Podcast transcript
Introduction
Before we get started, a quick message from our team here at MerchantSpring. We've just launched something we're really proud of, our new AMC Insights module. It's designed to make Amazon Marketing Cloud simple, powerful, and usable for agencies of all sizes. You get the five most popular AMC reports, pre-built, AI-enhanced, and ready to go. You can schedule them, compare trends over time, and never touch SQL.
We even spin up your AMC instance so you can skip the infrastructure headaches. And the best part? It's free on all agency plans. AMC Insights. Insights, zero friction. You can learn more or book a demo at merchantspring.io. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Marketplace Masters, where we explore the playbooks and principles that really help agencies thrive in the Amazon and marketplace ecosystem.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today we're diving into a challenge that many agencies, especially smaller agencies, wrestle with. How do you serve clients across multiple Amazon countries, multiple retail channels, without just drowning in complexity and cost? My guest today is Catherine Bolich, the founder of Bolich Consultanting.
Catherine is a former Amazonian who now runs her own boutique agency. And what's remarkable is that as a solo operator, she's scaled to 11 clients in just over one year, spanning not just North America, but also Europe, Australia, and beyond. And she's doing it across platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok. So in this episode, we're going to explore how she's managed to stay lean while delivering globally, how she navigates country-specific challenges and what other small agencies can learn from her approach. Catherine, it's absolutely delightful to have you on today's show.
Catherine Bolich
Thanks, Paul. I'm so excited to be here.
Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. Well, very exciting. I know, having started my own agency many years ago, not solo, might I add, I'm very curious about some of the hows here, because this is a, it sounds like a very big lift, but something that you have really managed to crack. Let's jump into that. Just curious, though, tell us a little bit more about like the journey from Amazon to starting your own agency and consultancy. I know many sort of Amazon professionals are either former Amazonians or maybe sellers think about starting their own agency. I mean, what was your journey around that? How do you get to that sort of position?
Catherine Bolich
Yeah, so I started at Amazon five years ago, and I worked across every category you could imagine, hard lines, soft lines, home and kitchen, sports and outdoors, consumer electronics. And my last years were spent leading an international team where I managed China-based sellers that were then selling and advertising into other countries. I loved the pace and the challenge of Amazon, but the more I spent time with brands, the more I really saw a gap in the market.
And I found that brands were craving a deeper partnership with their agencies, something that extended beyond tactics really into long-term strategic consulting. So that's why I launched Bolich Consulting. I wanted to bring that boutique feeling to the agency market. I don't want to just route the same SOPs to each of my clients. I want to build an agency that's highly personalised and tailored to the exact needs of each of my clients.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, fantastic. Now, there is something quite unique about your agency that you position it both as an advertising agency and as a strategic consultancy. Great dual positioning here. What do you see as the advantages of this dual model? What does it create for your clients and how does it reflect the broader mission of what you're trying to do for your clients?
Catherine Bolich
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the dual agency consultancy model is really important. I found that a lot of agencies are fantastic at execution. You see them building campaigns, reporting, and optimisations. But today's brands need more than that. They need somebody that can zoom out and really understand the CEO's five-year plans, and then translate that into a tactical strategy at the annual level for every platform.
And so that's why I really founded Bolich Consulting. I wanted to marry that hands-on campaign management with long-term strategic consulting. That combination really allows me to scale spend profitably, but at the same time influence things like pricing, product mix, channel strategy that are instrumental to success in the organic sales side to ensure that my clients are hitting their goals. It's really full funnel, full picture. And I ultimately see myself as a business growth consultant.
Paul Sonneveld
That's great. That's really good. So let me get to the big question. We'll unpack it here, but the top line question, which really intrigued me, I think when we first spoke was, you've managed to grow to 11 clients within a year. as a solo operator, right? Now, there might be agencies tuning in to go, well, we're doing 50 clients or 100 clients, you know, 11, that's not that much.
