the most critical parts of your business.
SPEAKER_01:100%.
SPEAKER_02:Conversion rate, PPC, none of that matters if you don't have inventory in stock. And so I would imagine through the 3PL and through dealing with your clients, you have dealt with some companies that are very good at inventory and inventory management and inventory forecasting. And you've probably dealt with some that are not. And so in the in the Amazon Shopify world, what are some observable best practices that you've seen? And that could be how often you're reordering, that could be safety stock. What what are some best practices that you've observed?
SPEAKER_01:Uh I think maybe one of the worst practices not observed is safety stock. So, like you said, without product, you have no sales. So without safety stock and adding in a measurable quantity of safety stock, so you have it on hand in case something changes. If your sales go up, sales go down, it doesn't matter. You have a built-in time frame. I have this stock in place so I can go get what I need for my manufacturer. There's so many companies that come on and that's not even a calculation. It's just what do I have? Uh it feels like I need to order, or my manufacturer minimum quantity is near. I need to order that. So and then then you wind up in getting to overstocking or understocking because you're just trying to meet minimums or hit reach the levels. So not having safety stock may be one of the worst things you can do. It's just the insurance. That's the insurance of your business. Something happens, you have the stock, and you can keep selling without selling, you're not paying your employees, you're not paying your your services, things like that. So that's that's a measurable that you gotta have. Um I don't know. What were the uh no?
SPEAKER_02:That's that that's uh uh really good, and I'd like to dive in there a little bit more. So on on the topic of safety stock, I would say in the e-commerce ecosystem, a lot of people are ordering from China or abroad. Their product is getting on a boat from somewhere. It's been my experience that lead time from the time I place my order to the time it's sellable is anywhere from 120 to 150 days. And so when you're thinking about safety stock, and of course there are seasonality and other things that would dictate this, but is there a a good spot to start? If someone says, Oh, I was listening to this podcast with Randy, I don't have any safety stock, I need to get some, what would be a good starting spot there?
SPEAKER_01:It depends on your bank account, really. Because when you think about safety stock, if you say, and and the software that we that I built is measured in days. So you're selling 10 a day and you want 30 days, that's 300 units of that skew. So but you also gotta think, if I'm doing 30 days and I'm going from zero to thirty days, all of a sudden I'm holding the cost of goods of 30 days of stock. And that may not be feasible for uh new sellers, small businesses, like that's that's a lot of money. So starting with something, I 45 is where I hey, that's that's a good spot to be because, like you said, if you're ordering from abroad, uh usually 30 days to make it and two weeks to airship if worst case, uh, but it's also another 30 days to sh air boat it, so that's 60 days. So almost a minimum of 45 is what I suggest on like our strategy calls I have with anybody that wants to have one. And anything lower than that, uh you have maybe an easy way to get stock. It's stateside, it's wholesale, things like that. There's clients that do 90 days, that's because they have the bank to do it, and their business is built on products and they do not want to run out, especially if they're you know anticipating high fourth quarter volume or Amazon special days, prime days, things like that.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Okay. So we we we touched on some of the best practices. What have been, and you may have some good stories here, the worst. What are some examples that you've seen of just horrible, atrocious inventory management?
SPEAKER_01:Oh man, it's not having your manufacturer do the things that are easy. Sometimes it's it's the manufacturer your box when you get it in should have the label on it. If your manufacturer can't figure that out, you just got the wrong manufacturer. That's that's like step one. It's so easy for them to do. Uh it's to process. A lot of our um clients that had multiple SKUs of variations, like their shirts or things like that, where str the manufacturer struggles to put the right barcode in the right thing. That's a good time to fire your manufacturer.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Find another one. Because honestly, in when we uh when I had um our sunglass and watch company, we had two manufacturers for every product. Always. Because if one manufacturer, there was always this like up and down ebb and flow with manufacturers, like great product this this this round, and the next round, well, what what happened? Did you guys outsource your outsourcing? And so we always had we would change our order volume based on how well the manufacturer was doing, and until we had it figured out, ironed out with them, they wouldn't get the order volume back. So that's a huge like safety net right there. But not having the box ready to go to send wherever you want to go, that's huge not having inventory like that. Managing a ton of SKUs in Excel, you can't update um your sales velocity for a hundred skews all the time correctly. So that's just like the easy ones right there.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. No, I I I think the the comments on on having things ready to go, that's that's something I remember in my early days of oh well, just ship them to my house and I'll put the barcodes on. And and you know, I can tell you there were nights where my wife and I were up till 2 a.m. barcoding, and it's a good example of working in the business and not on the business. And so that's uh I I think really good, uh a really good criteria for when you're engaging, when you're getting pricing. Um, you know, not just asking what's the unit cost, but what's the unit cost for this being in a box that's case-packed with barcodes on it? That's that needs to be part of the conversation. So I think that's a a really good pro tip. So now let's get into the nuts and bolts of SKUCompass. So for someone that has not used it, what's the the core functionality of SKUCompass and how does it make a seller make better decisions day to day?
