Episode 82: Office Space vs Working Remotely
Dave joins me today for a debate. Is it better to have an office space for your company or not? We have slightly different views on this subject. I personally like the professionalism of an office space and warehouse. Dave likes the freedom of working remotely and outsourcing. We compare our reasons for why we have our preferences and give our listeners some pros and cons of both business styles.
There is nothing wrong with either business approach. We simply want to explore our personal work styles, so that maybe you can decide which one best fits your situation.
Here are some points from our conversation:
- Dave’s upcoming move to Asia.
- Why Dave has decided to work from home.
- Why I prefer having my staff in an office setting.
- Dave’s office space blunder.
- Why a company should avoid overhead whenever possible.
- The benefits of renting a co-working space.
- How Treadmill.com pushed me into finding warehouse space.
- The problems of running a brick and mortar location.
- Should you hire an employee first, or rent an office first?
- How modern business culture has changed.
- How renting a warehouse can cause problems for your business.
- The benefits of outsourcing to a warehouse company.
- Why you need to focus on your company’s strengths.
- The pros and cons of hiring remote employees.
I would like to remind you that I have a couple of speaking engagements coming up:
- Global Sources — Hong Kong, October 17-19. For those of you wanting to attend Global Sources, we have a special listeners’ discount code (3ec50.) If you use this code, you will get $50 off your ticket price.
- EcommerceFuel Live — Laguna Beach, CA, January 11-13, 2018.
We also have plans to launch a course on Importing soon. So, check out www.ecomcrew.com/course if you want to sign up for updates. Don’t forget to like us on Facebook, so you can join us during the Facebook Live episodes each week.
Today’s episode was sponsored by Stamped.io. If you need to take your Shopify reviews to the next level, then Stamped.io can help.
We are also happy to announce, that have a new sponsor in AsiaInspection! AsiaInspection is a company Dave and I both use when we deal with our suppliers in China. AsiaInspection will represent you when you can’t go overseas to check your shipment yourself. They are both reliable companies and we are proud to be partnering with them.
Resources Mentioned Today:
If you have any questions or anything you’d like us to discuss on the podcast you can now email us directly at ecomcrew.com! Just send those emails to support@ecomcrew.com. Also, we would really appreciate if you would leave us a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening!
Full Audio Transcript
Mike: This Mike.
Dave: This is Dave.
Mike: And welcome to the EcomCrew Podcast number 82. It’s good to have you back on the show Dave.
Dave: Great, thanks. I’m glad to be here after a month hiatus.
Mike: Yeah just so everybody knows, Dave and I agreed that he would only be doing probably one or two podcast episodes a month. He is going to be focusing a lot more on the written content. So he’ll be on the podcast like I said once or twice a month. We are trying to record a couple of episodes when he does record. So this one is going to be due and going out live, so this one we are recording on Monday, August 14th live.
So if you happen to be in Facebookland we will answer any question you might have. Once it’s done it will go out on Thursday, and then Dave and I are going to record a couple episodes. After this we are both going to be doing some traveling coming up, and we like having a couple episodes in the can as they say. So we have a cool interview we are doing this afternoon that you guys will hear in a couple of weeks when that goes out. So we are excited about that. But besides all that what have you been up to, Dave? Anything new and exciting?
Dave: Yeah, actually our family made a pretty big choice to move over to Asia for a few months and kind of do the whole working remotely thing. So it kind of leads into this podcast fairly nicely, yeah. The whole work from home opposed to get an office, get a warehouse, get tied down, that type of thing, like I said compared to living the life I guess wandering around the world.
Mike: Yeah, so I mean the topic for today is basically when to get an office, or should you get an office, or how to stick your ecommerce business up or location independence, and we are going to be tackling all those different things today. Just for current landscape to kind of let people know where we both exist today: on our end we have a 3,000 square foot office/warehouse in Southern California, and then we also have an office now in the Philippines.
