Never Run Out of Inventory Again

Chelsea Cohen is an Amazon seller, copywriting expert, and the Co-founder of SoStocked and Badass Business Builders. Since launching a physical products business on Amazon with her husband Ari in 2014, Chelsea has built an Amazon empire that earns more than $1 million in sales per year.

As a speaker and consultant, Chelsea has spoken at Amazon seller summits and has been featured on several podcasts and YouTube shows, including AM/PM Podcast and Seller Stories with Jungle Scout.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Chelsea Cohen explains why inventory management is a challenge for Amazon sellers
• Why does it matter if your brand runs out of inventory?
• Chelsea talks about SoStocked’s game-changing inventory management software
• How a conversation with e-commerce entrepreneur Dan Fernandez inspired Chelsea to co-found SoStocked
• One of SoStocked’s secrets to success: hands-on founders
• The return on investment for Amazon sellers who use SoStocked’s software

In this episode…

Do you struggle with inventory management as an Amazon seller? Are you looking for a hassle-free way to maintain your stock so you can mitigate your business’ risks and effectively grow your brand?

Running out of inventory is a common problem for Amazon sellers. When you’re juggling the hectic day-to-day duties of running and marketing a business, the status of your inventory is typically the last thing on your mind. However, poor stock management can pose serious risks for your company, including lowered rankings, decreased cash flow, complicated re-ordering processes, and even a closed product listing. So, how can you optimize your inventory management in order to create a more profitable — and sellable — business?

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Chelsea Cohen, the Co-founder of SoStocked, to discuss how to mitigate your business’ risks by mastering inventory management. Listen in as Chelsea talks about why maintaining stock can be tricky for Amazon sellers, how SoStocked’s inventory management software can transform your business, and the secret to getting tremendous ROI while improving your brand on Amazon. Stay tuned!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Chelsea Cohen on LinkedIn
• SoStocked
• SoStocked on Facebook
• SoStocked on LinkedIn
• Badass Business Builders
• Quiet Light
• Quiet Light on YouTube
• Joe Valley
• Mark Daoust
• Quiet Light Podcast email: [email protected]
• Dan Fernandez on LinkedIn
• Ryan Moran on LinkedIn
• Airtable

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. By providing trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations, your Quiet Light advisor isn’t your every-day broker—they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

Not sure what your business is really worth? No worries. Quiet Light offers a free valuation and marketplace-ready assessment on their website. That’s right—this quick, easy, and free valuation has no strings attached. Knowing the true value of your business has never been easier!

What are you waiting for? Quiet Light is offering the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:07

Hi, folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Joe Valley  0:29

Hey folks, Joe here at Quiet Light Brokerage, the Quiet Light Podcast coming to you once again and sponsored by Quiet Light. We are a team of online m&a advisors that have all built, bought or sold their own online business and now act as advisors as well. In many ways, we’re actually just educators, that’s kind of what we do first is educate and help. And a little side job that we have is acting as advisors when you want to have your eventual exit. So help us out, reach out to us, chat with us. Don’t help us out, we’re here to help you out. We’re gonna we’re gonna give you some advice, talk about your business and help you get in the right direction for your eventual exit. Whether it’s six months or six years from now, it doesn’t matter or we’re here to help. Today’s guest is a really good one. Look, every time we put together a client interview, one of the questions that’s going to be in there for an inventory based company is when was the last time you ran out of stock? It’s not Have you ever it’s when was the last time because all of you have at one point or another might get an exception or two there. When was the last time you ran out of stock? How long were you out for Why did you run out how much did it cost you. Because what that is doing is telling the buyer of that business, if they’re better at inventory management than you are there’s instant equity in the business that they’re buying from you. The last thing you want to do as an owner of a business that’s about to sell it you’ve put your your blood sweat and tears into this building this business up is give instant equity to your buyer. Right you want to give them future growth to build a big great business that they can take over and you know have a great exit themselves someday but instant equity because you just screwed up is not really what you want to do. So our guest today is going to talk to us about how to avoid that her name is Chelsea Cohen. She is an inventory management expert specifically with regards to Amazon. She’s the co founder of a company called SoStocked they do just that help people keep inventory on hand do predictions and things of that nature. It’s great software she’s also been there done that right I might ask you to join the team after this because she’s also a seven figure Amazon seller she’s a speaker she’s consultant a regular clients are all seven and eight figure seller she’s been featured on many podcasts not not just the greatest one of all, the Quiet Light Podcast. She’s been on AM/PM Podcast, Seller Stories with our friends over at Jungle Scout, the Amazing Summit Stage among others. Chelsea Cohen, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast.

