This transcript is auto-generated and may contain spelling and grammatical errors

 

Tyler Jorgenson (00:08)

Welcome out to Biz Ninja Entrepreneur Radio. I’m your host, Tyler Jorgenson. And every once in a while, I get to interview somebody who I’ve been connected with for a while, who I’ve interviewed a half a dozen of his friends, but I haven’t yet had the pleasure of having them on the show. And I’m so excited to finally make this happen because Brian Burt is somebody who I have watched evolve as an entrepreneur. I’ve watched him as I would walk across the stage and collect my one, two, comma club award.

 

he would follow behind me and collect six or seven at a time, it seemed like. And so always somebody whose shadow I’ve tried to keep up with. I’m gonna share a couple of fun stories about my first memories with him once we get started, but welcome out to the show, Brian. I’m so excited you’re here.

 

Brian Burt (00:53)

Tyler, thank you for having me, man. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s a pleasure to be here.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (00:55)

You

 

Absolutely. It really has. think I first met you in Dallas at Funnel Hacking Live. You were paling around with Alex Hormozi who I was business partners with at the time. You guys came in and graciously introduced me and I was like, man, this guy’s cool. He’s a cool guy. And so thanks for being cool in the first time I met you, because not everybody is at those kinds of events. yeah, so that was cool. Tell us what you’re doing now.

 

What is it that you’re building? What do you run? And then we’re to zoom backwards into how you got.

 

Brian Burt (01:32)

Yeah, yeah. Right now I’m a professional stripper at Chippendales. It’s going really well. I like to consider myself an entrepreneur. I’m actually running canopy management. So if you don’t know what that is, I’ve been in the game for about six years representing Amazon and Walmart agencies. We represent mom and pop shops all the way up to multi -billion dollar a year companies.

 

We’re just over 100 people now on the team. And just as of yesterday, got announced third time in a row to the Inc 5000, fastest growing company in America. And I believe we’re the fastest growing company, or I should say agency in the world right now. So it’s been going well. Yeah, yeah, I’m really proud of that. You know, all the other awards, the two comic club awards, the two comic club X, all that fun stuff is cool. But it doesn’t really line you up against.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (02:16)

That’s huge. Congratulations.

 

Brian Burt (02:27)

you know, everybody else. Entrepreneurs, we’re competitive. We like scorecards, right? And typically, as an entrepreneur, most of time the scorecard is your bank account, but you don’t share that publicly, right? So that’s why I really like the ink one. That one’s cool. And this is my humble brag, and then I’ll get off my soapbox. But we’re really proud, and we just learned about it yesterday. So they say do it once, you’re lucky. Do it twice, you’re good. Do it three times, and you’re special. So we’re very excited, you know. Yeah.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (02:49)

I was about to say that exact thing. In order to hit the list once, it’s year over year growth. so to do it once is amazing, but to do it three times in a row shows a constant increase year over year, which is not easy to do. Have you noticed changes in why, like what were the challenges in the first year compared to the challenges in this last year?

 

Brian Burt (02:56)

Mm

 

Yeah, I think the first year is easy ish because you you kind of look back on year one, you started, they look back at your last three years and at year one, you start at $0. So the growth is, it looks massive and so to go from, from year one to year two is hard and year two to year three is very hard, but we’re proud because of our billing model, right? We’re a performance based agency. So we bill on growth. And so it’s really a testament to my team. call it the tribe, but more than that, it’s

 

Tyler Jorgenson (03:24)

Right.

 

Brian Burt (03:44)

it’s our clients that we call partners, it’s based on their growth. So if our partners don’t grow, Canopy doesn’t earn any money. And so this is why I don’t feel bad kind of, know, quote unquote bragging about this because it’s really more a testament to the growth of our clients in their own businesses than it is to ours. So super happy to hit it the third time. you know, to your point,

 

it becomes increasingly difficult. And especially over the past few years, you we always say that Amazon is the closest approximation to the actual happenings within the economy anywhere else, right? You can measure the economy by the amount of traffic going to Amazon and to Amazon stores at any given day. And, you know, during the pandemic, obviously our first year we hit the Inc 500, I think we were 325.

