742 Laura Meyer:

Let that sink in: Panic does not drive to profit. It can be a hard lesson to absorb because it is so easy to get discouraged before a marketing tactic is really bearing fruit, or whenever you read a headline about a shiny new strategy bearing fruit for others. My guest today Laura Meyer is an expert in Amazon sales and all things multichannel marketing for direct-to-consumer brands, and we dig deep into what it takes to market and sell your product.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and download Podopolo. Follow Wings of Inspired Business there and join the Wings community so we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who shares my passion for supporting female founded and mission driven companies – both as an angel investor and as the founder of a fast-growing omnichannel marketing company helping direct-to-consumer product companies grow profitable revenue across Amazon and beyond.

Laura Meyer is the CEO and founder of Envision Horizons, and today we talk about what it takes these days to excel as an Amazon seller – hint, it’s not enough anymore just to sell on Amazon. It’s vital to diversify and we get into all the best ways.

You may remember the Amazon gold rush, that heady period when anyone could grab a low-cost product from Alibaba in China, and re-sell it on Amazon to generate a successful cash flow business. Thousands of entrepreneurs made a proverbial killing as Amazon sellers – until the market changed.

These days, if you want to succeed in the Amazon ecosystem, you need a high-quality product that is significantly differentiated from the rest – because with all the competition, competing on price is likely going to wipe you out. And as we’re going to learn today, it’s not just about the product or the price – it’s the marketing, the branding, and it’s all about the necessity to sell across multiple channels and platforms.

Laura Meyer got her start working at Amazon in the advertising sales area, and when she started hearing customer objections back then, the light bulb went off that there was going to be a massive opportunity to help businesses navigate an increasingly multichannel world. Laura also had experience as a private label Amazon seller, and jumped into entrepreneurship launching her business at just age 25.

With Envision Horizons Laura works with Direct-to-Consumer brands who have $20mm or more in annual revenue, helping them diversify their marketing and sales – whether expanding beyond Amazon, or moving from brick and mortar into online sales, and figuring out high conversion marketing strategies and tactics.

Laura shares her deep insights and strategies about the direct-to-consumer market, and much more, plus her entrepreneurial journey and why she’s so impassioned about supporting other female entrepreneurs.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Laura Meyer, and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Laura, welcome to Wings.

Laura Meyer:

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m excited to get into all things e-commerce marketing with you. Of course, you were at Amazon working there for a while before you saw a couple problems that needed to be fixed, and went out to the world and helped a lot of small businesses and growing businesses figure out how to navigate that. What was going on at Amazon that made you think, “Gosh, I have to be the one to go and solve this problem?”

Laura Meyer:

Well, there were a few things that were going on. First of all, I was working for Amazon back in 2015 when Amazon’s media business, or at the time Amazon advertising business, was really in its infancy. At that point in my career, I had seen, I mean, I was in elementary school when I first learned of Google, but obviously Google advertising really came in the early 2000s, Facebook advertising really came in the early 2010s, and it was very evident that between Amazon’s data and just the sheer size of the company, they had such an opportunity to build an amazing media offering.

While I was working at Amazon, the biggest objection I would receive, because in sales it’s all about getting to the no first, so you can get to the yes, objections are what you want to overcome as a salesperson. The biggest objections, the most common objections were, “Hey, Amazon’s media solution sound great, but I’m not going to spend a dollar because this and this and this are all wrong on the operations and the retail side of the business.”

That’s what, when say, call the light bulb moment happened of, “Gosh.” One, there’s going to be… I foresaw that there’s going to be this massive media opportunity for brands to spend with Amazon, but more importantly, there was an opportunity to help brands on a full-service basis of helping them with their operations and their visual storytelling and the actual setup and the more manual side of Amazon. Because like any business, you need to have a great foundation first before you start spending a lot of money sending traffic. Whether it’s making sure you have a beautiful website first, or you have a fantastic product first. Those foundation points are so important. That’s why I started Envision Horizons was to help with the operations and the setup, but then also to be that partner in scaling with the retail media spend.