Chelsea Cohen  2:58

Thanks so much for having me.

Joe Valley  3:00

And we met years ago and an event down in Austin I think that right? Yep.

Chelsea Cohen  3:05

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, right outside of Austin. Event Ryan Moran was putting on

Joe Valley  3:10

and you’re still in Austin now you just survived the snowpocalypse and your your powers back on we were gonna schedule this folks a couple of weeks ago but she didn’t have any power she was gonna do it from a Starbucks or something like that. But they didn’t have power either.

Chelsea Cohen  3:23

Yeah, the whole city it was you know, it was it was crazy hotspot power in I mean, I can do without you know, we had a generator but you know, no, internet was the thing that got me you have a generator in your house.

We it’s it’s one that plugs in it. Basically, you can plug in a plug. We don’t have it wired into our house. But you know, we ran out of internet before we had a problem before so we thought this would solve that problem did not solve the problem.

Joe Valley  3:47

Yeah, I played a generator once never used it. But that was that was me being up in Maine. No, no, Austin different scenario all together. Anyway, we’re here to talk about inventory management stuff with with Amazon sellers. Why, why? Why is it a problem? I know why it’s a problem. But I’d love to hear from you why it’s problem?

Chelsea Cohen  4:05

Yeah, it’s a problem. I think, you know, interestingly enough, we’ve got a lot of people who are first time business owners when you come into the Amazon space. And our culture as Amazon sellers is very marketing minded. And then we figure out the rest is kind of like an afterthought of Oh, man, I have to you know, figure that out. And I feel like Amazon sellers are starting to grow up into you know, their businesses. And so there’s been a whole rash of you know, stock outs because they’ll try a new marketing thing and they won’t really look at the long term effects. You’ve got long lead times with a lot of these guys. And you’ve got these results that sometimes are really instant and and very effective and very good marketing strategies. But a good marketing strategy turns bad when it stops you out and so they don’t plan it out, or oftentimes the end person, you know, usually it’s the same starting out in the business, but then they those two hats split, the inventory person and the marketing person aren’t communicating. And oftentimes, you know, that’ll even be a partnership that sleeps in the same bed. But they’re still aren’t communicating. And so I think that that’s a big thing is that not planning these things out and not really being used to building out systems and fail safes that help you to avoid? You know,

Joe Valley  5:25

let’s go back to my old my old direct response marketing days, which is all problems. So solution oriented, what’s the problem? What’s the big deal was talking about? You just run out of inventory? It’s a wonderful thing, because you’re growing like crazy, and, and things are great. It’s a good problem to have. But why is it? Uh, why is it a problem? What ripple effect does running out of inventory half,

Chelsea Cohen  5:45

it affects cash flow a lot, and it affects your profit margins, the cashflow portion is you know, you you’re selling and then you no longer have inventory, but you still have to pay for inventory that you’re not going to sell for a month or two. So there’s always cashflow issues and this type of business. And, you know, so if you don’t have a steady stream of income, you can create, you know, problems for yourself with, you know, reordering. And then when you do,

Joe Valley  6:15

I sold out, I bought all this inventory, and I sold out. So aren’t I sitting on a pile of cash?

Chelsea Cohen  6:19

Yes, you still have all of your overhead costs. And some of these companies are running, you know, pretty lean. And so, you know, say they they’re used to making, you know, 30%. But then they have to there’s a lot of other things involved, you have to when you stock out, you actually have your ranking goes down. So you have to re rank your product.

Joe Valley  6:40

Why does the ranking go down? Talk about that for a sec? Because that is a I mean, people work on the the people on the marketing side of that bed, right? Let’s hope there any king sized bed, though, you know, that that half of the of the team is all focused on ranking, the other half doesn’t properly manage inventory planning, and they run out how does that affect the ranking? I mean, don’t you just get right back up there, once you’ve got inventory.

