Episode Summary
In this Prime Talk Podcast Sponsored by GETIDA – Matt Edmundson – CEO & Founder of Aurion Group talks about taking offline businesses into e-commerce, also more information about his life’s journey. #mattedmundson #AurionGroup
About Matt Edmundson of Aurion Group – Matt is an eCommerce entrepreneur and coach, a digital business guy who has had more failures than successes; it is just that his successes far outweigh his failures. More importantly, he has had a great team that makes magic happen. He says that he has got a bit of a loudmouth (in a good way!), and is always bouncing new ideas around. He is someone who likes to challenge the ‘norm’ (He calls this idea undefault). He gets a kick out of developing teams so that capabilities match the company culture. He knows that ‘culture’ is the most important thing for him to focus on so that work stands for something more than just a paycheck.
Find the Full Episode Below
Yoni Mazor [00:06]
[Intro]: Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Prime Talk today. I have a special guest I’m having Matt Edmonson. Matt is the CEO and founder of Aurion Group, which is an e-commerce sales and operations management group, but he’s also a host of a popular podcast show called that eCommerce podcast.
Yoni Mazor [00:22]
So Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Edmundson [00:23]
Thanks for having me great to be here. Yeah. Great to be here. Pleasure. Really.
Yoni Mazor [00:27]
Our pleasure. So today, is going to be the episode of you right the story of Matt Edmondson. So, you’re going to share with us, who are you, where are you from?
Where were you born? How’d you begin your professional career and where you are today with the world of e-commerce. So, I guess without further ado, let’s jump right into it.
Matt Edmundson [00:44]
So, let’s go for it. Brilliant. Well, like I say, thanks for having me on the show. Hopefully I won’t bore you too much with the story here.
So, as you can probably tell from my accent, I live in the UK. I’m proudly British and I was born in a place called Derby, which if you were to put a drawing pen right in the middle of England, that would be Derby, right? It’s quintessentially the most boring town on the planet. Yeah. It really is.
Yoni Mazor [01:10]
Yeah. But if it’s in the center of the UK, the United Kingdom, it’s pretty much it’s the center of the world. No?
Matt Edmundson [01:15]
No, definitely not Derby no. [laughter] Yeah. Something like that. So, I grew up in Derby. I did school and Derby and then I moved to North Carolina. So, then I lived in North Carolina for a while.
Yoni Mazor [01:30]
So, North Carolina, United States. Yeah. How old were you when you made the move?
Matt Edmundson [01:36]
I was 18, so yeah, I’d finished school here, high school, done college moved over to the states.
Yoni Mazor [01:46]
And you move by yourself or with our family or what was the trigger?
Matt Edmundson [01:47]
Oh no just me. At school, we did this thing where, once you finish what we call 8 levels, which is the end of your education and when you’re 18, you could go straight off to university to do your degree.
Actually, I didn’t want to do that. And one of the things they encouraged us to do at the school I went to was to take some time out before going off to college or university.
And just to sort of think about, you know, life a little bit more. So, I got a volunteer position at a children’s home in North Carolina.
I was supposed to go teach English as a foreign language in China. I really wanted to go live in China for a little bit.
Because you know, all the Kung Fu movies, and that, that kind of all fell through last minute. So, the organization, I was where they said, listen, we’ve got this sort of vacancy at a children’s home called Nazareth Children’s Home in North Carolina. Would you be up for doing that?
Yoni Mazor [02:37]
Was that in Nazareth the children’s home?
Matt Edmundson [02:39]
Yeah, Nazareth’s children’s home. It’s in a place called Rockwell, which is near Salisbury. I said, well, sure, why not? You know, what have I got to lose? So, 18 years old jumped onto a plane and met a very beautiful lady who became like my American mum or should I say mom. My American mom called Gwen at the airport. She picked me up in a Chrysler that had the biggest, we call them bonnet [inaudible 03:06] call them hoods. It was the biggest hood on a car I’d ever seen. She drove me to the children’s same where I stayed for many, many, many happy months and worked there and volunteered there.
Yoni Mazor [03:17]
What year that? Let’s slap a year on this when you moved to Atlanta?
Matt Edmundson [03:22]
I left in 91 because no, no 92: So, I left there in 1992 and I went there in 91: So, 91 to 92, I think it was because I started university straight as I got back, which was 1992: So, a while ago.
Yoni Mazor [03:40]
So yeah, not too well, not too long ago actually in my work, but I’m going to go. So, 91 to 92 North Carolina, I guess what was the next station? What was the next station you stayed in the United States?
