454: From 0 To Millions: His Inc 500 Business Turned A Simple Idea Into A Multi-Million Dollar Empire W/ Mike Barnhill

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today I my good friend Mike Barnhill on the show. And aside from being the lead singer in a kick-ass rock band called Hydrofighter and one of my favorite people, Mike and his brother Patrick started an e-commerce store selling ID badges over at Specialist ID, which has been in the Inc 500 for the past seven or eight years. They make millions selling what seem like mundane and saturated products

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And today we’re going to learn how and why they are so successful. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are almost sold out over at sellersummit.com. We are literally down to like the last three or four tickets. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you all know me well enough by now to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business.

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and not high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and we all eat together and everyone parties together every single night. I personally love smaller events and tickets always sell out. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room and help each other with our businesses.

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The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com. I also want to thank Spockit for sponsoring this episode. Now, most of you who have followed me for a long time know that I’m not a big fan of dropshipping, especially from AliExpress or China. But I do know that many of you listening don’t have a large budget to start an e-commerce business and dropshipping is a great way to get started. If you want to dropship,

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from US or European suppliers, I like Spocket, and here’s why. Spocket integrates with all the top e-commerce platforms, which makes adding products and order fulfillment seamless. They also offer branded invoices, which allow you to add your logo and store name to the invoice so it appears as though it is being shipped from your own warehouse. But the main value add is that 70 % of their suppliers are from the US and Europe. As a result, your shipping times are super fast, at between two and five days,

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and the quality of the product is superior. You can try Spockit for free over at mywifequitterjob.com slash Spockit. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash S-P-O-C-K-E-T. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I run with my partner Tony. And unlike this one, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way.

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So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcasts on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:59
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have my friend Mike Barnhill on the show. Now, first off, I’m just gonna say that Mike is one of my favorite people in the world. He’s such a passionate guy and he’s provided me with a ton of support over the years from my event, The Seller Summit, and I appreciate him very much. Now, Mike and his brother, Patrick, started Specialist ID back in 2001, and this company has been in the Inc 500 for the past seven or eight years. I kinda lost count.

03:27
They make millions of dollars every year selling ID badges and holders. And what I really love about Mike is that he’s a family man. He runs his business with his brother and he’s got a great relationship with his kids. And in fact, he and his son jammed together on video where his son plays the drums. And let me just tell you, watching these videos makes me happy every time I watch them. Mike also belongs in a band called Hydrofighter. In any case, in this episode, we are going to talk about how Mike started Specialist ID.

03:56
and grew it into a multi-million dollar business. How’s it going, Mike? Good, Steve, man. Thank you for that intro. You’ve been one of my heroes over the years watching you with your kids and your family and giving your wife the opportunity to quit her day-to-day thing and come do something more important and be there for your family. It’s been a big inspiration to watch you. And I can’t wait for your book to come out at the Seller Summit, man. Yeah, man, I’m excited about that.

04:22
Awesome, I will write a little nice something for you in the book for sure. Please do. Mike, it’s been a long time coming and just welcome to the podcast. I just wanna say this upfront. Now, I know I kinda call you out as the lead singer of Hydrofighter all the time and I’m just gonna be straight up with you. When I first heard about Hydrofighter, I was like, oh, that’s cool, Mike’s got a band. And then I listened to you sing and I instantly became a fan. Oh, dude, thank you.

04:49
I it was the Cyndi Lauper cover. I that’s what did it. Anyway. I’m honored to hear that, man. Thank you. We’re not here to talk about Hydrofighter for all you guys listening. We’re here to talk about e-commerce. How did you and your brother decide to sell ID badges of all the things that you could possibly sell? It was an act of desperation. then it was some learning. was, you know, my dad had been homeless for years. He got off the streets in Nashville where he’d been playing music.

05:18
He came into some money because he had some back owed social security, disability, pension, things like that he’d never bothered to get. He ended up befriending an attorney. The attorney got him some money and my dad came into our lives after years being gone and said, hey guys, sorry I wasn’t there. Sorry I didn’t pay child support, but I want to give you this like kind of lump sum of about 20 grand. I called it the dream fund. My brother being a lot smarter than I decided that we should invest it in ourselves.

05:47
And we built a recording studio. Recording studios, we thought everyone’s going to come record in our studio. We’re going to make a ton of money. It didn’t work out that way. So we had this beautiful studio my dad had helped us build, and we had to keep the lights on. And so it basically started as selling pro audio gear and things we knew on eBay. my brother found a distributor. We could sell things on eBay, list their catalog, go pick up, bring things over, ship them out.

