S3 E6 The Amazon scaling mistake costing you organic rank and sales

In this episode of the Online Hustle Podcast, AVASK  sits down with Destaney Wishon, CEO of BTR Media to uncover what truly drives scalable growth on Amazon. While many e-commerce sellers obsess over Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Destaney explains why this single metric can be highly misleading and detrimental to long-term organic ranking. She breaks down the evolving Amazon advertising landscape, emphasizing that basic keyword optimization is now merely table stakes for sellers.

Instead of competing solely on price, modern brands must leverage creative storytelling, video assets, and a deep understanding of consumer psychology to stand out on the platform. Destaney also shares candid insights from her seven-year journey building a top-tier agency, discussing the importance of mindset, the current limitations of AI in strategic planning, and how to hire a team that complements your weaknesses.

- Why focusing strictly on profitability can sometimes decrease a brand's total revenue and visibility.

- How the "Mom test" reveals the true impact of Amazon's diverse ad placements on shoppers.

- The structural advantage small brands have over massive corporations when implementing new strategies.

- Why a brand's long-term vision must dictate daily habits to ensure scalable success.


TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - Introduction and Destaney Wishon's early e-commerce career 
03:00 - The core values and risk-taking behind building BTR Media 
05:29 - Why ROAS is a misleading metric for Amazon sellers 
09:08 - AI limitations and optimizing for human buying psychology 
13:07 - Common scaling mistakes and the underutilization of video 
17:09 - Why creative assets and branding are the new competitive moat 
20:08 - Navigating Amazon's expansive retail and media network 
23:18 - The speed and agility advantage of small to mid-size brands 
26:10 - Crucial Amazon ad updates and utilizing creative studio 
30:13 - The importance of leadership mindset and long-term goals 
34:29 - Key leadership lessons from scaling an agency over seven years 
42:04 - How to choose the right Amazon advertising agency partner

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of season three of the online hustle podcast sponsored by Avats. Today we're joined by Destiny Wishan, CEO and co-founder of BTR Media, formerly known as Better AMS. In this episode, we are diving into what actually drives scalable growth on Amazon, why ROAs can be misleading, where brands get stuck when they're trying to scale, and how creative and strategy have become the real competitive MOP in e-commerce today. So before we get into all of that, Destiny, I'd love to give you the floor. Can you share a little bit more about your origin story and the pivotal moments that shaped your journey from your early career to building one of the most respected agencies in the space? Yeah, of course. And thank you so much for having me. Very excited to be a part of the podcast. I know we uh been planning on this for a while, so making it happen is fun. My name's Destiny, and I have been in the space for going on eight years now, I think. I got started managing Amazon advertising for brands that were incredibly successful in stores at Walmart and were willing to make the jump to being more online. And I got handed around$10 million of budgets when I was me too. It was like here finger without any Amazon advertising tech, no bolt sheets, anything like that. So that is where I fell in love with the space. It's a love-hate relationship some days, and I haven't nailed a leave. And now I'm continuing to do the same thing, manage Amazon advertising for large brands, but now that has expanded into Walmart, Instacart, and all of the retail media networks. And now I have an incredible team that uh does it as well. Amazing, amazing. Um, and I can't even imagine at 22 being into that kind of responsibility, right? Like, what do you do? I remember flying out to the brand, and the agency I was working with at the time was very small, but they punched above their weight, and they put a little PowerPoint presentation up in the boardroom, and it said Destiny and her team. I didn't have a team, but they needed like I had a huge digital media team because we were managing so much of a budget. And I remember sitting there in that presentation being like, there's no team, there's a destiny, and destiny is trying to figure out everything. So thankfully I made it, and uh the industry's definitely evolved quite a bit since then. Uh, we have a lot of tools and resources that make it a little bit easier than managing bids by hand, but that was a wild time and helped with a lot of my confidence for sure. Oh, I'm sure. Um before all of that, right? Your LinkedIn shows a huge leap starting from like server, intern, and then boom, CEO. Um when we look back, was there um belief or a decision when you're in your personal life early on that completely changed that trajectory phrase? Yeah, I honestly would say there's two core values that I think have driven a lot of my journey, maybe three. One of them is just having insane work ethic. I, you know, even while serving, I was working full-time as a server bartender while also doing digital advertising on the side while also getting my bachelor's in business. So I paid for my whole college experience completely out of pocket. So that was, you know, a key driver was just my work ethic. The second would be the confidence to take risks knowing everything would work out. I remember the first time I got asked to speak on stage was for Danny McMillan's conference in London. And I had never spoken on stage before, and I was