SPEAKER_01:It does sort of what I've been talking about, where knowing your numbers, if you have more than one SKU, it it's doing the calculations for you. Uh you could be selling one unit a day and just think that's that's what's happening, or you might be going to one and a half units a day. So the difference of that is a 50% growth. And if you don't have the stock for 50% growth, it's a different story on your metrics. And even even leaving off the decimal point on sales velocity matters at the lower uh end of the spectrum. When you get to the higher end of the spectrum, like you're selling a hundred and a hundred point two a day, that doesn't matter. But if you're down in the lower spectrum with a new SKU and you don't have a lot of inventory, it does matter because what you have to order doesn't go up by 10%. It may go up by 30% or 40%. So that that matters. Like those those small numbers matter, and that's where SKU Compass comes in, gives you, hey, here's exactly what's happening. And then when you onboard, it just pulls all the SKUs in automatically and it sets a default lead time, sets default um manufacture lead time and safety stock, and then just does the calculation for you. Here's what you need at Amazon, and you can little slider scale to say, I want 60 days in Amazon. And Amazon gives you what they want you to put at Amazon. And I I put a uh Facebook post out the other day. It's it's their calculation for their inventory storage for fourth quarter, it nearly triples. So what it costs to have a palette uh nearly triples in the fourth quarter. So they in some some areas, like Amazon wants you to fully stock their warehouses, but it doesn't, they're not looking at what it costs. They don't care what it's going to cost you. They want their warehouses stocked so they can ship in two days. But that may not always be in the best interest of the seller. They may only want 45 days, 60 days there. If they have 60 days of stock there, they're paying monthly on their stock to Amazon. I have one client, they they keep 35 days there. They pay next to zero FBA storage because it's always cycling. And they're high volume, and they're$10,000 a day. And they're always cycling their inventory so fast that they're hardly they're not getting long-term storage, they're not paying FBA storage fees because they're just cycling so fast. I mean, you got to pay inbounds to the story.
SPEAKER_02:Let's talk let's talk specifically Amazon inventory because it has been the I remember when I first started, you could just ship a container in without there's no inbound placement fees, there's no capacity restrictions. Uh it was really the Wild West, and that's changed a lot. And so good days, man.
SPEAKER_01:Good days.
SPEAKER_02:I know, I know. I I dream of days where things were that simple. Um and I so for the Amazon sellers listening, what are some what are some best practices or or what are some things that they need to be on the lookout for as they're navigating a complicated inventory process?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and again, this is so this can be very broad because you this the this the sellers that aren't selling a ton versus the ones that are selling more different strategy completely. But if you're in the middle of the road, um there's now Amazon's got AWD, which is Amazon's warehouse distribution, and there's a lot of positive with that. The fees are very cheap. It's it's it's very cheap compared to FBA. So instead of sending all my stock in FBA, and you don't have a 3PL, it's good to utilize AWD. But if you have a 3PL, there's a strategy that me and my other analysts have been working on. We haven't had anybody actually do it. Um, but we've like we've we've worked on the math just in general, just like it I think it makes sense uh where having AWD and a 3PL almost makes sense because your 3PL is going to be cheaper than AWD, but AWD can get the stock into Amazon faster. And you don't have those um placement fees that you have with moving I got a fly on me. With moving a 3PL, like the stock from the 3PL, you have to have those placement fees. You have to send in a minimum of five cases or whatever it is. Uh but with doing both, like if you have the inventory to split it up both, you can feed AWD slowly. And when the time calls for it, we need five cases. You can ship it in from your 3PL, and then you can balance, load balance both warehouses. You can really make an impact in like keeping uh FBA stocked, but at a lower level where you reduce your FBA fees, and then all your uh bulk fees are that are on your big inventory, all your inventory is in AWD and 3PL.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Is there so I know on AWD there's the auto replenishment and then there's the manual replenishment. Is there any recommendations there?