Melinda Wittstock:

When I think of all the Amazon sellers that I know and there are a good many who’ve made a lot of money selling on Amazon, and yet how to stand out when there’s so many other products on there. Amazon itself is a competitor with the seller. What are some of the things that people need to do? I know there’s a lot of Amazon sellers that listen to this podcast, what’s your advice for them? I mean, I imagine there’s a lot, but what are some of the things that you see them doing wrong where they can stand out in all the noise on Amazon and get to the top of the rankings and all those things where they’re going to be more easily discovered?

Laura Meyer:

The first thing that I’ll say is between, I would say, 2014 and 2019, even ’20, was really the gold rush for what I would call the private label Amazon seller. What the private label Amazon seller is, at least in my definition, is a business that was sourcing product via solutions like Alibaba, they were buying spatulas in China, they were making margin for themselves, and they were selling it on Amazon. This was a cash cow, This was that cash cow, period. We are now past that cash cow period.

If you want to be successful selling on Amazon today, in my opinion, it all starts with having a very high quality product, or at least a product where you have some point of differentiation. Because if you try and compete on price, you’re going to get wiped out because there’s a flood of manufacturers themselves that are selling direct on Amazon. So, you go in buying spatulas overseas and trying to make a 20% margin markup on Amazon now, that business model is not going to be viable.

What’s viable is if you have something that can really stand out. I don’t know, maybe you change the design of that spatula. I am not a product innovation expert by any means, but I think you see my point that if you go back to the classic four P’s of marketing, you really want to map out that strategy first. Where I think even five, seven years ago, it was that gold rush of like, “Oh, let’s see, Amazon’s keyword search volume. There’s a lot of searches for strainers on Amazon and there’s only a handful of people selling strainers. I can make a better strainer in China, come sell it.” Now all of that has been commoditized. What I tell businesses now is, “If you want to be successful in Amazon, Amazon can be your first channel, but really think about this as building a true business that you want it to grow up to be multichannel.”

Melinda Wittstock:

It comes into branding your story, just all these things and not being 100% dependent on any one channel. I know so many people personally who were in that gold rush, that they took the ASM course or the Amazing Selling Machine.

Laura Meyer:

Yeah, yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

They did all the things and it worked. It really worked. There was a lot of people made a lot of money. It was great cash flow business. You could do it from the beach in Fiji, wherever. This was great lifestyle business, but no more. If you’re coming into it now, it’s about the products, it’s about the message, about all the things. It’s about building a business. So, most of your clients, they also, presumably they have their own website with Shopify, whatnot, they have a whole bunch of other things and Amazon is not the only thing.

Laura Meyer:

Correct, yeah. We really don’t have, what I would call, private label businesses in our portfolio. We really focus on businesses that are striving to be a multichannel brand. We also tend to look to work with businesses that already have total revenues of 20 million or more, because they’re either in brick and mortar, they’ve killed it on their D-to-C, et cetera. I think what I should also disclose is that I myself have a seller central business. I also joined that gold rush. I launched a men’s undershirt brand myself on Amazon in 2017. Like you said, it’s a great cash positive business for me. But I know if I ever want to get that business to the next level, I have to make it into a multichannel brand with the rising cost of CPCs on Amazon, and quite frankly every digital channel, I need to build a brand and not just have a good product that converts in very transactional types of digital marketing.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Getting back to the advertising side of Amazon, I mean, to be credible there, it’s not just putting your product up there, to what extent do you have to advertise on Amazon as well, just to be discovered? I mean, it’s just like what happened to Google or even an app in the App Store, I think, of our podcasting app, Podopolo, we’ve got to look at advertising in both app stores to be discovered there, not just to have your app there.

Laura Meyer:

What’s interesting now is just how much Amazon’s advertising business has grown up even in the last two years. When I was at Amazon, the primary solution was Amazon’s paid search. Very similar to Google. Paid search is fantastic because it was self-service. A lot of companies were hiring agencies to manage it for them for their expertise, but for the most part, anyone could log into their account and start setting up campaigns and you have your keyword, you have your bid. It’s pretty straightforward.

