Level Up Your Amazon Business

The Amazon System and People You Need to Reach the Next Level

With over 197 million monthly visitors and 95 million Prime members in the U.S alone, Amazon has set itself apart as an online shopping giant. The e-commerce giant, however, didn’t get there through sheer luck. It’s through being dynamic and being able to redefine its operations to keep up with the changing e-commerce industry and the world at large.

For Amazon sellers, these changes might take a toll on you if you don’t have the right support system for your business. Running a successful Amazon business requires you to keep tabs on many moving parts. Without proper support, it’s easy to drop the ball on some critical parts of the business. It’s for this reason that you need systems and people to streamline your day to day business operations and allow your business to run seamlessly as a coordinated unit.

In this article, we will cover two keys to success:

1. Getting the people you need by hiring pre-vetted freelancers from a site like FreeeUp
2. Getting the Amazon business systems you need through a company like TurnKey Product Management, which provides standard operating procedures and/or coaches to help hires work better on growing your business.

What are your pain points?

The first step to effectively develop a system and hire people for your business is identifying your pain points. Ask yourself:

• What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about the challenges facing your Amazon business?
• Are YOU the bottleneck for every decision and operation in the business?
• What operations seem to lag? Is it order fulfillment, or product development maybe?

Write down all your business’ pain points starting with the highest priority to the lowest priority. Once you’ve mapped out your pain points, identify the ones that you’d be comfortable handing off to someone else.

Where do you find the talent you need to expand?

You’ve identified the areas in your business that need to be handed off. Now, how do you find the perfect candidates? An ideal place to find qualified candidates is FreeeUp.

FreeUp is a Marketplace that allows you, as a business owner, to connect with thousands of pre-vetted freelancers from all over the world. This platform has particular categories such as E-commerce Experts and Amazon Specialists, so finding reliable candidates isn’t a problem.

All you have to do is create a task description stating your business needs and the kind of talent you’re looking for, and you will be paired with qualified candidates in less than a few days. It’s imperative to keep your posting clear to avoid confusion and applications from incompatible candidates.

Levels of Experience

The first step in the hiring process would be to evaluate the candidates’ familiarity with Amazon. Find out:

• How much does each one of them know about running an Amazon business?
• Has anyonefreelance of them worked for a client such as you before?

Preparation for Expansion

As you’re carrying out your hiring process, you should also be building the onboarding and systems needed to work well with freelancers. Remember, you’re expanding your business by bringing new people on board, so it makes sense to upgrade the systems to accommodate the expansion and to create a manual to ensure that new hires integrate seamlessly into your business.

We recommend using project management software like Asana. It’s what we use with our 20-person agency at TurnKey Product Management. Asana is a work management platform that helps people to manage tasks and improve their productivity effectively.

With Asana, you can create and plan tasks for yourself and the freelancers you hire. They can share tasks among themselves or send tasks to you. You can also create recurring tasks so that you can easily organize work for everyone. This gives your business structure and creates a system that makes it more valuable.

How do you onboard new hires?

You’ve gotten your preferred candidates from FreeeUp, so what’s next?

It’s time to prepare to plug them into your business.

One way to shortcut this process is to use proven standard operating procedures from a company like TurnKey Product Management, which sells over 8-figures per year. Some of our most commonly used step-by-step procedures are available for free. They are useful for organizing some of the top growth-oriented tasks that can be handed off. We also have paid options such as an entire course or 1-on-1 coaching where an Amazon expert can guide hires on any topics to help systematize and scale your business.

If you want to do it yourself, we’d recommend that you start from the basics and work your way up to more complex operations of your business. In this case, you’d want to start off with an introduction to Seller Central. You can then increase the complexity from there.

In addition to the ins and outs of Amazon, you should also help new hires understand your business culture.

Day-to-Day Tasks

This is where Asana comes in handy since you can quickly identify your business’ repetitive daily tasks and guide new hires on how you want them handled.

For each onboarding session, you should have a video or a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that they can refer back to. An SOP provides the steps that one must follow when performing specific tasks in the business.

For instance, let’s say you are going through how to order from a manufacturer. It would be best if you created a screen share video walking them through the process visually step-by-step. It would help if you also had a written SOP on how to order from the manufacturer. Both the video and the SOP are critical because as much as a video is easier to follow along with, it’s easier to change an SOP than to re-film a video. So, cover your basis and provide both resources for new hires.

You also need a system for how each freelancer should perform these daily tasks. It’s essential to give them structure right off the bat so that they don’t develop bad habits.

What will their day look like? What will their week look like? What will their month look like? What will their quarter look like?

The objective is to build a system where each freelancer knows exactly what they’ll be doing on any given day. A great way to build this system is by writing down how you’ve done the same tasks.

Asana will play a pivotal role in creating this system and managing tasks. And then, you’re no longer the holdup when it comes to basic tasks in your business. You can finally take a vacation and your business won’t suffer!

Final Thoughts

Having the right Amazon business systems and the extra sets of hands to get tasks done will not only increase your business’ scalability, but it’ll also increase its value.

When you have a system in place and a structure for the people involved, it makes it easier for anyone to get plugged into the business. If you plan to sell your business down the line, it’ll be more valuable because of the systems you create. A structured system will enable anyone interested in acquiring your business to understand it immediately.