incredibly scared, but I signed the contract before I had a chance to say no. And I think there's a lot of different aspects of my story that are just like, say yes and figure it out. I didn't want to be a CEO. I didn't wake up and say, I'm gonna be an entrepreneur. Instead, I just said yes to all of these small choices and habits. My first podcast, my first webinar, my first speaking engagement. I kept saying yes, even though I was incredibly, incredibly scared. So the confidence is a big part of it, but it not a false confidence. It wasn't a cockiness. I was still scared. It was, I'm gonna do it and figure it out later. And I would say third one that I would maybe include into that is a little like just humility. I've had a lot of incredible mentors in the space that have guided me along the way, could never have done it on my own. Reading books, listening to podcasts, watching webinars, listening to others and taking feedback and advice is another key part of that journey, I would say. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. That's uh not enough people talk about that, right? Like having uh one saying yes to opportunities even when you have no idea what way it's gonna go. Yeah, it could be a complete failure, which is still a great learning lesson. Yeah. Or it can go the perfect way and lead you, you know, open up doors that you never knew existed. Absolutely amazing. Now, let's talk about the reality of agencies and Amazon world that we all so most e-commerce sellers and a lot of agencies are obsessed with this return on ad spend, right? What do you think most people misunderstand about that? Yeah, I think that's a great question, a hot debate in the industry, of course. ROAS is a general guiding principle to how your ads are performing. If you spend X amount of money, how much is being driven in sales? The problem with only looking at ROAS is people don't quite understand the impact advertising has on things like your organic rank or your positioning on the page. Something that we see frequently for our high spend CPG companies and you know, large high growth brands is the more they spend, the better their organic rank is. We see it almost across the board, especially if you're very strategic with how you're deploying your ad spend. And when people look too closely at ROAS and ACOS and only want to focus on profitability, one of the things that typically will start happening is they're gonna start decreasing their organic rank on the page because the digital shelf is not infinite. You know, there's only X amount of slots on page one. If you are spending less than everyone else, you're gonna slowly start dropping down the page. And as you drop down, competitors are increasing in rank. So you get less and less visibility because you're only focused on profitability. And Amazon advertising is one of the number one influences of traffic when it comes to your Amazon listing. And traffic is one of the number one indicators of organic rank. So everyone talks about the Amazon flywheel. You uh spend more on ads, you convert well, your organic rank increases, which means more people are buying your products, more people buying your products, which means more reviews, more reviews, better conversion rate, better conversion rate, better organic rate. It's all influenced by these metrics. So you can't just look at a customer OS. You have to zoom out and you have to look at things like tacos, share of shelf, all of those fun metrics as well. Yeah, 100%. I think when people and even agencies enter the space, they tend to forget about how many factors are involved in being successful in this industry. Yes. One of the things that we're always educating our team on is not to be yes men. And what we mean by that, sometimes a brand will come to us and say, I want a 10% ACOS. That's all that matters, right? And we have to kind of push back and say, look, I can get you this ACOS DOS ROAS target, but your total revenue is going to decrease. Your profit may increase, but your total revenue is going to decrease. Your organic rank is going to decrease because we can see that all of your competitors are driving X amount of traffic more than you. So instead of just saying yes, like we see agencies often do, we try to lead strategy and push back and educate so that way brands understand the consequences of the decisions that they're making. 100%. And what do you think is one of the biggest myths that these agencies are telling their clients and even telling themselves about which drives growth? Yeah, I think that that first point is probably one of the biggest ones that we see. The ACOS ROAS dichotomy of focusing on profitability, and then my total revenue decreases, and my overall profit decreases, even though my profit percentage increased, right? That's absolutely a big one. A second one I would say, I don't know if it's a myth so much, but we're seeing a lot of disruption in the space right now is what can and what should you rely on AI for? Things like optimizing bids. From an algorithmic perspective, it's just a math equation. So we think that AI does a pretty decent job of that. Harvesting keywords is one that AI can do decently well. I think an area where we're seeing brands struggle and agencies struggle with the AI implementation is leading the strategy. How do customers actually shop on the platform? I mean, one of the ANC reports that we build into our analysis shows the time it takes a customer to check out after clicking on an ad. And I recently pulled the audience on LinkedIn, and the majority of people thought that a customer checks out within 10 minutes of clicking on an ad. That's not true. Most people actually take longer than 12 hours. So you think all of the people that want