 

It was crazy, right? Like everyone was shopping on Amazon. You couldn’t get out of your damn house. so, you know, toilet paper to toothbrushes to, you know, stationary bicycles. didn’t matter. Everyone was on Amazon. The prime membership grew from, I think at the time it was like every two out of three homes in the States had a prime Amazon prime membership. And then through the pandemic, it was like every four out of five homes had a prime membership. So our growth was easy.

 

But then as things normalized and traffic started to trickle down, that’s where we really had to kind of fine tune what we were doing so we could show our clients more and more growth. So we added different services. We started as a paid ads management company. And then we added creatives. So we’re doing all the photography and videography and copywriting and whatnot for listings and products. And then we added DSP and customer service and yada yada yada. But.

 

We became a full, during that period, we realized we had to grow and add additional services to become a full -fledged shop, and we hit it year two, and then hitting it year three, we had to continue to innovate, and I think innovation is really, if you’re not innovating, you’re dying, who said that, jobs? But it’s one of those things where, then we added Walmart, and we’re representing a ton of our clients on Walmart now, and Etsy, and all those fun places. So it’s like innovate or die, and I think that’s the way that we’ve been able to sustain growth.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (05:59)

Yeah, I like hearing that. I was curious what all you guys had changed over the last couple of years, and so it’s good to see the innovation. Zoom back for me. When was the moment that you first realized… So just in memory, when was the moment that you first realized you were an entrepreneur?

 

Brian Burt (06:11)

Sure. How far?

 

How far do you want to

 

Bro, this is such a corny story. it’s just one of those eye rollers. I mean, six years old, right? Like I had started a lemonade stand. I found an old refrigerator box. I cut out like a window. It like a little drawbridge. It had a little slot to put your $0 in. We did so well that the next summer that rolled around in North Jersey, my friends were like, hey, can you build me a lemonade stand? So at seven years old, I’m franchising lemonade stands.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (06:24)

I don’t care. This is like, this show is all about corny. We’re embracing it.

 

Brian Burt (06:51)

building these boxes and giving them to my friends on the other block and they’re giving me half of their earnings. I had no clue that that was called franchising until much later in life. you know, the second, seven years old was my second year of business. And I had made enough money that year to buy my mom a 1989 Honda Civic at seven years old. And I was stoked, you know, I was like, this is cool. This is the path. If you’re a Mandalorian fan, this is the way.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (07:18)

The, you know, it’s only corny because you’ve heard your story a ton, right? That’s the first time I’ve heard it. I wasn’t corny at all because so many entrepreneurs start with a lemonade stand or a paper route or selling things door to door. But everybody’s story has a unique angle that I think you can see that angle later on in their life. So you understanding the power of not only selling, but also leverage. I’m sure that’s a huge part of the rest of your experience.

 

Brian Burt (07:22)

Yeah.

 

It is. It is. It’s like once you learn you can make money on your own, you see other people going to school and then going to get jobs. And you’re like, why are you? Why is somebody, why do you believe somebody has to hand you a dollar for your hour, whereas you can just create it on your own? It’s, you know, my brother -in -law is a green beret, right, in the military. And I should say army. But he kind of.

 

he makes a great analogy. He’s like, you know, I came back from my tours and everybody was a civilian. Right? He’s like, I’m not a civilian, everyone else. And that was a tough assimilation for him to kind of reintegrate as, you know, a civilian, not a military personnel. And I’ve always viewed entrepreneurs in a different light. You know, we’re friends with Alex Charf, and he coined the term the right way. Entrepreneurialism is a personality type. And you kind of see the rest of the world, like people in jobs, J .O .B. just over broke.

