IAM1223 – Founder Makes Online Sales through Amazon

Adam is the CEO of Web Deals Direct Amazon store. Web Deals Direct was founded in 2015. The company’s top brands included Spacesaver, Flexi Hose, Zap It!, and Grillman, as well as two dozen smaller brands. In 2020 Web Deals Direct had online sales of approximately 80 million dollars. Web Deals Direct was sold to Perch in May 2021. Prior to selling on Amazon, He was the CEO of a digital marketing agency and a senior manager at the IT consulting firm Accenture. Adam graduated magna cum laude from the University of Maryland with a degree in economics.

• CEO Story: Adam quit his corporate job to focus on family life. Used his developed skills in creating websites, then shifted into digital marketing and ventured into online selling which made them huge on Amazon.
• Business Service: Digital marketing and online product selling on Amazon.
• Secret Sauce: Take risk, while lowering your cost of living. Take branding of your product seriously.
• CEO Hack: Pick a good team, and let the team drive the business on their own.
• CEO Nugget: When starting a business, make sure every aspect of the structure is fitted with expert people for the job.
• CEO Defined: You get to make the final decision. It comes with a lot of responsibility, it also comes with a lot of rewards.

Website: www.webdealsdirect.com

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Transcription

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00:25 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Adam Feinberg of Web Deals Direct. Adam, it's great to have you on the show.

00:52 – Adam Feinberg

Thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to be here.

00:54 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, super excited to have you on the show as well. You're doing so many phenomenal things, and what I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Adam and some of those phenomenal things before we hopped in. Adam is the CEO of Web Deals Direct. Amazon store Webdales Direct was founded in 2015. The company's top brands include Space Saver, Flexi Hose, Zapit, and Grillman, as well as two dozen smaller brands. And in 2020, Webdeals Direct had online sales of approximately $80 million.

Webdales Direct was sold to Perch in May 2021, and prior to selling on Amazon, he was the CEO of a digital marketing company and a senior manager at the IT consulting firm Accenture. Adam graduated magnum cum laude from the University of Maryland with a degree in economics. Adam, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:43 – Adam Feinberg

Sure. I'm excited to be here. Anything I can do to help out is great.

01:48 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess where, where I wanted to start is to hear a little bit more on how you got started. Rewind the clock, and hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story.

01:56 – Adam Feinberg

Sure. Actually, the way I became an entrepreneur was probably a little different than other people, but I had what I thought was a big corporate time job doing it, consulting for Accenture. I was running an account at Verizon with about 200 staff, most of them offshore, and my wife was a physician. This is about eleven years ago. My kids, who are now pretty big, were about five and seven. And we basically, between my wife, who was a physician, we had a nanny raising our kids like 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, and I just didn't think it was sustainable for our family life.

So we sat down and discussed whose career was more important. And that conversation lasted about 15 seconds. Of course, your wife, who's a physician's career is more important. So I basically decided, to quit my job and kind of become a stay-at-home dad. Instead of just being a stay-at-home dad who would drive carpools and make lunches, I decided to use some of the skills I developed doing software development work and start making websites for people. I started by making websites, but I kind of learned pretty quickly that the real money was in marketing and getting them traffic and getting people sales more than just making a website.

So I kind of got into search engine optimization in about 2010, and I put up a website and I knew a bunch of different tricks to get it ranked in Google that I'd figured out from some forums and some friends that were into doing search engine optimization. And all of a sudden I had a little at-home business where people would just go to my website every day and want help with their website. And before long, they're doing a million, $2 million a year in sales with me, like, a small offshore team, and I hired like, some younger sales guy to help me along. It was a pretty small, low-key business.

And then my partner in Webdeals Direct was a British guy named Richard Bell. And he saw how well I was doing and he asked if not only could he be my client, but if he could start an office in London selling SEO services in about 2012. So we decided to expand over there, and the business grew to about $3 million in revenue a year. Fast forward to about 2014. We started figuring out that Google wasn't really too happy giving out free traffic to small business customers and really wanted people to pay for ads.

