Welcome to the Planet Amazon podcast with Adam Schafer , where we explore the world of Amazon and other e-commerce marketplaces . Join us as we delve into the latest strategies and tactics for successful selling on the world's largest online marketplace .
Hello , welcome to Planet Amazon . I'm Adam Schafer , and Planet Amazon is the place where we talk about all things Amazon and e-commerce related . Today , we have a truly special guest joining us , someone who has been instrumental in helping e-commerce businesses not just survive but thrive .
Matt Putra is a seasoned fractional CFO with an incredible track record of scaling , transforming and financing small and medium-sized businesses . As a key financial strategist for e-commerce companies and agencies , he brings a wealth of expertise in financing , forecasting , cash flow management and profitability optimization .
Currently serving as a fractional CFO at 8X , matt specializes in predicting business patterns , future outcomes and profitability across industries . He has worked with well-known brands like True Earth , the Tumeric and Lusum , ensuring their financial stability and growth . But that's not all .
Matt is also a co-owner of , and CFO and COO of , keep Nature Wild , proving that he doesn't just advise businesses , he's actively doing it . Welcome to the show , matt Putra .
Thank you so much , Adam . It's so great to be here .
Okay . So first of all , before we get started into this , tell us a little bit about you and a little bit about 8X .
Sure . So I was a CFO of a private equity group a senior partner and CFO , and it was great and everything . But one day a friend and his wife called me to ask about their e-commerce business and could I help and figure some things out for them . So I worked with them for a year and I really enjoyed it .
And then I worked for one of their friends and their friends and anyway that ended up being way more fun than working corporate .
So I quit that , started my own agency and now I've been running ADEX for five years and since you know , at five years we've now worked with probably more than 60 brands with revenues from two to a hundred million in revenue US , uk , canada , australia , amazon , shopify , walmart , cpg , retail .
So we work with a lot of people and we really drop into somebody's GPS system helping them navigate , growing , scaling , exiting , all that kind of stuff .
Yeah , I mean so it's awesome . So we've never really had a finance specialist on our show before . And again , I think people discount the importance of financial planning , accounting but Amazon is so , and in e-commerce , but so many transactions it's so complicated and Amazon doesn't always make it easy .
There are certain platforms that try to help you with this , but there's always a charge for something . There's always things you need to be looking out for . So just the basic accounting and reconciliation side is complicated .
But then the financial planning of buying inventory , how much inventory you're going to have , how do you finance that inventory and how do you ensure you're making the margins that you actually think you're making on Amazon .
So , with that kind of intro into what I see people struggling with , talk to us about how you help Amazon sellers and brands navigate this and plan . You know there's a thing you call scorecards and maybe you could talk a little bit about that and then get maybe into more detail .
Sure . So I mean , I guess , if we're talking about the universe of helping an Amazon brand , you know I'm going to start at the foundation , which is good bookkeeping , and people do it a whole bunch of different ways . There's A2X . You can use Soligo to integrate with NetSuite , let's say , or A2X to QuickBooks .
There's all kinds of things , but the foundational part that I believe of the Amazon bookkeeping process is there's a bi-weekly report that summarizes how much Amazon has sent you , how much they're withholding , what were the ad spend , what were the fees , what were the holdbacks .
And then it's a PDF and I forget where the name is , but it's in the business reports or the transaction summary . That forms the foundation of your bookkeeping . That one thing . The reason why is this A2X will do its own thing , so legal will do its own thing , and they'll put transactions in all these different places .
But that report is the is the truth , and so if you use that , you can check A2X , you can check any software and true , everything up once every two weeks , I believe they send it out . So from there , once you get your bookkeeping correct , the next thing that I think is really important is a financial plan .
So again , we're building up foundation , next level , next level , so a financial plan , meaning that what do you think you're going to do in revenue this year ? How much do you think you're going to spend on ads , what's your cost of goods going to be , what's your fixed cost ?
And then can you work all the way down to a net profit and maybe , even if you can't approximate a cash figure from there , you can go well , I'm going to invest in this part of the business or that part , but you can manage your cash flow . So that's step two , the Um , the . The thing that I think is the cherry on top of all of this is scorecards .
Um , I believe scorecards are probably one of the most important thing that people are not doing at scale today . People love dashboards , they love Looker Studio , they love Tableau , but they're not doing scorecards .
And and here's what happens Dashboards are nice , they're pretty , they look great , but only the best people in your company can tell you what a dashboard is telling you about your business . So there's bar charts , there's line charts , there's all these things , but there's no flashing message saying do this or this is wrong .
So only the owners and your literally best people can tell you what to do . A scorecard , for example , is going to flash two colors only red if it's okay , or green if it's okay . Sorry , red if it's not . So here's a really great example . I work with a client and this was October last year their fulfillment center .
There was a labor dispute , I believe , and so they stopped fulfilling orders . My client didn't notice for two weeks and then they noticed and they had to fly there and it took two weeks to fix it . In the meantime they short shipped Amazon and they lost $300,000 of revenue in October alone .
If they'd had a scorecard and they managed fulfillment rates or shipping rates , even on-time shipping , let's say they would have seen on-time shipping drop off right in the one week that it first happened , cause it would have , you know , the target would have been 99% on-time ship .