But, my challenge would be, well, how many people do you have? What does your business development team look like? All of that, a solo operator, building a business really from the ground up, doing all that business development, serving clients. I mean, let's just talk about let's not even get into sort of, you know, the serving side, but really about that growth. How do you get to 11 clients from zero with one person?
Catherine Bolich
I've been very fortunate and I'm very grateful for all of my clients for trusting me. I think it really comes down to fast results and referrals. You know, I've helped brands grow their sales 400% in 60 days, increased conversion rates 38% in 30 days, and achieved the highest ROAS in Walmart for their whole category. So when you're able to deliver that kind of performance really quickly, it leads to trust. And trust leads to growth, both in terms of net new clients and also depth with the clients that you have and expanding to different retail partners with them.
I think one of my advantages is my ability to simplify. I find, of course, that time is such a limited resource for anyone you interact with, right? I think my job is really to take as much work off my client's plate as possible, make their lives as easy as possible. And although advertising is complicated, it's very complex. To be honest, the fundamentals aren't. And whenever I pitch a budget or a strategy or a new client, I spend the bulk of my time explaining the why. I believe that strategy will work. You know that the why behind everything is so much more important than the tactical how. And that's where it earns you the trust and trust really is the key to scale.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I mean, great to hear about those driving those quick wins really, really early. Is there I mean, is there something you look for really to land those quick wins early? I mean, because I think everyone. Everyone loves delivering quick wins for their clients. It's great. But it can be very hard. Sometimes there are no quick wins or sometimes we don't know where to look. I mean, where do you look for those quick wins?
Catherine Bolich
It depends on the channel. So, you know, today we're talking so much about Amazon. Amazon specifically, I look for ways to ad spend and that can cut a couple of different ways. Is the brand's campaign structure set up in a way that they have multiple ASINs or campaigns competing for the same keywords? Are their placements optimised? Do they have a top-of-search strategy, a detail page strategy? What I find to be a really key to success is segmentation.
So I really want my clients to be laser focused on what exactly are their priority products by tier, and then how do we align those ASINs to the exact keywords or competitive products, we want that ease in to own, so that we aren't competing against each other, we're not driving up our CPCs, and we're able to see those really quick results.
Now, too, we're so fortunate with today's data and AI that we can use things like AMC reports, So we now know multi-touch attribution. We know conversion rates for every different path to purchase. So I can really dive in and see which pathways are the most efficient and compare that to the percent reach of each pathway so that I can shift around budget to really optimize for conversion rates.
Paul Sonneveld
That's really great. You and I should have a further chat about what further queries I need to build into our AMC module, really to unlock those quick wins. That sounds like a great build. Actually, we've got a great question here from Kristen around AI, and well, you touched on that. Kristen, thank you so much for your question. A great prompter for everyone else to put their questions in it. We're gonna answer it towards the end of this conversation. So thank you very much.
Catherine, I wanna go back to the second angle of kind of you scaling, right? One dimension is 11 clients, zero to 11 in one year, great. But you were, I would say, very brave. to also start scaling geographically and across platforms, right? Multi-country, multi-channel. It wasn't just like I'm scaling 11 clients in the toys category in Amazon in the US. No, you sort of went Walmart, TikTok, different countries, all of that. Pretty brave, I think. How did you get to that decision to actually go and do that? Because many in the industry would counsel against that. You've gone against the trend. Why?
Catherine Bolich
I would say in a lot of ways, my agency model bucks the traditional trend. To answer the first half of your question, why go multi-country? You know, my experience at Amazon, I think, really gave me confidence in navigating international nuance. I led an international team. I have managed account executives in the US and Canada. A dotted line to Japan and worked across all the Amazon markets internationally. And so through that experience, I really saw firsthand how fragile a brand is if they're overly reliant on one market or one channel.