Our staff in California is five people as of today and in the Philippines it’s seven. And we are currently in the process of deciding where to move to because we have outgrown this office — whether we need to go ahead and get another warehouse or we just need more people. So we are both — the front office is full and our back warehouse is full. So we are still in that probably going to go to a complete 3PL model or not. But we are thinking all that, but that’s just kind of a high level overview of where we are at, which is kind of the exact opposite of where Dave is at. So talk a little bit about what you’ve been up to.
Dave: Yeah, the overview of where I’m at is an 850 square foot condo in Vancouver, currently sitting in my bedroom trying to find a place to put our dog while he barks always on cue as soon as we start a podcast. And yeah that’s where I am right now.
Mike: And usually there’s an auto cry at some point and that as well.
Dave: Yeah, well we are trying to time it with the daughter. She is napping right now, so if anybody hears crying in about ten minutes, you’ve been warned.
Mike: Nice, so obviously we have very different lifestyles and setups. I mean there is obviously advantages and disadvantages to each. In some cases myself you kind of always want what you don’t have, and I definitely had the larger office and I’ve also worked from home, and when I’m working from home I kind of miss having an office. It’s nice going and seeing people and getting to the point where we’re hygienic, take a shower, go into work, and that part is nice but then…
Dave: I did shower today, Mike.
Mike: That’s just because you are on camera for the Y thing, otherwise you’d be stinky. But the other part that’s a downside for me and I was actually talking to someone, we are in the process of hiring this director of ecommerce. So for me just everyone works differently. I’m most productive when I’m working in spurts in two, three hours at a time throughout the day kicking 30 minutes or a two hour break depending on whatever it is and then coming back when I feel like working again.
And that’s more of the direction I’m going to try to head in once we do make this hire, something I talked to them about. And I want to also make it clear to people here that they are the ones in charge and not me once we make that transition. So hopefully that will help with that. But yeah, I mean talk a little bit I guess, Dave, about why you like the setup you have, and the flexibility that that has afforded you.
Dave: Well, giving kind of some background on where I’m coming from. So I haven’t been living in this bedroom for my entire business career. About four years ago, maybe five years ago I actually I pulled the Mike lifestyle and I actually rented an office and leased an office, I’ve gone to a multi-year lease, and this is when my previous business was doing about 750k in revenue. Now I’ve kind of learned from those mistakes because when I kind of made that decision to move out of my previous bedroom into a new office, the reason I did it was for a couple of reasons.
Number one, I had an employee. I was kind of sick of them coming into my living room and basically working with me. And the second thing was basically ego. And some, I think everybody always feels a little bit of shame if you are working from home and somebody says, “oh hey, where is your office?” And you tell them, “well, it’s actually in my condo’s bedroom or my condo’s den.”
So there is a little bit of ego that went with that decision, being able to tell people that I have an office actually and a physical commercial space. So anyways I did that for about two or three years. And it wasn’t until I was actually getting ready to sell my business that I realized how big of a mistake that was, because the office was costing about three grand a month. So over a year that was a about 36k a year.
And when you are selling a business and you are getting three times multiple on your profit that basically worked out to more or less around $100,000 hit that the sale price was taking because of that office. And the mistake that I made was that we were renting strictly an office. There was no warehouse, so we couldn’t do any fulfillment out of it. It was really just kind of a man cave for me and my two employees. And we really couldn’t — we didn’t really get any value out of it, and there was nothing else that we could do in the office that we couldn’t do working in my bedroom or my condo living room.
So that was kind of the mistake that I realized that I made in getting that office especially when I kind of had a business deal kind of on the horizon. So about a year or two before I was ready to sell the business, I said “hey okay, screw this, let’s get rid of the office.” And we basically went from working in an office, me and two other employees, to working remotely out of everybody’s bedrooms. And we did that for about a year and a half, two years.