Chelsea Cohen  7:03

Sometimes, I mean, sometimes you can recover ranking pretty quickly, if you turn off your, your listing. So that’s what a lot of people will do will turn off your listing. And it’s a lot quicker or easier to rebound. But Amazon’s looking at your sales velocity and their ranking based on sales velocity. And their algorithm isn’t quite clever enough to recognize when you’re out of stock, we’ve seen this with the inventory performance index and the limitations. They haven’t built a very sophisticated algorithm for the out of stock for some reason or another. And so when you go out of stock, they see that simply as your product isn’t selling as well, the velocity is lower. So let’s you know, move it down the ranking.

Joe Valley  7:49

And so your first advice, if that happens, I mean, obviously, SoStocked is designed to help prevent that from happening. But in the event it does, yeah, it’s it’s pause the listing, turn it off.

Chelsea Cohen  8:02

Which closing the listing, you’ve closed the listing, and then when you come back and stop you relist it, gotcha.

Joe Valley  8:08

Okay. Okay. So, one problem running out of stock is that the marketing side of the bed there has worked so hard to get those rankings up, and you put them at risk when you run out of inventory. Yeah, the other problem is, cash flow stops, and you still got overhead, you still have to pay for inventory that might be on a boat on the way when it hits the port, before it hits the port. What other challenges are there with or problems with with running out of stock?

Chelsea Cohen  8:34

profit, you start eating into profit. If you have to airship something, if you have to pay for a more aggressive marketing to get back to where you were before in the ranking. Those things cost money. And then the other cost of stocking out that people don’t really think about is what you paid to stock out. meaning there’s money that spent to aggressively drive your sales, right? Sometimes it’s sponsored ads paying Amazon’s for ad spend. Sometimes it’s paying for other ads, sometimes it’s getting discount coupons, because you decided there was a holiday and then you wanted to do something kind of on a whim, we kind of market in a vacuum. And we spend all this money on these marketing strategies, just to stock out. Whereas if we hadn’t been so aggressive, hadn’t spent so much money on ads hadn’t given that discount, we could have had full price sales and possibly stayed in stock. And then if you’re paying an agency to do all this for you, you’re also paying that agency fee to stop you out. So all of the cost involved before the stockout actually adds up and people aren’t really thinking about it or you know,

Joe Valley  9:38

adding that up that math sounds like tremendous cost right there. All of it and in some cases hard to calculate. I mean, it’s easy to say okay, I had to airship it instead of See, see ship it and that cost per unit may go up dramatically, but you’re only doing a certain portion of them just as a stopgap measure. hadn’t thought about the fact that you Last week, you spent money on PPC that has some sort of trickle effect where people are going to go back and buy. And now they can’t, because you’re out of inventory. And in some cases, you know, I’ve got clients that, you know, they pay a fixed advertising a fixed fee every month for their for their agency. And it doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re out of stock, they’re still charging you that fee. Yeah, lots of cost there. Okay. So there’s a ton of it. The drawback? I’ll tell you right now, folks, again, someday, you are probably going to sell your business, whether it’s to a family member to a friend to an unknown through an agency or an m&a firm? Like, why would you want to make sure that you’re in good shape in the 12 months prior to doing that, if you can sell them on an aggregator, they’re not going to go, Oh, looks like you were out of stock, let’s just adjust that discretionary earnings up a little bit, we’ll do some number crunching here, they’re not going to do that. They’re gonna go, oh, cool, you were out of stock. We know all the costs associated with that the things that Chelsea just talked about, and they’re gonna gain that instant equity. So you definitely want to avoid that. Alright, let’s talk a little bit about how to plan out, you know, out of stock problems and how you coordinate all of these moving parts and pieces together, can it be done in one piece of software?

Chelsea Cohen  11:21

Yeah, we’ve, yeah, it’s interesting, cuz there are a lot of moving parts. And the more we kind of got into building out the software, the longer it takes, I guess that’s, you know, the nature of software, but also the nature of, you know, an inventory management software. And there’s a lot of different factors, you’re actually when you have Amazon and you have a warehouse, you’ve got two different forecasts that are going on at the same time, there’s ordering from your supplier, and then there’s transferring from your warehouse. So you have to have two simultaneous forecasts. And you have to have the right data in there.