To me, expanding to a different market, it's not just about growth, but it's about resilience. And if you think about it, to use Canada as an example, it's one of the easiest next steps to expand into the Canadian population is about 10% the size of the US, right? So expanding into Canada is an immediate opportunity to grow your US sales 10% incrementally. And if you were to take that proposition to any CEO, they would jump at the chance, right? That would be so exciting. And that's exactly what the Canadian market and any other international market represents international growth. So my goal with international markets is really to help my clients future-proof their sales and make their businesses more resilient.
In terms of expanding to multiple channels, I think that has inherently more risk than expanding globally, to be honest, because there's more nuances between shopper behaviour of different channels. And for me, what I really wanted to do with each client is so deeply and intimately understand their business that I was their go-to trusted partner. And I think their entire e-commerce system works better, the more channels that I'm able to help integrate and manage. And so I think it's really a value add that I can then take, you know, what we're doing on Amazon and apply it to Walmart. So I think it's actually the best thing for the client.
Paul Sonneveld
It's a great defensive play too, right? Cause it sort of sticks, it makes the client a lot more sticky. And I remember, you know, many years ago when we were starting our agency, we would just do those channels for the client because for some reason they were very set on them. And if we didn't do them, they would probably ask another agency. And then the agency would be pitching for the Amazon business before you know it. Right. So there's a bit of a, there's a bit of that as well. Always.
Catherine Bolich
Amazon business.
Paul Sonneveld
Exactly. Exactly. But let's talk about the country aspect. Right. How do you tailor? Like you said, you're pretty big on strategy and working with the senior leadership team to really do what's right for individual businesses. You know, that passion comes across. But how do you do that, you know, across all these different local markets? Take advertising, for example. You know, how do you how do you tailor that across different countries? I'd love to hear maybe an example of how that's come together.
Catherine Bolich
Yeah, it's so important because each market has its own context in which the shopper is live shopping in. So to give some examples, in Mexico shoppers are extremely price sensitive and it's incredibly important that creative is mobile first. In Canada, we see very similar shopping behaviours to the American market. But if you want to sell anything in Quebec, you need to lead with the French-language creative that really earns trust with the Quebec market. And then Japan, for example, trust building is so important. And the Japanese consumer responds to that a lot more than a hard call to action. A softer call to action actually works a lot better in Japan. So in terms of advertising, it's critical to adapt the actual ad creative, as well as your bidding strategies and keywords to really align with that localisation.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, absolutely. That are some great examples there. What about like compliance? I mean, the compliance has always come up. And in fact, there's people that run whole webinars on compliance as you do geographical expansion. I mean, how do you navigate that? How do you sort of cut through that not becoming a full-time job?
Catherine Bolich
A year, right? It is a full-time job. And honestly, I've navigated it by not including it in my scope. I'm very fortunate that the brands I work with have incredible operations teams that are able to navigate the compliance. So I spend a lot more time focused on the localisation of the Ad strategy and the creative copy itself.
Paul Sonneveld
That makes sense. And are there any, in terms of that cross-country border expansion, I mean, what tools I know you're not a MerchantSpring customer, so just to be transparent here, it's not a sales plug, but what are the tools, systems that you use that just make your life a little bit easier?
Catherine Bolich
It's a great question. Obviously, asynchronous communication is really important whenever you're working across time zones. But I really think the most important thing is cultural understanding of the different markets, both for myself or whatever agency is activating in a foreign market, and also for the brand. And if you understand those cultural drives behind shopping behaviour, it really is going to mitigate any complexities that you run into. So I really recommend that any agency, brand that's looking to expand across the globe spend some real boots-on-the-ground time in that country.
Paul Sonneveld
That was my next question, actually, which is, I mean, you've had the privilege in your previous career, you know, parts of your career to be exposed to different teams, different countries. You've probably travelled. And so you have some understanding. But not everyone has, right? So how do you get familiar with, say, how do Japanese consumer shops? You know, great, great recommendation. Obviously, spend some time on the ground, learn that. You know, are there other tips that might be useful just to sort of how do you get an accelerated understanding of a country and culture that might be very different to Europe?