 

Like, what are you doing? Why are you allowing other people to tell you your worth when the money’s there for the taking, you just have to go get it. And so that’s a mindset, that’s a view, that’s like a lens that I’ve never been able to put down from literally the time I was six and franchising lemonade stands.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (09:00)

Yeah, you, it took a lot or at least a mindset shift for you to go all in on canopy, right? You used to do a lot of different things simultaneously. one, I’d love to hear some of your early stories and what you, know, types of offers and things you were running. and then after that though, let’s, and I’ll remind you, let’s dive into like how you decided to go all in on one thing. So let’s go first back into some of those early offers and things you did. Just curious how you,

 

Brian Burt (09:23)

Yeah.

 

Yeah, man, I’ve done everything from agencies to softwares. had a paper lead community and a business. I was the middleman. I found being the middleman, the broker between businesses because you know how to create sales and leads became really, really profitable. So going back to like 2004, I launched a company called Rockstar Auto Glass and the name was too damn clever. Right. Everyone thought like, yeah, you’re a rock star. You know, it’s literally what happens when a rock hits your windshield. It makes a star, right? That’s called a rock star.

 

And so that company was around for a while before I sold it. I had 17 guys all positioned at car washes and oil change shops. And as the cars would come through, they’d look at your windshield and let you know you have a chip that needs to be repaired or a crack that needs to be replaced. And I would then broker that sold deal, closed through the insurance, sold deal off to actual auto glass shops that would do the work. And here’s the fun part.

 

I’m 19 years old, running a team of 17 people. And every windshield that we would replace, the insurance companies at the time would pay us $900 to $1 ,000. And I was doing anywhere in the range from about 30 to 50 windshield replacements a day at 19 years old. And so you do the math on that. It’s 30 to 50 grand clear outside of the rent I had to pay at the car washes and gas stations. You know, I taking home

 

20 grand a day on average. 19 years old, had no clue where all that money went. First of all, I didn’t realize he had to pay taxes. Taxes were a big problem for a while. But it’s funny because we have a few friends in common that have almost the exact same story as me. They’re a little younger than I am. I think I pioneered that business model, or was one of the first to pioneer that business models. But now it’s everywhere. They still exist. You go to car washes and gas stations, those guys are still there. But Brandon Poole, if you’re familiar,

 

Tyler Jorgenson (11:04)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Brian Burt (11:24)

has the exact same come up story as me. And he’s like, dude, you had Rockstar Auto Glass. We knew Rockstar Auto Glass. You guys were like multi -state, which we were at the time. And he’s like, we basically just copy pasted your business model. And he was making a ton. He was making a ton as well. yeah, it was a really fun come up. I eventually realized, think somewhere around 2008, 2009, that you could do it online. Right? I’m sorry. You know what? I’m 10 years ahead of myself.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (11:37)

funny.

 

Brian Burt (11:52)

1999 I realized you could do it online. Right? And this is like right when the internet started happening. And I learned SEO from a guy named Howie Schwartz. He was kind of the only guy out there teaching anything related to SEO. was like Yannick Silver and Howie Schwartz. And that was it. And he taught me the concept of link wheeling, which is really simple. You take like one link on Craigslist, you link it to Backpage, and then you link the two together.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (11:54)

Okay.

 

Mm -hmm. Yep.

 

Brian Burt (12:18)

And I owned at that time, literally owned the first, I have screenshots I should send you sometime Tyler, it’s hilarious. I owned the first three pages of Google for Phoenix Auto Glass. Every link was mine. So, you you’d have somebody calling in, hey, I my windshield replaced, can you give me a quote? And I give them a quote, I’d say 300 bucks. They’d go down the list to the second link, they’d call back and I’d use an accent the next time. I’m like, hey y ‘all, how you doing? yeah, that one’s $400. They’d call me right back to the first link.

 

and I’d sell them the windshield if they didn’t have insurance, right? So it was pretty funny. And then all the other auto glass shops in Phoenix and Tucson at the time, they kind of unionized against me and threatened me with the dumbest lawsuit you’ve ever heard of. It was monopolization of Google.

