One channel is a death sentence.
A single sales channel used to feel safe. Now it is the riskiest bet a brand can make. When Amazon can change one policy overnight and reroute an entire category's fortunes, sitting on one channel is not a strategy, it is a gamble.
Michael Maher talked with Destaney Wishon, founder and CEO of BetterAMS, about how ecommerce brands and the agencies serving them have had to rebuild themselves around speed, flexibility, and constant change since the pandemic reshaped buying habits.
Destaney Wishon pointed out that industries used to change slowly enough that operational, process-driven teams could keep up. Amazon broke that assumption. A single platform change from Amazon's dev team can ripple through thousands of brands and agencies overnight, and there is rarely advance warning.
"Amazon can make one change that could completely change the projection of so many brands and so many agencies, and they're able to pass that down really quickly."
Her response was to hire differently. Instead of only people who execute a set process well, she needed people who could take context and make their own calls when the ground shifted under them.
Legacy retailers built layers of approval into every decision. Amazon does not work that way, and brands moving from traditional retail into ecommerce often bring that slow approval culture with them, at a real cost.
"We shouldn't need to have this seven week approval process to get this push through. Because that's seven weeks of private label. Ecommerce moves way too quick there, all these other brands are being a major competitive advantage over them when that happens."
The brands winning right now are the ones willing to unlearn habits built for a slower retail world and replace them with a willingness to move on incomplete information.
Behind every stalled Amazon strategy is usually a lack of people who truly understand the platform, not a lack of ambition. Destaney Wishon described a gap between brands who hire great ecommerce talent and boards who still balk at the numbers that talent needs to hit their goals.
"I truly don't think there's enough people who truly understand the platform well enough. And then when you're getting these really, really high salary asks that are causing this crazy shift in where people want to work."
That shortage is pulling talent out of brands and into agencies, aggregators, and software companies willing to pay for it, which only deepens the gap for brands trying to build in-house expertise.
Destaney Wishon built BetterAMS from freelance work into a 20-person agency, and she credits a specific mental shift for getting her there: treating both success and failure as small, incremental steps rather than all-or-nothing outcomes.
"When people think of failure, they think if I start this job and take the risks, start this company, and I fail, I lose my job, I lose my house, everything falls apart around me. But that's not how failure is, failures are these really small steps and successes the same way."
She pointed to saying yes quickly, before self-doubt could talk her out of it, as one of the habits that compounded into real business growth over time.
The throughline of this conversation was patience paired with urgency. Brands need to move fast on execution while resisting the urge to chase every funding announcement or acquisition headline in the ecommerce space. Destaney Wishon's advice: know what kind of company you actually want to build, whether that is a lifestyle business or a high performance one, and let that decision guide your hiring, your culture, and your pace.
Watch the full episode of The Longer Game for the entire conversation between Michael Maher and Destaney Wishon.
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