Catherine Bolich
Yeah, it's a great question. I think now we're so fortunate with all the different types of technology, we can really utilise them to travel virtually, if you will. TikTok is probably the easiest way to kind of check out what it might be like. For those that, you know, may or may not be on TikTok or various social shopping channels, what TikTok looks like in the US is wildly different from what it looks like in China or in Thailand.
And so I would definitely leverage the VPNs, honestly, to kind of hijack and virtually travel and learn what that shopping experience could be like because It's just, it's honestly a different app and whatever retailer or e-commerce platform you're trying to sell in in another country, TikTok's probably a good reference point as a competitor. So leverage a VPN, hop on the app and voyeur around a little bit to see what it might be like.
Paul Sonneveld
That is a great practical tip. I might just do that on the weekend and see. You're right. TikTok is so different depending on which country you are. Like we think it's like one, one, you know, it all looks the same, but it's so different. But what a great way to understand a local consumer, actually. That's fantastic. I want to sort of go to the other angle or the other dimension to this complexity kind of growth conversation, which is the platforms. Right. You're active. You just mentioned before TikTok. It's not just for research, but you manage clients on there as well. Walmart, you mentioned before.
What's your framework? How do you decide whether actually it's a good idea to expand your line on those? I'm sure all clients get caught up in the, hey, I want to be on TikTok or Walmart. Isn't it all incremental? But you at some point have to decide, OK, is it worth my while? Is it worth the incremental complexity? And I'm sure at times you've said no, because the rationale isn't there. What is the framework and how do you think about that?
Catherine Bolich
It's a great question. So when deciding if expanding to a new platform is right for each brand, my mental model is really three things. So first, where is your audience already? Where are their eyeballs? So we don't have to pay more to get them. It's kind of just organically wind in our sales. Number two, what's the brand's margin structure? And number three, what's the platform media efficiency?
So to give you an example of a time where we said, yes, expansion is the right move here. I had already helped a publisher on Amazon scale their sales very profitably with DSP and AMC. And I was doing a market analysis about retailers because they were only selling on Amazon and direct to consumer. And what I found was on Walmart is basically a white space. Their competitors who had thousands, tens of thousands reviews on Amazon, had less than 50 on Walmart. And so it's a really inexpensive cost barrier for them to enter the market and gain outsized market share and sales really quickly.
To the flip side, though, to your point, it's not always the right decision. So I've had brands come to me and say, you know, I hear everybody's on TikTok. The younger shoppers are on TikTok. Should we do this? And I'm very upfront with them and that if they're not willing to post at an absolute minimum five times a week, and if they don't have the content production capabilities to make that amount of videos, it's not worth their time.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, it can't just be because you're probably your kids told you, you should be on there and everyone's there. You have to make the investment and you have to be geared up to do that. You know, absolutely. Great insight about Walmart, too, around the difference that asymmetry around reviews and various entries. Fascinating. Well, I want to get to a little bit about how you work. Right. Because at this point, a lot of people are wondering, how are you so efficient? How do you get everything done? All of that. So, talk to me a little bit about how do you structure your work? You must be a highly disciplined, organised person. What does your week look like? How do you approach client delivery and business development?
Catherine Bolich
A lot of early mornings and a lot of coffee. I like to build playbooks at the channel level. Candidly, I believe that the really high-level advertising strategy across retail media platforms is honestly really similar. You're always going to have your cash cows, your star items that are going to make up the majority of your sales. But what changes is the tactics. So, really in the leads, how are we going to structure our campaigns? How are we going to set up ad groups? What's our targeting going to be like? That's what's different. So I kind of have modular strategy blocks that I can plug and play. So I'm not reinventing the wheel each time. And that really allows me to focus on what matters, which is profitability and market share.