 

And I said, well, first of all, I’m like 20 at the time. And I’m like, scared as shit. I’m like, I don’t want everybody suing me. So I just made them an offer. was like, hey, why don’t I just do it for you? And that was my first kind of entrance into an agency model. And we wound up representing a lot of auto glass companies and then auto dealers and kind of expanded from there.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (13:12)

Right.

 

Yeah, it’s always fun looking back on the story and seeing how they evolve and what things were taken from each experience into the next one. And so, you start doing agency, you start scaling stuff up. At the time I met you, were doing, kind of you were a mystery man. You had a lot of different irons in the fire, none of which you talked about publicly. But how did you, I think it was a conversation you had with some.

 

But how did you make that decision to say, hey, I’m going to stop trying to burn, you know, five candles at once and just go for one torch?

 

Brian Burt (14:01)

Yeah, that evolved into communities and teaching people. So I had a community, I had an agency, I had info product, I had a software, I had lots of things going and that’s when I joined Russell Brunson’s Inner Circle in like 2018. And it’s Brandon Poole, it’s me, it’s Alison Prince, it’s, you know, I’ve got Alex Horomose and Layla and like Alex and I and Layla all became like best friends and then all moved to Austin together and we all hung out every weekend. And Alex had a conversation with me

 

Tyler Jorgenson (14:21)

Mm -hmm.

 

Yeah.

 

Brian Burt (14:31)

one day and he goes, dude, you’ve got to just choose one thing and go after it as much as you can. And this is over a full bottle of Jack Daniels that he and I had finished. Alex and Layla would come over to my house on a Saturday morning. They’d come with a handle of Jack Daniels. They’d come with a full bottle of orange crush and a giant two liter of caffeine free diet Coke and mix them all together. And Alex and I named them swamp donkeys. So we’d have about

 

Tyler Jorgenson (14:41)

you

 

Brian Burt (14:58)

We’d have about nine or 10 Swamp Donkeys and then he’d get real with me and say, hey, listen, dude, you gotta, gotta, you gotta start killing off some of your businesses and choose one. And concurrently at the same time, I went out to Boise and I was in the inner circle with Russell Brunson. And Russell, if you know Russell or if you don’t, know, on camera, he’s very outgoing, on stage, he’s so charismatic. But in person, he’s reserved and a bit introverted. So I didn’t think Russell really liked me for the first year I knew him.

 

but I think he was just trying to get a gauge on who the heck I was and what I was doing. And so he finally sits me down and he puts his hands on my shoulders, which is odd for Russell, if you know Russell behind the scenes. He goes, Brian, I need to talk to you. And I felt like I got pulled into the principal’s office. I was like, shit. It’s like, what happened? What did I do? And he goes, you remind me a lot of me about three years ago, I had eight businesses all hovering around a million dollars a year. And it wasn’t until I decided to choose one,

 

which was click funnels that I took off. He says, so what I need you to do is kill your babies. I said, first of all, you’re a Mormon. Don’t tell me to murder my children. I think that’s against the religion. Two, pretty sure, probably all religions. Two, you’re right. And so I chose Canopy. It was the one that was making the least, but I thought had the biggest upside. And that’s…

 

Tyler Jorgenson (16:06)

pretty sure.

 

Yeah.

 

That’s a scary moment, right? Like just trusting your gut that, yeah, this one’s actually the lowest now. And so what did you do? Did you sell the other ones off or did you just like start closing them and move and shift and focus?

 

Brian Burt (16:25)

Mm

 

Some of them I sold for pennies on the dollar. You know, that was back before I understood anything about acquisitions or buying businesses or selling businesses. So some I sold for nothing. Others I just shut down. And some are still running to this day just on autopilot where I’m still making a couple hundred grand a year from them, but I haven’t touched them in five or six years. I mean, they’re just membership communities that have content that I created and that just keep running. And so that’s easy.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (16:49)

Rough, super rough.

