How To Get The Most Out of Your Business Day with Norm Farrar

Kathi: Hi everyone, I'm back and I am with Norman Farrar. He is a serial entrepreneur who provides online marketing and managed e-commerce solutions for brands. He's worked with several Fortune 500 companies, including Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola and 20th Century Fox. Since the 90s, Norm has focused on helping entrepreneurs optimize their business potential. Got that together a little bit. Hi, Norm. How you doing?

Norm: Good. How are you?

Kathi: I'm doing fantastic. So happy to have you on the show. We go back many, many years. And I know people really wanted to find out what's behind this beard guy. What's he up to right now? A dog. Oh, yeah. A dog in the snow.

Norm: Yeah, he's going to be let out. There he is. I believe he's gone. So, what's behind the beard guy? Probably beard and more beard. But you know what? This has been a crazy, crazy ride since the 90s. If I go back to what it was like to run a business back in the 90s, I remember I was working with Mercedes-Benz. I was a contractor doing some film for them. I got kicked off a movie set because I was not wearing a suit. I was a grip, or no, I was a camera assistant then, because I was not wearing a suit.

Kathi: That's crazy.

Norm: Yeah. And I used to do a lot of promotions with this large telco, a huge promotion all over the US and Canada. And the VP of sales, who I knew very well, came in. I walked over. I thought I was being very, very risqué, coming in with a suit jacket and a black mock neck turtleneck.

Kathi: Woohoo.

Norm: He waved me over and he said, "Norm, what are you doing?" And I said, "What?" He goes, "Where's your suit and tie?" I had a suit jacket on. He said, "If you ever come in here again, I'll make sure that your next contract will never be seen."

Kathi: Wow. And this was in the 90s.

Norm: This was in the 90s. Yep.

Kathi: Wow. And now we have California casual throughout the whole world.

Norm: Absolutely. And pajama pants.

Kathi: Lots and lots of pajamas. That's so funny. So before you became a serial entrepreneur, or were you at that point your own company, where you were doing video?

Norm: Yeah. So this goes right back into high school. We were always dabbling in something. From a rock promotion, which never got off the ground. And I say our; we were a group of four. We tried to do a rock promotion company. It never did anything, but it gave us some experience incorporating a company in your teens and just moving forward. In college, I was trying to pay my way through with a video company that I opened up with a friend. And then I pretty much always worked for myself, except for a very short period of time when I went back to work with my dad, who is a crazy serial entrepreneur. And also I went into the military. I was in the reserve in Canada for a year or so. So anyways, other than that, I've always worked for myself.

Kathi: Awesome. So now your company focuses on helping other entrepreneurs. Tell us specifically what you do for people at this part in your life.

Norm: Oh, this is going to drive some people crazy. There's no short Reader's Digest. Something I learned a long time ago, back in the 90s again, back at that telecommunications company: we were servicing all these companies, but I learned about vertical integration and I learned about perceived value. So everything I touch going forward is about vertical integration. How can you control the market? How can you control your own destiny? So with this, I went into Amazon, trying to learn Amazon, trying to understand it, and then how could I become an expert in a short period of time and deliver that to other people. The best way to do it without using my own capital was to go out and start managing other people's brands. Now, I'm pulling that out of the air, but I figure about 90% of the Amazon consultants are failed Amazon sellers. So we were, and I say we because I always talk about my company as a we, out there in the early stages, looking at brands, trying to develop brands, and that would just be managing the overall brand. Well, what could you do next? The next thing that you needed is you had to become an authority. Anything in e-com, authority equals trust equals sales, right?

Anything in e-com, authority equals trust equals sales.

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Kathi: Yeah.

Norm: So I met this guy named Rob Burns, and I started using press releases, and these press releases really worked with the company. Content worked, building up, so when somebody looked at you in Google, they knew that you were real. So I ended up buying a company from Rob called PR Reach and started to break it into more of a communications company, so you could get public relations, press releases, content. That led into another company called HONU Worldwide, and HONU provides the service side of sourcing, logistics, supply chain management and warehousing. We opened up a warehouse this year. We're breaking ground for a new warehouse next year, all for the e-com business. So these are the types of businesses that help. Now, the other side to the vertical integration is mentoring. We have a mentoring program called Private Label Legion, and we have some courses and stuff like that I don't need to get into, but all of this put together is vertical integration. So it allows me to take a company and even develop their brand, their website, manage their Amazon, manage off Amazon, provide SOPs, give them everything they need. That is what I mean. And then on the perceived value side of things, it's how can you take the average product that's selling on Amazon or in retail and get two times, three times, four times the profit based on perceived value. And it could be minor, minor, minor changes. And Kathi, we talk, and you've been on my podcast before, and we talk about organization and that mindset. That's the same thing with perceived value. If you have that mindset, that laid-out, organized thought process, this isn't a one-time home run. You can continue to increase your profits on an ongoing basis just by doing some simple steps.