Joe Valley  11:55

So just just for clarification, we’re talking about fulfilled by Amazon warehouse, and we’re talking about your own 3PL

Chelsea Cohen  12:00

Yeah, exactly. So that 3PL, then you keep excess inventory, you send it into Amazon, you need to know you know when to order and when to transfer, if you have a ton of inventory sitting there, you don’t need to order from you, your supplier. But those timeframes are very different often. And so you need to have those two calculations going kind of at the same time.

Joe Valley  12:22

All right, so you got two different calculations going the same time in terms of what inventory you’ve got, is it tied into your current sales velocity, so you can do predictive analysis? So actually,

Chelsea Cohen  12:32

yeah, so you’ll have so you know, we’re pulling data from the API, and it’s calculating what your velocity is. And you also have the ability to look back at say, last year sales, because sometimes, you know, you have a normal sales cycle. And you can use, you know, the last 30 days, or the last 90 days, average sales, right, we’re always factoring out stock outs. So our calculation looks at the number of in stock days, and calculates what your daily velocity is based on in stock days. And you can also filter out things like sales spikes that aren’t going to repeat themselves, like, you know, you did a promotion with an influencer. And that’s not going to happen next month, right? Those things are able to be adjusted in the system. So they have your daily velocity of in stock days. But then you also have the ability to switch and look back at, you know, last year calculated for, you know, sales spikes and stock outs, just because sometimes the last 30 days isn’t relevant to going into the holiday season, for example, you want to look at what happened last holiday season, and then maybe add a trend on top of that, to ensure that, you know, you’ve added the growth from the this year into, you know, your holiday sales, you know,

Joe Valley  13:45

in what we do, it’s not just simple black and white. This is this is what your discretionary earnings are this is you check a number of boxes, and here’s your multiple it’s, there’s so much art to it. It’s a huge part of it. And as I think about inventory management software and predictions and forecasting, and cash flows, and all these other things, it doesn’t seem to me, like it’s possible to just go by the numbers, because you just talked about a bunch of nuances. You know, if you had an influencer spike last year, or if you ran out of inventory last year, or if you’ve got, you know, a new relationship that may spike your sales or a new skill that didn’t exist last year. Are all of these things, you know, the art part of what is you’ve built into this program and how people will be able to make sure that they’re part art part science, making sure they don’t run out of inventory.

Chelsea Cohen  14:44

Yeah, exactly. So we have kind of stopped is built on the idea that you know more about your business than an algorithm does. And so we actually within the first six months of building out the software and getting you know about 25 users in there, we completely get At our forecasting, you know, algorithm, it was an algorithm, but it was customizable, but it was still an algorithm. And essentially, the user said, Well, my spreadsheet works. It just doesn’t work. Well, it’s tedious. So we go, okay, send us your spreadsheet, because obviously everyone starting on a software going back to spreadsheets over and over and over again for years, and finally settled settling on, I just managed everything by spreadsheets. And we said, okay, well, that’s obviously working for seven, eight, figure sellers. What is it that’s working, what doesn’t work? Let’s dial that in. And so that’s kind of where we went. And so we are taking past data. And that’s the first step of it. So there’s no, there’s no mysterious algorithm, we’re taking your data we’re allowing you to, you know, let us know what you need to look at. And then we’re also allowing you to not just with past data, but also future planning can be plugged in, do you plan to increase your sales with PPC? Do you plan to have a sale? You know, two months from now, on the first and second of the month? Do you plan to work with an influencer? Three months down the road? All of these things are going to be factors. Yeah, it’s also

Joe Valley  16:07

questions inside the software? Or do you have an actual human that communicates with the client to make sure that it’s tailored towards their business?

Chelsea Cohen  16:17

Yeah, so we have, we have a training process. And then currently, as of this call, and for as long as we’ve been, you know, live, which is about a year and a half, we get on a one on one call with people, obviously, you know, as we scale up to 1000s, and 1000s of users, that’s not going to be scalable. So we’re working on building, you know, more and more training. But we have found and coming into the space that our job is part, you know, teaching people about the software and part actually consulting people on inventory management. And so that’s a big part of what we do is explaining why it’s important to have what we call a buffer stock, which is a safety and safety net, an extra amount of stuff that you never touch, and all of our programming is based on you never eating into that safe 30 days worth of inventory. You know, why is that important? What you know, and, and why it’s important to think ahead of time and to plan out, you know, are you going to have a lightning deal? Are you going to have an email campaign, and here are the tools that you use to build those into the system. And so it really is, you know, the individual seller or employee of the business, who goes in and uses those tools to program those things in, but we do teach them how to use it, and that those tools are available.