Matt Edmundson [03:51]
So [pause] No, I made it back to the UK and came to a town, which you’ve probably heard of called Liverpool.
It’s very well-known town. I came here to do my studies, which was 30 years ago, and I’ve stayed here since met my wife here.
My kids are all Scousers, which is, you know, what we call people born in Liverpool. I would say I’m a Scousers.
Yoni Mazor [04:11]
What do you call them one more time?
Matt Edmundson [04:12]
Yeah. Scouser.
Yoni Mazor [04:14]
So how do you pronounce that?
Matt Edmundson [04:15]
So, S C O U S E R Scouser.
That’s what you call someone born and bred Liverpool.
Yoni Mazor [04:23]
Scouser, wow and so I got it.
Matt Edmundson [04:25]
Yeah. Liverpool’s great. The very strong accent here makes you feel instantly at home. Very similar, actually it’s North Carolina and a lot of respects, you know, they’ve got a very different accent, but a very strong accent playing in the south.
Yoni Mazor [04:36]
Yeah. They got the twang in the south.
Matt Edmundson [04:37]
Yeah. Yeah. Here, you know, very much, something very, very twangy. I love the accent and yeah, I’ve been here 30 years. Love Liverpool, very vibrant, very entrepreneurial, very get up and go Northern city, in the UK measure for right.
Yoni Mazor [04:57]
Is it still a major port? Yeah.
Matt Edmundson [04:59]
Yeah, it is still a major port. Yeah, and actually, a lot of the buildings in Liverpool, if you have a visit along the waterfront built off the back of the slave trade. So very strong links like with Richmond in the states and the shipping of slaves and yeah, I mean, it’s not got a brilliant history. But you know…
Yoni Mazor [05:14]
Yeah, in a way the connecting United States south, Liverpool gets shipped what slaves into the south end of the United States back in the day. Was that a kind of a route?
Matt Edmundson [05:23]
Yeah, they came, they came from Africa via ports, like Liverpool before heading over to the states. And so, yeah, it’s got strong links with the slave trade, so it’s got a very murky dark past. In a lot of respects and a lot of its wealth was built then, but after the slave trade crumbled, you know, where the likes of will force and all those sorts of ghosts. It became quite a poor city. So, when I was here 30 years ago it was quite a poor city, Liverpool.
Yoni Mazor [05:56]
Liverpool in 92: Same time you got back From a North Carolina. Got it.
Matt Edmundson [05:59]
Pretty much straight ahead to Liverpool. It was like a month. I was here.
Yoni Mazor [06:04]
Yeah. So, when you got there 92, give us a snapshot. How does it feel to look like?
Matt Edmundson [06:08]
So, like I say, Liverpool was quite a poor city, very working class. We’d had a lot of riots in the 1980s here. There was a lot of poverty.
Yoni Mazor [06:17]
When you say riots, who was rioting? I guess who and for what reason?
I find it odd in the United Kingdom, there are riots against something.
Matt Edmundson [06:24]
Yeah. There were riots against, basically against the government. The government and Margaret Thatcher at the time was probably the least most popular person in Liverpool. She and Liverpool did not get along at all in any way. I think we had corrupt local government here and a lot of wealth was squandered, and plunge the city into a lot of debt, which has taken it a lot. I mean, now it’s chalk and cheese. 30 years later, you know, the, the leaders of the city have done a remarkable job, turned it around us. Now it’s one of the most desirable places in the UK to live, the real estate market is doing very well here. It’s very buoyant. There’s a lot of people coming in, a lot of jobs being created here. It feels like Liverpool is sort of a bit more of a metropolis than it once was. When I moved to Liverpool you would rarely hear international voices. You would hear a lot of local accent and dialect. Whereas now it is much more cosmopolitan, much more international. You know, you can walk down the street and talk to 20 different nationalities.
Yoni Mazor [07:26]
I think also the football team is very popular on a global level. I do believe LeBron, James, he’s an arsenal, right? Who’s the owners of Liverpool right now?
Matt Edmundson [07:36]
The guys that own it are the guys from Fenway sports.
They own the Boston red Sox.
Yoni Mazor [07:37]
Oh yeah.
Matt Edmundson [07:38]
And so, Liverpool actually is worth more than the Boston red Sox think as their most valuable asset.
Yoni Mazor [07:48]
Yeah. It’s a popular global, you know, football slash soccer team.