And some of the techniques we were using were really, I kind of learned the more we were doing it, we're kind of like against Google's terms of service and weren't sustainable. So we kind of thought the business wasn't going to last. And I asked Rich to look into some new things to do, and I started looking into some other areas so we wouldn't have to go get real jobs. One of his good friends was a chiropractor who told me he was closing his chiropractor business because he was making more money in 2014 selling swim goggles and swim caps imported from China on Amazon in the US and UK than he was in his chiropractic practice.

So that sounded pretty good for us. So I decided to take over the whole digital marketing business. And I gave the rich a grand sum of maybe $25,000. And I said if Aaron can do it with about $25,000, see what you can do. So he started the Amazon business really small time in the UK and back in 2015 when we went into the US to start selling.

05:41 – Gresham Harkless

What do you feel kind of? I like to call it your secret sauce. What do you feel has been the thing that you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique throughout this business and everything you've been able to build?

05:50 – Adam Feinberg

I think the first key to being successful in business is being able to take risks. And I say out of almost everyone I talk to, they sabotage themselves. You don't beat them. They already beat themselves, because you already know, like, if you want to be a big Amazon store, you have to go sell big products. So it was a combination of, I was willing to, I was willing and able to take a bunch of risks, and I didn't really have any pressure on me that I had to deliver. That was really a really big thing. Cause most people I talked to just, they could have been, they could have done ten times more than they did, but they're just not willing.

They're just not willing to do it, or they have to, like, they have to have enough money set aside to support their family so they can't take that type of risk. And then, the other real thing that I think that we did well, that set us apart is my partner, Richard Bella, really good at branding. And I think, like, the branding that we did as far as, like, the name of the brand and, like, the quality of, like, the images we used and for our listings really set our products apart and made them successful on Amazon. So I think, I just think, like, the branding and the imagery and it just gave off a perception that this was like an American, big national product instead of some little cheapo Chinese thing. You go on to Amazon to save $5.

07:08 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense.

07:11 – Adam Feinberg

Those probably, are probably the two biggest things.

07:15 – Gresham Harkless

No, I appreciate you sharing that. And then especially talking about the journey to get to getting there and seeing how I went there, but understanding, being able to take those risks, but also understanding how important marketing is and branding is and being able to cement that with each of the brands that you have. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something you think makes you more effective and efficient?

07:41 – Adam Feinberg

The most important thing about being a good CEO is to pick a good team, honestly, and you have to be able to let your team drive the business on their own. And really, the success of Webdeals Direct was my partner was really, really good at a bunch of different areas. He was better than me at marketing, he was better than me at picking products. He was better than me, like doing design work. I was better at operations and finance and stuff like that. Then his sister-in-law came in and she was really good at logistics and warehouse operations.

And we just let Rich do what he needed to do. Lisa knew what she needed to do. Then we hired some other, like, mid-level managers that were good. If they weren't really the way we wanted, we replaced them. And I just was confident that, you know, if I was on vacation and I went to Egypt while business was running, I went to Africa and the safari while the business was running. And I was just confident that, like, everything would run right because we had the right people.

And really being able to pick the right people and then confidently delegate out to them and make sure that they're trained to operate the business without you being involved in every single thing is definitely successful. And it allows you to also do all the great things about being an entrepreneur, which is not to spend every hour at your desk. And I've been boating and taking tennis lessons and traveling and attending all my kid's soccer games and field trips and all that kind of stuff the whole time. I've been an entrepreneur for ten or eleven years.

And if the choice was to attend a meeting for work or to go to my kid's soccer game, I picked the soccer game nine out of ten times. And you can't really do that unless you have somebody else that you're confident could go on the call or handle the accountant or whatever, and you're not going to be missed. So the number one definite thing is to spend a lot of time cult of finding the right people and empowering them and then overpaying them and compensating them in such a way rewarding them that they want to stay working there. So people would tell me the biggest issue I had when I saw this part. One of them was our Coo. Her salary was pretty high.

It was more than double the market. And trying to convince purse that like you had to keep her out of salary, that that was like, you know, twice as much as what other people were getting made sense. But, you know, once they realized how good she was they're like super duper happy. And not only gave her all the, like, all the operations for the web deals direct store, she's now running logistics for like 20 other brands for parts. And it's only been three months, so. And that's because she's fantastic. She's fantastic at it. She's absolutely brilliant and hardworking. She's the type of person that if you have to come in on Sunday, she does it on her own.

