Juan Chavez From JMC Equipment: Business Secrets From an Inc.5000 Company

Hey Budai Nation,

We’re honored to share that Juan Chavez, the CEO of the successful automotive business JMC equipment, is our guest for today’s episode. JMC equipment has been holding the title of an Inc.5000 company for the past 4 years now. They have a successful B2B e-commerce store that you’ll learn more about in this episode.

Welcome to The Ecom Show! Your go-to weekly e-commerce podcast for uncovering new stories, strategies, secrets, and everything e-commerce. This podcast is sponsored by Budai Media, a retention marketing agency that’s helped 125+ e-commerce businesses generate over $35M+ in additional sales revenue.

Join Daniel Budai (our host and the founder of Budai Media) and Juan Chavez in this episode to learn more about:

✅ Juan’s Journey With Jmc Equipment

✅ A Business Lesson That Juan Learned the Hard Way

✅ Juan’s Advice for New eCommerce Owners

Let’s jump right in.

Juan’s Journey With JMC Equipment

Juan is the second generation to be leading the team at JMC Equipment. The business was founded by his father, and Juan joined in after he decided to call quits on his first venture. JMC equipment is an automotive parts distributor to repair shops and retail stores. Before Juan stepped in, his father would approach stores in New York one at a time, and find leads door to door.

Juan helped launch JMC into the world of e-commerce by setting up a website and letting customers approach them instead. JMC is a unique company because their team is based out of Medellin, Colombia, but their sales are focused entirely on the US market.

Juan E. Chavez is based out of Medellin, Colombia. He has another successful business venture as well. Juan runs his own travel and real estate company that helps clients based out of New York find their dream apartments in Colombia.

Back to the Inc.5000 company though, JMC equipment has a solid team of skilled professionals that take care of the SEO and e-commerce side of things. They’ve also invested in building a strong team of salespeople, and customer-care executives that make sure that their leads get the information and push they need to purchase.

JMC Equipment sells high-ticket products with their average orders running anywhere between $2000 and above. In order to close a deal, they’re very active with their email marketing and even go a step beyond by calling their abandoned cart to close the sale. Their paid marketing efforts include a combination of Google ads, Facebook ads, and email marketing. For organic marketing, they also have an enriched library of educational blogs.

A Business Lesson That Juan Learned the Hard Way

Juan has over a decade of business experience under his belt. We asked him what’s the hardest thing that being in business has taught him, and here’s what he had to say: “The hardest thing I’ve learned goes beyond business, it’s basically about how to pick yourself up from a failure.”

I have been in that position where I thought that I might have to shut my business down. But the resilience to push forward despite the difficulties is what helped. Every other skill is a skill that you could probably just learn, you know if you put in the work, and if you put in the hours, but actual experience of like, you know, the experience that you go through when you make a mistake, and you lose money, or whatever, maybe you're or you're thinking about quitting is not something easy to understand.

But if you stick with it, you will eventually come out the other side a lot stronger with tougher skin. So the biggest lesson is not to give up when failure is knocking on your door.

Juan’s Advice for New eCommerce Owners

The best way to start an e-commerce business is by finding a good product that you have knowledge about, and that you’re motivated to sell. Ideally, find a way to sell this product without having to start with production. Dropshipping is a great way to escape inventory management. Once you have your e-commerce storefront, and marketing taken care of you can look into expanding into starting your own production. This gives you time to focus on taking your business off. The second piece of advice would be to know your industry. Research and talk to your potential customers, it’s the best way to grow your business.

That’s all for this episode of The Ecom Show. If you enjoyed it please make sure to be back here next Thursday for a brand new episode.

Click on the link below to subscribe to our weekly newsletter and receive actionable tips, strategies, and resources to help you grow your e-commerce store. 👇

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By the way, we are giving our email marketing cheatsheet for...

#142 Jeff From the Atomic Bear: How This Survival Gear Brand Built a 7-Figure Business

Hey Budai Nation,

Welcome back to The Ecom Show. I’m your host Daniel Budai, and today I’ve got serial entrepreneur Jeff from The Atomic Bear joining us for a tell-all about how he managed to bootstrap his survival brand business and scale it to a steady seven-figure money maker.

The Atomic Bear is an e-commerce store that supplies safety gear ranging from tactical pens to survival bracelets and outdoor survival tools. They specialize in creating portable safety tools that help everyday folks prepare to survive the outdoors.

If you’re new here, here’s a quick recap of The Ecom Show.

The Ecom Show is a bi-weekly e-commerce podcast hosted by Daniel Budai. Daniel Budai is also the founder of Budai Media. (The agency that sponsors The Ecom Show.) Budai Media is a retention marketing agency that helps e-commerce brands grow with personalized email and SMS marketing strategies.

In the last 4 years, Budai Media has worked with over 125+ businesses and generated over 35M+ in additional sales revenue. Budai Media is committed to helping e-commerce business owners grow in every way possible, and this podcast is one of the many initiatives by the agency to work towards this goal.