Obviously there comes a time when you are working with employees that you need to get together. That’s where kind of in today’s economy where everything is kind of shared, everything shared, driving shared, shared homes, there is also of course co-working spaces. So every week or two we would get together, me and my two employees, rent out a co-working space, an office there. I think we paid about 75 bucks a day, went there, got together, actually had a face to face meeting time and in the process saved about well over two grand a month. And when the time finally did come to sell the company I basically got back all that profit three times over.
So that was kind of the mistake I made was renting an office way too quickly and renting basically a single use space which really didn’t do anything extra for our business. So learning that mistake as I started this new business, I realized staying really nimble, avoiding overhead at all costs until it’s absolutely necessary is a really important thing to do when you are a small ecommerce company. And yeah, that’s basically the mistakes I’ve learned, and hopefully I’m rewriting a better story going forward.
Mike: Yeah, that’s interesting. And so I’ll kind of go through our evolution with the office stuff. I mean I’m in the exact same boat as you. I certainly don’t do it for the ego. I mean I have had a much larger company in my previous life doing affiliate marketing. And actually having an office is something I knew I didn’t particularly enjoy or want, but the need kind of came up when we did that first employee hire.
And I think that it’s important, it’s hard when you are hiring employees. I find it’s easier to find the best employees if you have an office or at least have a location for them to go to. A lot of them don’t want to be working out of their house necessarily, and that was certainly the case when I made my first hire. But I kept things very lean and nimble as well.
I rented a co-working space. I just got one office in that co-working space and threw two desks in there, and at least it was a place where I could interview and I was able to hire our first employee, and we used that space for quite a while. The thing that really drove us to move out of there actually was treadmill.com. It was actually kind of a funny story because we were selling other manufacturer’s products. We were an online exclusive retailer. And the treadmill industry, the fitness equipment industry particularly has some legacy business practices in place, so I just kind of put it that way where either there is territories or they want to see you having a brick and mortar business yourself. So we ended up getting a warehouse to accomplish a couple of things. We made a “storefront”; I’m using air quotes right now for those listening on the podcast or in the car, whatever. We made a retail store out of the fun part of our office and took pictures of that. And that was enough to get us by, to get a couple more manufacturers to license us basically to sell their products.
We never once had a customer come in the store, we didn’t really want that. We had it listed so people could come by, but that wasn’t really our intention. And in the back we just had a bunch of empty space, and we weren’t really utilizing the space all that well. But we knew we had that space and we were like, you know what we will do is we’ll use this space to get some treadmills in here. We will use it as a place to take returns in because that was one thing we didn’t have a really good process for. We would have to send returns back to the manufacturer, and it was definitely more economical for us to take those back and then resell them out of our facility.
And then when we got to return them we actually were like, what we’ll do is we’ll use those machines in the meantime for videography to take videos and stuff for. And that’s what we did with that particular office until we sold treadmill.com. And it was like alright, now we still have a warehouse and I have a lease which this is the downside to having a warehouse, to being stuck to a brick and mortar location.
But just like anything else in life I turned that negative into a positive. And that’s when we purchased Icewraps.com and started running that site out of there. And we eventually then moved into where we are at now because that business eventually overgrew to where we are at now which is a 3,000 square foot spot. It’s about double our last location. And I think the negative to where we are at now and just having a warehouse is our lack of being able to be nimble like Dave was talking about. I mean we can’t just move out of here whenever the heck we want. We have a lease. And the downside is that whenever you get a brick and mortar location and we have a lease like this, you either you typically have too much space or too little space, right?
You either — when we do move from here we are going to have to get probably a 10,000 square foot space. We won’t fill that all to begin with, we’ll eventually fill that up and then be out of room again. So you are just constantly in this back and forth. I either don’t have enough room or I have too much room, and it sucks because you can’t just move from spot to spot. So that’s kind of where we are at now, and I feel a lot of things out there. Dave, any comments on that?
Dave: Yeah a couple of things. So you mentioned and this is the same spot I came from when I first got my office was, I actually had one employee right now who happens to be my aunt. So she was comfortable coming into my bedroom. I was comfortable with her coming into my home too. But I have another hire on the horizon and I figured, jeez, I can’t hire somebody and tell them to come into my living room and interview there. I need to get like a space to become real. So do you think — and I have my opinion on this, but do you think that somebody should hire first and then get an office/warehouse, or do you think they should get the office warehouse and then hire second?
