Removing The Bottleneck from Your Amazon Business


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Dan Ashburn joins to talk about removing the bottleneck

  • Worked with over 500 Amazon businesses
  • Need a system with SOPs, task lists and a framework to join the system up
  • Having a team is fine but without the system you end up the bottleneck and not removing the bottleneck
  • You are always busy and working without spending time with your family – always on your mind

Stress Reduction

  • Worked with a brand with 5 x SKUs in Home and Kitchen
  • They got the brand right and stood them well with rapid growth
  • Got the maintenance of the Amazon business and brought in a load of VAs to handle the day to day issues
  • When the VA didn’t know how to do something it always came back to the business owner and couldn’t scale and didn’t help in removing the bottleneck
  • The capacity of the team was so inefficient

Repeatable Steps

  • What core 20% of the business is working
  • What is repeatable
  • Break those down into SOPs
  • Then into a task list
  • Then into a project management system
  • Give each of the areas a clear owner
  • So you can then sleep at night and take your mind off that area of business
  • Focus on growing and expanding the business
  • Brand is now across all marketplaces and 25 SKUs and well into 8 figures

Project Management Systems

  • Gantt charts are glaze over materials
  • Open a google sheet
  • Sit down with whoever your working with away from the office to get your head out of the game
  • What different areas of outcome are there in the business
  • Group by outcomes (Launch, Optimisation, Customer Service, Metrics)
  • Just list on a tab every task that you do
  • Massive list of tasks – grouped by outcome
  • Put down the frequency with which you do the tasks
  • Who is the current owner of that task?
  • Once grouped by each team member are they aligned or spread across the business
  • This spreadsheet is now your bible

Task Management System

  • Assana is a great tool
  • Clickup is also a good on but with more scale
  • Build out your recurring task lists into these tools and assign owners
  • This is then your base and your engine
  • Time tracking can be the next steps to know – how long customer service takes on a monthly basis
  • Then optimising these by time each month

Task Management

  • Work out a deadline for each task based on a calendar month
  • Completed by 7th Day of the month as an example for reporting
  • The system is now managing their tasks and so not you
  • The weekly update meeting shows the task still outstanding nad then pressures the work to be done
  • When hiring put candidates through a series of tests to check them out
  • Free personality tests on-line is a good hurdle
  • Stage 2 would be to give them a task to complete that would be part of their job
  • Skill is one thing but hire people on their core values so they fit in

Writing SOPs

  • Using video with screencastify…
  • Constantly testing
  • Record a video start to finish of you executing the process / SOP
  • Screencastomatic is the tool used
  • Assign the video to the person who will operate that tsk
  • Then ask them to write the SOP themsleves
  • You get it back and quality check it and give it back to them with changes
  • They re-write it with changes
  • Then they go through it and record a screencast of them doing the process
  • This is then a video walkthrough
  • Use Process Street as a tool to distribute these SOPs – very intelligent tool
  • If there’s an error then check the SOP for mistakes first

Books

  • Work the System by Sam Carpenter – the only book you need
  • The One Thing
  • eMyth Engaged
  • As CEO – you should have system that are running your bsuienss

Contact

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