06:17
kind of worked, kept the lights on. So we started trying more and more things and ID badge holders. brother had had a previous relationship with, you know, an employer and the guy would sell us badge holders in bulk. And for some reason, these little retractable badge reels for 99 cents on eBay, 299 shipping, we’re selling like, we couldn’t have even forecast like how well they would sell. And they were just selling on, you know, on and on and on on repeat.

06:44
we were reading this book called Good to Great by Jim Collins. one of the things it suggests is that, know, do something that you can be the best in the world at. And we realized right then and there, we can’t be the best in the world at any of other stuff, but we could be the best in the world of badge holders. So we went all in on badge holders, went hardcore and tried to become the best badge holder company in the world. And I think we’re about there. Yeah, I mean.

07:09
I was actually doing, I was just doing some Google searches actually for badge holders just in preparation for this interview. There is a lot of competition out there. It’s actually quite saturated. And maybe things weren’t like that back in the day, but certainly now it’s a lot more saturated. How do you guys stand out? Yes, you’re absolutely right. There was nobody doing it online when we started doing it. And now it’s, you know, can go, you can own a factory overseas and you can.

07:37
you know, use some tools and you can sell them on Amazon and everywhere else. No problem. And so our, you know, really what it comes down to is what we’re good at is we, you know, we’ve known our customers for the last decade. That’s been a huge advantage. So we do, you know, we don’t just sell on Amazon, but we also have, you know, fortune 500 companies. work with, you know, with county government, federal government, everything in between. And we can sell from, from one on Amazon to 500,000 pieces, you know,

08:06
to a big company. And that’s been really good. And the other thing was actually at one of your conferences, this guy Jake gave me the book Blue Ocean Strategy. And just kind of realizing that the ocean’s always going to get saturated with competition. So we always need to be innovating. And one of the great things is we have customers that tell us what they need that doesn’t exist yet. And we’re able to find that, source that, and bring it into the market. And it’s kind of an advantage.

08:34
Is it fair to say that Amazon’s just a smaller fraction of your business? You know what’s crazy is Amazon has consistently remained about 70 % of our business. Really? We didn’t intend for it to grow into that much, but it’s about 65, 70 % of our business consistently. It just keeps growing. Interesting. Okay, I wouldn’t have thought that actually. Actually, I didn’t do a search on Amazon for ID badges, but are you guys ranking for those really hard terms?

09:02
Yeah, we’re still ranking pretty well, but I know there’s a lot of work to do. know, our catalog is so enormous, you know, and we have the kind of 80-20 thing where most of our sales do come from a small proportion of products. And we do need to, I guess, kind of what we’re kind of doing that this focus this year is to revisit all of the tools for keyword tracking and, you know, re-optimizing listings and things like that. yeah. Just curious, how many SKUs do you guys have? SKUs? It’s in the thousands.

09:31
It’s in thousands. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that’s a lot of skews. Well, take me back to the beginning, because that’s where a lot of listeners find it most interesting. So you sold these on eBay, you’re selling like hotcakes. And what was the next step? Starting your own website? Or? The next step was, it was, yeah, it was pretty much going deeper into the product lines at first. So you know, we had some badge reels, and then we realized people wanted red badge reels, people wanted blue ones, pink ones, everything. So we started kind of adding products to eBay mostly.

10:01
And most of our sales were eBay for the first several years. We did end up adding a website, you know, to start trying to get bigger customers and the phone started ringing. And, uh, you know, we started answering phone calls and actually trying to, uh, you know, put out quotes and proposals and things like that. So we started getting some bigger customers that way. And then we started putting products on Amazon. We basically tried to become ubiquitous. We wanted to be everywhere, anywhere that there were people that needed badge holders. We wanted to be there with the best offerings.

10:29
We wanted to be the Nike of batch holders. So what’s funny about this is you started in the early 2000s and because you even started before I did and back in the day there weren’t that many options for websites. So you did eBay for a couple years that takes us to maybe what 2004, 2003, 2004. There’s nothing available for websites back then. So yeah, no, the original. So the business incorporated in 2002 in my brother’s dorm room and it was more of a consultant group at that time. It was not a consultant group.

10:59
He would go do installs for other companies. He was working in photo ID business, but he incorporated the name specialist ID and he got it. We really started our e-commerce journey late 2000, 2007, 2008, think 2009. So we could start around the same time. yeah. And we did our first Amazon around 2011 was when we started putting products on Amazon. Yeah. Okay. So you were on Amazon pretty early. 2011 I consider pretty early. Yeah, yeah.

11:28
Yeah, that was a hard slog to we were putting products on Amazon from some of our suppliers and then Amazon would actually kind of take the attribution they would own the listing and then all these new sellers would come on and we were like, wait a sec, we put this listing here. It’s like eBay, how come everyone’s jumping on these listings? Yeah, I didn’t understand what’s happening that is a yeah. So so you after did the website come first or did Amazon come first? The website came first and that was that came first. Yeah, yeah. And how did you promote?