Matt Edmundson [07:53]
Yeah. It is. It’s the reason I moved here. It was a real, I chose.
Yeah. It wasn’t because of the school. The school was okay. I went to the university of Liverpool, stood there. Great. You know, university, if you’re ever thinking about the university,
Yoni Mazor [08:02]
Remind me who was playing in the nineties with Liverpool. Remember the names again.
Matt Edmundson [08:06]
Oh, so you had all kinds of people throughout the years. You’ve had Ian Rush. You’ve had Michael Owen. You’ve had Robbie Fowler. You had Stevie Gerards you know.
Yoni Mazor [08:16]
So, I know all four names; I take pride in that it’s pretty good. Oh, Well done.
Matt Edmundson [08:19]
Good on you. Do you watch football or soccer?
Yoni Mazor [08:23]
So, what I did, when I was in, high school. I did a kind of a whole project about the premier league and I it’s all the time. So, I got up like a plus, my teacher was from London, so she was, she was very fond of about the fact that it’s all premier league in England and the whole thing. So, I was able to learn about the teams, the teammates, and also the, the British geography because of that Lester and Dorfman and all these more because of the teams.
Matt Edmundson [08:51]
Yeah. So, that was always one of the things that surprised me about North Carolina, actually, when I lived was the amount of people who didn’t know where England was or have any kind of concept of the geography of England.
Yoni Mazor [09:05]
Because America is the only place on earth in America. That it’s pretty big. It’s pretty vast.
Matt Edmundson [09:10]
Yeah. I would say, I would say yes back then, maybe not so much now because of the internet, I remember having a conversation with, the cook, the children’s home. She was lovely lady actually. She said to me, are you going back home for the holidays as coming back home for Christmas? And I said, yeah, sure. I’m flying into London. And then she was like, “are you going to fly to England after that?” I was like they’re the same thing. It’s a sort of [inaudible 09:35] conversation. One person asked me once, which I’ll never forget what language we spoke in England, which tickled me silly. I really, really appreciate that question.
Yoni Mazor [09:49]
Speak English in England. Yeah. It’s kind of in the word, but all right. So, let’s take this a bit on the highway, right. So, you went to move to Liverpool. You studied. what’d you study?
Matt Edmundson [09:59]
Accounting and law and accounting.
Yoni Mazor [10:01]
Okay. So, you, what year did you graduate? Graduate? 95: And If I asked about three or four years. Okay. And what was your first station after college?
Matt Edmundson [10:11]
So, as soon as I finished school, got my degree, I went and volunteered for a year, with my local church. I worked for them for a year.
Yoni Mazor [10:23]
The second year you volunteer, one North Carolina and one in Liverpool.
Matt Edmundson [10:26]
Yeah, yeah. I’m a big fan of it. Like my son is now 19 and I’ve got a son who’s 17, who’s thinking about university. Actually, my oldest son didn’t, he went straight to UNI. But I’m a big fan of taking some time out before going to university or college, just to figure yourself out a little bit. You know, just take a break from education, understand who you are as a person and what you stand for. Because actually that’s quite hard to figure out in school. Because there’s so much going on around you and you can get sucked in to so much.
I was a big fan of doing the voluntary work. During that a year before university and a year after made a lot of sense to me.
Then after I’d done my voluntary work, I ended up working for a friend of mine who was an entrepreneur, was running a business. I really wanted to remain in business. I always had run my own businesses back in school. I thought I’m going to go work for him because he can mentor me in what it means to be an entrepreneur. I really respected him and really liked him as a business.
Yoni Mazor [11:31]
What kind of industry?
Matt Edmundson [11:32]
So, this was in the health spa industry. We installed, saunas and steam rooms and all those kinds of things. It was an emerging market in the UK at the time. We imported the men from Germany and, you know, installed them here in the UK. The business just absolutely took off. I mean, not just because I was part of it, but it was a great business to get into it.
Yoni Mazor [11:58]
Is it a brand-new business, is he established your friend? Was it already there and then you kind of tagged along?