Mike: Yeah, I mean I think you are probably going to say something differently, but I think that having the office first is kind of an important step. I think that for a few reasons, I think you are going to end up hiring a higher quality caliber person. It’s just the impression that having an office gives off. It’s just I guess an illusion of professionalism; I don’t know that any of us are all that professional.
Maybe it sounds like it on the podcast, but once the light goes off we are just like a bunch of potty mouths and jumping around like we are little kindergarteners. So you know it gives that illusion of professionalism. And I think it’s also important for them to get comfortable I guess is the right word in where their workplace is going to be. Like when you say like we are going to hire either a warehouse or an office or something like that whatever it is “somewhere around here”, quote and quote, that extra mile or two in whatever direction depending on where you are and a bunch of other factors can come in a lot. And I think it’s important for people to know exactly what they are getting themselves into.
Dave: Yeah, and I mean I kind of take a contrary view of that where I think anybody who you hire, if they are not comfortable coming to work from home environment and the office is a stumbling block for them, I don’t think they are necessarily going to be the greatest hire anyway. So I think anybody who is going to be a great hire is probably in a different location than you are working at. Now I do think most people they do actually want to get out of the house as opposed to what people may say they want. Like oh, I want to work from home.
Most people do actually want to get out of the house every now and then. And I think that’s where a co-working space can actually serve a nice little gap there where you can avoid the long term lease, and also avoid being cooped up in your house nine to five every day. So I think that’s one way to look at it. I also think nowadays people are way more receptive to the idea of actually working entirely remotely, going to a Starbucks, and doing an interview there opposed to maybe five or ten years ago when the idea of actually not having an office to work from absolutely terrified people. So I think people are a lot more receptive to it nowadays even to just even a few years ago. So I think it’s definitely a little bit different hiring landscape now than it was before.
Mike: Man, unquestionably especially for the younger generation. I feel so old saying that. Especially for the younger generation; it’s certainly much more involved or whatever to work in a co-working space etc. Even for myself like — again the environment I prefer to have worked in, I mean to be able to bounce from place to place and wherever I want to be in the world and work at a co-working space I think is awesome. One thing I do struggle with, I think it’s just a personal, like a personality thing, I like having my employees like in the room with me when I’m going over new things. And that is just something you can’t just replicate with a co-working space or working remotely type of thing.
So I have worked very, very hard in this business to have us be in just two locations, one location here in San Diego and the other one being in the Philippines, and that is the only place where our employees work. It’s just one of those two spots. So we try to keep it as centralized as possible. So I think it does help with the collaboration and bouncing ideas off of things. And I’m just at a point where like I’m really sick of like having to write out long paragraphs of stuff to explain to people how to get things done, which is how it has to be if you are doing things remotely rather than just pointing to the screen and saying, hey, this is what I have in mind. So I think this is just a personality thing.
Dave: Yup, yeah I know you definitely have a very valid point there. So just kind of going off from that, do you think there is ever a point when somebody should have an office opposed to a warehouse? And just to tell you again where I’m coming from that was a mistake I made. I rented an office, strictly an office, no warehouse space in my last company. Absolutely useless aside from the fact that people can get together, me and two employees and actually talk, there is no fundamental change that having an office made over working remotely. So where I’m coming from I don’t think I will ever rent strictly an office space ever again. I think it either needs to be strictly warehouse, or at the very least mixed office and warehouse space.
Mike: Yeah, so we are in a mixed use space right now. I mean you’ve been here to our office. I think that’s a great combination, but we’ve recorded several podcasts about this, we’ve been talking about it for a while. This has been a much harder project to complete than I thought. But we are in the process of evaluating going to a strict office space, or just getting a larger warehouse, and we are going to make that decision here very soon.