11:58
How are you getting these phone calls? How are you getting like the early business on your website? A lot of it all honestly came through eBay, man. It came through ones and twos. What we did was back in the day, we’d put little coupon codes, you know, on our on every shipment that went out, you know, and every every shipment that went out was kind of a lead magnet. We might have to we wanted to get our foot in the door. And what usually happens in the big businesses, you know, the HR department is going to care about the badging. But but somebody’s badge real broke.

12:25
and they have to wait for somebody to approve something, to approve something, to approve something, to get their freaking badge reel that they need for work. And so what we really were was through eBay and things like that, a foot in the door, and everything came back to our website early on, and we were offering promo codes and come see our website and check out all the products, and that was from the beginning. What platform were you guys on back in the day? I think it was Volusion. Okay, yeah, I was about to say, because back in the day, Shopify, I don’t think, was popular.

12:55
Did you guys move over or are you still on? We did, yeah. We’re Shopify now. For a while we were transitioning from one to the other and it was a very expensive transition, but glad we’re there. It’s a good place to be in Shopify. Okay. And then you, okay, so you got a lot of sales from your own website driven from eBay through coupons and whatnot in the packaging that you were getting business from. Actually, what’s interesting about your business is most of the people who buy from you are probably businesses. Is that accurate?

13:26
It’s, you know, everybody that buys from us works for a business. So sometimes it’s the person that’s providing for the whole business. And sometimes it’s the person that just wants one that’s a little heavier duty or blocks RFID signal or is more hardcore. So we want to be there for everybody, man, from the guy that needs one thing to the purchasing manager who needs hundreds of thousands. then, So is it fair to say that when you get a customer, chances are they’re going to buy from you again, like if they enjoyed the experience?

13:54
Yeah, our reorder rates very high, even like on Amazon and stuff like that. do have like, think double, I was talking to one of the people over there, is about double the average reorder rate for a company in our industry. And yeah, we have a sales guy now, this guy Lars, he’s brilliant. And he’s like, man, you guys gave me the best leads ever. I just go through our phone list and I call the people that have ordered from us before and I see how they’re doing and they buy again. you know, customer service has been, we read Tony Shay’s book, Delivering Happiness at the beginning.

14:23
And that became like our culture. You we had to make every customer super happy, even if it meant losing money, if it meant, you know, overnighting products, like let’s make everybody so incredibly happy that even if they hated us yesterday, they love us today. That’s like our policy too. In fact, there was one time when a bride ordered too late and we freaking hand drove the handkerchiefs over to their wedding that day.

14:50
And I’m pretty sure she told all of her friends, you can never discount the word of mouth in any industry, I don’t think so. It’s true. you know, the beautiful byproduct of that is it gives you it allows you to get a good night’s sleep too. Because you know, when you’re going back and forth, are they screwing me? What should I have done? If you just do the best thing for the customer, you just realize, hey, I just did that. You don’t have to fight it anymore in your head that you’re getting screwed. You just go to sleep and you’re like, I don’t think about it anymore. I made somebody happy. Cost me some money. Big deal.

15:20
That’s awesome. So what I find interesting is that your business is very Amazon heavy and, and Amazon obviously owns a lot of ecommerce, but do get a lot of repeat business on Amazon as well? Yeah, yeah, that’s so Amazon is where we kind of have like, like I was talking to somebody, somebody over there about a month ago, and he was giving me a lot of data that I needed. And one of the pieces of data that was so interesting was in our industry, we have

15:49
I think it was a 16%. I’m horrible with numbers, but our reorder rate was about double the industry standard for office supplies. So even through Amazon, we get a lot of reorders. We’re trying to build out the brand leveraging Amazon’s eyeballs. And do you think it’s because people are aware of your website and aware of who you are and they’re like, okay, we trust these guys, but I prefer to shop on Amazon and that’s where I’m gonna get my IDs. I think it’s a bit of both.

16:17
There are people that are always gonna try to price shop or say, well, know, I these things on Amazon, but I want a million of them. You know, I can’t buy a million on Amazon. It’s too expensive. Like, can you get, cut us a deal? So we just, you we put our logo on everything. We have a beautiful logo. Now I’m so proud of it. We try to put it everywhere, have it always be seen. Just, we wanna have that imprint in everybody’s brain all the time. Doesn’t matter to me where they buy from. You we want them to buy wherever they wanna buy, but we wanna be there. Is the pricing on Amazon similar to your website? Is it the same or?

