Post Purchase PRO - Profitable Email Marketing For Amazon Sellers

EP#143 Scaling Global Remote Teams: A Chat with John Cavendish

• Post Purchase PRO - Seth Stevens & Shawn Hart • Season 4 • Episode 143

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"The key to success in e-commerce isn't just about having the right product—it's about having the right support system in place."

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of Amazon operations with John Cavendish, the CEO and founder of Seller Candy. With a team of over 70 Amazon experts, John and Seller Candy take the headache out of seller support, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on scaling their businesses. John shares his journey in e-commerce, from founding successful ventures like ecomDNA and Magnet Virtual Assistants to living in Ho Chi Minh City and hosting The Amazon Strategist Show.

Key Takeaways:

  • Simplifying Amazon Operations: Learn how Seller Candy provides unlimited support and solutions inside Seller Central, helping you avoid the hassle of onboarding and training new team members.
  • Focus on Growth: Discover how Seller Candy can handle the complexities of Seller Central, so you can concentrate on growing your business.
  • E-commerce Expertise: Insights from John's wealth of experience in e-commerce, including his Amazon-centric supplement brand and his passion for personal development and Tony Robbins' teachings.
  • Scaling Remote Teams: Strategies for effectively managing and scaling global remote teams in the e-commerce space.

Resources Mentioned:

SPECIAL OFFER: Head over to sellercandy.com and schedule a consultation to see how Seller Candy can streamline your Amazon operations, or visit sellerunderground.com for exclusive membership discounts.