SPEAKER_01:I am going to give um my my suggestion and just take this with a grain of salt. It's again Amazon's game, and they are going to want to stock their warehouses appropriately. That's the math they're in. To do two-day shipping from anywhere is to stock the warehouses. Again, that if you do auto replenishment, they are going to stock the warehouses to their levels and not necessarily to the levels in which you think you are selling or scaling. And I had a client on board last year, and his his only warehouse is AWD. And he came to me, his long-term storage was forty seven hundred dollars a month. And it's because Amazon stocked him up, FBA, didn't need to. They just kept stocking FBA, and the result is he's had forty seven hundred dollars of long term. Storage when he could have left all that into AWD. And then when it came on to us, we're just like, we're taking over manually. We're not sending anything into FBA unless it's above the 30-day mark. Like we're below 30 days of stock, then we'll send it in. So over six months, um, by the end of July, June, we had them down to like the$1,500 of long-term storage. There's other strategies on top of that that you know he wasn't willing to do, but basically we didn't add any new long-term storage because we took a we took charge of what AWD was doing. So that's my suggestion.
SPEAKER_02:Key takeaway is is Amazon, AWD doesn't always act in in the best interest of your bottom line. And uh and there's definitely some examples that we can point to there. On on the topic of long-term storage fees, I uh it's something I think if you sell on Amazon long enough you're gonna run into. You've got a couple options, right? You can you can dispose of your inventory, you can return it to the seller, you can continue to pay long-term storage fees. When you've got a client in a pickle like that, what what are the things that you're looking at to make that decision?
SPEAKER_01:On what to do next. It's sort of um sometimes you just got a bad product. And I've had my bad products too, and there's time to cut the ropes, and you can pull your stock back. There's there's a uh show, um, I think it's Marcus Luttrell, the Prophet, I think it's his name. It's on uh CNBC Money or something like that. It's an amazing show where he just goes in and buys businesses, but he gets into these businesses where they have all this extra stock just sitting in the rafters and warehouse. And first thing he does is like, just get rid of this. So we have the cash flow back. We have the storage, we have um the cash back in our pocket. Sometimes it's okay to cut your losses and sell out of something to get the cash back to reinvest into what's working. So if you've got long-term storage, it's either because you didn't you mismanaged your FBA, sales changed, or it just wasn't a good product to start with. So there's a I mean, ads is always a thing. Like if you're not doing ads, you're not gonna get any rank, you have a bad listing, there's a lot of things going involved, but if it's the bad product, it's a bad product. So sometimes you can cut your losses and move on and find a good product, or you need to work on your listing, work on your ads to get it visible again.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, okay. On so long-term storage fees is an example of where you you have a unit that's at Amazon, you need to decide what to do. Uh another topic here is returns. And I have definitely experienced this with my own customers that they know that they can get free returns for 30 or 60 days, and and you know, some people will buy the product, use the product for 29 days and return it. Uh, some people buy the wrong size and need to swap it out. But there's a a decision that needs to be made on what do we do with this? Do we just allow the customer to keep it? Do we return the inventory back into stock? Do we what do we do with this? Do we dispose of it? Which seems wasteful, but sometimes is the economics of it make the most sense. Yeah. Any as you've worked with with uh clients of of varying um velocities, have there been any best practices here that you've observed?
SPEAKER_01:Uh this is actually an interesting topic because I I met a guy in um in Seattle at the Amazon conference, and this was what his company does is like they help profitability with um Amazon companies or any really products business that has a high volume of returns. And he was explaining it to me, and I was like, this is genius, because there are some recourse that you can push back to the customer and Amazon, but you have to act within, I think, 24 hours of receiving the product. Like so if your product comes back and you look at the reason why it came back and is like, oh, um then having shoelaces and you open the box, take pictures of it, and it has shoelaces on it, you can go back to the customer and say, hey, this is your return reason. Uh it does not fit what the actually the problem is. Would you like a half credit back? Would you like like what can we do? You can actually work with the customer on that. And if the customer doesn't work with that, you can actually go back to Amazon and work with them. But there is a time limit. And this may not make sense for a larger seller who's got low-cost goods that you're gonna have to wind up paying somebody to actually do this for you. If you've got to pay somebody to open every return and look at it and decide and you're spending more on that person than the return, then you've got to weigh that cost. But if you've got a high volume cost item and doing a lot of volume, it may be worth it because your competitors are sending or your customers are sending back competitor products, which we've all received. If you sell anything on Amazon, you've received somebody else's product. And you know, you gotta look at that. Is it is it worth my time? Is it worth my time to actually go after, not go after the customer, but you know, confront them. Is it worth that?
SPEAKER_02:Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Okay. So we we've talked about a lot of best practices on inventory. We we've talked about a lot of scenarios that say an Amazon seller is going to be running into. Uh taking our conversation back to SkewCompass, what are some other features here that you think are are notable or are something that separates this software from what is commercially available?