16:47
cheaper or? It’s honestly it’s just different. It’s different. If you’re buying things in bulk, it’s going to be cheaper on our website. lot of things we try to keep it about in line or would you know, they a lot of times they’ll have different skews because you know this this one comes in packaged packaged form with the sort of colors or it’s a bundle. Whereas on our website you can just pick five of this color 20 that color 10 of 10 that color so on. Okay. So does that imply then that you are packaging your

17:17
your IDs and kind of bulk specifically for Amazon? Absolutely. we do we have a lot of, you know, auto baggers. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of them. Probably have we have a ton of auto baggers in house. And we have a whole assembly team product. We call it packaging and branding. And they package all our products, put a barcode on it. It’s got a logo and ship it to FBA or whatever. Okay. And how do you kind of decide like what bundles to sell on Amazon?

17:44
Running your store is probably easier, right? But for Amazon, you actually have to decide what makes sense. Well, the beautiful thing is my brother’s great at e-commerce, he’s great at marketing, he’s great at leading teams. He takes care of all things website. And I’m just this goober dork who loves looking at patterns on Amazon. And I feel like Amazon is the place where I can leverage things like keyword optimization and product market fit and all that cool stuff.

18:10
auto completing keywords, like all these things where I’m able to, you know, product products that have demand but have no relevant, you know, listing. So I love to play in the Amazon space. And just, I think it’s actually really easy to find things on Amazon people looking for just by knowing the industry and knowing Amazon, it’s kind of like Scott Adams, who founder of Dilbert, says, don’t have to be the best in the world at things, just be really good at two different things, you know, and you can have some success there.

18:40
So do you, what do you guys source your products? Is it still from that same guy or you have your own? Oh no, no, we outgrew him. He sold his company and we didn’t, you know, we moved on to bigger, bigger pasture. So we, we source from all sorts of places. just, we’ve looked through all that. We’ve looked for all the best badge holder manufacturers that we could find across the globe. And if they’re to our standard, like a Nike, you know, or like a Nike kind of factory, we’ll work with them. If they’re not, we don’t, pass.

19:10
And so we have, we work in Taiwan, we work in China, we’re working with products now in Vietnam, we work with US manufacturers. you know, yeah, we’ll work with anybody who has a great badge holder. And then what do you guys do in-house? Because I know you have your own facility that’s pretty large in Florida. What are you doing in-house? Do do printing? Do you do any manufacturing there? So we do a lot of the printing like you’re talking about.

19:38
We specialize in these products called badge buddies, which in hospitals are a little tag that hangs behind a badge that just quickly identifies what the person’s role is. So they walk in and you see, oh, it’s an LPN, it’s a nurse, it’s a doctor, what have you. We also do lot of, you know, just assembling of two different products. One of the first things we ever did when we were developing new products for Amazon was, you know, like sticking badge, sticking key rings on badge reels. Cause at the time nobody had to ever put a key ring on a badge.

20:07
which to me was crazy. So I used to drive back and forth to the warehouse an hour a day and I would bring buckets of badge reels and key rings and in traffic I would sit there and I would assemble them, stick them in a different bucket. know, and so a lot of that we do, when we’re trying a new product and we don’t want to go all out, we do a lot of in-house manufacturing as well. we’ll bundle things, assemble things, put two pieces together, you know, and then if it is great, then we’ll have somebody else make it for us, but keeps our costs low for trying things out.

20:39
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21:35
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22:05
invitations to book parties that I’ll be throwing all over the country, and other special offers. That’s mywifecluderjob.com slash book. Now back to the show.

22:16
So walk me through the progression here. So you started out with this smaller outfit who was selling you. You started selling on eBay, you saw success, so you started selling in an online store. When did you start deciding to, you know, source from overseas? Like when did the operation get a little bit bigger? When you decided to move into a facility? Like the early stuff is what’s interesting to a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. The early stuff was, especially talking about like, like our first facility was the studio. It was that studio. We had this little, little, little garage there.

22:47
And that’s where we did everything. Um, and my son, when he was about three months old, we didn’t have any place to stick them. So he’d just come with me to work every day. So pretty much, I know I’d be in the back doing purchasing while he was doing tummy time. I’d have him in a stroll. Literally I’d have him in, I’d have him in the stroller talking about the early days. I have him in the stroller in a county lanyards and I’d go one, two, three, four, you know, teaching him counting while counting products to put in packages.

23:14
And then, you know, I’d be taking sales calls while he was, you know, on my shoulder. And sometimes he’d start crying or, whatever. And, you know, I’d say to the person trying to buy, buddy, I’ll be right back. I got to go change my son’s diaper or whatever it was. And, uh, got a lot of sales that way. But yeah, so I kind of went off on a tangent there, but you know, we started with this little garage by our studio. Next thing you know, the building behind us comes available. We move into that place to knock down some walls. Another place comes available, knock down some walls.