Kathi: Yeah, I love that. It's always the simple, small things that make really significant shifts. I say that all the time: the smallest, insignificant thing has ripple effects into greater and greater profits and profitability. So what did it feel like when you landed your first client, when you made that pivot over and started becoming the Amazon expert?

Norm: It was interesting, because I was at a conference and I overheard somebody. Okay, so I was at a conference and I was there with a group of people that I already knew. I met these people at an earlier Amazon conference, and they were saying what they were doing, and the most anybody was selling was $5,000 a month, which I thought was crazy. I've known these people forever, or well, at least for a year and a half, and they were selling $5,000 a month. What was going on? I know other people that were selling way more in a very short period of time. Anyways, they were all huddled around and they were listening to another guy say, "Look, if you're a failed Amazon seller, why don't you buy a course on consulting?" And so this is where I picked up this first person as a client. They had all signed up for this. These failed Amazon sellers were talking to this other guy. He was from Ireland and he was a doctor, and I overheard him say something along the lines of, "If I could only beat the S&P." And then he said, "I'm a deer in the headlights. I don't understand this other stuff. I don't understand the advertising." Anyways, I'm hearing this. I went over to him and I just said, "I can do that." And I hadn't been on Amazon very long. I hadn't proven myself, but I knew from everything I was doing in my past e-commerce experience, I could do it. So we got together. I told him a price. He didn't know the product I was sourcing. He didn't know the packaging. He didn't know the category. I did it on my own. I gave him three or four options. He ended up picking it. We put it up, and then we brought in another product on the supplement side. Anyways, that's how it all started. And the answer to your question, very long-winded, was it felt fantastic. And that goes back to the thing of, say you can do it. If you say you can do it, you generally can figure out the way to do it.

If you say you can do it, you generally can figure out the way to do it.

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Kathi: And obviously you've done it very successfully. If you had to give a hack to an entrepreneur who really wants to launch, what's your favorite hack for making progress with your goals? You really want to get out there. If you have a hack that you use personally when you're first launching something, what is it?

Norm: Well, I don't know if this is much of a hack, but this is something that I do all the time on a daily basis, and I think this gives me a lot more time during the day. And this is the night before. Usually I turn off everything. I'm not one of these four-hour-a-day people, but my computer goes off usually around, well, it's kind of late, around 9-ish, maybe 10-ish. But before I turn off my computer, I spend 20 minutes on my next day's work. So I create a list. I put it into my calendar. And some people reverse this; I like doing this. I have somebody check my inbox for me, so I don't have to do it. Anything that's urgent, I need to see. Everything that's not urgent, I'll see later on. A priority one task: what do I have to complete first so I can get the stress off my back? I turn off 100% of all communications except one urgent email. If there's an urgent email, it goes to a separate email account where one of my team can get a hold of me and say, "This is urgent. Stop what you're doing." Other than that, all communication channels are shut off until I'm done. They come back on when I have either my B tasks or C tasks. Check emails. And I like doing C tasks before B tasks, because I can get 100 done in 30 minutes. You might have to define them as B tasks, but there's a lot of B tasks that are kind of B-C-ish. And we also make sure that anything that's urgent, we see. Anything that's urgent and important, I see. Anything that's important waits till I'm free. And then if it's just general, then it can just go. And we have a color coding system. So if I see a red exclamation mark when I come back online and I haven't been told, I know that that's urgent, important. If it's a red star, it's, yeah, you better look at it. Yellow is general. Green is a receipt that just came in. I don't get to see them, but we put it onto a spreadsheet so I see receipts or payments that have gone out. And then I have a list of spam that I look over very quickly. I don't do it. It's my assistant that helps put all my spam or all my junk mail there, just so I can go down and make sure that we didn't eliminate anything. And we also filter a lot. So yeah, that's one hack. There are too many shiny objects, too many distractions during the day.

Before I turn off my computer, I spend 20 minutes on my next day's work.

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Kathi: Yeah.

