Podcast 36: So we just bought AutoAnything.com ….

Nerd Marketing Ecommerce Podcast

In this episode, Drew talks about buying a company, and a few major lessons he learned from doing the deal. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? Click here to download the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights The Lessons I learned from the AutoAnything deal Links / Resources AutoAnything Press Release Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can request the text transcribe and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Who is tired of hearing about Karmaloop? Raise your hand. "Here goes Sanocki, the one trick pony. Karmaloop again? We've already heard about that, Drew. Tell us something we don't know." Right? Well, this is the problem when you have one big recent case study that kind of is very relevant to your audience. I mean, I've done stuff since Karmaloop. I was the CMO of this company Teamwork and I run my agency, Growth Engines. We've got a number of direct to consumer brands, but the problem there is I can't talk about a lot of them. Today I'm excited to announce something big and something I've been working on a long time. I was part of a team that bought a new company, and the company is called AutoAnything. Autoanything.com, they are in the car accessories category. They sell things like floor mats and converters and things to sup up your car or Jeep or truck. It's the reason I've been in California so much. I know I've been saying, I do this podcast from San Diego. Been here for months, going back and forth to New York, and it was because I've been working on this deal. AutoAnything, the deal was announced today by AutoZone. We bought it from a public company, AutoZone, I guess about an $8 billion company. There was a divestiture, so what that means is, any company that size owns a number of different business units and for some reason or another, they decide that this business unit isn't core to their business and they want to get rid of it or think it'll be better off as an independent entity. I was part of a group that could move fastest and put the right offer together to acquire the asset. AutoAnything itself is a beast of a business. I mean, a million plus skews. If you can imagine in the auto category there is a make, model, year of every car and if you're selling something like a floor mat make, model, year, and then that thing comes in every color imaginable. Just a huge product catalog. It's primarily drop ship, but they do own a couple private label lines and brands, which obviously have great margins. It does about, I can't get into the specifics, but call it a nine figure retailer and seven figures in EBITA, so seven figures in profits, which is great. It all depends on the deal price, on what you buy it for, and obviously I can't get into that, but we're happy with it. Obviously it made sense for all parties. Man, I learned a ton in the process of this deal, and would love to kind of start getting into it, start getting into what we're going to do with the company. Just for me as a marketer and as an online merchandiser, I look at a number of assets here that I'm excited to work with. First, there's just the scale of this business. You know, you don't get to work on a nine figure business every day. There's four million people on the email list, from what I see a lot of discounting going on and not a lot of lifecycle marketing, so that gets me excited. Four to five million visits a month, there's just traffic. You know, there's scale here. Scale that you can sink your teeth into and make changes and see results very quickly. Some of you might be saying, "Drop ship retail," I mean, this was my first reaction when I heard drop ship retail, like, if I started a business today, an eCommerce business, it wouldn't be drop ship. Right? Because you don't have anything proprietary and you're selling the same stuff your competitors are. "Drew,