Matt Edmundson [12:04]
He had been in business for a number of years, but when I joined the sauna thing, it just really got started. It was kind of a new venture for him. And so, yeah, when, when I joined it was, it was, that was quite new. Then that took off because the, the reason it was different, not because saunas were new to the UK, they weren’t at all. The reason it was different was because everybody was used to spending like $3,000 or $4,000 on a sauna if that, you know. They were just a simple wooden box; you’d put by a swimming pool or whatever. We were coming in and say, no, you don’t want to spend 4,000 pounds on a sauna. You want to spend 40,000 on a sauna. You know what I mean? These, these were beautiful, high-end bespoke type units. We just had a big time and I worked with Simon for like five years and absolutely loved it. There was one year I’ll never forget it. We have something in the UK called the times, top 10 rich list. It comes out every year. The times is one of our newspapers here and it prints a list. It names like the top. I think it’s the top 100 richest people in the country. And you can see, you know, who’s moving up and down the rich list in the UK or the times top 10 rich list in one year. Most of those guys, I had them in my mobile phone because I was working with them on some projects somewhere. I’d flown on their private jet. So, I’d stayed in that ski chalets, you know, in Kosovo. There are all kinds of things that I had done at this point in my life.
Yoni Mazor [13:35]
What was your role and in the company? What was your evolution in the combo? Where’d you start and then five years?
Matt Edmundson [13:42]
I started just working with Simon, doing whatever we needed to do, and I ended up being the director of the business. I mainly did sales and health spa design. I designed a lot of health spas. I oversaw the installation, a kid in my early twenties to me, and I’m enjoying the ride. It was phenomenal.
Yoni Mazor [14:01]
Really Nice. Any of these wealthy people, owners of football teams at all?
Matt Edmundson [14:05]
No. Although there is a funny story actually, I can’t name names obviously, but one of the guys, I was having a conversation with him in Germany. I’ll never forget it. He is incredibly wealthy. He was a big Manchester United fan, and yeah, that’s a problem for a Liverpool fan. There’s massive rivalry between the two clubs. We sat there, just joking. I’m giving him a bit of stick because he’s a MU fan he’s given me stick because I’m a Liverpool fan and you know; the conversation is great. I just said to him jokingly, one day, why would you not buy Manchester United football club? Because, you know, the Glazers had bought it at this point, I think, and they weren’t doing, they weren’t testing.
Yoni Mazor [14:41]
They were fledgling in the late nineties and early 2000’s.
Matt Edmundson [14:44]
Yeah. They’re just not, you know, the fans don’t like them.
I said, well, why don’t you buy the club?
Yoni Mazor [14:51]
There are not actually doing great. I’m sorry, my bad. I thought Manchester the city.
Matt Edmundson [14:56]
Manchester United. Yeah, they did well as a club, but they got bought out by some people who weren’t well received by the fans. Glazer. I just remember having this very surreal conversation with this guy about why he should maybe think about buying Manchester United football club. Actually, he could have done it and he thought about it.
He just said to me at the end, do you know what the reason I’m not going to do that is because I just like my money too much. I just thought was a very fascinating comment, but I’d never really had a conversation before with someone that could actually buy a football club.
Yoni Mazor [15:35]
I mentioned the Manchester net is a series a gig because it’s also, I believe a public company that’s traded on, on the stock market, at least in England or something.
Matt Edmundson [15:41]
Right.
Yoni Mazor [15:42]
That was a serious move. Okay. So, five years into the mix, while you’re in the [inaudible 15:49] for and move to the next station.
Matt Edmundson [15:50]
So, in 2001 Simon sold the business. I parted ways with the new owners is probably a polite way to put what happened. We did not see eye to eye. So, at this point I then started my internet business. I’d been doing internet stuff part time to sort of like a side hustle as we now use the phrase. I’d started programming websites in 1998 just to see if I could do it. And I would work during the day and then spend hours at night, figuring out websites. In 2002 we started the internet business. That was the year I did my first ever e-commerce website.
Yoni Mazor [16:36]
There you go. Welcome to the world of e-commerce. So, what was your first step stone in the industry? What are you doing?
Matt Edmundson [16:41]
So, the first website we did was a website called Tenmat, which I won’t go into the etymology of the name. But we started this website Tenmat it was quite a fascinating business, because one of the things that we did with the health bar installations was a lot of that included sunbeds, right? You could get us some bed in a room.
There still is a company here in the UK, which sold a lot of some beds supplies. I was friends with those guys. We supplied them products, which we import them from the states. We knew them. I just said to them, listen, can I sell your products on a website? I want to try this online selling thing. I don’t really have anything to sell, so let me sell your stuff. And then I’ll just buy off you as, and when I sell it, is that okay, made this really loose agreement with them and they were great guys. They said, Matt, just do whatever you want to do. We’ll figure it out and we’re like, cool. We set up this website, Tenmat, and very quickly it started to take off, which was great. I rewrote the website, made it much more appealing.
Yoni Mazor [17:47]
What did you write it on?