 

Yeah, doesn’t take up your bandwidth. And so now Canopy, you you fast forward back into where you are now. Canopy’s doing great. You guys are scaling up. You’ve, you’ve a hundred team members. but you guys are kind of now in, this iteration point where now you’re acquiring other things. now all probably with under the same brand, but isn’t it interesting how there’s this season? It’s like a hourglass. Okay. In order for me to get through the middle, I need to eliminate and get small.

 

but then there’s now this point where you’re start expanding again. What are you guys looking to do in terms of expanding?

 

Brian Burt (17:32)

First of all, it’s great metaphor. The king of metaphors over here. But that’s exactly what it is. You really do have to narrow down in order to expand. It’s like turning over the hourglass. So during the process of growing Canopy, we started as just an ads company, as I mentioned. We realized we had to expand, so I actually started looking for acquisitions. One of the other Inner Circle members wound up being a business partner of mine in a…

 

much larger fund that we started, hundred million dollar fund that we started, Tom Shipley. I had met him and he gave me some really great advice. He said, listen, there is no business problem that cannot be rapidly solved for via acquisitions. So there really exists no business problems that can’t be solved for via a purchase of another company that you integrate into your existing company or you roll up. At the time I had never bought another business, but I started looking actively.

 

And I found Dio, it was a 12 person team called Click Ascent. They had been in the Amazon agency business for a very long time. They had a huge book of SOPs on how to run Amazon businesses. And I said, listen, guys, let’s be creative here on how we’re going to acquire you. And we weren’t much bigger than them at that time. Not from a revenue or EBITDA standpoint, not from a personnel standpoint, but…

 

It worked out. I did a seller finance, is, they held the note and I paid them off over every month, but I paid them off with their own profit. So it’s like what we call N O O P acquisition, no out of pocket acquisition. It was really more of an Aqua hire because we did bring their team in for two years and they were brilliant. They really did set us up for success because although we had a lot of people that wanted to use our services, we realized once we kind of hit the 30 client mark, we were

 

out of control. Our results were diminishing for our clients. We hadn’t collected on like $130 ,000. I didn’t know where it went until we hired the right people to help me identify that. But through this acquisition, it really did button us up. And I even hired my, even promoted their CEO to my COO and he became a brilliant piece of what we did. And then now we’re sitting at around 2000, just under 2000 pages of documented SOPs in our Wiki. It’s all.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (19:33)

you

 

Very cool.

 

Brian Burt (19:52)

kind of our secret sauce on how we run Amazon and Walmart agencies. So it did solve that problem for us. And subsequently, we had acquired a software that I’ve invested two or three million into that’s become kind of our backbone, our technology that makes us much more efficient. We’ve acquired communities. It’s been a lot of fun. And that’s really opened my mind to how important acquisitions are. Now we’re in a place where we’re looking to expand to TikTok Shop.

 

Recently, I think this week Amazon announced that they are going to integrate with TikTok and Pinterest. So hell yeah. It’s a giant, giant, giant move, such a smart move. I’m super excited for the day that they announced that Amazon buys TikTok. And so now we’re looking for people to help us build out that end of the service offering, right? Because adding TikTok shop management, adding…

 

Tyler Jorgenson (20:25)

Huge. Huge.

 

Brian Burt (20:45)

Google ads and Facebook and meta ads, we’re looking for shops that do all these things and that’s really kind of our next move to help catalyze our innovation.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (20:55)

Yeah, that’s huge. If people aren’t into the e -comm world, what TikTok shopping is doing with a closed ecosystem, but then opening up and bringing in new data feeds, it’s gonna be insane. It is really how the current and younger generations shop. And it is so easy for the older generations to adopt, where unlike, you have to go get your credit card out and go switch over to Shopify.