Now, Amazon is really laying the groundwork to be a true media mogul in that their display network has not only expanded, but improved significantly in the last few years. Two years ago, to be frank, I didn’t recommend that a lot of my clients would spend on DSP, which is their display network. Today, I’m encouraging almost every single one of my clients to have DSP investment. Because what’s happening is because paid search is so accessible to everyone, the CPCs have become just unprofitable, especially in certain categories. So, you can go out and, let’s say, you have a supplements company and you’re trying to show up for turmeric-related keywords. I think last I looked, this sponsored brand placement for turmeric-related keywords was over $30, which is outrageous.

What we’re doing from a media planning perspective is now we’re spreading our clients’ ad budgets to have both upper funnel, mid funnel, and of course lower funnel investment. And we’re seeing that a lot of this upper funnel marketing is really driving a lift in sales for our clients as well as increasing the number of brand searches for our clients within the estimated monthly search volume.

That’s exciting. I mean, now they have streaming TV ads with all of the money that Amazon is pouring into their prime video programming from their Lord of the Rings half a billion dollar investment to their partnership with the NFL on Thursday. Amazon owns NFL Thursday now. And as an advertiser, if we wanted to, and it made sense with that audience, we can now go buy media placements for NFL. I have no doubt that, in the near future, you very well could be buying a Super Bowl ad through Amazon’s media placements.

Melinda Wittstock:

God, Amazon runs the world, right? I mean.

Laura Meyer:

It’s a little terrifying, I’m not going to lie. But I’m just a little plankton attaching myself to the whale. I’m along for the ride.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. No, I totally get it. Well, sort of everybody has to be, if you have a consumer product…ddd can anyone really succeed without being on Amazon? I mean Amazon is going to be the first place comes up in search or searching for a type of product. Chances are you’re going to see it first on Amazon.

Laura Meyer:

Absolutely. I’ll disclose, a good majority of the clients that I work with are within the beauty, wellness and personal care space. A lot of these companies like Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and so forth, there’s a reason why a lot of their more recent acquisitions, especially in the CPG space, are focused on businesses that have what you would call a review mode on Amazon, where they have a dominant Amazon channel and that product has 100,000+ positive reviews, because that lives there forever and that is extremely valuable.

I’m talking about brands like Paula’s Choice, they dominated not only TikTok and social media, but they have an amazing Amazon presence. That was strategic on Unilever’s part to acquire them. One of the more recent acquisitions that happened within the CPG space is Hero Cosmetics. Hero Cosmetics was acquired for 630 million by Church & Dwight, which is Arm & Hammer, another big parent company or holding company. Hero Cosmetics started off as an Amazon native business, but they had the strategy in building a brand beyond Amazon. After they owned Amazon, then they moved to brick and mortar. Once they had really amazing placements in Target and Ulta, then they moved to their D-to-C.

A mistake I see a lot of businesses make is they get ADD and we’re all, I think, especially as entrepreneurs, we could be guilty of this as we’re all looking at the next shiny thing. But the businesses that I’ve seen be most successful are those that have intention in their actions. They hold true to their strategy. And they don’t panic when revenues are growing, because there’s a LinkedIn post even saw this morning that said, “Panic doesn’t drive to profit.” That when you’re reactionary instead of proactive, it just causes more issues down the line.

Melinda Wittstock:

That is such important advice, because it is really easy to second guess your strategy as an entrepreneur. It’s like, “Oh man, maybe I should be,” remember when chatbots were a big thing for a nanosecond?

Laura Meyer:

Yes, I do.

Melinda Wittstock:

[inaudible 00:15:59] chatbot and all this investment in chatbots and then it kind of went away just as fast. If you abandon some other longer-term strategy for that, you can just be reacting to things and never really growing or just dividing your effort too much. Really the advice is pick one thing, do that really well, then when you have the capacity to invest in the next thing, invest in the next thing.

Say, for instance, you might start out in brick and mortar and then your next thing is Amazon. Or you might start out with your website and your page and you have a direct to consumer, maybe you have pop-up shops or something, or you sell at conventions and then the next thing is brick and mortar or the next thing is Amazon or whatever. But you have to have all the components.