23:43
Eventually we ended up tearing down the studio and we just became we just were growing and growing and growing adding team members and things like that. What were your traffic sources back in the early days? Like were you running ads was I don’t even think social media was around back then. So what was it? It couldn’t have been just all eBay, right? No, no. So by that by that point, that was when I was all going down, that was all Amazon private label. So we started Amazon private label in 2014 by watching guys like Scott Volcker.

24:12
Yep. And, these other, these other people that were giving away a lot of information on the internet. And I’d be watching these videos going to this is like what I need because I’m selling other people’s products. Everybody else is beating me on price. I don’t want to play this game forever. I’m stressed. I’m losing my mind. I can’t sleep. Like I’m going to start private labeling this stuff. You know, it was basically taking products that already existed that we knew there was demand for giving them keyword optimization, giving them beautiful photography.

24:40
You know, maybe making them special, making them into a five pack or a 10 pack or something that had never been offered before. Uh, looking up the, you know, the long tail searches on Amazon and saying, well, why is there no product? There’s so many searches for this, you know, this product that doesn’t exist and just going hard in all those opportunities. And so we just, you know, we went hard into private label and that was what grew us into having 70 % of our revenue from Amazon. wasn’t intentional. It was just because that was where the opportunity was. And, um,

25:09
We just had to keep adding people as we grew. So given that it’s so competitive now, today, like if I were going to look for ID badges and let’s say I didn’t know you at all and I go on Google or Amazon, how do you stand out from someone who does not know you at all? Or is your business primarily, since you have such a strong customer base, you have this really nice base of repeat orders now that you can just build upon.

25:39
It’s honestly, it’s both, you know, I’ll always go back to the idea of the ubiquitous brand, you know, being everywhere that people are looking, looking, we do have a marketing team now that we work with, it’s really good for helping us with like Google search and things, or Google ads and things like that. We’ve not done much in a way of any of that stuff until the last year or two. even like email follow ups and stuff, we’ve never done funnels, we’ve never done follow ups, we had never done any of that stuff. We had not, we had,

26:09
minimal Google ads just because you had to. about a year, maybe a little bit longer ago, we did start outsourcing that stuff to a great company called Zen Media. And they’ve been fantastic. And so now we do have Klaviyo, you know, things, email follow ups, but we had done none of that. There’s so much opportunity stuff for our business because we hadn’t done any of that stuff. Yeah, crazy, right? Yeah, that is crazy. I think the beauty of your business is that once you have a business customer,

26:37
And I can speak from this because for our business, like we focus on our business customers because they buy in bulk and they buy often. It seems like most of your customers that we talked about earlier, they are a business or they work for a business. And once you find someone who’s reliable, like they’re not gonna switch. And I think that’s the beauty. That’s why I was asking you, I wonder if you really even need to advertise.

27:00
So Google works, do you guys do any Facebook advertising or social media or anything like that? We do a little bit now, yeah, we review that every month and we do a little bit. It’s, you know, our ROAS is not fantastic, but it does keep more eyeballs coming in. And like you said, like we try to treat every customer, especially business customers with, you know, with kid gloves, or not kid gloves, but know, with like white glove treatment. And we hope that they’ll keep coming back. And historically we’ve had just great repeat business from customers we’ve tried to make happy.

27:26
And then you mentioned that you were taking calls. that a party? Like, do you want people to call you? Is that part of your strategy? Because I know people I’ve interviewed on this podcast where they just turn off the phone so they don’t want to deal with it. Yeah, no, no, we do. We have two full time customer service reps here in the US and they’re fantastic, you know, and they really care. And that was, you know, very important to us from beginning. And they’ll pass off our, you know, people that might be potential bigger players to our sales, our sales guy. And he’s brilliant, too.

27:54
And these are all things that we’ve built kind of in the last couple of years, but we’ve had customer service forever, ever since my son was born and I couldn’t do customer service, we brought people that started hiring in the US. Actually, that was my next question. Are most of your employees in the US or are you outsourcing any to other countries? Yeah, most of our employees are in the US. Most of those US employees are in the office in the warehouse in Miami, Florida. A couple of us work remote.

28:23
two new hires, they’re both fantastic that are in the Philippines. But you know, our business is so old, it was kind of built before this whole. All these opportunities presented themselves. So we built ourselves as a business to business kind of thing that happened to sell online real well. But we didn’t build it with the intention of scaling the way that people do these days. very, very different mentality. I have to ask you this. I noticed that you guys hit the Inc 500 in 2021, which is pandemic time.

28:51
Yes. And during pandemic, I can’t imagine like people weren’t going in, people weren’t throwing events and that sort of thing. How did you guys manage to grow during that period? Let’s talk about that. I am happy to because we got lucky. And we had been in the business for so long. And we had had great relationships with suppliers that we were able to move on things that other people didn’t see very quickly. So we have these double ended land. So the first thing we did was we made we make these badge buddies I was talking about.