to do day partying or all of the people that turn their heads off at night because their sales are low, they're really optimizing for an algorithm, but not optimizing for human habits. Humans typically take much longer to decide, or maybe they add to cart but don't click heck out till the end of the day. So I think a huge myth or a huge mistake we see brands and agencies make is optimizing for the algorithm and not optimizing for consumer behavior and psychology. Yeah. That's such an interesting point because it's almost like you kind of have to put yourself in the seller's shoes, right? Think about your own shopping habits, your own consumer habits. Like you're when you're saying this, and I'm thinking, yeah, I do the same thing. Like it's almost like because we learned how to hack the algorithm really early on, like in the early days of selling, we forgot consumer psychology. We forgot marketing. We we forgot things like why video is important and moving up the funnel. Instead, it was like, oh yeah, I can just basically have this little slot machine of I put in$5, I get out$20. Sponsored ads are amazing. It's like, yeah, they're they are great, but you also have to consider, like you said, how do customers actually interact with your brand and shop on the platform? Yeah, exactly. I think sometimes, you know, and of course in any industry and with your own business, um, you start seeing dollar signs and you kind of start to forget about all the other things that really matter for, you know, the other side, the consumer, the human that's that's making your business be successful. Absolutely. I remember speaking at Amazon Accelerate, I think three years ago now, and Jeff Cohen and I talked about something we called the mom test. And I've had to do this frequently when I am talking to CEOs. I I basically explained to them, you know, how does your mom shop on Amazon? And we pull out an iPhone and well, it doesn't have to be an iPhone, but we pull out a phone and we go to Amazon and we type in something like electrolytes. And the first thing I do is I hold this up and I say, What's the first thing you see? Sponsor brand ad. What do you see next? Two sponsor product ads. And then you see roofing. And we go through that whole experience to put ourselves in the shoes of the customer and be like, now you understand why ads are so important. It's all you see at the top of the page. And your general customer doesn't know the difference in sponsor brands, SBV, sponsor products, videos. So, really, you know, taking the time to act like your customer, whether it's on TikTok or Amazon or in store, I think really helps break through the advertising mentality of it. Yeah, 100%. And, you know, when it comes to ad spend, people spend a lot, a lot of money. And if you don't know what to do with it, then it could be a waste, right? I mean, you have managed, you know, nine figures in ad spend. What do you think uh is one scaling mistake with that that you see a lot of sellers make over and over again? I think that we are all spoiled by how successful sponsored product ads have worked, and we forget to move up the funnel and educate our customers. We still, to this day, see underutilization of sponsor brands, underutilization of video ads, underutilization of AMC audiences. People are still trapped in this mentality that it's 2020 and keywords are the only thing that matters. But at the end of the day, keywords and bids are table stakes. Every good brand is running decent keyword optimization and bid optimization. Brands are forgetting how much more competitive the platform is and how they need to stand out. And they need to lean into things like sponsor brands videos, sponsored brands custom images, sponsored products video. That is what makes a brand stand out on the page. It's, you know, movement, it's that UG Steve UGC style. I mean, again, consumers have changed rapidly. We're now seeing TikTok shop change product discovery. And you have to take that into account when you're running Amazon advertising as well. My cat has decided to join our that are listening in. Yeah, who wants to be part of the podcast? All good. We're working welcoming all the fairy friends. We're lucky it's only one of them, if we're being honest. Yeah, so do you think that that is um you know one of the things that is separating brands from having long-term success on Amazon from the ones that are just, you know, seeing short spouts of success? Absolutely. The brands that are only running sponsored products are already behind because they need to, again, do that mom test. Go type in your number one keyword, look how competitive the shelf is. You're being compared to every other product that now has 500 reviews, four and a half stars, great content. Those things are table stakes nowadays. They're not a competitive advantage to have amazing SEO. It's not a competitive advantage to have amazing reviews. Everyone has these things. The competitive advantage is standing out. And, you know, we live in the attention economy. If you are tired of being compared just on price to every other product on the shelf, you have to lean into brand building. You have to run TV ads. You know, TV ads are the number one way to educate a customer before they even come and click on a keyword. We we manage a really large baby brand. And when we started leaning into TV ads, what we saw is one, there was an increase in branded search, which meant our customers were coming to Amazon and typing in our brand name. That's a really big moat. They're no longer seeing competitors. And we also saw an increase in our sponsored products conversion rate. So, because of A and C, Amazon now gives you the data and insights to connect things like your DSP video views