 

I’m just amazed at what’s happening in that space right now. could do hundreds of shows just on that one. So man, I love your story because you continue to build things you love, you continue to do things you’re enjoying. What are some of the challenges that you face now? And usually I go backwards, but I wanna say currently. What are some of the things you’re facing in this last year now that you’re…

 

Brian Burt (21:27)

Super exciting, really, really exciting. Yup.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (21:50)

CEO of a hundred person company or, know, this is very different than being the kid running, you know, the 20 year old running some kind of off book businesses potentially, you know, very different part of the, of the process. So what are some of the challenges you’re facing now that you didn’t think you were going to face or maybe that have caught you off guard and how are you solving those?

 

Brian Burt (22:10)

It’s funny because I look back at when I was averaging like 20 grand a day profit with a 17 person crew and I was probably making more take home than I am today Right just a skeleton crew a very simple business model. I’m probably averaging you know, if if not less just right around that right and But the upside to that there’s the downside where you go Wow, I’m working way harder for less or equal It feels like you haven’t made any progress in

 

Tyler Jorgenson (22:18)

yeah.

 

Brian Burt (22:40)

I know, 25 years. But the upside is that I built a really exitable asset here. Right, so right around this time last year, we had a nine plus figure offer on our company. So no matter how many $20 ,000 days you have, you’re not gonna get $100 million unless you just workin’ your ass off until you’re 80 -something, right? So that’s kind of the upside of it. The downside of it is you do look at it like, man, this is hard.

 

when you’ve got a hundred plus person team or even I think it really starts around 25 to 40, you get politics, you have to become Switzerland, you’ve got to become so emotionally regulated. know, everything you say as a CEO or a founder that’s running the business is through a megaphone. Everything you do is under a microscope. And for me, it’s, you know, at first it was a lot of pressure. So going from marketer to CEO, which I’ve given a big stage talk about to a room full of marketers went over like a fart in church.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (23:16)

Mm

 

Brian Burt (23:40)

You know, it was a very difficult evolution and I’m still not great at it. You know, I know there’s a lot of room to improve for me, but that’s a challenge. Also, you know, I hate to talk about the economic headwinds or wonkiness or whatever you want to call it. It might be the R word recession. Who knows? But, you know, I think you can judge the health of the U .S. economy via the traffic to Amazon.

 

How many people are shopping at any given time? Right, they used to call that the Starbucks test. How many people are buying cups of coffees? I think Amazon’s probably a more accurate litmus test of the actual state of the US economy. And that also has decreased. And because of the Wittily bill, it’s had an impact on revenue. It’s had an impact on revenue.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (24:10)

Right.

 

Right.

 

So yeah, that’s true. Yeah, so yeah, because you tie everything to performance. And so there’s two parts I wanna touch on that was like, did you start day one as performance only? then if you didn’t, how did you decide to make that switch? But then also, I wanna talk about those headwinds. So let’s first go to the first one. We’ll come back to what’s happening in your litmus test.

 

Brian Burt (24:33)

Mm

 

Yeah, well, I had run an agency prior that I mentioned, and that was all based on a percentage of spend and a flat fee. whenever you hire an agency, if you’re listening to this and you’re looking to hire an agency, if they’re charging you on a percentage of spend, basically at the end of the day, they’re just going to want you to spend more money. Whether you’re performing well or not, the answer to everything is spend more money. And ethically and morally, I thought that was wrong. I had tried.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (25:13)

I concur.

 

Brian Burt (25:15)

Yeah, I’ve tried to go down that road. It was terrible. So I said, if and when I do another agency, I’m going to flip that model on its head and it’s going to be based on growth, right? We better perform or we ain’t getting paid and we’re getting fired. So that’s what I did. It was right from the beginning. And when I started this business with my business partner, Brian Johnson, I said, that’s the way we have to build. It’s going to go over so much more ethically. I think it’ll resonate in a sales situation. People will align. That’s why we don’t call our clients clients. They’re partners because

 

They have to grow for us to make money and for us to grow. And so that was the idea, right? That was the impetus, just because I had made that mistake in a prior life at a prior agency. So I learned.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (25:46)

Yep.