29:22
out of desperation, we started looking on Indeed and Monster for who was hiring. Hospitals are hiring. These travel nurses need all these badge things, these badge buddies. They’re having to buy them themselves to show up at a new hospital, right? They have these favorite colors. So we basically put out every single job title that was hiring. We started building custom badge buddies for those, putting them in the top colors.

29:51
putting them on all sites and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, started getting just tons of these badge buddy sales, making everything mostly in hot pink. was awesome. The next thing we do is outreach or were they, did they find you? weren’t doing okay. I putting it on Etsy, putting it on Amazon products that had not existed before, you know, just saying, what do we have? What can we make? What do people need? What can we make immediately? The next thing that happened was we have these double ended lanyards, right? They’re for events, they’re for things. They hold a mask for a mask lanyard.

30:21
unbelievably. So we had just designed like a napkin holder, like a double ended napkin holder to start programs on. And so we had photos and all this crap already. And the next thing you know, we’re like, wait a second, people are using these to hold masks. And we were the first to market with mask lanyards. we went boom, we bought up every double ended lanyard we could find that was currently in the US. And we, we marketed it and we sold it, we put it on Amazon.

30:46
The first day that we started selling them, think we sold like 20 sets of mask lanyards. Next thing you know, we had our biggest two months in history. And then we were making them for schools in different school colors. We were making them with a breakaway so that kids wouldn’t choke on them. We made them MRI and metal detector friendly so you could walk into your office. Like we just kept innovating, innovating, innovating, getting copied, getting copied, getting copied, innovating, innovating, innovating. And if you know anybody that wants to buy some mask lanyards right now, I’ll give you a good deal because…

31:15
We got way too many of them now. What’s hilarious is your story is similar to ours. No one was getting married. Our customers are airlines and hotels. No one was using any of those. And so we started turning our handkerchiefs into masks. And back in the day, the cloth masks were popular. And no one was selling the decorative ones. They were all like the surgical masks. And we had like a really good year because of those masks. We just said, hey, stop making hankies. Turn those into masks. Dude, brilliant.

31:45
Man, okay, so that’s how you guys managed to go. That was ingenious. That was ingenious. It wasn’t even genius. was a good idea that had already been thought of and we happened to have enough product knowledge and relationships with vendors. We were able to just move and then ask the next question, what do they need next? They need a breakaway for their kids. They need a shorter one for their kids. So I think what you guys did was genius because that was a bold move, very quick and…

32:13
I mean, didn’t cost us any money. In fact, my wife was even hand sewing them for a little bit just to test the market. And we started giving away hankies for masks and gave away the instructions. Oh, nice. That caused people to come in too. So these lanyards, so what was, you went on indeed.com and you were looking for who was hiring? That was the first thing. That was to build the badge buddies for the hospitals. we needed to know which hospitals were hiring, what jobs were they hiring for.

32:42
Cause we knew that these nurses were going to have to go to new places. Every, every hospital is either color coded and they’re kind of badge buddy thing, or nurses just pick their own favorite colors. And so we just started, we’ll say, well, let’s build all the important colors that we know are color coded and the blues and the reds and the greens. And then let’s build a hot pink because that’s the top seller on for most of our, our badge buddies and build that for every title. And so, you know, looking at all these jobs that were very specific to the hiring of the time. Um, right.

33:11
putting those out everywhere. And were those marketed as such, like badge buddies for like nurses or medical? Oh yeah, yeah. So we would find out like on Indeed or Monster like, okay, an LPN is also called a licensed practical nurse or a license. And you start looking up all the things on the, pretty much the form where they’re supposed to submit their resume. You’re looking for all the different words that we don’t know. What are the other things associated with this job? Okay.

33:41
I can’t even think of them right now, but we’re looking for all those words that were significant to them that we didn’t understand, we didn’t know, and then building that onto the listings and the marketing and everything. Yeah. totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. For your own website, I’m just kind of curious, like off Amazon stuff, do you guys create content for SEO or what are the things that you do specifically to drive traffic to your website? Man, I wish I knew more about that side of the business. You’re the Amazon side.

34:10
I don’t, yeah, yeah. Pretty much all third party channels are where I can have some expertise and I’d be making it up if I gave you an answer. hi. Well, let me ask you this. Are you guys still selling on eBay and Etsy? Yep. You are? Okay, so can we, can you just tell me what percentage of that is to your business? I imagine it’s pretty small, right? It’s definitely small. A lot of Etsy customers end up becoming great website customers because they’re crafters and makers and they’re buying supplies, they’re trying us out. They love it.