to keyword searches. So hypothetically, you know, the Super Bowl just happened. We saw all these crazy commercials. Um, um, I know Mountain Dew, Coke, they always do big commercials. With Amazon DSP, you could say if someone typed in Liquid IV after watching this video ad, I want to bid more. Or let's say they typed in electrolytes because they saw the liquid IV commercial with the toilet, and I could then put a bid boost on it. So it's starting to connect that full funnel with Amazon ads, which is pretty incredible. Interesting. That is very world we live in now. Right? The technology is just gonna just get it. Um so you you said before creative is the new. And you also mentioned that people are spoiled by Amazon advertising. So, what do you think Amazon advertising still gets wrong about creative today? I think that creative is the number one way to stand out on the page. I think Amazon made it so easy for anyone to sell a product that it became a race to the bottom, right? Especially in the height of the aggregators. Everyone just kept lowering price, trying to be the number one on the page, and then realized there's no profit in that. On the flip side, we saw brands like Dude Wipes and E. Cosmetics come in and disrupt the space. And if you think of what they did differently, it's they leaned into their brand and then their creative. They told a story that resonated so well with an audience. I mean, let's talk about dude wipes. They're baby wipes, like and uh Sean, if you're listening to the oh sorry, I'm always such a anyone could have launched it. They didn't do anything insanely innovative. Sean will tell you that it was a bunch of dudes in college sitting on a couch, and they said, We're going to market a product towards a specific audience, and that audience is gonna resonate so well that they are willing to pay more to get a product specifically made for them. And because they told that brand story so well, I mean, they created a new category for men. It's exceptional. Is the product that unique? No. Is their branding, marketing, and creative unique? It's absolutely exceptional. Same thing with liquid death. Liquid death is selling beyond water. Yeah, exactly. They speak so well to a certain audience that people are willing to pay more to buy their product they resonate with it. And I think that's you know, even with Amazon advertising, we have sponsored products videos, sponsored brands videos, sponsored TV, streaming TV. The brands that are leaning into that and taking advantage of the creative opportunities are basically telling their customers we're better for you because of XYZ. And they have the ability to convert higher and have a higher price point because they're commanding a niche that no one else is. Yeah, 100%. Those are two really great case studies, actually. I I have bang roll over them. Sean Riley is one of the on uh the Better Media podcast, and he's exceptional. How he tells a story, he uh he gives the playbook for building a brand, and I think others should listen. Yeah, absolutely. You've also mentioned that brands shouldn't try to compete with uh Amazon's retail media net. What what happens when they do what breaks when they do? I in what regard? So if these brands are trying to compete, right? Like obviously we know Amazon has grown tenfold and their retail media network with that, you know, when especially newer brands are trying to compete, like in your opinion, what have you seen happen to these brands? Is it something that you know can make them more successful? Can it break their business altogether? Yeah, I think there's a few things. A lot of people don't realize how expansive Amazon's media network is nowadays. A lot of people still view it as sponsored products only. In reality, Amazon has one of the largest DSPs. So if you think Trade Desk, um, they're a direct competitor of that. They also own a lot of the TV network space andor partner with a lot of the TV network space, things like Thursday Night Football, the WNBA. Um, you think of their their own shows like The Boys, Amazon now can connect the dots between all of that media. And I gave the example earlier of, you know, Liquid IV just paid millions of dollars for the superdown Super Bowl spot. You can now connect the dots with how that Super Bowl spot affected your sponsored product's performance. So something that we've seen is instead of, you know, trying to compete and have your media spread across multiple different networks, a lot of people are consolidating it all under Amazon because now your AMC insights pull all of it together and you can help, you know, bid boost on sponsored ads based on something that's going on off-platform. So that's definitely been something incredibly advantageous, especially for brands that are used to running TV advertising, is leaning into the media network that way. I would also say that anyone who looks at the Amazon earnings can see that Amazon advertising is consistently one of the fastest growing segments of Amazon. And when we know that, we can always assume that Amazon ads are going to play a big role when it comes to things like organic rank and positioning. But also, Amazon's gonna continuously invest in making their advertising better. And I know a lot of brands are like Amazon just wants me to spend more money and steal my money. And I'm like, that's not quite true. If every Every single brand in the world had a one ROAS, Amazon wouldn't have a quick, a fast growing media network. People would go take their money and put it elsewhere. So it's advantageous for Amazon to, yes, increase advertiser spend, but to also show a strong return. So that way they keep growing and pulling in all the media budget that they're pulling. So I think those are