Laura Meyer:

Absolutely, yeah. Never spread yourself too thin. When I have conversations with prospective clients and they’re like, “Oh well, we’re so busy with this, but we know we need to do Amazon, so we just want to get it moving.” To me, it’s such a red flag, because I’m like, “Okay, let’s take a step back. Do you have the operations, do you have even the inventory to launch on Amazon properly?” And then I want to know, “Do you have a good point person internally who’s really going to captain the execution and the launch of this channel?”

Because as an agency, we’re obviously here to help and guide the train forward, but we’re not internal, so we can’t go and call the CFO and be like, “We need this marketing budget approved so we can move forward.” We’re not able to call the warehouse manager and say, “If you don’t get this out tomorrow, you’re in trouble, buddy.” You need that internal champion for it to be a successful launch. Look, that’s the case for Amazon, but that’s also the case if you’re launching with any new retail partner.

Melinda Wittstock:

When your clients come to you, you mentioned that on average they need $20 million in annual revenue really to qualify to work with you. So, what are the problems that they’re having at that stage? What is their biggest need? And talk to me a little bit about how you work with them to get them to that next level.

Laura Meyer:

Yeah, I mean, the problems definitely vary. I mean, we have everything from really lean teams that are growing so fast, that they just need hands on deck. Sometimes, we will expand our scope of work to take on some of that internal communication, because they’re such great partners and we want to continue to move their ship forward. Some other problems that we’ve run into, and really the big thing that’s happening right now, is that a lot of brands of this size, especially if they had D-to-C native businesses, they are hurting after the iOS 14 update and everything that’s going on within both the Google and the Facebook world.

Now, they had these marketing budgets that used to perform fantastic, that today they’re not seeing the same return. What we’re doing a lot of, especially in the last year, is we’re actually receiving incremental budgets from the Facebook or the Google initial allocation. We’re working to find those incremental opportunities where we can still drive a strong return on investment for our clients. Because there is, I mean, I don’t know if the word desperation is the right word, but there’s certainly a sense of urgency for a lot of these D-to-C brands to find where they can get that holy grail again.

Brands are looking at TikTok. I know brands that, depending on the category, have had a lot of success with Pinterest. Reddit’s an interesting one. Obviously, influencer marketing, you can’t talk about marketing today without talking about influencer marketing. But the issue with a lot of those alternative solutions I just mentioned is scale. A lot of these D-to-C brands are used to spending over a million dollars a month on Facebook with the return that they had pitched to all of their VCs and investors. And when those returns started to dwindle, they now have these large budgets and it’s hard to find places to spend it. Amazon really is that next opportunity where now there is a lot more scale, especially with their display and their streaming TV.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh gosh, 100%. Increasingly, in my world, in podcasting. Podcast advertisement-

Laura Meyer:

I forgot about podcasting. Yeah, exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Podcasting is huge.

Laura Meyer:

Massive.

Melinda Wittstock:

I mean, when we’re placing ads for folks on podcast, this is extraordinary. But the conversion rate for an ad on a podcast is 60%, six, zero. It’s extraordinary. It’s because I think of just the know, like, trust that the podcast host has with their audience. People have been listening to this person forever. So, suddenly when a podcast host says, “Oh God, I love my Magic Spoon cereal,” or whatever. Right?

Laura Meyer:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

I just realized that a lot of my purchases have been from podcasts, because there’s that intimacy in the conversation, the ability to be creative. And of course, Amazon acquiring Wondery and owning Audible and all these things, I mean, it has that capacity there as well.

Laura Meyer:

Totally. Well, I think what we’re finding and what a lot of marketers are looking for is how to find the social gratification or the peer referral at scale, because that’s what influencer marketing was at first. But then it became kind of convoluted, because some influencers, it was just so apparent that they were being paid to endorse. Now, it’s about finding high quality influencers or high quality podcasters where they have… What’s the word I’m looking for. I have full pregnancy brain right now. I’m losing words from my vocabulary by the day, it seems.