Norm: Understand that if you're working on a project and somebody interrupts you on Skype, I look over here, Skype. Okay, that's going to take me five to 10 minutes to get back into that train of thought. Or if somebody hits me up on Slack. And this is a really cool hack. Get an app called Rambox or Franz and put all of your communication in there, and that way you can turn all the apps off on your computer. And you can just look over. I look over there, that's my other computer, there's my Rambox. I can see all the messages. Right now I have four messages that have come in, five social media messages, three that are on Slack and something from my assistant. But I'm not looking at it. I just minimize it, and they go ahead and take care of all that. That channels everything into one line of communication. Another thing that I could probably say is, if you have a problem, and this is a mental hack, no matter what the problem is. We've had some serious problems this last month that I've had to go through. I would have been sick. I would have been physically ill 30 years ago. I wouldn't have been able to sleep. Now it bounces off my shoulders. I eat bonbons and I go to bed. And what I've learned, and somebody told me this early on, is that it'll never, ever be as bad as what you think. Ever.

Kathi: Yes. That is a truism for sure.

Norm: Yeah.

Kathi: We always fear the worst, and I guess it's a defense mechanism or whatever. I love the fact that you organize before you turn off your computer. You do your top four to five tasks, and then the delegation part is so critical: delegate what you don't need to see. Have other people figure out what you do need to see. That's huge. You have so many systems in place. I very much appreciate all that, Norm. Of course, being an organizer, I'm like, you got it. You got it.

Norm: Thanks. I even have people watch training for me, because I don't have time. And you know, you've gone to the same conferences. You sit there and you've got these great speakers, and it's all fluff except for midway through, to get you hooked, and the last five minutes, and then there's the pitch for the course. So I don't want to listen to the fluff. I will get somebody to watch it, pay them for it. Of course, they summarize it, and if anything can be implemented into the company, we can. We have a Friday five strengths, five weaknesses. We train one hour a day, whatever you're in, and then there's: what suggestions do you have that we can improve the company? This is handed in every Friday. I can look over it and then we can implement.

Kathi: That's fantastic. So what's one lesson that your business has taught you over the years that you wish you would have known in the beginning of it all?

Norm: One lesson is resilience. Resilience is very important because a lot of entrepreneurs, new entrepreneurs especially, cut out too early. They're almost there. Their risk tolerance hasn't built up. Their stress tolerance hasn't built up. They think that the sky is falling just as everything's turning around.

A lot of entrepreneurs, new entrepreneurs especially, cut out too early. They think that the sky is falling just as everything's turning around.

Kathi: Yeah.

Norm: Probably even more important, I mean, resilience is very important, but cash flow. If you're playing with capital you don't have, so this is money you can't afford, if you're borrowing from your house or your 401(k), in Canada your RRSP, if you're doing that, that's scared money, and you cannot do that. Start off small. Make sure that you get proper capitalization. Personally, friends and family, that's easy, but that's a recipe for disaster. A lot of times that doesn't work out. Credit cards is fairly high debt. So you just have to find ways. There's lots of ways to get money. I'm in Canada right now. There were government programs that helped. There was a government program last year that allowed you to have a $60,000 loan, but only 40,000 was repayable. So, $20,000 free. Hey, that's great. I took advantage of it. Economic development boards in different cities might have something like that that you could take advantage of, or you might be able to rent an office very inexpensively. Just don't go and buy every app that's $12.99 to $49.99. You'll be at $3,000 a month in no time and you'll never use these apps. Just start off tight with your money, and make sure that if you do have a home run… I see this happen a ton: let's say a third base hit to a home run. So you've got a winner, but you can't capitalize the winner. It's taking up all your inventory. Or people decide, "Oh, I'm going to be smart and I'm going to order six months of inventory in advance." Well, you just messed yourself up, because you could take your cash flow and do it in one-month increments, smaller chunks of cash, and increase the inventory as your sales increase. But cash flow is so bloody important.

Kathi: Yeah, absolutely. It's really good advice. And there have been so many grants and opportunities out there, especially for women entrepreneurs. I took advantage of a lot of them during COVID, and there's still more to come. Take advantage of the government programs, and SCORE. If you want some free advice, go to SCORE too, which is here in the United States. It's senior executives giving advice. So there's all sorts of programs out there for people, and I think that's fantastic advice. Don't mortgage your house, gang. Figure out a way that you can. Start small and just do incremental income into your business. That's really good advice. So tell me, Norm, we all go through it at one point in our life. Think about the deep, dark time when you felt like you were just slammed and overwhelmed and tired and just burned out. What did you do to get your mojo back? What was your tactic?