34:40
Some of our biggest customers today are the ones that we met on Etsy six years ago. know, we consider it, we don’t, I say as a percentage of sales, we’re looking at what’s Walmart, eBay and Etsy, maybe about 1 % each. Wow. Maybe up to 3%, but small. How can you, so how can you justify, cause I know we used to be on eBay, we actually stopped because eBay customers are kind of more of a pain, like they require more customer service. They always try to low-ball you for something also.

35:10
For such a small percentage for your revenue, I imagine you still have like a person dedicated to working on eBay at least, right? Or someone taking care of it. How do you justify those costs? Yeah, so for us, it doesn’t seem like there’s any sort of added costs that we’ve noticed. We have a customer service team. They’re handling as many things as they can handle every day anyway. To us, it’s all kind of a profitable lead magnet. And so when we created Amazon, our process is typically when we create an Amazon listing, we just create a, we just move it to eBay, we move it to-

35:39
to Etsy and we move it to Walmart and we strategize, know, it’s a couple of tweaks in the keywords in the title and that’s pretty much all that we’re changing. And then it’s all just, you know, sales coming in and some things that do crap on Amazon do really well for us on Walmart. So we never really know. So we just put it there, let it do its thing and then our customer service team handles the customers. What’s interesting about all this is Etsy I wouldn’t think would be a

36:08
a good place to sell your stuff. But you just mentioned that some of your best customers are from Etsy. So do you recommend that people sell on Etsy also if they already have like a really well established e-commerce store? I’ve loved Etsy because we’ve built our best customers, the most loyal customers, the most community oriented customers have all been on Etsy. And for us, it makes sense because what we do, what we sell is kind of craft supplies. What we realized…

36:36
But we learned from our Etsy customers as well. We learned that a lot of nurses have side hustles where they’re buying a badge reel and they’re decorating it with some bling and they’re selling it to their friends. And then they’re selling on Etsy too. And then when they get really good and really big, they’re go, you know, some of them, don’t even work in the hospital anymore as a nurse. They become a small business owner who is just an amazing crafter. So I would, in my personal opinion, I tell everybody, sell on Etsy because the percentages are pretty low.

37:06
They’re changing all the time. you meet good friends and you learn a lot. Some of our best product suggestions have come from Etsy customers who were like, hey, I know the vendor who makes this. I don’t wanna buy 10,000. Will you buy 10,000 and put them on your website and I’ll buy the first 500 from you? Let me say sure. And so a lot of our best ideas come from our best customers. So on Etsy, presumably you’re selling just like the blank holders, right?

37:36
Do they enforce the fact that it needs to be hand made? I guess you are the manufacturer. is that legal technically to sell? Yeah, yeah. So they don’t even require that you have it handmade anymore. And when we started going there, our loophole, and it wasn’t even really loophole, is if you supply the handmade industry, then you are welcome to sell as they had a whole supplies like catalog or not catalog. And so we just went in as a supplier for Etsy resellers.

38:06
Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about Walmart. Do you think it’s been worth your time? Are you using WFM? We’re trying it. We’re always just kind of dabbling with Walmart. Okay, so right now you’re fulfilling yourself? Yeah, yeah, we have about five products I think that we’re trying Walmart Fulfill. But we’re not making any moves on it. We’re not making any aggressive moves. We’re just trying to be there. I see. Where do you see the future going in terms of

38:36
your sales, is it still all on Amazon, even though it’s getting more more competitive? We’re really doubling down on our website now. I think that’s what we’re trying to bring everything to the website, know, hiring these new things, you know, the marketing team that we were working with joined EOS. So we’re really trying to fix our website, learn everything we needed to do to have that be like just dominant. And then

39:03
You know, and having our sales guy and everything like that. We’re really trying to optimize for our website going forward. Okay. And if you guys seem to be selling everywhere, can you prioritize for me what your marketplaces are? Like if you just tell me right now? Yeah. Yeah. So Amazon. Okay. Website, definitely. Okay. Uh huh. And then it would probably go Etsy, to be honest. Really? Etsy. And then eBay and Walmart. I don’t know.

39:32
That’s a disparage either of those but we know I was just curious what your priorities are because everyone’s priorities are a little bit different like I I actually just had some Walmart guys on in the last episode and they were like yeah you can expect between five and twelve percent you know of a revenue lift by going to Walmart assuming you you put like what was funny about what they said is a lot of times what sells

39:56
poorly on Amazon will sell well on Walmart because it’s not nearly as competitive. Especially if it’s a more competitive product that’s kind of more mainstream is actually what they said. Seems like you’re saying the same thing. Yeah, I would agree with that, especially kind of the inexpensive things or bundle things that are so super saturated on Amazon. That’s where we sell more on Walmart than we do on Amazon even. One thing I’ve always been curious about also, you and your brother are tight.