We keep on finding like more and more of a company to evaluate. Every time we think we are done we hear about another referral, and then just kind of like trying to untangle a bowl of spaghetti. It gets difficult to figure out which is our best solution. But we are at a point, I mean we are at a point here where there will be six of us full time in the office. So I think that there is value in having a full time space for us.
If we are to get rid of our warehouse and get whatever square footage it takes, let’s say 1,000 square foot warehouse, I’m sorry just office space, I realize that that is an expense of $1,500- $2,000 a month whatever it will be. That does add up over the course of the year, but I don’t know, I think it’s a good environment for us to have everybody in one spot like I was mentioning before versus all of us trying to figure out ways to work remotely and get things done in that environment. For me like the thing that I struggle with the most is that issue, that whole like people and management issue as it is, and I think that that would just make it worse. So that’s just my opinion on it, I know you feel differently.
Dave: Yeah, and well the way it sounds is that you are actually considering getting away from a mixed use warehouse and office and actually going strictly to office, am I gathering that correct?
Mike: That’s only if we can pull it off. I mean to us, the evaluation we are making right now is okay, what does it cost to have a warehouse? What does it cost for us to have employees that need to be doing the pick, pack, and ship versus what it costs to have a 3PL do it, and is it cheaper to have a 3PL do it? And if it is cheaper for a 3PL to do it, we will certainly go that way. If it is not cheaper we probably will just stick with our own warehouse, and use a hybrid model because I think that the thing that’s worked really well for us right now is that we do have like a hybrid model.
So we’ll use a 3PL when it makes sense. Like right now we have a lot — we have over 100 pallets stored in a 3PL and they are charging us $10 per pallet which is significantly cheaper than we can do it in our own warehouse for. And then we have them do other activities like get that stuff into Amazon and things like that. But we still have our own warehouse to do pick, pack and ship and store things where it makes sense. So yeah, I mean we are kind of in a best of all worlds situation right now. I’m looking to potentially to change that up quite a bit.
Dave: Yeah, and I think that’s a danger when you do actually move in to a warehouse. I think you can actually get addicted to doing fulfillment in-house and just ignoring the other side of the coin where you can actually have it completely outsourced. And I’m kind of, at least my last company and in even in this current company, I’m kind of in a unique situation where our 3PL’s literally about 15 miles away.
So it’s almost like a co-working space for a logistics company. And it’s so tempting to actually go down to this 3PL every week, even a couple of times a week and actually check out inventory and actually be there on the ground where I have multiple friends who managed all their logistics completely remotely.
Like we have a mutual friend who is in the middle of Indiana and he has never once I think seen one of his containers come in. He does it completely remotely. And I think not getting addicted to the idea of actually having to see your inventory and actually be handling it every day, inspecting returns, just being able to factor this in to your cost model, it’s kind of liberating, not even having to ever think about shipments, returns and all that mess that goes with it.
Mike: Yeah, I mean I think the first time my container shows up is really exciting, and the enjoyment you get from those arriving after that is diminished pretty quickly.
Dave: Nothing like un-stuffing a 40 foot container with you and your mother-in-law.
Mike: Yeah, we’ve been there, done that. It’s a — I guess the first time that showed I was a wow! Look at this, it’s like look at the sea container and you pop the can off the back of it and unloading and it’s just neat like anything else in life. No matter what it is, if it’s new, it’s cool. But now that that happens on monthly basis it isn’t so exciting anymore. And reality is that we can probably do that more efficiently by outsourcing it to another company that that’s all they do.
Dave: Yeah, and I think a lot of ecommerce companies actually have kind of like personality complex where they are not quite sure if they are product companies, if they are marketing companies, if they are logistics companies, like where do you fit in that whole model? Are you, — and I’m not actually asking this directly to you Mike, but it’s kind of just a question to I guess the audience. Like are you a marketing company who specializes in creating the best ad copy for your products? Are you a product company who specializes in creating the best products, or are you a logistics company who specializes in getting things in from your distributors and manufacturers cheaper than anyone and actually distributing them on to customers?