Norm: Well, and it's not just me, but if I see employees like this, or contractors. Literally, this is back in the days of paper. I don't know if you remember paper, but that's what we used to write on. I remember an assistant that was working with me, and she was overwhelmed. She was completely overwhelmed. And this is exactly what I do on my desk as well. I would have piles of paper, and we just had fun with this. I would go over and I would take it, and then we would start to reorganize. I would block the time. There is nothing I can think of, for the most part, that will destroy you if you don't get to it immediately. I mean, there might be some, but most likely not. I would rather take a breath. If you have to walk away, walk away, come back, throw. And literally, that's what I did, and it would be all over the ground. I am not kidding. And I did that to her desk as well. But when she realized what I was doing, and I did it for myself, she'd seen it. I would pick it up: A, B or C? A, B or C? And then all of a sudden clarity would come. That would be if I was completely stressed. If I was in a dark place, I mean really, something happened, maybe you have to close the business, everybody has failures, that's a different story. That's a mindset. Sometimes you have to take a week, a month. Don't rush yourself and just get back into something, because your mind's not clear. Look, I'm not a doctor, but this is what I've done. I know I took a year off. I got screwed over so bad once that my trust had been eliminated. If your trust isn't there, how are you going to do business? So you have to make sure that your mindset's there. Everybody talks about mindset nowadays, and a lot of it is fluff, but there's a lot of good quality mindset. And we're talking today mindset. It's like my mom said: if you're depressed, make your bed. Start there. That's a starting point. Well, I do that in business. Start making your bed. Start getting the files organized. Start with SOPs, okay? And I know that organization has saved my butt. So I got into a rut. Everybody does once in a while, and it was a longer rut. I lost a big client and I was trying to see how I could make the business survive. And because I had the SOPs to keep everybody in place, we had SOPs in the office for how to make a cup of coffee, a five-page SOP, I was able to take the time off. I wasn't bothered. I had a working staff that worked four days a week. Our goal, our system, was we wanted you to work four days a week, and I'll pay you for 40. And we had cover-offs. So if somebody was a project manager, when they took four days off, the other project manager would cover them. We had enough staff in place that would do that. And anyways, the SOPs, the standard operating procedures, which are not a standard operating procedure; it's a predefined buy-in for the corporate culture. So why is this important? The definitions of words that people have no clue what they mean. Prerequisites of what you have to know, or the SOPs you have to know, the screenshots, the reporting, the quantifications and the templates, where are they all stored. Everything was there. Everything was there. And that was something I started in 1995, from a book I read by Michael Gerber called The E-Myth at the time. Now it's called The E-Myth Revisited.

Kathi: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of people call on Michael Gerber for his advice. I actually helped organize his office.

Norm: What? Really?

Kathi: Yep. So I love talking to you, because you talk organization, you've got the organization down, and we talk the same talk. So it's always fun to hear what you're doing. And we all lose our mojo at one point in life, and I think that space creates clarity. If you're feeling like, I have no idea, add some space to your life and clear off your desk, like Norm says, and that will definitely do the trick. If nothing else, you'll be able to sleep better and then wake up feeling more refreshed and more clear. So this leads me into another question. You've given so much advice out here for people who are in business. What's the best piece of advice that you've ever received from a mentor, or from someone that you respect, or even from your mama?

Norm: Yeah. Well, Mama was the making the bed.

Kathi: Yeah.

Norm: But probably a very successful businessman that I talked to. This is way, way back, maybe even in the late 80s. He rephrased it. He said, "The sun is always going to rise from the east and set in the west. There's nothing you can do to change it." And that kind of led to the stress. As a young entrepreneur, I remember losing like 10 grand and having a panic attack. I remember losing $40,000. I remember losing, in one day, $285,000. There's so many times that you have these: What am I going to do? How am I going to make payroll?

Kathi: Yeah.

Norm: And it always ends up working out. Even if it doesn't work out exactly the way, guess what? Another door will always open. And at the end of it, and I see this all the time, people think they're at the end of their line, the end of their rope, because they think life has ended. Well, you know what? It's a learning experience. Take what you've learned from it, move on.

Another door will always open.

Kathi: Yeah. Move on. And it's never as bad as what you think it is. It never will get as bad as you visualize that it's going to get.

Norm: Yeah. You know, it's interesting, because in the work environment I'm very involved with, and I think you know this, I've been involved with the first group, the first Amazon group. This is really bizarre. There were very few Amazon female entrepreneurs.

Kathi: Yeah, it was always a male-dominated stage.