Matt Edmundson [17:51]
So, the first site was in a piece of software called Actinic, which I think is still around actually. Then the second site, I actually wrote all the code from scratch using PHP.
Yoni Mazor [18:03]
Yep. You wrote it all yourself or with a team back then?
Matt Edmundson [18:04]
No. I was doing all this myself by then. I was figuring it all out.
Yoni Mazor [18:03]
How are you driving traffic into, in those early days into your website?
Matt Edmundson [18:13]
This was back in the day when you could say I’ll build it and they’ll come because we were the only really one of the only places on the planet. You could buy something.
Yoni Mazor [18:20]
Nothing, fancy, nothing sophisticated, you scrapped it all together. And traffic was just coming in and buying like magic.
Matt Edmundson [18:25]
Absolutely. You can go to, I think it’s, what’s it called way back machine or way back into net or something like that. You can see early iterations of the site, Tenmat.com and it was great. Six months later after we built it, we sold it to the guys who I was in effect buying the product from. They bought it from us, and they took it on.
Yoni Mazor [18:45]
It was the brand. The brand eventually bought the website. That was kind of something good. That’s interesting. All right. What was the next station after that?
Matt Edmundson [18:53]
Oh, geez. So, then we just get into more and more websites.
We get into more and more stuff online. We try various different things and then nothing really of any significant way.
Yoni Mazor [19:02]
When you say we it sounds like there’s already a team behind you.
Matt Edmundson [19:03]
Yeah. So, there is me and my then business partner. We hired our first ever guys fresh out of UNI, a guy called Mark. Mark actually still works with me today.
He’s now the head of technical. It’s funny, isn’t it, how these things come about. When he joined us, he looked 12: Today he still looks 12: He’s just one of these guys that sort of never ages.
Yoni Mazor [19:27]
Was he tanning in those machines? [laughter]
Matt Edmundson [19:30] [laughter]
Yeah. He went into the sun as the spas. So, Mark, came out of UNI with his electronics degree and in effect. I taught him how to write code. I don’t do this anymore because he is way more advanced than I am way. He’s taken it to a whole new level.
But I told him matzoh to write the code and he got into the basics of that. We started to develop websites and businesses at the same time. Bizarrely, the company that we sold soreness for, and the German company got back in touch and said, listen, it’s not working with the new buyers. How about we have a conversation that contract’s coming to an end. I now run into businesses.
I go back into the house by business and I’m also running the internet business.
Yoni Mazor [20:17]
There’re two threads of the past came into the future, right? The company you were in supplying stuff for tanning, right? So, you have that relationship, you build on that, and you made ecommerce website and you sold it to them. Then the actually German company of those saunas, they reached out back to you and you, went into the business that you were running before that, but this is true. This is offline business. Yeah.
Matt Edmundson [20:39]
It started off as offline. Yeah. One of the ways that we actually grew that business was because we had the web design. We were like, right for that, our strategy is going to be simple. We’re going to have the best website, out of all our competitors, we’re going to have our best of the best website.
Yoni Mazor [20:54]
The website is just going to showcase the catalog, the designs and Bush orders. So, so you get, ordered any sort of custom, you got to come in and really customize it to the facility of a client.
Matt Edmundson [21:05]
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We understood who the target market was with our website. It wasn’t actually the end client; the target market was architects. We promoted that, knowing what we know about digital marketing, using Google ad words and all that sort of stuff was that was then starting to take off to architects. For the longest time, that was our strategy. We’ll just have the best digital experience and that in effect what got our foot through so many doors and how many people found us.
Yoni Mazor [21:37]
Is that offline business merged into your online track? Then in the online tracking of that route and which other tracks or categories are you selling in?
Matt Edmundson [21:46]
So, what happened was in 2006, a friend of mine who I got to know through the health spa game a guy called Andy. Andy was involved in a chain of health clubs here in the UK with a business partner and then they split the business up.
So, the business partner took all the UK sites and Andy took two health club sites on an island called Jersey. Jersey is just a small island off the north coast of France. It’s kind of a beautiful place as 45 square miles. It’s sort of independently British it’s English. Everyone speaks English.
Everyone is English. They’re covered by the English military, and it has its own parliament. It has its own sort of set of rules and the way it does things. Jersey is a lovely place.
Yoni Mazor [22:40]
Is it like a tax Haven of some kind or no?
