What worked and how growth began happening

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In the previous video I told you about the challenges we were having in the early going of the execution stage of that ground of selling that ground cleaning product now I'm gonna start telling you about what caused the turnaround and the early successes which is much more exciting and there was a lot of struggle and as a coach this is the most depressing part of my job where I see the person either in person or on skype and their face is just sad and depressed and not only was I confident in my strategies and then I start to second-guess my own strategies and start to second-guess myself or maybe am I not understanding them enough or am I not doing something enough and it just I just feel also bad for that person because they are struggling and you can see in their face like they are not in a good place like they are under stress and this is hard on the entrepreneur and it will meet me and the founder Jeff like we spend some time many weeks some months past where it was a long struggle and we were kind of hanging in there by a thread a little bit because just low confidence on top of failure on top of low confidence and all the time just snowballs and I knew was gonna turn around but when I don't know and every time I had to kind of look at Jeff and be like oh you know like meeting when is it gonna start went to work for him that that really was actually hard for me and for him so things are never 100% smooth and we know that theoretically.

Of course he knew that I knew that I'm sure in your business you know that but experiencing that stress it's a whole different story there's nothing that can replace it there's nothing see really like it there's nothing there's no logic you can tell yourself that is gonna make you feel better about it it's just that is real hardship of entrepreneurship and precisely that is why maybe you can do it but a lot of people cannot do it that's what sets entrepreneurs apart we are able to overcome it in the end and we stick with things so what happened was in the early going a lot of people who did buy the product on Amazon they weren't using it correctly they left some bad early reviews and the product just sank in the rankings and it wasn't going up in the rankings and you know ik rankings really correlated with sales so that was a problem point so what we did is we package the product better with better instructions and the people got those instructions when they open their ground model then there's - how to use it and they started being happier with the product because they when they use the product correctly the product gave them the results they were happier so they left naturally better reviews in the better reviews gave better ranking on Amazon and more sales so it's actually so simple you see we just had to execute on that one point and like I said in the earlier video if I was doing it everything would have kind of grown faster just because this is my field but we have to go through some growing pains in hindsight it seems so simple but when you're in the middle of it it isn't that simple at least it doesn't feel that way so with better rankings we got more sales and more sales got more customers and more customers got more reviews and more sales and the rankings went up and up and up and up and it actually started rapid growth.

One month we hit like not even a thousand dollars in sales and then boom it was like 5,000 next month was 10,000 in sales 20,000 in sales next month was 40,000 in sales and I was like is this for real because remember in the business plan that I showed you on the jungle Scout tool which is a way to tell demand on Amazon they said that the top cleaning product on Amazon is making around 20 or 25 thousand dollars a month so where is this forty thousand dollar month coming from and then like boom we went like it was crazy the jumps in revenue per month were insane the next month was like a hundred and twelve thousand and there might have been a month between the 40k and the hundred and twelve Kade I think there was a seventy thousand dollar month it just went boom boom insane growth like doubling every month almost or 50% every month depending on the month but just unreal growth how is this possible because that jungle cow tool said that the time crowd cleaner was making only 20,000 something and what ended up happening happening is we actually expanded the market on Amazon because the previous cleaners weren't that good Amazon was only recommending them to a limited audience yeah the product ranked in search sure but on the Amazon recommendations Amazon wasn't recommending the passed grout cleaners to customers because previous customers really mean bad reviews but the customers of this product were living great reviews because it was working that was our entire assumption that this is the best grout cleaner and this assumption proved to be correct in the market so Amazon started promoting this product by recommending this product next to a lot of other cleaning products and this product just went through the roof way beyond the search levels we tapped into the vastness of Amazon by becoming one of the top cleaning products and then amazing things happen all this revenue gave fuel for growth in the business the founder Jeff he decided he's gonna create new product lines this wasn't this was a product for cleaning grout but what about pet stains and what about similar things so there was like a pet product that's in the works now then there was like a stone tile product that this particular product didn't address but the stone tile sure so there was other product that was amazing Jeff was able to hire more staff he hired actually his family his son started working for him his wife - because he heard his wife was able to leave her job and started working on his business and that his wife did this amazing thing where she created a community on Facebook of people who were learning how to clean the grout using these products and this community were the happiest customers were passionate about the product.

We're leaving even more reviews on Amazon because they were getting such a great experience it it was no longer just a cleaning bottle of stuff it was like a community now people who are cleaning people who share tips it was so much more people finally met other people online who had similar interest yeah it was a geeky topic sure but like that's what happens with niche topics from the outside it seems geeky but from the inside people are really happy with finding people who also are also passionate about the same things that they are and so all this stuff the community the more product lines more staff even more warehouse to store more inventory because the levels of inventory like there's like thousands and thousands of bottles that are getting shipped each month for that much revenue and there has to be like a little warehouse so they had to invest in a warehouse so you see this business really hit a new stride it took about a year and a half to two years depending on how exactly you count the months but that growth of the 10k 20k that happened in about like a year the 10k mark happened in about a year and by the way this client came to me and he said in the very beginning in the early days she said to me and I remember if I only made between five and ten thousand dollars I'll be fantastic because I can just leave my service business right that that nine-to-five job that he kind of had which was his business but he had to go and do the service and that's what she's that was his goal he just wanted to leave the service business and his goal was to make like you know if he made ten thousand a month that would be amazing right and he made this incredible it way surpassed his goals and it really started to hit like a different stratosphere of expectations of reality really because I mean it was like a pinch yourself kind of a moment I mean who makes one hundred and five thousand a month we don't expect that typically when we were just struggling and this is all great by the way but I'll point out that there is still a lot of challenges at this point the Google ranking is still not happening the product is still not in brick-and-mortar stores and it's becoming really hard for Jeff to keep up with the inventory turnover because now the chemical company has to keep up with the demand because they have to manufacture a lot of bottles of the ground cleaner and they have to ship it to Jeff's warehouse and he has to ship it out so now it's like a lot of work and in all this inventory customers have to remain happy and yet they're models of grout so this actually is not an easy business to run and there's still a lot of Chow like ranking number one with Google and getting this into the brick-and-mortar store so we'll talk about that in the next video.