The road to entrepreneurship can be filled with hurdles and obstacles that leave an entrepreneur doubting themselves and their abilities. That is why they are encouraged to celebrate the small wins. Jason Kwan, Chairman, and President of the Pearl West Group, a strategic Amazon seller that also specializes in the acquisition of Amazon stores, has shared some of the accomplishments that have helped propel him forward despite challenges and failures. Kwan originally started as the founder of Adviant Media.
Successes from Operating a Digital Ad Agency
The entrepreneur who grew up in a traditional Chinese household has had to overcome challenges such as his father’s death and the struggle to please his family or pursue his goals. He eventually chose to pursue his entrepreneurial goal and started a digital ad agency that became successful after months of hard work. Kwan, who describes himself as a lover of Math, evidences his achievements by highlighting the numbers. “When I ran the digital ad agency, I achieved a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 140% for seven years running. We became a big force in the online direct response industry because of our ability to maximize returns for our clients.”
Understanding and Monetizing the Framework
The ad agency developed many creative campaigns with high conversion rates and low cost per customer acquisitions, which helped to drive customers to the companies they served. This meant that the companies could spend less on advertising than with traditional forms. “We initially started with Google AdWords and learned all the keyword bidding intricacies and created high-converting landing pages for our clients. When the Facebook Ads platform opened up, it expanded our opportunity to reach even more customers.” The Facebook Ads platform gave Kwan and his team at Adviant Media access to data that included the type of products and ads their potential customers would respond to. “We were a very data-driven agency, so we tried to make all decisions on data and the results we’re seeing.”
Testing and Revamping for Success
Testing became a cornerstone for the company so that they could reap results for their clients. “Our mantra was focused on testing new ideas to gather data on what works and what doesn’t work faster than our competition. We were continuously testing new ads, new landing pages, and new campaigns for our clients.” This helped the company to identify strategies and marketing campaigns that were either profitable or not. They could then revamp these and scale accordingly. “At its peak, we were generating over $100,000,000 a year in revenue for our clients. We came to a point where we felt we could create more value by using the profits we’ve generated to acquire and start our own internal brands and use our past marketing experience and the massive amount of data we collected to grow internal brands.”
The Beginning of Pearl West Group
This marked the beginning of a new journey for Kwan and his team, which became the Pearl West Group. “We formed it to start and acquire our internal brands. We stumbled onto Amazon-type businesses because we felt Amazon was a fantastic channel that we could learn from. We love exploring new channels and taking the time to figure out how to run brands on them.”
Since the early days of reading and understanding the merger and acquisition process, the company has grown. “We were able to grow our collective brands to over $30,000,000 in revenue with a good healthy EBITDA margin, all within three years. We’ve built a great platform for us to continue to build on.”
