Looking Backward

Will Tjernlund of Goat Consulting discusses how his company helps brands and manufacturers sell more effectively on Amazon. They assist with catalog organization, choosing the right business model, logistics, copywriting, marketing, and day-to-day case management. Many of their clients are new to B2C and are transitioning from selling to other businesses. Will explains the process of cleaning up existing Amazon listings and using Amazon's Brand Registry to override incorrect information.

Exploring many different opportunities is a great way to gain a broad range of experiences while narrowing down what craft you want to pursue. Travis Devitt engaged in a plethora of different entry level jobs, leveling up each time until he attended a presentation that pushed him into his core discipline of investments. Now marrying education with his domain expertise, Travis is helping others understand the 101s of investing.

Some people love the process of building a business. Figuring out how the puzzle pieces fit together at every stage is part of the fun. But those individuals don't always find immediate success, instead they serially start at the beginning until something hits, which can be years in the making. William Griggs, after years of gaining a broad range of experiences, found a gap in the events market renting expensive technical virtual reality experiences.

What makes you select an item off the shelf in your local grocery store? Pretty packaging, the name, or just a feeling? Social media companies like Facebook have become behemoths because they can sell ads on a very granular level to marketers. Alison Smith at Umai Marketing does just that for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG). Having bounced around from the family pump business, to LA fashion, and drop shipping in Vietnam; she now helps you make the decision on which eggs or coffee to pull off the shelf long before you step into the store.

Entrepreneurship is serendipity. Chance happens and if you're paying attention, it can turn into opportunity to realize that 5 hour/week lifestyle. It doesn't happen overnight, but if you're willing to put in some hard work up front and sacrifice "safe bets," then you can be like Nick from Storage Squad. One phone call changed Nick's career trajectory from a safe $70k a year job to sweat through moving boxes in the summer heat. Five years later, Nick is helping others realize this same dream through sweatystartup.com

How do people know that your business exists? How do you spend money to educate the right people and avoid wasting money advertising to the wrong ones? Michael Gaman from Gudnow Media specializes in a special intent based marketing known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). If you've ever searched on Google, you're interacting with the type of ads that he delivers. Michael and I discuss his background while attempting to explain the basics of this technical and complex type of digital marketing.

Not everyone pines after becoming an entrepreneur since they were young. Sometimes, opportunity is sitting right in front of your years of specialized experience and it makes too much sense not to take the leap. Austin Venue Collective is an outsourced service whose customers are the very bars and restaurants you reach out to when you want a private corner for a birthday or the entire venue for an engagement party. Allison's years of experience managing half a dozen venues prepped her for this next part of her accidental journey.

How do you think your electricity bill is calculated every month? Turns out there is a very complex system of buying and selling that goes on. Matthew Boyda stumbled onto a public data file while working on a related project, allowing him to start Energytics which provides market forecasts for power consumption across Texas.

We hear a lot from our guests that randomness plays a lot into their eventual success. In the case of Cuatro Sammons from ATX Fabrication and ATX Construction, that randomness stemmed from learning how to weld as a child on a farm located in rural New Mexico. Later, when he found himself in a dead end, with a job going nowhere, accidental opportunity struck where his ability to weld led to his new venture’s first job.