And one of Jeff Bezos’ quotes he’s famous for is Amazon is not actually a retail company; they are a logistics company who happens to do retail very well. So I think keeping that in mind and actually what your strengths as a company are is really important to keep in mind. And as a company I don’t think I ever want to be a company where our core competitive advantage is logistics and distribution.
Mike: Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense. I’ve mentioned that on an episode earlier when we were talking about that we move our warehouse and have another company do that stuff. I mean their core competency is logistics, right? So they are going to do it better than you. I definitely think that our core competency is marketing or being a technology company. To me that’s what we do well, it certainly isn’t unloading a container. Like I don’t think I’m any better at that than someone else, right?
Dave: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And yeah, I think it’s just determining who and what you are as a company which is kind of the big question that you have to ask yourself. And sometimes it takes a little bit of a candidness too with who you actually are. And I think I have kind of evaluated that my company in the past and my company now were actually more product company than really a marketing company. I think that’s where we are kind of a little bit different. You really excel in the marketing side of things, and I think my companies have excelled more on the product end of things.
Mike: Yeah, I mean I think that the product — you can’t be good at marketing if you’re having crappy products, right? And if you are selling a pocket of bullets people aren’t going to be happy with assuming we definitely force ourselves to be good with products, I mean I’m very passionate about the products we make even if I’m not a customer myself, certainly not in the coloring. I’m probably not going to get into — in the baby clothing unless we have a baby. But I am passionate about the reviews that we get on these products. I mean I can tell you that any non-five star review like affects me like really personally. So it drives me to make the best products we possibly can.
Dave: Yeah, yeah I know and I think you have a great product. I think though the thing that you are better than everybody else on is definitely your marketing. And I think you create a whole experience around your products which a strict manufacturer can’t do. And I think that’s where you guys have done extremely well with basically all of your brands.
Mike: Yeah, so in the last couple of minutes we have here, let’s kind of take both of our final opinions on the best way to run an office, or what you should do for ecommerce since we have two really differing opinions. So it will be maybe not so beneficial for our audience, but at least here are two different opinions, and kind of form your own thing. We’ll start with you Dave.
Dave: Yeah, I mean I don’t think we are actually that different. I think just the timeline of when you make things happen is potentially a little bit different for me and you. I think definitely the first thing you should is hire somebody and then find space just because when you make a hire that is probably going to add to your bottom line, or it will take away from your bottom line. But it will acutely add something to your company and hopefully in the long run it will add to your bottom line.
So I think definitely hire first then get a retail — not a retail space, an office space or a warehouse space after. And I think make sure that you can actually grow into that warehouse and that office. Don’t get an office or a warehouse that’s too small for you to kind of fulfill your grand vision of who you are as a company. So make sure that you buy something big enough that you can actually grow into. So that’s kind of my perspective on how to look at that.
Mike: So my perspective would be as far as like the timeline if I can go back and do it all over again, we didn’t have the issue like we did with treadmill.com because that kind of forced our hand, right? So we needed to get this quasi retail location. I think that you need to look at things first of all, are you like a pure Amazon only business, or are you also running your own store. The thing I think is different there if you are doing 100% Amazon, I really believe that you can do that basically out of your house and to a very large extent till you get way in the seven figures. I mean Amazon handles the majority of all your problems for you. It’s a great business model.
I do think that people tend to wait too long until they hire. So I think that getting your first employee sooner the better, but I think that first employee should be like a Filipino VA type person. Get someone that you can get as cheaply as possible to help with tasks that just are going to take up a lot of your day, and you don’t need an office for that. So you can kind of pump that down the road as far as long as possible and that will continue pumping that as long as you can just because once you sign that lease it’s done for two to five years depending on what you get yourself into.
Where we are at right now I’m pretty happy. Like I think that in a perfect I would love to see us have just what's called a class A office space. Just to have us in a downtown type building with our six to probably eight to ten employees we’ll have here in California over the next couple of year as we grown, and then having this office that we now have in the Philippines. Getting that office there was one of the best things that I ever did.
