E208: What happened when Taylor Benterud stepped away from his agency
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Taylor Benterud is COO & founder of BetterAMS. They specialize in Amazon advertising and help brands on Amazon doing between 7-10 figures grow faster through better ads management. They started in 2016 and exploded in growth going from about 300k/ year in 2019 to doing 1mm rev in 2020. They’re pacing to do 1.5 mm this year with >25% margins.
Episode highlights:
- How Taylor went from leaving Serbia while playing semi-pro football, to becoming an entrepreneur.
- What Taylor’s toughest bottleneck has been for the last several months.
- What the biggest issue with Amazon sellers is right now.
- What happened when Taylor realized he was (what Gino Wickman calls) an integrator.
- What surprising thing happened when Taylor handed the keys to the business over to his trusted employee.
- What Taylor did with his time away from the business.
- Best advice: Understand systems thinking and bottlenecks
- Habit that contributes to success: Waking up at the same time daily and getting going on a good routine, including time away from work. Set hard boundaries and you won’t experience burnout.
- Recommended tool: Notion.so
- Recommended book: The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman and Power vs. Force by Dr. David Hawkins
- Run time: 36:33
Links:
- Gino Wickman’s Traction and Rocket Fuel
- Youtube Channel
- Interview with Brent
- Taylor’s agency: BetterAMS
Quotes:
- “Amazon as a platform was an absolute blue ocean.”
- “I thought I was God’s gift to Amazon advertising.”
- “One niche, one service. Nothing else.”
- “It was difficult in the beginning. I think from lack of experience.”
- “I think that’s why we plateaued.”
- “I, myself, never really scaled the agency to where I loved it.”
- “She’s a natural visionary. She’s the antithesis of me.”
- “I’m happy to organize chaos in the shadows.”
- “A lot of the ideas that she has are really good….We just don’t have the cash for it.”
- “Every new person that comes to the team makes everybody better.”
Takeaways:
- Find great team members, trust them, and allow them to step forward into greater roles.
- Create a culture early on, and consider what you want and how you’ll get there.