kind of two important things that we like to consider when we're looking at the future of Amazon and how it's evolving. They're going to continue to connect the dots across retail business, ad business, TV business. And two, they're going to continue to improve the return of that business because it's advantageous to have more advertising dollars. Yeah. A hundred percent. And we've spoken a little bit about big brands, right? Um, you've had major success with a lot of big brands, like Lacoste, for example. When smaller brands think, okay, we're gonna come to an agency, um, you know, we need their assistance, and they see something like, oh, they've worked with Lacoste, and they think to themselves, okay, we're not there yet, right? They deal with these big clients, we're not there. What advice would you give to those um those businesses? And then what part of that strategy actually applies to them now, even if they're not there yet? I would say that the number one advantage small to mid-sized brands have is they move much quicker. And in the world of e-commerce, Amazon, Walmart will make an update and can disrupt the whole business. I mean, at Unboxed this year, they announced sponsored products video, and it was probably one of the biggest viral announcements that we've seen. Big brands cannot move on things like that very quick. I mean, if we take, you know, Lacoste or some of the other apparel brands we work with, they have thousands of SKUs. You know how hard it is to produce 10,000 video assets that can be used with sponsored products video? It's very difficult. Small to mid-size brands, they can take advantage of that real estate immediately. And, you know, they can also utilize AI. And bigger brands sometimes can't lean into AI due to legal issues or brand guidelines or brand safety issues. So I think that's one of the biggest things we've seen. The big brands that are successful are the ones that are moving incredibly quick and non-bureaucratic. And the small brands that we see are the ones that are testing and learning quicker than anyone else in the category and moving much quicker because they don't have the same level of risk as the big brands. Yeah. Yeah. That's such a good point that I think a lot of smaller, especially startup businesses, don't think about right. Like obviously the goal is to get there. And so that's kind of what you think about and you get stuck in that one track mind. Yeah. How can I, how can I take the situation I'm in, right, and use that to my advantage to get to there? Absolutely. I mean, we have a we have a larger CPG brand that we work with, and anytime we want to launch a sponsored brand ad, we have to get legal and creative approval. Sponsored brand ad. It's 50 characters. I don't know what we can say in 50 characters that could get a brand in legal trouble, but it it takes don't quote me on that. But I mean, it takes four weeks to get a single sponsored brand ad. And any brand listening right now can hop in and launch a sponsored brand asset in under five minutes for a normal brand. So they can just move so much quicker, which is incredibly advantageous. You can move at the speed of culture much quicker. I mean, when Taylor Swift announced her new album, I think we all saw Instagram turn orange for a month. And the brands that move quick and move at the rate of culture have an opportunity from a consumer alignment perspective, a test and learn environment, and just it's it's advantageous. Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, and you mentioned that Amazon hasn't made a ton of changes lately. Of course, they're always evolving. Uh, but they rolled out dozens of ad updates recently. Looking at you know, the rest of 2026, what do you think is one change that uh brands and businesses can't afford to ignore? Yeah. Some of the biggest updates in the last four to 12 weeks, in my opinion, have actually been around operational efficiency, which has been pretty cool. We have a lot of fun ones. Um, AMC has been rolled out to everyone, anyone listening right now. If you are not running AMC, it's a huge miss and you are the leaking money on the table. Like, I don't care if you have one ACN or 30,000 ACNs. If you aren't running AMC audiences, you are lighting money. I'm sorry. It's available to everyone nowadays, and it's a huge opportunity. You have sponsored products video, which is a big opportunity. You have sponsored prompts. Big opportunity, not seeing impressions just yet from a scalability perspective. And then you have the operational efficiency side. You have Amazon's Creative Studio um agentic partner. You can go into Creative Studio right now and prompt Amazon and say something along the lines of I am selling hand lotion. I need a streaming TV campaign, analyze the category, find my competitive advantage, and create a video for me. And it will in under an hour. No excuse to not have creative assets. Um other small things that Amazon's rolling out are like operational advantages around rules, you know, bid management rules, budget rules. They have an AI agent in ad console now that helps you find underperforming targets. It's it's never been more complex to manage Amazon ads, but if you know what you're doing, it's also never been easier. There's been major democratization around tools in creative that we've never seen before. Yeah, a hundred percent. Just like as we said, technology gets better and better every day, right? AI is only, you know, poured fuel to that fire. Things are moving so quickly. I'll wake up and you know, ClonBot has gone viral or ChatGPT has gone viral, and it's just improves so quickly that it can be over 100%. And so there's all these new Amazon tools like you've mentioned that are super beneficial