Joe Valley  17:28

Now, I haven’t gone in and use the software software myself, because I’m not running a physical product e commerce business. Yeah. You talked about spreadsheets, right? Google Sheets, things of that nature. All of that I’m very, very familiar with is is there a familiarity in that regard? Where it sort of feels like that, but it’s got more prediction to it?

Chelsea Cohen  17:49

Uh, huh. Yeah, the The interface is, is pretty streamlined. And there are ways to export spreadsheets of all the data that you need. One of the things that we have is called the inventory timeline. That’s something that really helps people who don’t really, like numbers don’t really like spreadsheets, it helps to visualize because if you’re just given a number, you’re thinking, Oh, this is the number you’re going to order based on my secret algorithm, that doesn’t really work well, because if someone can’t understand why they’re being told to order what they’re being told to order, they might not listen to that, you know, we have had time where people have, you know, question the order, and then we’ve looked at the timeline, and basically, what the timeline is, is it’s every single day, what your inventory level is, and then the prediction of the decrease as the sales go, you know, go through any transfers, coming in at any transfers, going out any additional, you know, sales, and you’re gonna be able to scan down the entire year, it goes out for a year and see what is happening, what are our recommendations, when are we predicting you’re gonna have to order next when is that we’re gonna arrive. So it really helps to, for someone to be able to visualize what exactly is going on, you know, within the software. So that side of things is very helpful. And then the other side in terms of the familiarity with spreadsheets, is that we actually have a system where you can, you know, turn on columns, turn off columns, filter things out and customize your own view, because different sellers are used to looking at different data. So if you wanted to see what you’re overstocked on if you’re wanting to see what you’re going to stock out on if you wanted to see what orders are coming in, you know or your entire inventory from the FBA all the way through your warehouse in your po as you can see those an individual dashboard that you can customize yourself

Joe Valley  19:37

did you develop this yourself? I mean, you this is this is so techie, and you just have to love this stuff. I mean, let’s talk about the origin of SoStocked and did this thing.

Chelsea Cohen  19:49

Yeah, so I am not I have no software background at all. I didn’t even have an Amazon background when I started. So you know, I guess it doesn’t really matter what your background is. If you find the right people. The right processes. You know, like for me, Amazon, I did, of course, you know, and for this, I found the right people, it was being frustrated about, you know, inventory, realizing how much money it was costing how much it was eating into my profit, my cash flow was, you know, being upset by it. And diving into it and realizing how much time it took, I was basically doing nothing but inventory management and trying to set up a system. I was using a tool called Airtable, which is a great tool. It’s kind of like a very souped up version of the spreadsheet, but it still wasn’t getting there. So a lot of what our dashboards are, they’re kind of designed to act like Airtable, that was the inspiration for our dashboards, the filtering, the grouping, the, you know, hiding columns, the rearranging columns, all of that kind of feels like Airtable. And so that was kind of where I started, and I, and then I decided to, you know, well, I just need to build a software because I kept going to people and they said, No, we have tried everything I’ve tried, I tried a couple of them, either they were way too expensive, or the algorithm did didn’t work. It worked for some products, not for others. It wasn’t customizable, it was confusing. So in deciding to build the software, I said, Well, I just have to find someone to build the software. And two weeks later, I went to an event in Sugarland, Texas, which is right outside of Houston. And met someone named Dan Fernandez is the founder of tomoson.com.

Joe Valley  21:28

I know, Dan. You do? Yeah. from years ago.

Chelsea Cohen  21:31

Oh, awesome. Yeah. So I ran into Dan. Yeah.

Joe Valley  21:33

That’s awesome.