Welcome to the Post-Purchase Pro Podcast. This is the only podcast that dives deep into post-purchase marketing to help Amazon sellers increase sales, rankings, reviews, and profits. It's everything that happens after the initial sale that makes a difference. We call this the back end. Hey, everyone. In this episode today, we have something really special to share with you. Not only are we going to be talking with one of my favorite people in the Amazon space, but we're also going to be talking about a really interesting topic that I think is going to be really helpful for anybody that is running a business online. Our guest today is John Cavendish, the CEO of Seller Candy. John and his team of over 70 Amazon experts help entrepreneurs eliminate the headaches of seller support, allowing them to focus on growing their business while Seller Candy handles the complexities of Seller Central. John, Cool. Great. Thanks. I mean, I think I'm 12 hours ahead of you. So great. And it's late. 10pm right now. Yeah, getting late. Are we live? Are we live at the moment? We are live at the moment. Wow. Yeah. All kinds of fun stuff today. Yeah. So I know in this one today, we're going to be talking about building remote teams and just like how to scale that, you know, globally. But something I'm really interested in, just as somebody that's always wanted to travel a ton. I hear a lot of people talking about like Indonesia and Thailand, but Vietnam is something that I don't usually hear often. And I wanted to see how you came to that. And from your accent, you Yeah. No, I mean, so yeah, just to let everyone know, I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, we're actually moving up to Da Nang in central Vietnam next week, moving house. Um, and I've been here for eight and a half years. So time has passed quickly as it always does. And I came traveling here in 2011 and I did a backpacking trip, you know, the standard Southeast Asia. If you ever do that with you and, um, down through Vietnam, across Cambodia into Thailand, that was kind of like the, the trail to do a backpacking trip. And I loved it. Like back in 2011, I was like, this is awesome. If I can make some, well, actually I thought I was going to get a job and move over there. Cause I was an engineer back in the day. And then when I got a little bit later, I was back in 2013. I was like, if I can make $2,000 a month on the internet, I can go and live in Vietnam because it's super cheap to live over there. Um, then in 2015, when I started making money in 2014, 2015, when I started making money on Amazon, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go live in Vietnam for three months. And now it's eight and a half years later and we're in 2024 and I'm still in Vietnam. Like, nine months a year, three months a year traveling around US, Europe, No, that's awesome. Uh, was there anything specific about Vietnam that drew you to that over some of the other countries you traveled to during your Um, so Vietnam's got a great mix, like it's super convenient. So there's like an app for everything. People are super nice, easy to get around. Uh, food's amazing, great internet everywhere, like literally everywhere. Um, And it's just a great mix of everything. Like I feel like Ho Chi Minh City is a good mix of like, if you've been to Thailand, like mix between Bangkok and Chiang Mai, which are the two kind of big cities people go to. It's more developed than Chiang Mai, but more local feeling than Bangkok, which is like a mega city. Indonesia's got Bali, which is super cool, but Bali's now overrun with Russians from, you know, since all the crazy stuff going on there. So I think it's a good mix. And, you know, then I met my wife. She's Vietnamese. And, you know, we love living here, to be honest. Every time we go travel around, it's nice to be back and back into the convenience and Yeah, well, that's awesome. Thank you for the insight. I mean, I'm looking at doing a trip next year, so I was looking at Korea or Vietnam specifically, so I think I might have to stop by and say hi. I've been trying to convince a few friends to go with me so there can be group of like Yeah, I'll give you a itinerary. It all depends on time of year, because Korea is super cold in the winter and super hot in the summer. So if you go to Korea, depends on the time. Vietnam is pretty much the same all year Awesome. Awesome. Getting into what the primary focus was for the episode is, once you actually got to Vietnam and you started your Amazon business, but what really got you to the point where instead of just John, it started to become more of like a team focus, you know, going from like a lone wolf operator to, or a solopreneur over to Yeah, so I mean, I started out like anyone else who starts out hiring their first employees by hiring cheap people with no experience and making loads of mistakes. And that's what always goes super well, isn't it? So I was making like $20,000 a month, I think by the end of 2015. I was like, I'm going to hire an assistant and make a million dollars next year in revenue. And so I had this girl and I was like, we're going to make a million dollars next year. And she was like, yeah, whatever. And we did a million dollars in the next year in revenue. And I think it was also right place, right time. It was a good time to be in the industry, a good time for things to grow. I wasn't that smart at the time. And if I'd known what I know now, that business would be a $10 million exit and I would have been retired already, based on a piece of paper. But yeah, that was that. And then as I grew and as I hired more people, I got more experienced at hiring and training and hiring people that were actually competent and knew how to do what we were supposed to be doing. And I opened office in Vietnam and Saigon and then I had a bunch of people and I realized you shouldn't just hire people because they're local. So I closed the office and started hiring remotes