Paul Sonneveld
And sort of, is there a way in which you structure your week? Do you have like a rhythm? Do you say, look, in the mornings I do client delivery, in the afternoon I do business development. Is there any kind of way in which you chop up your working week?
Catherine Bolich
Yeah, there is. I know you're a dog owner, too, so I know you'll appreciate this. I have a very overeager puppy, and I'm fortunate that I can structure my work week very flexibly with her in mind. So what I typically do, I wake up quite early in the morning when my husband's still at home. He takes care of the dog, and I can crank out a couple hours of work. And then we can go on a walk and i I'll start taking client calls. When she’s tired again. But in terms of the day in a week, I typically do my weekly reports every friday. I look at rolling attribution from the last Monday to Saturday. At least about 36 full hours of attribution.
And then I set up my normal client calls, Tuesdays to Thursdays, and I spot in optimisations every day of the week, making certain everything's running as is. And I really leave Fridays for discovery, new business development, not necessarily sending out cold calls or emails then, but that deep work time I carve out for myself on Fridays to know, OK, this is where I want my business to evolve to.
Paul Sonneveld
That is a great template for organising the week. It's good to set dedicated times aside. Otherwise, typically, you talk to business owners, and time for business development or deep thinking never happens anymore because you're just always doing the doing.
Catherine Bolich
There’s always something very relevant there.
Paul Sonneveld
You have to be protective of your time. That absolutely makes sense. Now, this is a great success story. You know, within one year, 11 clients, multiple countries, multiple platforms. I'm sure there's been some painful learnings across the way or maybe things that you've almost gone off the road and just managed to, you know, stay on the road. For those, you know, just, obviously feel free to share to the extent you're comfortable with, but what do you feel like were your biggest mistakes or things that could have gone horribly wrong, but you were fortunate they didn't. Any advice for other solo flyers in terms of Amazon agencies out there?
Catherine Bolich
Yeah, definitely. I'm always happy to share. I think the biggest wins come out of learning opportunities or failures. You know, candidly, my pricing model for my agency is quite different from other agencies. I don't take a percentage of Ad spend as my fee. Personally, I think that inherently doesn't have the most trust to a brand because if you're taking a percent of their Ad spend, do they ever truly trust your recommendation in terms of how much money they could spend?
And so when I was starting my agency, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is the most optimal way to do a pricing system for my clients if it wasn't based on a percentage of spend. And I ultimately came up with a flat fee model based on different thresholds with performance bonuses. And it took some learning to get the performance bonus correctly, especially depending on categories. So as an example, I have a couple author clients and the way Amazon attributes data back just doesn't work very well, to be honest, because of Kindle page reads.
So it will attribute data back for 14 days worth of Kindle reads. But for the most average person, I would say it takes them more than 14 days from the day they download a book to the day they finish it. So I've had to do some revisions with authors to understand, OK, we want this to be a win-win situation. That's probably why I have a low flat fee model, is so that you are really confident in the results and the trust I deliver. So what makes the most sense here?
Paul Sonneveld
That's great. Gee, I should read more every night. I try and read my Kindle every night. But the book I'm on, I'm sure I've been going for about five weeks now. And I'm like, well, that's not good for the attribution model, right?
Catherine Bolich
I know.
Paul Sonneveld
So I need to read more. Go to bed earlier, read more. Great. Last question from me before I open up to the audience here is scaling further from this. So, hypothetically speaking, well, actually, there's really two questions and the second one might be irrelevant. The first question is, where is your internal strategy in terms of, you know, will you continue to grow? Like, do you think you'll be at 22, 25 or you're specifically trying to keep it small?
I mean, we have worked with some clients who have a very deliberate strategy. No more than 10 clients do a good job trying to grow them. That is our business model and it can be a very good business model. So what's your growth strategy? And then secondly, if the answer is yes, I will grow. Maybe it's not. Otherwise, this question is irrelevant. How do you think you'll scale? Systems, hiring additional people? What do you think is your next move on the chessboard from that point of view?
