⏳ My Dad's Best Lesson (I Still Use It Today)

What you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:

• 🏒 Leave it at the Rink… [True Story]

• 👋 TikTok Shop Is Ending Independent Shipping

• 🚀 The New (AI) Frontier

• ⚒️ Make Your Own App [How to Guide]

• 🔥 Why You Feel Stuck as an Entrepreneur…

🚨 Kevin Kings Ecom Mastery AI featuring BDSS is happening in Nashville (April 8-12)! Use code: NASHVIILE for a special discount!

🏒 Leave it at the Rink… [TRUE STORY] 

Back in the 1970s, I was playing hockey in Montreal.

And if you know anything about hockey back then, it was a completely different game.

This was the era of the Broad Street Bullies.

The Philadelphia Flyers were the team nobody wanted to play.

Elbows were part of the game, fighting was encouraged.

Some nights I had multiple fights in a single game.

My parents came to every game.

My dad especially.

He was an avid hockey player himself and loved being at the rink.

I was 15 and played as a forward. I had a reputation as a hard hitter.

One game, I remember getting absolutely smashed into the boards.

It knocked the wind out of me and I saw a guy on the other team laughing.

I remembered his number.

Later in the game, late in the third period we dropped the gloves and went at it.

Then the game over was over.

But I was still fired up.

I stormed out of the rink, spotted the guy, and started screaming at him to finish the fight.

His name was Marc and we went to the same school.

I was young, angry, and full of adrenaline.

Then my dad stepped between us in the parking lot.

He walked right between us, put his hands out, looked at me, and said something that stuck with me for the rest of my life.

Just five words: “Leave it in the rink.”

The fight was part of the game. and the anger was part of the moment.

But once you step off the ice, it’s over.

I didn’t fully appreciate that lesson at 15.

But I’ve carried it with me ever since, especially in business.

The Business Lesson

Sometimes business gets aggressive.

Deals fall apart. Emotions run hot. You battle for contracts, clients, market share, and positioning.

That’s all part of the game.

But once the meeting is over, once the deal is done, once you walk out of the room, you leave it there.

You don’t make things personal, you leave it at the rink.

— Norm

👋 TikTok Shop Is Ending Independent Shipping…

TikTok Shop is making a clean policy change with messy operational consequences.

Beginning February 25, 2026, and completing by March 31, 2026, U.S. sellers can no longer use independent shipping labels. That means your 3PL can’t simply ship TikTok orders using their negotiated carrier accounts and upload tracking the way they do for Shopify, Amazon, and wholesale.

TikTok is taking control of the shipping layer, and that changes who controls cost, speed, and customer experience.

This means:

• no more third-party label purchasing

• no more uploading tracking from external carrier accounts

Sellers onboarding after February 9, 2026 must comply immediately.

Going forward, sellers have three main paths:

1. Fulfilled by TikTok (FBT)
   Inventory goes into TikTok’s warehouses. TikTok ships. Inventory is locked to TikTok orders.

2. Upgraded TikTok Shipping
   You still fulfill from your warehouse or 3PL, but labels are purchased through TikTok’s system and TikTok selects the carrier.

3. Collections by TikTok (CBT)
   You pack orders. TikTok arranges pickup through their carrier network.

TikTok also suggests Amazon MCF may remain a permitted pathway, but details are still unclear.

Under TikTok’s model, TikTok controls:

• which carriers are used

• what rates are charged

• what “fast enough” means

Sellers will be moving from a model where you manage shipping to one where you will have to accept them.

The 3PL Integration Problem

TikTok has only approved a limited set of ERP/WMS integrations for their logistics services. If your 3PL’s warehouse management system isn’t supported, TikTok orders can become a manual workflow.

The Dispatch Window Is Tightening

TikTok also tightened dispatch requirements effective January 26, 2026: orders must be picked up and scanned within 2 business days, impacting your Late Dispatch Rate.

This is where fulfillment becomes a ranking and visibility issue, not just an ops issue. It’s also where Amazon MCF becomes risky. MCF can work, but scan timing varies, and TikTok cares about scans, not promises.

🚀 Read more here

🚀 The New (AI) Frontier

OpenAI just launched Frontier, an enterprise platform designed to help businesses deploy and operate AI agents at scale. If you’re a successful Amazon seller, this matters for one reason:

Frontier is a preview of how the best operators will run their businesses in 2026.

This is built for agents that do real work across systems, with the controls and reliability needed for serious operations.

What Frontier Actually Is:

Frontier is a centralized platform that helps organizations:

• Build agents

• Deploy agents

• Manage agents

• Control permissions and access

• Maintain shared context

• Evaluate performance over time

Agents need the same structure people do.