because I wanted to hire the best person in the world or at the best price for this role wherever they need to be. And I realized I could find much better people who were willing to work from home anywhere in the world, whether it's the US or UK or Vietnam or the Philippines. And that's what really took us off in terms of having a really good team is that I had the best people for the role rather than like, oh, I've got to find somebody within 10 miles of my house, which is difficult. Yes. Uh, have, have you like, I, I assume you've had difficulties with people being all over, like you got multiple time zones to manage. Did you want everybody to conform to specific time Oh, I made so many mistakes, um, on this as well. Cause you know, I think we all have this like egalitarian idea that everyone can be self managed. figure stuff out for themselves and just get the work done. And that works if you have everyone up here. But as soon as you start having delivery people and middle management, middle management is fine, but delivery level or frontline people, without structure, people tend to, as they say, you give someone enough rope, they'll hang themselves. Without structure, everything tends to get a little bit nuts. So the mistake I initially was giving everyone freedom and just saying, Just make sure it gets done, because that's how I would like to be managed. That didn't work that well after a year or so. And we started getting more and more structured and times and shift times. And I'm still flexible and our leadership team is flexible. But our delivery team, because we interact with clients very much specifically between these hours, they have to respond within a certain amount of time. We have a lot of metrics and KPIs and performance Gotcha. And speaking of KPIs, so I know one thing that some people do when they have remote teams is they'll have like a time tracker slash like screen tracker to make sure that the team members are staying on task. Do you guys use anything like that? Or do you purely rely on KPIs to Yeah, we don't use any of that. I believe on giving responsibility, not on giving tasks. So, you know, at least with our, anyone that I interact with, everyone has responsibilities. If I'm responsible for something, then that's when it's going to get delayed because I'm all over the place and not, you know, not necessarily most organized, but also I'm pulled in a million directions. The way we work as a business, because the way Seller Candy works, we work through a system. So in that system, we can track response times, quality of responses, all this kind of stuff directly through the Seller Candy system. So when clients interact with us, they can monitor, they can mark how good we were, how quickly we responded. So it's very data-based, which makes KPIs really easy to implement. So we can see who's not performing based on the data in the system, as opposed to having to do screen recording and monitoring, because who's going to look at that? The only time you ever look at that is when someone's not performing, and Yeah, I... I heard it from somebody else as well, that it's just not like it doesn't promote like a very good culture when you have to use screen recording to track everybody. And it's easier if you can, just like you said, use some sort of KPIs. Well, you should have KPIs in place in the first place. But you know what I mean? Like it makes a lot more sense to, you know, give people a little leeway. But like, as far as you know, tracking how they get stuff done, but using the KPIs to say, okay, they they are actually doing their job, or they're exceeding, or they need improvement, and so on. Yeah, totally agreed. Sorry, just space for a second. So, in terms of, like, When you started doing hiring, or let's say in my case, like, let's say I'm starting a company now. And I'm wanting to start hiring people in different places throughout the world. So I can get not only the best talent, but optimize for everything as far as cost and the right person, right team everything. Do you usually work on like a referral basis? Or do you like to go through job boards? It's a good question. It depends on the level of the person and what we want them to do. If it's like a senior person, like a leader or someone of that nature, usually I try and go through referrals first. Do we know anybody in our network? I'd reach out to you. I'd reach out to someone else and say, hey, do you know anyone who might be a good fit for this role? Then there's headhunters. So there's some good headhunters we've used in the past who can help shortlist people who'd be good for senior roles. And then if we're doing frontline hires, then if we're hiring in the Philippines, we'd use onlinejobs.ph as initial. If we're hiring somewhere else, we'd use a different job board, and then we'd just go through the job boards. And we actually now have a recruiter. So we have a recruiter on the team. All she does is go through job boards, sort CVs, do first interviews just continuously. And we build up pools as well of candidates, because if we've got a lot of people, we have some turnover, especially a frontline team. So to make sure we have a continuous supply of excellent candidates to replace anyone that may churn Gotcha. And do you have any insight into, when hiring people for these specific roles, really like what we should be looking Yes, a lot. But it depends on the role. So let's say we always do personality testing. So I'm a big fan of DISC, D-I-S-C, personality profiles. There's a load of different tools you can do DISC tests on. A friend of mine has a software called RAMP, R-A-M-P. I'm sure it's not ramp.com because I bet someone else owns that, but ramp.something. They have like a really good personality tester and you can test in bulk and just get from all of your applicants. The cool thing about that is you can like, okay, what do I want? I want an accountant. All right, well, what personality should an