Norm: Still is. Still is. She's one of our friends. Anyway, she came up with the first event, and this goes back just a couple of weeks before we were all shut down. It was very successful. And the reason I'm saying this is women have a whole other set of problems that men don't, especially old men with beards. But I remember people saying, "Why are you going? It's for women." No, it's not. Did you see the lineup? These are very successful women entrepreneurs. And it was one of the best conferences that I ever went to. Learned a ton. Now there are more. There have been three or four virtual events. But there are things I can't tell you, because I'm not in your shoes. But some of the same principles apply, like the stress side. If you've got all these pressures coming in from 10 different areas, all right, what do you do with that? How do you deal with that stress? And this comes back to that quote and the organization part: it'll never be as bad. You've got to keep that in mind. And also the capitalization part. One thing I've noticed, and we weren't going to go down this route, we never talked about this, but I've noticed that a lot of e-commerce female entrepreneurs don't say that they're entrepreneurs.

Kathi: Really? What do they say they are?

Norm: They're sellers. But if I go up to a successful female entrepreneur, a lot of really successful ones will say, "Absolutely, I'm a serial entrepreneur." But it takes a lot of successful Amazon sellers to realize that they are an entrepreneur. I don't know if you've noticed that, but even at that conference, I met probably 50 women talking about their e-commerce experience. And one thing that came up, and they talked about it during the conference: you ask who's an entrepreneur in the audience, 2%, 3%. And if you go and do that in a male audience, they put up their hands. Yeah, both hands. That's an interesting thing. So there are some different complexities here that people don't realize between the two.

Kathi: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I can think back on conferences that I've been at with women, with coaches, with other organizers, or whatever. Oftentimes it's, "I'm a life coach." Well, but they don't claim the entrepreneurship, which I think is where the systems fail, or where the systems are never built to actually be an entrepreneurial business. It's like, "I'm a coach. I'm not really a business person." And I think a lot of the people that will listen to this podcast, think about that yourself. I've been a serial entrepreneur my whole life, so no matter what hat I'm wearing, I'm still an entrepreneur. And I think the women that do embrace the entrepreneurial part of it then start thinking like a business person and start building the infrastructure behind the business, as opposed to just being the coach or whatever it is. Nothing wrong with being a coach, by the way. It's just the mindset. I think you're totally right, Norman, as far as which comes first and which are you really. And you have to be both.

Norm: Right. Have you heard of a lady by the name of Andrea Lake?

Kathi: No.

Norm: Oh my gosh. Okay, I obviously need to introduce you. But anyways, she is this absolutely serial… We're saying that too many times, but she's a crazy entrepreneur. Between her and her partners, she sold about a billion dollars' worth of T-shirts. She's been on The Apprentice, I think season five. Anyway, she's an incredible lady. And she has this organization called Power Chick Mafia.

Kathi: Oh, now I've heard of that. Oh my gosh.

Norm: So they have two sections of it. Andrea, if you're listening, I hope I'm explaining this right. But the first section is, everybody can go to it. You're an entrepreneur, come in and listen. Then at the 10 million and above level, they have this event where anybody with a beard, get out. And it's just women that are successful entrepreneurs over $10 million, and whatever they discuss, it's the secret society I'm not allowed into. But anyways, she is fantastic. She's a mentor. She's just an incredible entrepreneur. So I will introduce you.

Kathi: Yeah, I need to have her on the podcast. So I will definitely do that. That's prime time. Okay. So I know that you have a valuable free resource or something that you could offer the listeners on this podcast. What is it that you want to give them, Norm?

Norm: Okay. Well, we have the Lunch With Norm podcast every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That's basically Amazon and e-commerce. It's an Amazon e-commerce podcast that helps people out. It's all free. In fact, if any of your listeners want to get more information, I can provide them, in our group, a free month or two in Private Label Legion, if you like. And that's $199 a month that I could just provide, if you like.

Kathi: Oh, that's very generous. Yeah, we'll put the link down below the podcast when it comes out. And if you guys are looking to go vertical and scale, Norm is definitely the guy for that. So join his league and learn what you can learn, and then continue forward. You can't go wrong with that. So, thanks.

Norm: We won't sell you anything. This is not a hit-you-with-something-and-sell-you-something. It's not like that. This is just: go out there to learn, become a better online seller.

Kathi: Yeah. And I will vouch for Norm. He is a true blue, honest type of guy. Even with the beard. I think the beard actually makes you a little bit more trustworthy.

Norm: Oh, I thought you were going to say sketchy, but thank you.

Kathi: I don't know. I think it's all about the beard, really. And yours is a trustworthy beard.

Norm: Oh, okay. All right.

Kathi: Well, thank you for your time. I really appreciate you being on the show. And check out the resources below. I always love talking to you, Norm. So thank you for your time.

Norm: You too, Kathi. Thank you.

Kathi: Yeah, take care.