But they’re looking for just that general trust in that it’s an endorsement that’s genuine. I love it when I come across influencers who will say no, because to me it means that they have their grounds and their territory and that’s actually more of an influencer I’d like to then find out what products within my client’s catalog or in my overall business portfolio that they might be interested in, because then you’re going to get such a better return, because their audience is going to resonate there.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s exactly why the data that’s made possible by AI is so important. I think just even with what we’re doing at Podopolo and really understanding who the podcast audiences actually are and what they care about means that you can add a predictive layer to the advertising where you know you’re really buying a qualified audience. That same thing with influencers.

Laura Meyer:

Exactly. The sense of community is really going to evolve in the digital world. I will fully admit, I have not really gone deep in researching the metaverse and everything like that, but I think we really saw, during the pandemic, how important social interaction is, whether that’s in person or it’s in the digital world and the brands that can strategically position themselves within these strong online communities are the ones that are going to have a lot of success, because consumers now are becoming more and more jaded by digital advertising.

When was the last time you actually saw a display ad and clicked it and bought the product? I’m going to be honest, as a marketer, I don’t think I ever have other than maybe some Facebook ads. But it just [inaudible 00:25:03] happen. But if I see someone who I like and respect endorsing a product and maybe I also see some display ads over time, I’m eventually probably going to get curious and convert, if it’s a product that’s right for me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Maybe the display works as a remarketing tool, but it really is about conversation and connection. [inaudible 00:25:29].

Laura Meyer:

Yes. I will tell you, I’ve worked with a fair amount of baby brands and if you’re a baby brand, do whatever you can to start networking with various mommy groups, because, oh my goodness, when you have the support of the mom community and you have those referrals, those products, you don’t even need to invest in a lot of marketing at that point, because there’s so much organic momentum behind it. But it goes back to then having a great product, you have to have a great product to get those social referrals.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, they’re so important. I remember even going back into what we were talking about earlier, the gold rush in the Amazon days, the products there, even back 2014, 2015, 2016, all had really active customer reviews. The folks that I saw doing the best are the ones that actually interacted with the people who were reviewing their product and really creating a sense of community, just added hugely just to the value, just even the valuation of the business, because it was a community now, not just a product.

Laura Meyer:

Yeah. It was really unfortunate when Amazon took away the capability to comment back on reviews. I think they did that as a community safety guide, because things maybe sometimes got a little heated, although most brands were very respectful. But actually, it was announced yesterday, the Amazon Accelerate conference is going on right now, that Amazon is opening up the ability to do email marketing with your Amazon customers as a way to engage with them more and start to build community retention marketing and just improving the LTV overall for brands on Amazon.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. That’s so important. Yeah, it’s tricky actually in the social moderation side of things now, where we’ve seen what’s happened to social media and how contentious it is. I think for a lot of brands, it’s scary out there in a way, because we have this outrage culture. In fact, there was a book that came out the other week where our brains have all been rewired to be in outrage, because we’re [inaudible 00:27:58], we get a dopamine hit for being in that, in social media and the algorithms and whatnot have encouraged that. When you have that kind of ecosystem and you’re trying to develop community or whatever around your brand on social, that can be scary or it can work or not work. I mean, I don’t know, how are your folks navigating that piece?

Laura Meyer:

It’s crazy. I will say even from just personal experience, as a part of my own business marketing, I’ve made the decision to become a lot more active on LinkedIn and that’s really my social channel and domain. Because Instagram doesn’t really make sense for me as a B2B business. I found personally that when I have insights or sharing updates within the news, I typically get anywhere between two and 5,000 impressions on my LinkedIn post. A few weeks ago, I made a little bit more provocative of a post in response to the launch of Peloton and them coming to Amazon, claiming that a D-to-C only business model is dead. That sparked a lot of debate. It was probably one of my more just controversial points of view. And that I think got like 15,000 impressions, because you’re absolutely right when you stir the pot a little bit, the algorithms, whether it’s LinkedIn or whether it’s Facebook, they reward that type of engagement.

Melinda Wittstock:

They really do. It could be good for marketing but really bad for society. You know what I mean?