Catherine Bolich
Yeah, it's a great question. I will always try to continue to grow my business. I think it's part of my DNA. I think I look at scale maybe a little bit differently than your original question in that I really prioritise depth with my clients. So if I start with a brand on Amazon, and I can grow to manage their Amazon and Walmart. I think it's honestly a win-win for both of us because it streamlines their internal operations. And it also is able to bring a lot more synergy to what we're doing across their different platforms to give the consumer a better, more holistic experience with the brand.
So right now, my main focus is growing depth with the clients that I do have. Of course, I'll bounce in and out of net new business as well. But in terms of, you know, tactically, what does that look like? There's, of course, amazing software you can leverage. AI has changed the entire world, right? It's magnified the impact that one person can have. But I really do believe in people. And the next step would definitely be starting to hire out a team where I'll really prioritise hiring people who are both strategic, analytical, and really customer-obsessed.
Paul Sonneveld
That's great. Thank you so much for that. We're at 30 minutes, but I've got two questions here, so I'm just going to try and squeeze them in. One of them, very relevant, you just mentioned it again. And Kristen asked this really early on. Thank you for your question, by the way, Kristen, really appreciate it. Do you use AI to support time efficiencies and technical processes? Maybe we should rephrase, which AI tools and why are your favorites and really help you in your agency?
Catherine Bolich
Yeah, thank you for the question, Kristen. It's nice to meet you. I do really love AI. The tool I use most often right now is honestly, probably the premium version of ChatGPT. I have been using it as if I had my own creative production team in-house and my own big idea brand-building agency. It's done incredible work for me in terms of actually creating creatives, creating hooks and taglines, as well as really understanding what profitability looks like at the keyword ad group level. So right now, Chat GPT is my favourite.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. I would certainly echo that. All right. Last question here from Bence. How do you navigate your clients around Amazon having the whole lowest best price when you're selling across multiple sales channels, this whole sort of pricing architecture, multiple multichannel distribution strategy. Do you offer them a product portfolio strategy as well? A couple of questions in there, but love to get your thoughts.
Catherine Bolich
Yeah, it's a great question. And it's so important. Amazon's really good at scanning for that lowest price and matching it, aren't they? I would say all the brands I work with have map policies in place. So their pricing is really standardised across the industry. Of course, everyone's now running into issues with this with the tariffs. And a lot of brands are unfortunately needing to increase their prices. So it's becoming a bit of a challenge, I would say, to get that smoothly rolled out to the entire market. I'd say I'm much more of a consultant, a high-level role for that, rather than actively, proactively providing advice to brands.
Paul Sonneveld
Great. Thank you for answering that question. And, Bence, thank you for asking it. It's great to see people engaging and asking live questions. But unfortunately, we are out of time. So that is a wrap on today's episode of Marketplace Masters. Catherine, thank you so much for sharing honest, practical insights.
Your ability to deliver high-value results across regions and channels while keeping your model like really so lean is really really interesting and really inspiring and really highly relevant for agency leaders navigating very similar challenges. So thank you so much for coming on the show and you know I want to wish you all the best in the year ahead and look forward to catching up with you in a couple months time to see where you know where you've gone next with your business.
Catherine Bolich
Perfect. Thanks so much for having me, Paul. It was wonderful. Thank you.
Paul Sonneveld
It's my pleasure.
Catherine Bolich
Bye.
Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone. That is the end of today's episode. For those watching or listening, if you'd like to connect with Catherine or learn more about her consulting work, we'll make sure to include her contact info in the show notes. And don't forget, you can explore all of our past episodes and register for upcoming ones at merchantspring.io. And of course, if you're looking for a partner to help you simplify your reporting and performance analytics across Walmart, Amazon, TikTok, and most countries on the globe, we'd love to show you what we're building here at Merchantspring, specifically for marketplace agencies. I'm Paul Sonneveld. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, take care.