accountant have? They should be super conscientious and then maybe they have some stuff around it. So, okay, I need a high conscientious person. Oh, this person tested as all I, which is opposite of C. What's I stand for? Do you remember? Interpersonal communication. Something to do with communication anyway. Dominance, I, stability, contentiousness. And if they have super high I, they're going to be a terrible bookkeeper. No matter how good you think they're going to be, they're going to be a terrible bookkeeper because the I people are motivated by continuous variety, like connecting with people, having fun, not sitting behind spreadsheets all day, making sure the data is right. So we personality type them. We interview them for culture first, so our company values, we have our recruiter do that. Then they have a technical interview to make sure they're technically competent. We've made that mistake before. They can talk, but they can't do it. Then they have a final interview with someone else. Then I always meet them again at the end. to okay them. And this is just a tip from me. I think that people, especially in the Philippines, they get attached to the person that interviewed them last because they sign them off. So if it's your company, great for you to meet everyone before they get hired because then they have, oh, the boss approved me. And then it makes it easier in case anyone leaves in the future, or you have any churn of management, that they're not going to be too attached to That's that's actually really good. I haven't heard that one before at all in terms of like being. Yeah, being the last one to hire. No, that's good. So speaking of the culture, though, how do you actually maintain that with the team being dispersed? I do see a lot of people in, you know, companies that are really specific about staying, everybody needs to be in the office. It's a really always a big culture thing that they're talking about. So how To start with, I think it's core values. Having your defined core values as a company and then rewarding based on them and communicating with your team based on them. For us, it's like own it, determination, impact through growth. If someone demonstrates that, we say, oh, cool, you see how this person really owned it. You see how this person pushed through and was determined. Then, at least for me, because I want a friendly culture where everyone looks after everyone, I communicate that continuously. Each team has at least one weekly meeting where they all get together. It's like more of a social part as well. And I think that little bit of wasted time in meetings helps, you know, like, yeah, have a bit of social in once a week meeting to feel like you're connected to your colleagues. because I realized to me that comes quite easily, but doesn't come easily to everyone. So we try and force it. And then everyone feels like part of the business. Like I don't feel any different when I'm there in person with my team occasionally as when we're remote. Um, cause we all get stuff done. We all have a great time together. I mean, I enjoy the people I work with directly and yeah, Yeah. I, um, I, I do like having those, like even if, um, Even if our team doesn't really have anything to report on, because usually we'll have, like, an hour long team meeting and it's, you know, the 1st section is, like, if anybody has anything to report on, anybody's having any issues or anybody has anything to talk talk about, like, problem wise that we can work through those there. But then. also on top of that, that is usually where our team will just like, get a chance to actually talk to each other. Because usually we only have those meetings once a week, unless they're like, you know, calling each other on Slack, to have separate meetings about things. But you know, that's all generally all work related stuff. So nice little like social Yeah, totally agree. And, you know, my business coach would might say like, oh, you know, it's a waste of time not, you know, having any meeting to transmit information, should be in report form. But I think that when you're remote, it's nice having those face to face zoom meetings, because Yeah. And on with being remote, do you guys have any tools that you would recommend anybody that, you know, they they're building a business or maybe they already have a business and they're focusing on making it more remote. Like what, what kind Um, I'm going to sound like a, like a record. Cause everyone's going to say the same stuff that pretty much, but zoom to communicate. We use zoom. I like zoom. Um, we use discord actually over slack at the moment. Uh, we might move back to slight, but it's like, it's so expensive when you, times it by 70 people. Does it add$7,000 a year worth of value to our company? I don't know. So Discord is pretty much free and has the same functionality apart from some of the external integrations. So if you want external client integrations, then you're going to need Slack. But in the back end, Discord works fine. Um, we use ClickUp for our backend company, you know, operating system portal. Um, and then we just use our standard, we use HubSpot for sales and marketing. So that's our general stack as a, as a, as a business, you know, just, we just pick the best off the shelf solutions because yes, you can build stuff, but it's not worth it unless you're Yeah, I would not venture into developing like a communication software or like, you know, task I mean, and you could even you can just run on WhatsApp if you wanted to. It depends how big your team is. If your team is only, you know, two to five people, then you might even need that. WhatsApp plus Google Yeah, um, Discord is a really good option. I didn't even think of that when I was going through the different platforms that we could have used. But, um, I mean, we've been using Slack because we do have client integrations, like where we have the, I believe they call them connections, where you