Frontier gives agents:

• onboarding

• shared company knowledge

• clear permissions and boundaries

• feedback loops to improve quality

Enterprises are already overwhelmed by disconnected systems across:

• data platforms

• internal tools

• CRMs

• ticketing systems

• analytics dashboards

Agents are now being deployed everywhere, but most of them are isolated. They don’t share context, can’t access what they need, and can’t be trusted to operate safely. Every new agent often adds complexity instead of removing it.

OpenAI calls this the AI opportunity gap: the gap between what models can do and what teams can actually put into production.

Frontier is designed to close that gap.

Why Amazon Sellers Should Be Excited

Most Amazon sellers are running a multi-system business already. Even “small” brands operate across:

• Amazon Seller Central

• inventory forecasting

• Slack

• creative pipelines

• agencies and contractors

Ideally this will be where AI agents operate across all of these systems with shared context and governed access.

Frontier is enterprise-first, but the use cases map cleanly to Amazon operations.

Here are practical examples of what “AI coworkers” would look like:

1) Listing optimization agent

An agent that:

• monitors keyword movement

• flags listing gaps

• suggests A/B test ideas

• rewrites copy in your brand voice

2) Customer insights and review intelligence agent

An agent that:

• clusters reviews by theme

• identifies emerging complaints

• generates fixes for PDP and packaging

• creates feedback loops for product dev

3) Advertising diagnostic agent

An agent that:

• monitors TACoS, CVR, and CPC

• flags wasted spend

• recommends bid changes

• generates weekly summaries

Frontier is OpenAI building the platform layer for agent operations. It’s an attempt to make agents consistent, secure, scalable, measurable, and usable across the business

The biggest winner will be the sellers who build repeatable agent systems across their operations.

🚀  Read more here

🌎 Where in the World is The Beard Guy?

🔥 Why You Feel Stuck as an Entrepreneur

Here are my favorite tips from this episode!

1) The #1 way sellers bleed money is working on the wrong things

James frames it cleanly: there are only value-creating activities and everything else is waste. For sellers, this is the difference between working on pricing, conversion rate, and distribution vs. spending hours tweaking minor listing text, obsessing over dashboards, or doing admin work. If your weekly work doesn’t clearly connect to profit, growth, or risk reduction, it’s almost always waste.

2) “Buy back your time” is the real hiring trigger, not headcount

The most actionable hiring insight is that you should hire when you can buy your time back at a discount. For sellers, this means: if your time is worth $300/hr and you’re doing $25/hr tasks, you’re literally paying an invisible tax every week. The advanced move is to build a running list of low-value tasks and systematically offload them as soon as cash flow allows.

3) Stop giving yourself jobs. Give yourself projects

This is one of the strongest operational lessons in the entire transcript. Early-stage sellers often “take over PPC,” “take over customer service,” or “take over inventory” and then accidentally camp there for years. The right frame is: your role is to build the system, then replace yourself. If you do need to step into a function, treat it as a short-term project with a defined end date and replacement plan.

4) Most hiring failures are not people failures, they’re clarity failures

This is why sellers churn through VAs, agencies, and freelancers. They hire without defining what good looks like. If the person doesn’t know what success metrics they own, they will default to activity, not results. Advanced sellers hire around outcomes and reporting, not task completion.

5) Managing people is really managing the process they plug into

This is a high-level management truth most sellers never learn until they’re losing money. When there is no process, the only way to get results is micromanagement. Sellers who build repeatable SOPs, templates, and reporting systems can hire cheaper labor and still get consistent output, because the system carries the quality, not the founder.

6) You don’t need SOPs for everything. You need SOPs for the repeatable, expensive mistakes

The episode pushes back on obsessive SOP culture, and this matters for sellers. The goal is not documenting every tiny action. The goal is documenting the work that causes real damage when done wrong, like listing compliance, ad account changes, inventory reorders, and customer messaging. The best sellers document high-risk workflows first, not random tasks.

7) Your business should be scored by 5 pillars, not by “how busy you feel”

The five pillars framework (Marketing, Sales, Delivery, Operations, Finance) is a useful operating model for sellers. It prevents the common trap of over-investing in growth while operations are broken, or obsessing over operations when marketing is dead. Advanced sellers do quarterly “red/yellow/green” scoring and only focus on the pillar that is the current bottleneck.

🔥 Watch the full episode here

Find this episode of Marketing Misfits on YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts

And that’s it, Beardos.

See you next Monday!

- Norm

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