You don't have to ask her. And those are really the type of people that you want. And if you don't, I always try to set up situations where we bring on people and tell them it's a trial, and if they do well, immediately give them a big bump in pay. And if not, just kind of say, sorry, it didn't work out, the trial. Thanks. So, like, you could bring someone on and pay them $70,000, and then if they're, if you think they're fantastic, immediately give them 100k, like after three months, you can tell right away.

11:16 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes sense. And I appreciate you, you know, being able to kind of give that, you know, tangible asset because a lot of times you hear the most successful organizations and businesses are because they set up, you know, they have really strong teams and you, like you said, you know, so well, you have to take care of those people that are on the team and make sure that you're, you know, compensating them even above sometimes what they think. And a lot of times those investments, for lack of a better term, I guess, end up paying dividends.

11:44 – Adam Feinberg

Yeah. And then they want to succeed because they know they're going to get rewarded based on it, whether it's a high salary or high bonuses or some equity in the business, you think you're giving up something by giving someone a little equity in the business. But if they're willing all of a sudden too, you know, prioritize this first in their life and they're smart, you know, and they're skilled, then a lot of times you're going to end up getting more rewarded yourself by giving some up.

And that's kind of like the way that I've seen it and the way it's worked out for me. So I'm really fortunate. And I would say, like, I would owe like, at least two-thirds of the success I had to like to Rich and Lisa, who are like the top two, like senior execs at web deals directly. I wouldn't have been close to successful without them.

12:31 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. So would you consider that to be what I like to call CEO nugget? It's a little bit more of a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it's something if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self or even tell a client as well.

12:43 – Adam Feinberg

The biggest thing that made the business difficult, like when we were trying to sell it, was we didn't bring in the right financial support from the beginning and understand all the laws related to like bat and all best practices for accounting and all that. When you start a business, really, you should bring in like the right experts and the right lawyers and hire like the accountants that are experts in your area and make sure like even the structure, if it's an LLC or an S corp or whatever, like understand all those things and set it up like correctly from the beginning.

Instead of you're sitting here and you want to go sell to private equity or, and then purge or another aggregator and you realize you did 20 things wrong for like the last five years, it's going to make it so difficult. So now that I'm walking away from Web Deals Direct, I started two new Amazon stores, one that's already selling and one that will be selling at the beginning of the year. I just, we just spent a lot of time a, I picked two really good people to help me with the businesses. A lot of success on Amazon.

And two like we have the best, like accounting team, attorneys, lawyers, bankers, everyone's aligned. Exactly like what we're going to do. What are the objectives of the business? And we have the right setup and we're not going to run into issues like halfway through, like when we're in an audit and they're going to go, you should have done your cost of goods sold like this and you didn't, or you didn't handle like all the, all the import rules correctly and stuff like that.

14:19  – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, I appreciate you so much for sharing that and getting that information. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote CEO's on this show. So Adam, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:32 – Adam Feinberg

You get to make the final decision. It comes with a lot of, it comes with a lot of responsibility, but it also comes with a lot of rewards. If you succeed, you get the benefits of your decision and if you fail, you get the benefits of the downside of your failure. Basically just, being the CEO just means the buck stops with you in my opinion.

14:51 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely appreciate that perspective and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do was just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find about all the awesome things that you and your team are working on.

15:07 – Adam Feinberg

So if you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, just look for Adam Feinberg, Webdale's direct, and see me and look forward to meeting you and hope you're successful in your business endeavors.

15:19 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Adam. We would definitely have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that everybody can follow up with you, but truly appreciate you for being such a wealth of knowledge. There's so much information and knowledge that you have, so I appreciate you sharing that and of course, being open to connecting with other people. And I think that's, you know, the saying is, you know, you can see so much further by standing on the shoulders of giants. So I appreciate you providing some of that expertise so that we can stand on your shoulders as well, too. So thank you so much, my friend. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:45 – Adam Feinberg

You too. I mean, that's how I found some of the best people that I'm working with in my new business just by, you know, meeting other people and saying that this person's really good and really smart and someone I'd want to work with. So I'm happy to meet with people all the time. You, that's the best way to, you know, just see what talents out there and what other people are doing. Thank you.

16:07 – Gresham Harkless

There's so much that comes from conversation. You too, take care of.

16:11 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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