40:25
What’s it like running a business with your brother or having it being a family-owned business? think it’s great. I love how smart he is. I love what a great leader he is. I think part of the success is that neither of us wants to the other down. We’ve always considered ourselves two ninjas with our backs facing each other. He sees that. He sees the enemies. He sees that. And I see the enemies over here. And what’s great for me is I love him. I’ve loved him since…

40:53
since he was born, you we shared a bedroom growing up, you know, we had parents that fought a lot. And so we were always kind of tight and we kind of had our thing. He’s so good at so many things that I’ll never be good at. And that’s great because I’m pretty damn good at some things that he’s not the best at. And we just have never had that competition. I remember the first time I saw him jump onto a soccer field and score a goal. was like, well, there you go. He’s the soccer player, not me.

41:19
And when he got a guitar for Christmas, I stole his guitar and I played it all the time. And he’s great at guitar too, but it’s cool. We let each other shine and I love watching him shine. Yeah. The reason why I ask is, you know, I work with my wife and whenever people ask me whether you should work with your spouse, I’m always a little hesitant. Maybe it’s different working with your brother, but with the spouse, it’s already stressful. Kids, everything.

41:47
and running a business together just adds another layer of stress where we were fighting all the time in the beginning. Now we have it down, but it can be tough. Yeah. It seems like you guys are really coming into something special. When I see the two of you together and I see what you’re doing through the business and with your kids, to me, as an observer, it just looks really special, man. It’s been cool to watch that. Cool. Last thing I want to talk to you about is

42:15
know, specialist ID is not your only thing. Talk to me about Hydra Fighter. So you’re in a band. How do you manage to balance all these things that are going on in your life? And tell me about the band. I’ve always been curious. Yeah, sure. So the my band is called Hydra Fighter. And it actually is based off of a book by what’s his name, Josh Kaufman. He’s a business writer, but he wrote this parable about the guy who fights Hydra and

42:41
I just love that story. The guy who fights Hydra is a guy who’s a blacksmith, who’s got a very comfortable life and everyone tells him to be a blacksmith, work hard, love your life. And he says, I get that I love that, but I really, there’s this Hydra out there that’s attacking our city. It’s always beckoning me to become the ultimate Hydra fighter. So he goes off and, you know, it’s just a parable about pursuing what means the most to you. And, you know, so seemed relevant.

43:08
for the music stuff. the music that I write is very, we call it sad bastard music. It’s the kind of music where if you’re watching a movie and somebody breaks up and drives away in the car, the songs that we write are the songs that are in that scene. And so I I love folk music, I love acoustic music, and I got a buddy here, we play together, and my brother produces our songs. so, yeah, it’s something I always love doing.

43:35
we’re finally in place in the business where I can actually resume that pursuit of just playing because I love to play. And this is my home studio and you know, I’ve always been a songwriter. It’s in me. And so just I’m doing it. And it’s what your original business was in a way, right? With the studio. Yeah, the whole plan originally was that we were going to build the studio. And the funny thing is we worked so hard for all these years and now my brother and I both have home studios. I record here. I sent it to him in Miami. He’s brilliant at mixing and engineering and he does that.

44:05
And then we come up with these songs that are just so cool. So it took us not being in the same state, not being in the same studio for us to actually find the time and the workflow to make music together again. So it’s been so cool. It’s funny how that happens. It’s like most of the friends that I see most often are ones that don’t live in the area. Cause when they come into town, we make sure we see them. Yeah, right. When they’re in the area, we’re just like, ah, we’ll see them whenever we can, but we never end up doing it. So love it. Mike.

44:35
It was a pleasure talking to you. If people have any questions about your business or need any IDs, where can they find you? Yeah, thanks, Steve. Well, they want to check out specialist ID calm that singular specialist ID ID card calm. And from right here, if you need any mass holders, they’re on they’re on clearance. They’re on clearance. Yeah, come pick them up. Bring the truck. Cool. My thanks for coming on, man. Appreciate it.

45:03
My pleasure, man. It’s good to see you. Thank you so much. We’ll see you at Seller Summit, bro. Summit and ECF. And ECF.

45:13
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now Mike is a very successful entrepreneur and there’s lots to learn from him and be sure to check out Hydrofighter on YouTube as well. For more information, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 454. And once again, I want to remind you that my annual e-commerce conference will be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 23rd to May 25th of this year. I really want to hang out with you in person, so let’s meet up. Go to sellersummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com.

45:43
I also want to thank Spocket, which is the drop shipping supplier that I like for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily add products to your store and have pre-vetted suppliers ship your products to the end customer without worrying about storage or fulfillment. And the best part is that most suppliers are in the US and Europe for super fast shipping. For more information, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash Spocket. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash S-P-O-C-K-E-T.

46:11
Now I talk about how to use these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.