Laura Meyer:

Yeah. Well, and it’s a little scary, too. I am not someone who likes to start controversy. I’m from the Midwest originally. My mother raised me to always keep the playing field level. I’m a Libra, I like balance. Yeah. But it’s those that are a little bit outlandish that get the microphone.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, when you’re thinking of a budget, say, for your marketing and all the things where you have to be working and working effectively with all these different strategies, how much really do you need? Say, you are a $20 million business and how much, really, what proportion of your spend these days really has to be focused on marketing across all these different channels? We’re talking about Amazon, social, just all the things, the podcasting, all the things that a brand has to be doing to really be growing market share.

Laura Meyer:

Well, I think, especially in the current economic state that we’re in and that we are officially in a recession, VCs and investors are holding onto their cash. If they are making investments, it’s likely at a lower evaluation then it would’ve been even 12 months ago. So, I think the point of me bringing this up is, in my opinion, your marketing budget should be based on your P&L. How profitable is your product in the first place?

I think where a lot of businesses that got in trouble, who had a lot of VC money and that were investing really big on advertising, those that are running short now on cash, it’s because they’re selling a mass price product via e-commerce where you have shipping and other expenses and at the end of the day you’re losing money.

I really like when I build media plans, I like to have an idea of the client’s target margin and where their COGS sit. Then I look at the Amazon fees, I look at our fees and then that’s usually how I start to build the media budget. Now, if the brand’s goals, of course, is aggressive market share, we’re going to run in the red for a little bit to achieve that goal. But still, the two year, the three year plan is to still build a profitable business. So we need to identify where we can get the best return with it, with our dollar, while still running a profitable business.

But to give, I guess, some hard numbers, I would say in the beauty category, which is very promotional heavy, whether it’s actual promos or just spending a lot in advertising, I would say you need to be budgeting, especially if you’re a new brand that doesn’t have a lot of brand awareness, anywhere from 15% to even upwards of 30% of revenue reinvestment into marketing, which is a lot. Look, there’s some supplement brands that reinvest up to 50%, because they’re so focused on building that consumer base and betting on the fact that they’re going to have strong LTVs and repurchase rates. Where products where there’s not that replenishment element to the product, I think 10% to 15% is probably a more healthy ratio.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. I want to make sure that we take in a little bit of your backstory, Laura, because you started your business at age 25, congrats to you for jumping in. A lot of women tend to wait until they’re the older. Don’t necessarily have the confidence just to jump right in at that stage. What made you do it? I mean, I know you saw the problem at Amazon, but where did you get that confidence from? For anyone who’s listening, who’s thinking in starting a business and they’re in their early 20s and it is just like, “God, can I do this? Am I good enough?” All that kind of stuff. Where did that [inaudible 00:34:22] from in you?

Laura Meyer:

I’ll be honest, I have no idea where my confidence came from. My mother will say that I was just born with it and she really didn’t know what to do with me. Because I was pretty strong, well, most of my life. But I will say, I am fortunate that… My backstory is I graduated college, I went to college in the Midwest as well and I knew I wanted to be in New York City and I bought a one way ticket with no job lined up and was just ready to take the city by storm, which it was probably just me being a naive and overly confident 22 year old at the time.

But I was able to land an internship and it was in business development. That was such a great experience because my sole responsibility was just going out networking and meeting people. As a result, right out of the gate, I was really forced to put myself out there. One of the biggest pieces of advice is that if you are looking to start a business or you’re just looking to further your career, you have to get out of your comfort zone and you have to, whether you are an extrovert or an introvert, I tend to find myself sit somewhere in the middle, you have to be willing to reach out to people, but do it in a genuine way. You want to build genuine connections.

I like to do favors for people unsolicited all the time, because, one, I feel good about it selfishly, but two, the ROI and the good karma you put into the world, it always comes back. So, that experience, really those first three years of being in New York, completely away from home, I think I shared, my dad owns a hardware store in Michigan. My parents knew nothing of the corporate world. New York was a totally different animal, but I was probably overzealous and wanted to take the city on.