In this episode, Jeff shares what the behind-the-scenes of running a seven-figure survival gear brand looks like. Tune in to learn more about:

✅Jeff’s Decision to Shut His First Business

✅The Idea Behind Atomic Bear

✅Why Jeff Wants to Downsize His SKUs

✅Atomic Bear’s Acquisition Strategy

✅How to Educate Customers About a Product in the Survival Gear Space

✅Jeff’s Advice to eCom Entrepreneurs Looking to Scale Their 6-Figure Business

If you enjoyed listening to this episode, make sure to let me know by leaving an honest review.

Visit Atomic Bear to learn more about its products and the story behind them.

https://www.theatomicbear.com/

You can find my agency and me by clicking on any of the links below.

Find me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/budaidaney/

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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKtHC2ojO_7mhMHXQ-qZcHQ

Subscribe to my weekly newsletter, packed with the latest e-commerce buzz:

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Check out some previous episodes:

https://www.thebudaimedia.com/podcast

Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you back here next Tuesday.

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#125 Brandon Higginbotham from Vintage Gentleman: How To Use Social Media To Launch Your Brand

It’s no secret that social media applications have taken over the world we live in. Every business owner is now a creator too. In fact, we’ve spoken about how important story-telling and social media can be in creating a strong brand identity in today’s world in several of our previous episodes of The Ecom Show.

But we’ve turned the tables around for this episode. Join Brandon, the founder of Vintage Gentleman, to learn more about how a social media creator/influencer can use their platform to bootstrap a brand from scratch.

Before we begin, here's a small recap of what this show is all about for all the new listeners. The Ecom Show is a weekly podcast hosted by Daniel Budai, the founder and CEO of Budai Media. Daniel invites e-commerce business owners from different industries to share their experiences, learnings, and expert tips to highlight the latest trends, hacks, and best practices for all e-commerce stores out there. This show is sponsored by Budai Media, a retention marketing agency that’s helped over 130 businesses scale their e-commerce stores with personalized email and SMS marketing.

Now that you’re all caught up, let’s continue with the show!

Tune in to learn more about:

✅ How Brandon Started the Vintage Gentlemen

✅ 3 Things That Have Helped Brandon Build a Successful Business

✅ Brandon’s Advice to Creators Looking To Start Their Own Brand

How Brandon Started the Vintage Gentlemen

Brandon has benefited from having an early adopter advantage. He began using Instagram in 2015 when he started noticing how the application helped create trends. He noticed an opportunity to build an audience and created the Vintage Gentlemen, which back then was just a simple lifestyle account that offered suggestions for men’s lifestyle products.

Since men’s lifestyle was a new niche he quickly gained traction and built an engaging community of about 20-30,000 followers. He started getting offers for brand endorsements and became a popular influencer. Brandon knew that there was scope to build something bigger using the community he had created, this is what led to him launching his own e-commerce store.

Brandon began by dropshipping products from the artisanal brands he had previously done endorsements with. After seeing how well that worked he slowly expanded to creating his own range of products. Currently, about 70-80% of Vintage Gentlemen’s range of products are manufactured in-house.

3 Things That Have Helped Brandon Build a Successful Business

With a following of over 240,000 followers on Instagram, Vintage Gentlemen has grown immensely since it began. What was once an influencer account is now a fully functional e-commerce store that manufactures most of its in-house products. Here are three key factors that have helped Brandon fuel Vintage Gentlemen’s growth:

Reinvesting money back into the business: Despite the success of Vintage Gentlemen, Brandon has still retained his job in the insurance industry. His job allows him to fund his own lifestyle without needing any money from Vintage Gentlemen enabling him to reinvest all the profits into growing the business.

Leveraging organic social media platforms to build a community: Vintage Gentlemen might have gone from being a lifestyle social media account to a full-fledged brand but they haven’t forgotten their roots. In fact, Vintage Gentlemen has expanded its social media reach by focusing on TikTok as well. Their strong social media presence and use of other social media creators to aid their growth has helped them build a community.

Finding a balance between paid and organic content marketing:Since Vintage Gentlemen already had an existing community of followers that supported the brand from its inception, Brandon spent the first few years focusing on fine-tuning the e-commerce operations. He set up other paid marketing channels like Google Ads to drive more leads, and email marketing to convert/retain these leads. His end goal is to create a brand that has both strong paid marketing as well as an enriched library of content that's engaging enough to build a community in the men’s lifestyle space.

Brandon’s Advice to Creators Looking To Start Their Own Brand

We asked Brandon what his main advice would be to content creators looking to start their own brand with very little capital. Here’s what they had to say:

• Have a strategic approach to starting your business.
• Consider drop shipping to save initial start-up costs, invest in a basic Shopify plan, and look at low-risk methods of bootstrapping your business.
• Your initial focus needs to be on grabbing user attention and creating a community around your brand.
• The key is to find creative ways to build you...

#123 Matt Edmundson: Scale and Sell Your Business In These 7 Steps

Hey Budai Nation!

Welcome to The Ecom Show. If you’re new here, The Ecom Show is a weekly e-commerce podcast series hosted by Daniel Budai where he invites new speakers each week to talk about their experiences and share their expert insights on trending ecommerce topics. This show is sponsored by Budai Media, a retention marketing agency that helps customer obsessed e-commerce brands grow with email and SMS marketing.