 

Yeah, I very much align with that direction. I think it never ever made sense to So I started my agency after owning my own brands. so like same kind of thing. I’m like, I wouldn’t have wanted to pay a percentage of spend that that’s not, I’m not encouraging them in the right things. So it just never ever made sense to me, even though that was in that era of time, the market standard was a base plus a percentage of spend. It just never ever sat well with me.

 

Brian Burt (26:05)

Thank

 

And if you’re not good at what you do, you can’t charge on a performance basis. You know, so if somebody’s saying, hey, you got to pay me a percentage of spend, they’re probably not that good at what they do. And we knew we were best in class. know, we fucking rock at what we do. So why not move it to a performance base? And by the way, we make more that way. We grow accounts so much that we wound up making a lot more than if we were just charging 10 or 20 % of spend. So it’s a win -win in all scenarios.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (26:27)

Right? Yeah.

 

Right, not anymore at least. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Mm -hmm.

 

Yep, yep, absolutely, yeah, and it’s just much healthier alignment. Okay, so the headwinds of what you’re seeing, you guys have how many growth partners right now?

 

Brian Burt (26:59)

So we’re just north of 250. So if you can’t, we count them on marketplaces. So we’re really looking over 300, right? Because there’s Amazon US, Germany, UK, you know, all that.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (27:03)

Okay.

 

Yeah.

 

Sure. So you’ve got a pretty good finger on the pulse of what’s happening inside the Amazon ecosystem, not only from your partners, but also just the fact that you’re in this industry as one of the leaders. What I’m curious, like, did this last Prime Day underperform people’s expectations? What are our average cart values decreasing, our returns increasing? What’s happening? What are the metrics happening within Amazon?

 

that people need to be aware.

 

Brian Burt (27:41)

So I’m always an Amazon optimist. I believe in Amazon. If you look at even through the quote unquote economic headwinds, even through that, you look at Snap, you look at Meta, you look at all the big tech giants, they all dropped off a cliff in terms of earnings and reportings and growth quarter over quarter, year over year. Amazon is the only one that continues to keep going up. Now, did it slow down? Yes. But is it still going up? Yes, it’s the only one.

 

one of the only ones that’s really still going up. And Prime Day performed as we expected. We’ve done it enough. We thought it would be good. It was good. But if you really listen, every Prime Day, there are the Amazon pessimists out there. They’re going to say, this Prime Day is going to underperform. This last Prime Day that just passed in July was our best Prime Day ever. It was still the best Prime Day that Amazon has ever seen, period.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (28:17)

Okay.

 

Brian Burt (28:40)

And that’s incredibly impressive considering we’re in one, pretty damn close to an election, right? Two, lot of economic wonkiness happening out there. And three, overall Amazon traffic use cases is down, or user sessions is down. that’s, it’s pretty impressive to see what Amazon’s able to pull off. And now they’re adding other things like Amazon.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (28:48)

Yep.

 

Brian Burt (29:08)

big days which are coming up in October. It’s like a prime junior and then there’s a second prime coming up and then you’ve got Q4 which is tremendous. They’re doing all the right things over there to make sure that they’re the leaders and will stay on top. I mean people just shop differently nowadays, right? And so we’re happy that it’s going up. We’re attached to the right ship.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (29:33)

I can’t hear you at all. was waiting to see if it came back up.

 

Yeah

 

and we look fine on quality on everything. Let’s see, can you hear me? You are frozen completely on my side. And you’re gone.

 

Brian Burt (29:45)

Sorry man.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (29:46)

It is okay. Okay. So, it’s a good segue. Yeah. yeah. No words. So good segue is you’ve built all these amazing things, right? You’ve built some really cool businesses. Some of them, I mean, the fact that you have, you have membership sites that you built years ago that you haven’t touched in five years that are still making you, you know, five times the average income in the U S is mind boggling, but you’re just like, that’s no big deal. It’s on the side. But all of this is in my opinion,

 

Brian Burt (29:50)

Hurricane.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (30:15)

Business isn’t anything if it doesn’t help us have the life that we dream of and the life that we really want. So what is one item on Brian Burt’s personal bucket list that you’re gonna accomplish in the next 12 months?