We have all our Filipino workers in one space under one roof with one manager who does an amazing job, not only managing them but also finding these people. And that environment is a complete co-working space, so as we add another desk or another employee we just pay for another desk. And it’s helped us stay very centralized and to do just two spots, and we don’t have employees scattered all over the United States.
One thing that you need to keep in mind if you do go the remote route and you have employees scattered over the US, that those create an excess and multiple spots for you. So it’s something else to be thinking about. It’s another reason why I’ve been very careful to just hire only in California because the additional — I honestly don’t mind the sales tax part, it’s just all the additional people work is such a nightmare, like trying to comply with each state's individual roles.
So that’s something to kind of keep in mind. So that’s just kind of like where we are at, and we are going to make that decision here locally in the next few weeks. It will be a big podcast topic, probably over multiple episodes once we decide the exact way we are going to go. But I do like the centralized approach and having people under one roof. So that’s where I’m at.
Dave: Yeah, I think that like I said I think both of our perspectives are probably valid in their own right, and it’s finding what works for you as a company. And I think with today there is so many different options available that weren’t there even five or ten years ago. Like we are talking about with the co-working spaces, and Amazon FBA is obviously the big changer in all of this.
Mike: Yeah, cool. Alright guys, well I think this was a great episode, just a couple of final remarks here. Two sponsors I want to give a shout out to. First of we have a new sponsor this week, I’m really excited about talking about AsiaInspection. They are someone that we use, both Dave and I have used personally for a couple of years, and it’s really cool to get them on as a sponsor. We are going to have a lot more information about them over the coming weeks. You can go to Ecomcrew.com/inspection to find out more about them.
But AsiaInspection, I’ve talked about them on the podcast before even without them being sponsors. But they will do inspection of your orders, they’ll go out and inspect the factory for you, do reconnaissance work for you. They are basically your boots on the ground representing you in any situation you can think of in Asia, different factories there. So definitely check out Ecomcrew.com/inspection.
And then the other sponsor stamped.io, I love having over the last couple of months now as a sponsor of the podcast. I can’t thank I them enough for their support. If you need reviews for your Shopify store, I would definitely check there first. Again they are something that we already use ourselves and we’ve had great luck with.
And a couple other remarks, Global Sources coming up October 17th through 19th in Hong Kong. I’m going to be speaking there this year, actually three times. I’m going to be speaking on two different topics and I’m also leading a panel. If you want to go to Global Sources you can use the code; 3-E-C-5-0. The number three, Edward, Charlie, Five, Zero. That will get you 50 bucks off your ticket which always helps, anything off that definitely helps. That’s October 17th through 19th and I believe Dave is going to be coming down there as well.
So if you are in Hong Kong, whether you go to Global Sources or not, definitely give us a shout out, we’d love to catch up with you, and we might have a couple of surprises off our sleeves, we are still working on some details. And Ecom Fuel, January 11th through 13th definitely come check us out there, both Dave and I will be there out as well in Laguna. And finally I mentioned before, but Dave and I have been secretly working behind the scenes planning together a course on importing which we are really excited about. I think it’s going to have a lot of value.
If you go to ecomcrew.com/course you can sign up early. You will get a discount that won’t be offered to anyone else if you are on that list when we launch it. We are looking to have some early signs up like to run through the course with us and give us candid feedback. So the discount will be pretty substantial just to get some people to go through it and let us know what you think.
So with all that hope you guys have a great week. We’ll be back next Monday with another EcomCrew episode live on Facebook and then Thursday will go out on iTunes. Until then everyone, happy selling and talk to you soon.
Outro: Thanks for listening to the EcomCrew Podcast. Follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/EcomCrew for weekly live recordings of the EcomCrew Podcast every Monday. And please do us a favor and leave an honest review on iTunes; it will really help us out. Again thanks for listening and until next week, happy selling.