If you’re a regular, welcome back! We have an exciting episode lined up for you. We’ve got Matt Edmundson, a serial e-com entrepreneur, founder of a successful e-commerce agency, and e-commerce coach, here with us today to talk about his 7-step strategy to successfully scale and sell a brand.

Tune in to this episode to learn more about:

✅ Matt’s eCommerce Adventures

✅ The 7-Step Guide to Scale and Sell Your Business

✅ How Livestreaming Can Help You Stand Out

Let’s jump right in!

Matt’s eCommerce Adventures

Matt was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug at an early age. His first venture began while he was still in school. He started a candy shop and was so successful that he was asked to stop because his school decided to start their own candy store.

But it was back in the last nineties when he properly got into e-commerce. Matt was working as a salesperson for a company that designed and installed saunas when he was approached by a friend that needed some help with building a website for their church. He offered to help his friend build this website in exchange for his friend sponsoring the software required to launch it.

Matt taught himself how to code and built a functioning website using Dreamweaver. He then thought about taking his knowledge of building a website to create his own ecommerce store, but he had one problem, he didn’t have a product to sell.

Matt approached a business that sold tanning lotions and started selling their product through his ecommerce store. This worked out fairly well, and he ended up selling the website to the business he sourced the products from. That was twenty years ago.

Currently, he’s the founder and CEO of Aurion Digital, a group of e-commerce services companies dedicated to helping companies grow online. He’s also an e-commerce coach, serial entrepreneur, an avid podcaster, and a pastor.

The 7-Step Guide to Scale and Sell Your Business

Matt Edmundson has generated over $50,000,000+ in sales revenue through his combined e-commerce ventures. He’s set up, built, sold, or failed at 19 e-commerce websites in various forms, and has decades of global experience in the world of e-commerce. All his years of mastering the world of e-commerce has helped him devise a 7-step guide to help scale and sell businesses.

Here are the seven steps:

Step 1, The Story: Before you start your business ask yourself what your brand is all about. Do a thorough research of the market you’re entering, and figure out how you plan to position yourself.

Step 2, The Product: Make sure that you understand the product you’re trying to sell before you hit the market. Anticipate the demand for the product you’re trying to create or sell, and ensure that you’re knowledgeable enough to be an expert in that field.

Step 3, The Website: Research on which platform fits your needs the best and create a website to start selling your product.

Step 4, Marketing: Figure out your go-to strategy for digital marketing and create a presence on platforms that your target audience are the most active on.

Step 5, Engagement: This stage focuses on how you can maximize your investment by generating more value out of your leads. How do you get a customer to keep coming back to your brand? It basically talks about how businesses can formulate a strategy to continue selling to their existing customers.

Step 6, Customer Experience: One of the most important steps that most big businesses struggle with. In this stage, Matt talks about all the tiny actions that create a lasting impression on customers, and the steps that businesses can take to elevate their customers’ shopping experience.

Step 7, Growth: In this stage, Matt shares how businesses can scale and repeat the success they received from the previous six stages to grow their business. He deep dives into what gives successful businesses the cutting edge over the rest in the market.

How Livestreaming Can Help You Stand Out

Live Streaming is a great way for brands to engage with customers in real-time. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn allow businesses to engage ...

Welcome to episode 280 of The Ecom Show! Today, I’m joined by Soma Tóth, founder and CEO of Recart, a platform that’s helping Shopify brands scale their SMS marketing efforts. What began in 2016 as a tool to solve WooCommerce’s cart abandonment issues has evolved into one of the top-rated SMS marketing platforms on Shopify, boasting a 4.8-star rating and over 5000+ positive reviews.

In this episode, Soma takes us through Recart’s journey—from its early days as a small tool to its current status as the go-to SMS app for Shopify brands. We dive into the key decisions that led to the platform’s success, why they pivoted from WooCommerce to Shopify, and how AI and pop-ups are transforming SMS marketing.

Click on the link below to book a free demo with Recart:

https://recart.com/shopify-app

In this episode, we’ll cover:

✅ How Recart evolved from a WooCommerce tool into the #1 SMS platform for Shopify.

✅ Why Shopify brands are turning to SMS marketing to increase conversions.

✅ How AI-powered pop-ups are helping brands capture more leads.

✅ Strategies that the top 1000 Shopify stores use to grow their SMS lists.

✅ Soma’s journey as a founder and the key decisions that shaped Recart’s success.

Thank you for tuning into The E-Com Show! We appreciate your support, and if you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review.

Visit Budai Media’s website to learn more about us:

https://www.thebudaimedia.com/

👥 Special Offer: Running an e-commerce store with over $50,000 monthly revenue? Book a free consultation with me to get a complete audit of your performance and retention marketing strategy.

https://calendly.com/budaimedia/strategy-call-with-daniel?month=2024-09

Before you go, don’t miss our free resource – the ‘Top 100 High-Converting Emails of Budai Media.’ It’s packed with invaluable marketing strategies that can boost your ecommerce business. Click the link below to grab your copy:

https://www.thebudaimedia.com/top100-emails

Find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/budaidaney/

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