Chelsea Cohen  21:34

Yeah. So I didn’t, we hadn’t met before. And so I knew his software. And we were hung up during the weekend, we were both speakers at this event. And he said, he kept saying he was so bored. He needed a new SaaS project. And, you know, he continually said it over and over again throughout the weekend. And I had just decided two weeks prior that I needed to find someone. Yeah. So I kept being like, well, you should do this, you know, what about this, and I had this idea. And he, I guess, thought that I wanted him to do it, so that I could buy it from him or something. And so it was finally my, you know, my husband going back and going, look, she wants to do this with you. And and then we you know, connected up and, you know, got together. We’ve been in business for two and a half years, and we’ve only met the one time. So it

Joe Valley  22:22

was tell me I said, Oh, I had no idea. Hey, you know, as a talker, as we’re talking about this, and I’m thinking about it. And you know, one of the problems I personally have is that my calendar doesn’t jump out and say, Hey, Joe, you have a call in 10 minutes. There might be a reminder there, but I might have forgotten to, I don’t know, turn on the volume or something. What kind of what kind of notifications? Like, is there? Are there any alerts or systems in place? That would tell me if I’m running low on inventory? Because I, you know, I can’t know that I’m low. And I’m going to run out next week. I have to know, you know, months in advance. So what what notifications, I guess would jump out to help people that are so busy, they can’t pay attention, these little details that are so critical.

Chelsea Cohen  23:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re gonna get an email anytime you need to order a transfer, and you can set up those notifications to be daily. It’ll only email you when you actually need to do something. Can you tell me to? texting? Not Not yet, but right. Yeah. All

Joe Valley  23:27

right. All right. See, I’m here to help. That’s it. Right? It’s given you. I’m sure it’s on your wish list. And Dan’s developers are working on it.

Chelsea Cohen  23:36

Exactly. Yeah. Well, that’s one of the things you know, I mentioned, we do these onboarding calls, I myself have done all the onboarding calls, we’re finally being bringing my husband in, you know, to do some of the calls, Dan, has been on the customer service portion of the business. And we’ve been running it fairly lean like that. So because we want to get all of those ideas. Yeah, every idea comes to a founder, currently right now. So ideas, you know, bugs, feature requests, all of those things, we wouldn’t have been able to build the software to be so robust as it is right now. If we had kind of siloed ourselves off, and, you know, set up a, you know, remote VA support team, we wouldn’t have been able to develop as quickly as we have been, and be one of those software’s that currently people are telling other people about because it has everything the things that people think that we don’t have, we have like, I wish I could do this, oh, actually, you can look at this, you know, and there are things that of course, there’s so many different things that we want to add and improve and tweak. But we have some of these things that are surprising to people because they’re so used to not having those types of features in the software they’re they’re looking to do.

Joe Valley  24:47

I think a key thing you said there and I just want to repeat it is that you know, your your users, your customers, people that are so desperately trying not to run out of inventory and have better predictions in the future and better cash flow or Got to be able to talk to founders, you. And Dan, I think it’s critically critically important. At some point. Unfortunately, with almost every business there, there comes a day when, you know, the founders gotta work on other things, but you’ve got people in place, you’ve already been able to people ask you those questions and you’ve answered them, and you’re putting all the proper tools and and you, you’re selling yourself on Amazon, it’s not like you’re living in a bubble saying this is I think these Amazon, people need this, you’re actually doing it yourself. You know, in running an FBA business. I, I see in the p&l, you know, the deep, deep levels of SaaS products that people subscribe to. And often one of the questions we ask is, well, how often are you actually using those? Oh, yeah, I stopped using that one last year, but I’m still paying for I should cancel that should not and I’m like, yeah, it’s costing you $3,000 a year, and you probably want to cancel that, because that’s gonna cost you $10,000 off the price your business? What are we looking at in terms of, you know, expenses here for people? And what would you say the return on investment is? Because this is an investment in both money and time? Because they’ve got to learn it as well, right? Yeah,