Matt Edmundson [22:41]
Yeah, yes. More so than he more so it used to be more so than it is now. Andy said to me, in 2006, Matt we’ve got to start creating some income, what’s you reckon. I was like, Andy, you really need to be selling products online. Right. Because you’re in Jersey. Jersey at the time had a VAT or tax sales tax advantage that no one else enjoyed.
I’m like, we, you know, let’s throw something together on online, up or the website you’ve got the products. He was like, yeah, sure, okay, let’s do that. Started this website called Jersey Beauty Company, just literally off the back of a conversation like that. We launched it August 2006: We did a little bit of research as much as we could do back then. We were like, okay.
So, we think between now and the end of 2006: The next four months we should be able to sell about $10,000 worth of product. Right.
Yoni Mazor [23:38]
What are the categories of these products?
Matt Edmundson [23:41]
They were beauty products. Andy and his health club had a few beauty treatment rooms. They sold these sorts of moisturizers and cleansers and toners and things like that. They sold those through the beauty rooms, and they did okay. I don’t know how much they sold $20,000 – $30,000 a year, but he did. All right. We were like let’s just put those online. Let’s sell those and see what happens. We thought let’s same for $10,000 in the first four months. Well, by December 2006 they had not sold 10,000 pounds worth of products on this website, in fact, 400,000 pounds worth of products have been sold. So, 40 times what we were expecting, and it was chaos, you know what I mean? It was an unbelievable problem to solve, both from the website of things, the technology side of things, but also from the practical side of things. How do you ship these things out? How do you, how do you pick and pack the boxes so quick? Because by the time
Yoni Mazor [24:42]
So, you have to pick it, pack it in Jersey island and ship it to the mainland.
Matt Edmundson [24:46]
Yeah. That’s what they have to do. It was complex and the tax laws were complex, and it caused all kinds of different scenarios that we had to try and resolve.
And we learned very early on that actually, there was nothing you couldn’t really sell with a bit of ingenuity from a technology point of view. If you just sat and thought about something long enough, there was a solution to most problems with one exception. That problem was the stupidness of humanity. You can’t resolve that with technology, but you fundamentally can change and deal with most things. They were some phenomenal years, and the business grew rapidly.
Yoni Mazor [25:30]
Was that like an earth-shattering moment to you personally and professionally? I guess, entrepreneurially realizing this has great power here in this e-commerce space we’re building. We expect to 10,000 and we got 400,000 and you thought I’m good. I’m set. Or was your it more like, what’s the next peak? Or what was the next stage?
Matt Edmundson [24:46]
Yeah. Our mind then became all about growth. How can we grow and how can we grow and how do we develop this and how do we take this forward?
How do we? No one was sitting on their laurels. At the same time, we weren’t crazy.
A lot of businesses were running that a lot of e-commerce businesses at the time were making massive losses for customer acquisition. We never did that. We never followed that strategy.
Yoni Mazor [26:13]
I would assume you were profitable from the get-go.
Matt Edmundson [26:16]
Yeah, absolutely. Whatever we sold on the website, we always pre-bought. I wouldn’t order stuff from a supplier and take an invoice and then try and pay that invoice 30 days later. We just didn’t do that. We always had this policy, which said, whatever we need, we buy. Cause then at least everything on the shelves is ours. If it all goes a bit wrong. And that was a policy we took, early on the decision, Andy actually made very early on in the process. I think in hindsight that was one of the things that saved us.
Yoni Mazor [26:51]
Hold on. So, the strategy was to set up some sort of market research and understand where the demand will be, and you buy that, and you own that. Was that the strategy?
Matt Edmundson [27:01]
Yeah, we kind of, we very quickly, we could start to predict what people wanted.
Yoni Mazor [27:06]
How did you do that? What was the mechanism or what was the date?
Matt Edmundson [27:09]
So just looking at the data. By the time you’ve sold a hundred thousand pounds worth of product with inside of a few weeks, you know, what your popular products are, you know, the main things that people want. 80% of your sales are going to come from just 20% of your products, the 80-20 rule, right? So, you can, you can figure out what those four or five bestsellers are going to be quite quickly. We just stocked up on those and it just became that whole thing. The profits in the first few years were just all about buying stock, buying stock and building up the stock holding.
Yoni Mazor [27:43]
I guess there’s two packages. Again, the growth strategy was okay, I can buy a portfolio of products and let the market do its thing, recognize where the power is and then keep compounding on that. That was kind of it.
Matt Edmundson [27:56]
Yeah, totally. It was all organic. There was no outside investment. There was no, like I say, invoicing, ther