for sellers. Uh, things that, like you said, at this point, why aren't you using right? Use this to your advantage. Um, on the flip side, what do you think is one critical insight that Amazon still isn't giving brands that you think um, you know, that they should be? I uh think that there's still a huge disconnect between the advertising business and the retail business. And the retail business is Amazon calls it the retail business, but it's you know, your total sales, your organic rank, just your general seller central business. Um, there's not a single dashboard where you can see tacos in Amazon. And it's like, why aren't you giving us ad spin and total sales? We know that they're connected. I would say that's probably the biggest disconnect, even going back to your first question on what's wrong with just looking at ROAS. It doesn't paint a full picture. Now, Amazon's working on fixing that. I think in the next quarter, we're gonna see, you know, better connection across everything from search to DSP to the retail business, but it's a huge miss. You know, something that we're always advising our brands on is you should be looking at search query performance before making advertising decisions. Why are you high on this keyword when you have the worst conversion rate in the in the category? And those are things that like aren't just easily viewed within Seller Central, in my opinion. Yeah, a hundred percent. Have you sent these tips to Amazon? I'll I'll probably get a message right after this podcast is posted by someone if we're being honest. Yeah, it's well for a lot of sellers, um, you know, when you kind of you can get stuck right in the process, especially when you start small and you're trying to scale, there's so many things going on, so many factors. Um, and especially when you're a smaller team, it it can be easier to feel stuck, feel burst out, um, you know, struggle with that mindset. What do you think usually needs to change first? Strategy or mindset? Mindset, absolutely. I think it's important wherever you're, whether you're a brand owner or an agency, things change quickly. It's so easy to get caught up in whatever's on fire during that day. So, one of the things that we're always advising our brands of is let us know what your long-term goals are. If you tell me your long-term goal is to exit for 50 million, but you're sending my team messages daily asking us to lower acos, lower acos, lower acos, there's a misalignment in your daily habits and your long-term goals, right? So one of the first things that I had to do as an agency owner was change my mindset because again, I would wake up and you know, we'd have one unhappy client and I would tear down our strategy and rebuild it. And it wasn't always in our best interest. I had to start taking this longer-term point of view. So that way, when I had a bad day, it was much easier to wake up the next day and still be motivated. One bad day was not a reflection of what I was trying to achieve. Our brand owners are the exact same. Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in these microhabits that are actually detrimental to our long-term goals. I mean, look at look at LinkedIn right now. You log in every day and there's a new AI hack or a new AI tip, and it's like people are destroying themselves, trying to stay up to date with every new thing possible instead of you know waking up and looking at what is my long-term goal, how do I achieve that, and then starting from the habits I think that are gonna build that success. Yeah. 100%. Um, and and speaking of LinkedIn, you have grown a massive following on LinkedIn, right? Uh, what do you think um is the best thing about content-led growth? And what do you think sellers misunderstand about content-led growth? Great question. I would say the best thing about content-led growth is the brands that have been following us for a very long time are already educated on our philosophies and strategies. So they come to us with a higher barrier of trust. And we don't have to re-educate. And brands who don't agree with my strategies probably don't reach out to us. So we have over a 95% retention rate when we ended last year. That's because the brands that come to us know what we're about and they stay with us, especially when they see the results that we've been preaching. The most misunderstood part of content and education is my content is not for everyone. It's impossible to please everyone when you're creating content. And it's taken over seven years. Like my first LinkedIn post was over seven years ago. So a lot of people see the success I've had now and they try to duplicate it with um, you know, engagement pods or AI comments. And I'm like, look, at the end of the day, I'm a big believer that the reason my content grew the way it did is because I led with a lot of authenticity and I did things that did not scale. I would hop on and answer questions from virtual assistants, and then use it as content and direct competitors would reach out to me with questions and I would answer them. And at the end of the day, again, it wasn't about revenue growth for us. It was about building a community. And that's that long-term vision that we just talked about of going back to it. If I would have tried to connect my LinkedIn content to sales early on, I would not have created content any longer. It's not always a direct correlation between a random LinkedIn post and your revenue that month. And a lot of CMOs um have a lot of CMOs will preach brand awareness and CEOs will be like, absolutely not. Thankfully, my team's bought into it and they've seen the power of it, but you definitely have to have a long-term mindset when it comes to posting content. Yeah. Yeah, that's a fair