 

Brian Burt (30:27)

that man and well said, well said, right? I tend to have a bit of like a beef with the lifestyle entrepreneurs, you know, hey, I just want to live in Thailand and make 60 grand a year. Okay, cool. That ain’t me, right? Like, let’s get to work.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (30:40)

Yeah, maybe that’s not an entrepreneur, but that’s fine. You can go be a freelancer.

 

Brian Burt (30:44)

I’m like, I live your life the way you want to, no judgment here, but that’s not my style. I’m like, let’s get to work. Let’s create an empire. But for me, I think over the next 12 months, I would like to, as I mentioned, I’d love to acquire a meta slash Google ads slash TikTok agency. I think that’s just fun. I love being on the bleeding edge of things. think that.

 

Amazon sellers and Walmart sellers now are realizing that they have to drive a lot of external traffic to be successful. So from a professional standpoint, that’s where I’m living. From a personal standpoint, dude, I’m kind of living the dream and I hate to say that, but you know this, I split my time half the year in Austin, Texas and half the year in the US Virgin Islands. So I’m here in the Virgin Islands right now in St. John and it’s paradise. It’s beautiful. And the tax breaks are nice.

 

So that’s where I’m at. mean, could I sell the business and get a yacht and a private jet? Yeah, I mean, those are monetary things. Those are material. That’s cool. I’m really very happy with the way things have turned out. I want to pay off the mortgages, which is a goal. Help my mom pay off her mortgage, which I’m doing.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (31:45)

Yeah.

 

Brian Burt (32:03)

You know, but I really want to do something fun. You know, I’ve got an engine within Canopy. I haven’t said this publicly, nor have I probably even said this very much privately, but I want to create an irreverent brand. So I love Deathwater, for example, as a great brand, right? It’s irreverent. It’s kind of like a big F you in the face of the entire water beverage industry. You know, something that

 

Tyler Jorgenson (32:18)

heck yeah.

 

Brian Burt (32:28)

We could mark you and I are marketers. We love marketing. I love the creativity, creativity and marketing. I love the innovation. I love the data too. I love reading, you know, the experiments and pulling it in to see what worked and didn’t. So I want to be able to have some fun with marketing, create like a really fun, irreverent brand that will totally be a standout. You know, it’ll be something that is a little offensive. You know, before I started Canopy, I was going to start a company and call it thrust media, you know,

 

And it was all about launching brands and info products. And it was going to kind of have an irreverent name. But I actually think it’s going to be a physical product that’s got a bit of an irreverent name. And I want to do that for just the pure joy of it. Find a product that’s amazing that really does help people. But make it irreverent. Like Poo -Pourri was really neat, or Squatty Potty, or something, or Death Water, you name them. They’re so fun.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (33:01)

Yeah, I love it.

 

I love it.

 

heck yeah.

 

huh.

 

There’s some good ones out there right now, for sure.

 

Brian Burt (33:26)

It’s just like marketing fodder, just cannon fodder for marketing, right? And so I want to do something like that, but it’s got to be able to solve a real problem, right? The core tenant is you can’t just create like a goofball product and marketing or else you’re to wind up in like a Spencer somewhere. But, you know, I want to do something really cool like that just for the pure joy of the game.

 

Tyler Jorgenson (33:46)

I think that’ll be super, super amazing. Brian, thank you so much for coming out on the show. To all of everybody listening, go check out Canopy Management. You can find Brian on LinkedIn and socials, all those places. So definitely check the show notes. We’ll link to all those places for you as well. To all my biz ninjas, wherever you’re listening, tuning in or watching, it’s your turn to go out and do something.