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1. Value Soft Skills When Hiring – Michael believes that when hiring new team members, work ethic, urgency, and genuine investment in the brand matter more than technical ability, because those traits can't be taught the way tasks can.
2. Leverage AI for Business Operations – Using multiple applications to run a business runs the risk of oversight of key operational factors. Michael uses AI to consolidate scattered information into a single dashboard, ensuring nothing critical slips through the cracks while keeping a close eye across all operations.
3. Higher Price Points Leads to Sustainable Growth - Price point is a strategic foundation, not an afterthought. Michael maintains that a higher price builds in the margins needed for marketing, reinvestment, and the inevitable mistakes of a new business.
4. Mine Customer Reviews: Michael believes that mining customer reviews, your own and competitors', is a valuable tool in E-Commerce. At Sprinkle & Sweep, patterns in feedback revealed real market gaps that can drive product innovation and genuine differentiation.
5. Listen to Your Customers: Michael reminds E-Commerce leaders that customer messages across social media and marketplaces are a valuable feedback loop. Dedicating real attention to messages and reviews deepened his team’s understanding of both product performance and brand perception.
Meet Michael Shannon, Co-Founder of Sprinkle & Sweep!
Sprinkle & Sweep is a rapidly growing E-Commerce pet-care brand that revolutionized pet cleanup by replacing traditional mops and paper towels with a hands-off, absorbent powder. Its formula deodorizes instantly as the solidified pet mess is swept into a dustpan and disposed.
When Michael Shannon and his brother entered the pet industry, they drew on their background in industrial absorbent manufacturing to tackle cat litter odor at the source, neutralizing it rather than masking it with perfumed scents. Together, they launched Sprinkle & Sweep in 2021. With a focus on sustainable growth and rigorous R&D, Michael and Sprinkle & Sweep are redefining pet mess clean-up, turning a once-dreaded chore into something simple and stress-free.
Before launching Sprinkle & Sweep in late 2020, Michael Shannon had built his career in industrial absorbent manufacturing. Eager for a change, he and his brother decided to channel their entrepreneurial energy into something more personally meaningful. "We took what we learned and pivoted into the pet space, because it's a more exciting market," Michael explains. "We developed a product that was perfect for it."
Sprinkle & Sweep is a pet mess and odor cleanup brand that manufactures most of its products in-house and sells through its own E-Commerce site, as well as Amazon, Chewy, Walmart, and PetSmart. "It was just me and my brother in the beginning," Shannon shares. "Now, both of our wives work for the company, and we have a warehouse staff of three – making us a team of seven."
Bringing its Amazon PPC in-house gave Sprinkle & Sweep a notable growth boost, but it was a deep dive into customer reviews that truly sharpened the brand's edge. "We downloaded all of our reviews into CSV files and identified patterns, both positive and negative," Michael explains, noting that the same process was applied to competitors. The exercise exposed gaps across the industry, chief among them, the limitations of the standard litterbox deodorizer, which functioned as little more than a scent bomb, masking odors with fragrance rather than eliminating them. That insight drove Sprinkle & Sweep to develop a cat litter deodorizer using activated carbon to dehydrate waste and neutralize odor at the source. "With this information, we were able to improve our products, becoming better versions of ourselves and our competition," Michael says.
Sprinkle & Sweep handles customer service through direct messages received via its website, social media, and the marketplaces it sells on. Initially, Michael and his brother relied on reviews for customer insight. "As we grew our social media, both our audience and customer base got significantly bigger," he explains. Adding members to the team has allowed them to dedicate more time and attention to monitoring the influx of messages from customers, resulting in a stronger understanding of product and brand performance.
Shipping through Amazon as a third-party vendor can take weeks before products enter active inventory. "There were times when we grew a ton, and the inventory we had at Amazon turned out to be far fewer days of supply than we expected," Michael recalls. To keep up, he and his brother joined their warehouse team to produce and ship as much product as possible, while pulling back on ad spend to avoid stockouts that could hurt their organic rankings. "We're a lot better at forecasting inventory now, but those were some of the growing pains in the beginning," he adds.
Six years in, Sprinkle and Sweep's biggest challenge is bandwidth. "We're a lean team. On the leadership side, it's me and my brother running the company at a high level," Michael explains. Their wives handle social media, admin, accounts payable and receivable, and bookkeeping, while marketing across Meta, TikTok, Amazon PPC, and Walmart PPC, along with product development and R&D, round out the demands of staying competitive in the pet industry. However, they’re in a place yet to add more team members. "The biggest challenge currently is that as we've scaled, there's more to do, but we are the same size team," Michael says.
Looking ahead, Michael sees AI and operational efficiency as the keys to doing more with the same lean team. “Our goals are to simplify operations so we can do more in the same amount of time using both AI and our own people,” Michael says about Sprinkle & Sweep’s future. Profitability is also a priority for 2026, marking a shift in strategy after years of focusing on unit sales and top-line revenue growth. “We’re at a point where we’ve scaled pretty well. Now we’re trying to dial in profit so we can grow in a more financially healthy way,” he adds.
For aspiring E-Commerce entrepreneurs, Michael recommends targeting a product with a price point at $40-50 minimum preferably higher. "When we first started, we were only selling products between $12 and $18, which is difficult because you have to sell a lot of units to generate enough revenue to cover everything," he shares, noting that the thin margins left little room for advertising and marketing. To offset this, Sprinkle & Sweep began bundling items into multipacks, pushing prices closer to a profitable range. Still, Michael cautions that selling a lower-priced product often means being prepared to grow at a loss. A higher price point, by contrast, allows for faster growth, more opportunity to reinvest in the business, and the leeway to make mistakes which, when launching a new company, is inevitable.
Can’t-live-without-tool? Claude. We’re developing a lot of internal tools to help us keep a better eye on our business, financial picture, inventory forecast, inventory management, and task management. It all runs on different applications and it’s easy to forget to check on something – then all of a sudden your business is falling apart in one area because you’re busy somewhere else. AI systems can take in all the data from the various apps and combine it into one dashboard so you can keep an eye on the important KPIs and other key factors that you need to pay attention to run a business.
Key hiring trait? I focus more on soft skills because we can train people on what to do here and how to do it well. But if they don’t have a work ethic or sense of urgency, it’s going to be an issue for us because we are a lean team. We need people to wear a lot of hats and work quickly, efficiently, and care about what they are doing. And we’ve hired people that just don’t care are here for a paycheck – which is fine and may work in other companies. But as a lean team, we need people who care. It’s those soft skills, something you can get along with.
Favorite book or podcast? I listen to Alex Hormozi all the time. He has a ton of good insight and a natural knack for business. I get all my ideas that improve our business from watching his content.
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