Chelsea Cohen  26:14

exactly. Right now, I mean, we are going to be getting into a tiered structure, it’ll be, you know, somewhat based on orders will never be, you know, as high as some of these other software, some of these software’s get into 1000s of dollars per month, we’re not looking at at that, we are going to be tiered based on orders. But the starting point will probably be 90, you know, 97, you know, tearing up to, you know, around 400 or so. Yeah, and currently, right now, because we’re in what we call advanced beta, which just means that we’re taking on more feedback, we’re getting there certain pieces that we’re implementing such as you know, integrations with Shopify, and Walmart, the various different things that people expect to have, right, we’re adding those final bells and whistles of multi channel and things like that. So we have a couple of things on our punch list, within the next couple of months, we will go into that tiered structure. Right now, we are doing what we call, you know, the lifetime pricing, which is right now, $79 a month, and that’s for life, that means you get an early one, we get your feedback, and we are very open, you know, like I said, you know, to receiving that feedback, so you have some say in how the software is built, especially these guys who started out our first 25, you know, sellers. But the, the, you know, pricing allows you to grow as much as possible without paying any extra, you get all the features, any features that we launch, where we’re heading in the direction of trying to save costs even more like there’s a lot of marketing software’s where the software for make keeping more of what you already make. So the direction is cash flow modeling, because we do forecast modeling, that’s what if I did this, what would happen? Cash Flow modeling, what if I change the terms with my supplier? What would that do to my cash flow? I went to 90 day terms, and then logistics modeling, all of those fees that you get charged from your warehouse, the per Carton fees? What if I simply instead of six units per Carton? I did 10 units per Carton on an annual basis? What is that going to save me, we ran it with one of our own products, one of our lesser sellers. And it was I think $8,000 a year. And so just these slight, you know, little hinges move big doors, you know, that’s what we’re interested in? How can we save you more money? For the business that you’re actually already running right now?

Joe Valley  28:44

Yeah, no, that stuff is brilliant, you know, and it’s it goes beyond simple, you know, inventory management software, it’s, it’s, it’s helping people, all the little aspects of inventory, not just inventory, manage all those little aspects. You know, we’ve had people on the podcast talking about trips to China to, you know, me to have dinner, have drinks, and be able to renegotiate the terms on your on your inventory and cash flow, right? Because if you’ve got more cash flow, you could spend more money on ads or hire an influencer, that would have an impact that would drive more revenue and sales and need more inventory, and so on and so forth. So cash flow people is so so critical. That’s really, really important.

Chelsea Cohen  29:27

Yeah, and people talk about it’s funny, because scale is the new kind of it word. It has been for a couple of years now, you know, how do I scale want to scale? And you know, what’s this? What’s stopping you from scaling cash flow, but then when you start looking back, you look at inventory and inventory has not been a conversation and we’re kind of, you know, inserting ourselves into that conversation to let people know, well, if you’re having a conversation about cash flow, and you’ve stocked out at all this year, then you’re having you know, you’re having only a partial conversation.

Joe Valley  29:56

Yeah, and when you’re scaling if all you’re thinking about is your top line, that’s Your vanity. You know, the bottom line is your sanity. It’s what what puts money in the bank and allows you to grow more wisely. It’s not about how much you make, it’s about how much you keep and that goes with running your business or selling your business or whatever the case may be. Well, listen, I’m pleasantly surprised to hear Dan was involved. I think this is exciting. You and I met years ago, and I was incredibly impressed that and I’m so glad to see that this is, you know, been created, and it’s so desperately needed, and it’s so desperately needed for, for the purpose of helping more people in all those little details. It’s not software that just shows you, you know, units by skill skill, soul by skill does a lot more than that, and I’m real excited about it. How do how do people you know, get in touch with you Chelsea? How do they learn more about SoStocked and things of that nature?

Chelsea Cohen  30:52

Yeah, they can go to sostocked.com We’re also on Facebook, and then we have a LinkedIn account for SoStocked, so they can reach out to any of those those ways.

Joe Valley  31:03

And on the Facebook, is it just simply reaching out to you? Is there some sort of community?

Chelsea Cohen  31:08

We do have a community it’s a private user community. Yeah, but it would just be it would be the page and then they can connect up with us. And we also have, they could get on our email list, we send out, you know, information about you know, the various best practice. This is for inventory management. I do webinars on you know, best practices, because that’s one thing that’s sorely missing from you know, people system, you’ve got seven and eight figure sellers that don’t even, you know, run a buffer stock round there. There’s impact to that, you know, so we talk about all of those things.

Joe Valley  31:39

That’s fantastic. I’m so glad you have your power back down there in Austin and we were able to record today, folks, take a look at sostocked.com if you’ve currently running your own inventory management software, take a look at this. Have a call with Chelsea, Dan anybody in the team and learn the advantages of its thanks so much for coming on Chelsea.

Chelsea Cohen  32:00

Thanks so much.

Joe Valley  32:04

And that’s a wrap. Thanks, folks appreciate you listening in. Hopefully that was useful to you and you’ll have some better inventory management processes in the future. Please hit that like button subscribe button, give us a review. It will help us reach more people and help more people in the online world. We’ll see you next week.

Outro  32:25

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.