have two companies that have Slack accounts that are connected together, as if we can't do that on like any other platform, like WhatsApp or something. Um, But no, that that is a good option, because that's I mean, like you were saying, like, does it add that value? Because for us, I think it's I don't want to say it's thousands and thousands of dollars a year, but it's quite a few hundred dollars a month just go into communicating with our team and some clients that communicate with us there as Yeah, I mean, I think we're thinking about integrating a Slack integration if we do that, you know, either we migrate the whole team there or we just put all the account managers on it. would be a way of us using it. If it's just customer communication, then we only need the people that communicate directly with the customers through Onnit and use it as just a Yeah, no, that does make a lot of sense. Well, we'll see. Oh, so you just have like a small subset of That would be the idea because the way that Seller Candy works is we have actually a communication platform. So all the clients go in, we have like a very customized version of fresh desk that we use to communicate with our clients. And it all has a portal, a portal based system. So we spent a load of money on that. I mean, that's a lot more than $7,000 a year. But the whole, the whole company Gotcha. No, that makes sense. Well, John, it really has been awesome to get a little bit more insight into how you would do that. Would you have any other takeaways for anybody that's trying to do something similar to what you've done? And not necessarily from a service perspective, but just growing a team and being able to have like this fully remote system, because I feel like it's a lot nicer, because like you were saying, you really do get the best of the best, not only They could be from your country. They could also be from Yeah. I mean, if you're in America, you can hire non-Americans. I mean, I've actually just hired another American, which I said I wouldn't do. because you guys are so expensive right now, compared to the rest of the world. So just as well, just as highly educated person somewhere in the UK would literally be half the price. So you've got to be amazing to get employed internationally while living in the US. Where was I going with this? I was... I can't swear, can I? But yeah, I was just talking about America. I would say... Yeah, hire the best people you can. Try and hire a more senior person first. It's the worst thing you can do. It's really tempting to go like, I'm going to produce a bunch of SOPs and hire a bunch of doers to do these SOPs, you're just making yourself a giant headache to have in like four to six months when something changes and they haven't put their hand up and said, Hey, you didn't realize this thing changed. They've done the same thing over and over again, and it doesn't do anything useful. So hire smart people I like that because I've gone the other direction and I can tell you from personal experience, sometimes they won't even tell you that it's not working how it should have been anymore. They'll just be like, well, I've been following the SOP that I hate when people say tasks. We give responsibilities and then we pay to think, not process. Are you thinking? Are you processing? You're paid to think. That's not my feedback to them. I do it more nicely, but we're paid No, I think that's a, that's a good way to put it. Especially for, you know, when you're thinking of hiring remote, because I, I think when, at least from my experience, when people think of hiring remote, they're thinking like VAs from the Philippines specifically is what I hear a lot of, but I think we You can get some great VAs in the Philippines. We have a VA recruiting service in the Philippines. But you can get good people from anywhere. My latest remote employee is in the US. If you want a guide, I think we actually have a guide on that. We have a guide. I think it's the seven steps to transition from operator to owner in your online business, in your Amazon business. And that's at sellacandy.com forward slash seven steps, number seven, Perfect. And we can actually have that put in the notes as well in the, uh, That would be super happy with me for, uh, for, for, for sharing that with everyone. That's been telling me that we don't share enough of No, you don't. You need to do a little bit more. I've been combing through everything. I think there could be a lot more resource sharing there. Just for anybody that has not used Seller Candy, has not heard of Seller Candy, could you give a little bit of context into what you guys do? Just for anybody out there that would be interested. Awesome. So yeah, I assume most people here are selling on Amazon or thinking about selling on Amazon. Once you're selling on Amazon, one of the worst parts about selling on Amazon is dealing with Amazon themselves because it's frustrating, you get templates, it's just really annoying. So what Seller Candy does is we remove the need for you ever to talk to seller support again. And we do that through, we have our own portal, you log outcomes with us. We have over 40, 45 X Amazon seller support agents in the Philippines that we hire directly from Amazon. And, um, we take your pain away. So you give us the outcome. We do whatever it takes to make the outcome happen. Whether that's raise cases, create flat files, appeal, suspended ASINs, create plans of action. We do all of the frustrating, difficult stuff. So you never need to argue with Amazon through cases or on the phone ever again. And if you're interested, head to sellacandy.com and you can click talk to an expert and we will see if we're a good fit for you. So you can book a call with one of our guys and they can see if we actually fit your business Awesome. Um, well, I, I think we can leave it there, but, uh, sorry. It's been great, John. Thank you for being on here today. And, uh, I appreciate it having you.