point. Um, and then obviously over these past seven years, you've scaled this agency. Um, you know, you've you've really created a network. Um, it's it's very respectable and admirable. What do you think has been the hardest um lesson as a leader for you uh as the company has scaled? Great question. I would say the philosophy of what got you here won't get you there. That is really, really important. I have to tell myself all the time. You know, the team that got me to a million dollars a year might not be the team that got me to five million. And that's not gonna be the team that's gonna get me to 50 million. You know, there's all these different stages of growth and you have to continuously evolve. You would think that, you know, after your first million, things get easy. Yeah, it does get easier because you get harder, like you mentally can handle it better, but you have to constantly, I mean, when you're in the early stages, a lot of what you can offer employees is an amazing culture, right? You can't necessarily pay top of market. You don't have the brand presence to attract amazing talent. So you have an incredible culture, and then you grow and you realize, okay, I need to have like a little bit more of a mature team framework. I need better systems, which requires a level of talent. So just it never it does get easier, but not because the work you're doing is any easier, I would say, but because you're more emotionally and mentally prepared to handle it. You're constantly though. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. And how do you think that that has changed how you lead on a day-to-day basis? In the early stages, I would say I led on just vibes. Vibes and autonomy. I would, you know, I had an incredible team and they would just do what needed to be done. And now that we've gotten bigger and bigger, it's like, oh wow, yeah, we need we need more improved systems and I need to communicate better. Yeah, I there's, you know, there's a quote of as long as you have the right people on the bus. And that's something that I've been really passionate about, is just making sure we have the right talent. And then my job is to set the vision, give them a map, and then figure out how they get there. So that's that's probably the been the biggest thing. In the early stages, it was just me being an Amazon advertising expert. And now it's much more about being a leader and a motivator and taking care of my team. And that's been a, you know, I never led a team before this. So it's a work in progress. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And how big is your team? We have we're on 30, I think, right now. Yeah. Yeah. 30 is our onshore team. Um, something that we're we're really big about is whenever we pair brands with our account managers, we want to make sure there's a strong personality fit, there's high alignment before a contract's ever signed. So that's a big focus of ours, is you know, being able to work at the same time zone, being able to communicate with whatever is necessary for the brands that we're working with. So it's 30 onshore. Awesome. Well, you know, of course, your team has grown, as you mentioned, after seven years of doing this. Um, what do you think is one belief uh that is holding most people back from starting this process, right? I'm sure at one point for these seven years, you maybe thought like else if this is possible. Yeah. What do you think is one belief that that holds people back? And where do you think that belief comes from? I would say imposter syndrome as a whole is something that I see across the industry. And a lot of people have this belief that their competitors are doing things perfectly, and that's what prevents you from starting. If I can never do something better than them, I can never do something better than them. No, like at the end of the day, it's not the perfection, it was the uh not afraid to try. You know, I I used to watch all the competitors in the space and be like, we'll never be them, we'll never figure that out, but we still tried and grown to be much bigger than quite a few of them. So I'd say that's a big one. Um, another one that I would say is relatively cool to see, and I think is also being enabled and driven forward by AI is we have a decent amount of team members who were very young and never managed Amazon advertising before, and they learned so incredibly quick. And like the biggest thing is if you attract talent that is hardworking and eager to learn, they figure things out incredibly quick. And that's been amazing. I mean, our head of our head of content marketing, uh, right out of college, brought him on board, hired him, didn't have a ton of prior experience, but was one of the most impassioned, is still one of the most impassioned, passionate people on our team. We gave him a budget to run the rebrand from Better AMS to better media, and he did it all on his own, pretty much. And it was exceptional, in my opinion, since the rebrander business is almost doubled. Our, you know, um site visits have almost tripled. But he had passion and work ethic and tools like AI that taught him what he needed to learn. So it's like again, if you give people like this general roadmap and just empower them to do the best that they can, it can be an incredible thing. