Amazon FBA Sustainably

Patrick Kinkade, founder, master coach, and Amazon selling expert at Master Private Label. Patrick has many brands on Amazon, but he focuses on doing it sustainably, and he helps others do the same with his Master Private Label Academy. If you sell on Amazon or have thought of it, now you can learn what it takes to do it sustainably. https://www.masterprivatelabel.com
 

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 28 | Patrick Kinkade |

[Upbeat theme music plays]
Female Voice Over
[00:01] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. Here’s is your host, Taylor Martin.

Taylor Martin
[00:17] Welcome, welcome, welcome, everyone. I have Patrick Kinkade on today. He is the founder and master coach. He’s a sellerpreneur expert. He’s been helping people sell on Amazon for quite some time now. He’s here to share what he has learned, and ways that people that do sell on Amazon can do it in a more sustainable way. Patrick, can you tell our listeners about your background and how you got to be in the position you’re in now?

Patrick Kinkade
[00:47] Sure, and thanks for having me on here today. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your fantastic podcast. I’ve been loving listening over the recent episodes I’ve been catching. I happenstancely got into this space that I’m in now. I studied anthropology and environmental studies at the University of California. While I was doing so with my advisors, I was actually able to create my own curriculum with my focus on environmental anthropology, which is actually a cutting edge subfield within anthropology at the time. I caught a recent episode of yours with the anthropologists, which was good stuff, grabbed my attention there.
Backing up a little bit, I started studying environmental anthropology at UC Davis because I always had a love for the natural world and people, and that juxtaposition of those two things. Growing up in southern Arizona, I would get out a lot with my dad. He was an archaeologist, so I had this perfect mixture of learning and appreciation for the outdoors and our natural wonders, and appreciation for people. My dad studied people from the past. I was just thrown into that at an early age and spent a lot of time growing up, growing my love of nature and of people.

[01:58] I’ve always just gravitated towards asking people questions and hanging out with 50-year-olds when I was 12. When I returned to college to finish my degree after a couple decades of scrambling around and finally got to return to college in my 30s, I returned immediately to my passion for learning about people and how they interact with our environment. I came away from the University of California with a custom degree in environmental anthropology. Then right after graduating, I got married and started a family. I was working for the university, but I definitely knew that I did not want to be working a day job. I wanted to do things differently than my parents and my grandparents had done. At the same time, I also wanted to bring myself and my family the freedom for me to be able to be there as a dad and as a husband.

Also, I wanted to somehow figure out how to bring this environmental anthropology interest of mine into my everyday work. Kind of fell in my lap this idea of the Amazon FBA platform was just completely separate from the academic world I’d been in for years prior to that. It did raise the flag that, okay, I’ve ran my own businesses before. Let’s give this a go. I just dove in with starting my own Amazon brands actually on the platform. For a couple of years, I started and ran our brands of products on Amazon. Right out of the gates, my first brand, which turned into two brands, was focused on products that were sustainable and in different ways that were climate-friendly and earth-friendly.

[03:45] Running my own business, yes, a lot of time constraints. You’re working all hours of the night when you have to, but I got to choose that. Even as of today, still to this day, I just came back from spending three hours in the middle of a Tuesday hanging out with my kids, second grade class at this ice skating rink that we went on out of town on a field trip. I was the only dad in there, one of just a few parents that got to be. I’ve been doing that for his whole childhood. He’s eight now. It’s just afforded me that space to be there for my family. Over time, I wanted to pass that onto others, and so I started coaching people how to bring their passion for the natural world when possible. Not 100% of my clients are necessarily focusing on that, but many of them are. We’re able to find with the Amazon businesses ways to bring up those interests and channel those out to our customers and the people we’re targeting, and providing goods for people that are looking for spending and voting with their dollars in a different way than just buying unnecessary plastic items, as I say.

Taylor Martin
[04:56] Yeah. Voting with your dollars, man. I agree with that.

Patrick Kinkade
[05:00] Exactly, voting with your dollars. Something I really learned from my environmental economics professor at UC Davis was if we’re going to make our activity here on the planet more climate-friendly, and this was 15 years ago and we’re talking about this, we’re going to have to figure out how to bring economics into it. I see that a lot with finally oil companies and some of the big businesses that are bringing more of a climate-friendly approach into things. Anyway, I digress. Since I discovered that you could be a seller on Amazon, and you could bring your interests to the plate so you were upholding your values, I ran with it, and kept on selling myself and started coaching others. I’ve just really come to enjoy it over the years. It’s lucrative for the individual, and it can be lucrative for all of us.