SPEAKER_01:It's really grown uh since, you know, two years ago, since day one. Like it's uh in and my ideal clients grown too. Like who best fits StewCompass and it fits everybody, but there's not everybody has a need for it. But it's kind of grown into a multi-channel um source for pulling in orders and volume and stock and analyzing what's where and how much is selling so I know how much to order. So as you know, clients grow and these products business grow into multi-channels, like we added Walmart, uh, we have Shopify, we got WooCommerce, um Teemu actually reached out, they want to integrate with us. And then on ShipStation, if any of the integrations that ShipStation does, we can uh link into and as which is like 80 other platforms. So we can pull all of that in. So the clients that have been coming to us now are ones that are on multi-channel because that's where the huge struggle is. Amazon's a struggle by itself, and it helps and it reduces like overstocking and understocking and running out of stock, things like that. But if you're growing into multi-channel, you've got a whole other problem. It becomes another set of problems. Just like Amazon's has its own set, you now have another set on all the other platforms. You gotta have distribution, you gotta have stock, you gotta have somebody monitor that. Um so SkewCumbers is helping there. It's really um the one of the main features I added in early was bundling kits. Uh with my brand, so I think our highest year was like 1.5 million in sales. 40% of that was bundles. We started bundling everything together, and I think it's bundling is underutilized in the products world. So we would bundle sunglasses of the watch and we'd do a five-pack, and we would do all kinds of things and just up the order volume uh from the customer. And when you sell a 10-pack of something, that's a that changes your velocity if you're not accounting for that. And it gets really hard in a spreadsheet. So then you're constantly doing math, and that's why like Skew Compass is it's built for that. That was one of the baseline uh program that I put in there. And it was really uh the thought process was behind that was something I brought in from like how I did something at the bank. So brought that in and made it to where it was super simple. You can bundle till your heart's content, and you can push the stock numbers back to Amazon. You push the stock numbers back to Shopify, and you don't have to worry about running out of stock that way.
SPEAKER_02:I I can tell you from personal experience, adding I started out Amazon only, and it was when I added in Walmart and Shopify that my own uh inventory management went sideways. And as those have become bigger and bigger components of my business, that that is continu, you know, I I am now managing inventory in in multiple locations and and uh my orders with suppliers have gotten more difficult. And so I I that feature alone is is something that I think sets apart uh Skew Compass from a lot of different providers out there that are focused on one particular channel, such as Amazon.
SPEAKER_01:So um Amazon was a hot ticket, hot button thing, and all these other guys are unless you're uh like top-tier software and you want to spend thousands of dollars to go with. So everybody went with Amazon.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. Um now, Randy, if people are interested in in checking out Skew Compass, what's the best way to do that?
SPEAKER_01:You can just go to SkewCompass.com. Um there'll be a link probably in this podcast or our video wherever it's at and to check it out. And you can the pricing's there. Uh, I think right now our lowest pricing is just for that intermediate, like starting out person,$9.99 a month. Like it's super simple. And it scales all the way up to uh I think our largest client, it does over 30, 40 million a year on the outstanding just runs. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Definitely definitely something that'll scale with you. So outstanding. Well, this has been a really, really good interview. Before we wrap up, there's something that we do called the fire round. It's four questions we ask every guest at the end of the at the end of the interview. Are you ready? Hit it. All right, let's do it. What is your favorite book?
SPEAKER_01:So the this two-part, right? Uh non-business book. It's called Michael Vay. There's a series, and it's just a good one. Something I uh got my kids into. I read uh several times. So business book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
SPEAKER_02:That book has changed more lives than uh than probably any other book on the face of the planet.
SPEAKER_01:So it gets you out of the uh the normal bias thinking.
SPEAKER_02:I I fully agree with that. All right, number two, what are your hobbies?
SPEAKER_01:Hobbies pretty much don't have a lot of hobbies. Um I have been trying to learn golf. Um it's more of a frustrating hobby. But it's I I don't know. I I think that would be the only thing I'm I've been venturing into lately is trying to play golf.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. What is one thing you do not miss about working for the man?
SPEAKER_01:Man, the thinking and using my brain for somebody else that's not beneficial for my family.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. I agree with that one. And final question: what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail, or never get started?
SPEAKER_01:The ones that are doing well, they just went out and did it. There's a there's a quote from Matthew McConaughey that says, if you're gonna do it, do it. Just go out and do what you want to do. And if you fall short of doing it, then and stop, that's you're not gonna be successful. The world's not gonna make you successful because you want to be. It's it's because you're trying to be successful. Outstanding.
SPEAKER_02:Outstanding. Well, Randy, this has been a really good interview to our audience. I'm gonna post links uh to Randy's social media as well as Skew Compass's social media. Be sure to check them out. And Randy, looking forward to staying in touch. Appreciate it, brother.
