Steven Pope, Founder of My Amazon Guy.
In this week’s episode of the Agency Accelerator podcast, we were joined by Steven Pope, Founder of My Amazon Guy, an agency that helps their clients turn their Amazon stores into revenue-driving machines!
During this episode, we got to hear some key points about successfully running an Amazon agency and building a strong company culture.
Here’s a summary of the main takeaways:
Running an Amazon Agency
Steven Pope’s agency, My Amazon Guy, is a 400-person digital marketing agency that focuses on helping brands succeed on Amazon. The core components of success in this space are: People, Process, and Product.
Leadership and Team Development
Steven emphasizes the importance of leadership development and communication skills. He describes his approach to building strong leadership within his agency. One of the challenges he faces is finding external leaders who align with his agency’s culture and core values.
Core Values and Culture
My Amazon Guy’s core values are learning eagerness, tech savvy, strategic communications, get on base let’s go (GET ON BASE), extreme ownership, and radical candor. These values are deeply integrated into the company’s hiring process, feedback mechanisms, and overall culture.
Customer Avatars
Steven discusses the significance of defining a customer avatar when launching products on Amazon. He emphasizes going beyond demographics and delving into the specific characteristics of your target audience. This helps shape branding, messaging, and product development.
Packaging and Logistics
Packaging plays a critical role in the success of products on Amazon. Steven highlights the importance of both retail packaging (attractive to consumers) and logistics packaging (protecting the product during shipping). This approach ensures that customers receive products in good condition.
Content Creation and Education
Steven’s agency places a strong emphasis on content creation, particularly through video. He refers to his agency as an “education company that happens to be an agency.” Educational content helps build authority and trust with potential clients.
Hiring and Onboarding
Steven is proud of his agency’s ability to hire a large number of interns quickly and effectively onboard them. This demonstrates their commitment to training and integrating new team members, showcasing their strong company culture.
Business Growth Strategies
Steven advocates for sticking to what you know and understand when choosing products to sell on Amazon. He recommends focusing on areas where you have expertise to gain a competitive advantage over others who might rely solely on data.
Leadership’s Role in Feedback
Leaders should prioritize giving feedback to their team members regularly. This fosters growth and development, aligning with the principles of radical candor while also investing in people’s growth.
Communication and Leadership Training
Effective communication is crucial, and Steven emphasizes the importance of training leaders in this aspect. He also highlights the need for leadership training, which should be a continuous process rather than a one-off event.
“Being able to go in and manage people, QA their work, and give them feedback is what leadership is about. If you’re not investing in your people, how are they supposed to grow? How are you supposed to replace yourself if you don’t invest in those people?”
Hiring and Onboarding
Steven shares more insights about how he managed to pull off the massive task of sending out a large number of job offers in a single day! He explains that they had a system in place and had already built the training and onboarding processes for the roles they were hiring for.
The key factors included sourcing the right candidates, having a dedicated trainer to guide new hires, and simplifying the roles to make them easy to perform. He likened it to franchising roles down to the simplest level, which allowed for clear expectations and efficient execution. Setting up Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with measurable metrics was also crucial in ensuring everyone understood their responsibilities.
In conclusion…
In this episode, Steven sheds light on the intricacies of running an Amazon agency, building a strong team and culture, and strategies for success in the e-commerce industry.
We encourage you to check out My Amazon Guy Success Academy, which is a program Steven offers for aspiring Amazon sellers. He explained that the program offers two tracks: one for self-paced learning and the other for a “done-for-you” approach where his team helps source a product, launch it on Amazon, and provide training and SOPs over a six-month period.
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