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. That's amazing to hear. Um if you were starting all over, right? You can think back to seven years ago. What do you think is one thing you would completely ignore, even though everyone says that it's essential, and what would you focus on instead? Ooh. I don't know actually. I don't know if there's anything I would completely ignore. I I don't I don't know if I could answer that if we're being honest, but I I will say something that I don't think is talked about enough in the space, and I felt like was missing in my entrepreneurial journey is you start reading books on how to scale a team and how to scale systems. I I remember reading about um Zappos, I read about Google, I uh read about Microsoft. What really matters, I think, is having the self-awareness to know your strengths as an entrepreneur and build your company around that. I remember one of the first books I read was on systems building. I am not a systems person inherently. I don't like that level of structure. I like autonomy. I don't want to work for a boss that's gonna put me in a box. Like, I'm that type of person. So anytime I try to roll out systems for the team, they would just collapse because they would be like, well, you're not doing this system. Why should I do the system? So what I learned is you have to build your foundation, your culture around your personal strengths. I lead with content, influencing, and relationships. My team that I've built around me tends to do the same. Now, that being said, I had to hire for my weaknesses because I know I wasn't bad at systems. My uh partner and CEO, Alex, exceptional at systems and what we call is adulting because I'm terrible at those things. So I think that's really important is actually to start with the self-awareness and then build your team and culture around that rather than trying to be everyone else's playbook. It's not gonna work for you if it's not your strength. Yeah, 100%. And finding the people, the team members that can complement your strengths and we're humans, we're not perfect, everybody has their weaknesses as well. And you know, finding the people that are gonna fill that gap for the business, I feel is very important. Absolutely. And for somebody that either doesn't know where to start, um, maybe has been thinking of approaching an agency like yours, but doesn't know because maybe they think again they're not there yet. What do I do? Um, what advice would you give them as someone who's again very successful and very well respected in this industry? I would say the first thing is don't focus solely on price. We see this a lot, even outside of like our agency, when you know people are looking for a creative partner or supply chain partner, anything along those lines. If you only focus on price, you're gonna get what you pay for across the board. Um, the second thing I would say is find the agencies that align with your beliefs strategically and what you're trying to accomplish. And this goes back to understanding that long-term mentality that you and I talked about of find the agency that's similar to you. Even if if an agency goes, you know, I got an email the other day of an agency saying they had a 62 row ads. And I was like, that's a red flag. That's terrible. And they were promoting it like, you know, a positive. And if you're a brand and you see that, don't get caught up in the shiny objects and the excitement. Dig into their values, dig their beliefs, listen to the podcast of the founders and make sure their beliefs and values align with yours. Because again, the team is going to be built off that find founder's mindset. So those are probably like most important things. And the other one would be to like crowdsource feedback, you know, try to find someone who's worked with that agency, ask the agency for a testimonial or a review. Agency is always going to give you know their happiest client, so that doesn't always work the best. But I think that's like a content led marketing is you can see an agency's belief through their content. You know, my whole team posts content, are um head of product. An API award that he did with Amazon. So it's just like find those other resources and nuggets. Don't just fall for the sales process. Like I like to say we don't sales team, because I I'm not I'm the world's worst salesman. I think quite a ton of value, but like we're not gonna negotiate on these things. But to a extent, I would say. Yeah. 100%. I mean, you're finding somebody that's helping you build your brand, right? Like, why don't this go for the first one that looks good? Um, you know, you don't do personal life, but so why would you play with your business?

SPEAKER_01 44:36

Absolutely.

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Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, Destiny, this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you for sharing both the strategy and the real behind the scenes of running an agency, what seven years has this work has looked like, um, how to scale your business properly, what you can take and what you cannot take from Amazon. Um, this has been wonderful. Where can people reach you if they have questions or they want to get in touch with you? Yeah, of course. Uh, Better Media is our website. That's always an easy one if you're interested in working with us or finding out more about our team, our technology, or having an audit ran. Uh, if you're just interested in the content education, LinkedIn and YouTube are probably the best places. We post a lot on just here's the updates on Amazon, here's what it means for you as a brand. So that's probably where I'm most well known from a content standpoint. So definitely be out there. My name is not spelled the easiest. Uh, there's an A in an EY in there, but I'm sure you can find it if you just type in PPC Girl or something along those lines. Awesome. Well, if you got value from this episode, please make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share with other e commerce sellers who might need to hear this. Thank you again, Destiny, and to Avast for powering the online hustle podcast, and we'll see you in the next episode.