As a result, I was able to find some great mentors along the way. That mentorship, I think, really did guide me towards the entrepreneurship journey. I’ll also disclose, my minor in college was in entrepreneurship and I had some amazing professors through my minor program that were always very supportive in students eventually launching their own business. But I just had the realization at 25 that what had happened was, I left Amazon and I worked for another ad tech company and I actually brought Amazon on as a client for them. For a 25 year old, at the time, it seemed like I made a lot of money on that deal.

I was able to use that commission as essentially my seed money. Now, in that first year on business, I still racked up over $40,000 in credit card debt getting started, which the financially savvy will cringe. But today I own 90% of my business. I didn’t necessarily take external investors at that point. I will say, if you want to start a business, it’s kind of like children, the timing is never perfect. But at that point in my life I was like, “Look, I have no dependents, I don’t really have a huge nest egg that if I lose everything and have to file bankruptcy, it’s like the end of the world. I don’t have a mortgage.” I was pretty carefree and what better time to roll the dice?

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that. I mean, having started businesses at all ages, in my case, [inaudible 00:38:26] there’s a sweet spot for women, obviously, before having kids. Also, a lot of women start businesses when they have kids, because they need the flexibility of just their own hours, all of that. Then a lot start after their kids are grown. Everybody’s on their own journey with it. But I love what you said about the investment in your business, too, that I don’t know an entrepreneur who hasn’t gotten into some sort of debt of some kind, [inaudible 00:38:58] including me, oh my god, and sometimes huge amounts, right?

Laura Meyer:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

But being able to come out of it knowing that you’re creating this amazing valuation, value for yourself and you still own a lot of it and you’re still in control of your own destiny. I mean, there’s a lot to be said for that. As opposed to taking in external investment. Also, if you do need an external investment for a technology company, that sort of stuff, being able to take it at a moment when you already have product-market fit.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s already working. So, you’re taking the money to grow something that’s already succeeding is the smarter way to go. So, Laura, what’s the ultimate vision for your company? Where do you see it going? And where do you think you’re going to be in 10 years from now?

Laura Meyer:

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s funny you ask, because I’m actually in the process of interviewing and vetting various business coaches, because my business is five years old now, and I’m really trying to map out how can I get my business to 100 million? I have my ideas, others on my executive team have their ideas. I’m looking to hire an external consultant so we can really map out a very solid five year plan. A 10 year plan is probably more realistic for 100 million, but, hey, why not be ambitious?

But what I’m really focused on is a few things. One, I do have a technology piece to my business. In 2018, we did start on the journey of building our own proprietary tech set, and I’m focused on automating as much of Amazon brand management as possible. Everything from the inventory management, the suppressions that can happen on Amazon, tracking SEO, and building an SEO strategy, business analytics, there’s a whole long list. Right now, our platform is very robust. But the next step in the process is bringing on some data scientists so that it’s more of a diagnostics tool and identifying those anomalies in the data to really have those actual insights so that my team can spend more time on strategy and we can automate a lot of the execution elements of the business.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, that not only speaks to just a much higher margin business [inaudible 00:41:41]?

Laura Meyer:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

But also just the valuation of growth, something like that, and being successful, that gets you 100 million, you’d be surprising how fast. It’s not a 10 year horizon. It might be a good deal shorter than that. But really, really smart to go that way. Gosh, Laura, I feel like we barely scratched the surface. We could talk a lot longer. I’m just going to say, I’d love to have you back on this podcast in six months or so and see how you’re doing and how you’re going and dig into a lot of these topics even more. But I want to make sure that people who are listening that qualify to be a client of yours, know where to find you and also just how to follow you and your LinkedIn. If they’re a little bit earlier stage on the journey to get to the point where they would qualify to work with you. What’s the best way?

Laura Meyer:

Yeah, absolutely. You’re always welcome to just go to envisionhorizons.com. So, I kind of shared the qualifications for our agency, but we still do have just our software piece, too, if you want to check that out. There’s no minimums for that, obviously. Then, on a personal note, you can always find me and follow me on LinkedIn. It’s Laura Meyer, M-E-Y-E-R, yeah, I’m always open for new connections and helping other entrepreneurs in their journey.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, I know that I will be reaching out. Thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Laura Meyer:

It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.