For the first few years I was selling on Amazon, yeah, I have my own brands that was focused on my values and making sure that I was operating my business as sustainably as possible and bringing sustainable goods to the market. When I first started coaching, I stuck in the mainstream. I was just coaching anybody who came along, teaching them how to sell on Amazon. It was bothering me at first. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I’m like, okay, here’s this channel. Amazon’s overtaking the world. Everybody’s shopping from the channel.
[06:22] So much is being shipped around and it’s not always done efficiently. The pollution – I knew all about the environmental impact of transportation around the world. It wasn’t sitting right with me. I finally dawned on me one day. I’m like, Patrick, go look on the Amazon platform and look at all the ways that we can affect change on the planet in a positive way through what you do, selling and anybody who you teach to sell. From that, I came up with a list of all the different ways that we can make a difference on the platform. Let’s face it. I realized it’s not going away. Hundreds of millions of people shop there every single day. It’s the largest company on the planet. I could either run from that and go find some other way, or I could embrace where I’m at and find a way to bring in my values even more into it. It was a relief to finally figure that out and bring that idea into everything I do from that point forward, with my own brands and with the people I teach.

Taylor Martin
[07:27] You were teaching people at the beginning, when you first started your business, then you started teaching, and now you’ve recently upgraded it to – you have an online academy, right? It’s Master Private Label Academy. Is that correct?

Patrick Kinkade
[07:40] That’s correct. I’ve just kicked off this year the Amazon Selling Masters Group program. It’s a mastermind. It goes for six months. I basically hold people’s hand through it. They, every week, get to watch a certain number of video trainings and do assigned homework. Then I get on calls with them every week. We really do a deep dive in whatever the teaching was for that week. Really just getting them from not even started yet to having their brand of products up on Amazon with their first product launched and selling ready to take off and run for years to follow.

Taylor Martin
[08:18] That’s awesome. In terms of when you’re coaching people, what are some of the biggest hurdles that they’re having to get over when it comes to just selling on Amazon in general?

Patrick Kinkade
[08:27] The single most largest hurdle that pretty much everybody who comes to me has struggled with, either because they’ve been misguided or they’ve got stuck, most people get stuck in the phase of finding what to sell. I backed them out of, okay, we’re not looking for your first product or your next product to sell. Yes, that’s what we’re going to get to here in a month or whatever. First, what we’ve got to do is figure out who your audience is, who your customers are. If you don’t know who that is yet, then you need to figure that out because we’re selling products to people, to customers. It really matters who you’re building your products around, and what message you’re trying to bring to them, and what kind of improvements on whatever product you’re launching, and however you’re innovating your products. You need to know who you’re innovating that for.

That’s really where we start our focus at. Find your niche, and then figure out what your customers are missing, or what they like that you can give them more of, and then bring it to them. It’s just that simple. That really helps people jump over the hurdle of, what am I going to sell? Because there’s 355 million different products active on Amazon right now, on amazon.com. There’s a lot to choose from there if you’re going to choose what to sell. I don’t like to just go in there and sell any old thing. We don’t tend to go after products that are cheap because those are most often not the most efficiently made.

Taylor Martin
[09:57] Disposable.

Patrick Kinkade
[09:58] Disposable, exactly. I always guide my clients and my own products. We’re always towards the top of the price point in any given market because we want to bring quality stuff that sticks around, stuff that you’re going to use for a longer period of time. We can spend more when we’re developing the products on packaging that’s more sustainable on the products themselves. Make it out of bamboo instead of pine or whatever. Do things that wouldn’t be in your wheelhouse if you were worried so much about how cheap you wanted to make your product.

Taylor Martin
[10:33] Do you find that you have to find certain manufacturers that work in that space like you mentioned going from pine to bamboo? Do you have a long list of suppliers and that’ll work with you in that space?

Patrick Kinkade
[10:48] Yes. There is millions of suppliers across the globe. Sadly enough, when I came into the Amazon FBA space in 2014, 2015, we had spent a couple decades pushing our manufacturing overseas. So much of what’s on Amazon has to come from overseas. We simply don’t make the stuff here in this hemisphere anymore. That’s been changing of late. That’s been changing. At first when we were sourcing mainly from China, yeah, I took it upon myself to really speak with every single supplier and really weed them out before I even got on any calls with them, and wanted to make sure that they were going to be able to give me what I needed as far as sustainable products go, and that they weren’t focused so much on just pumping product out.
I live in California. I learned when I was going to school at UC Davis that our governor from a few years back, Governor Brown, from a couple times, he’s actually gone over to China for many, many decades and has been helping them over the years, teaching them how to do things more environmentally, sustainably.

Taylor Martin
[12:00] Oh, wow.

Patrick Kinkade
[12:01] I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but they have him come over there constantly. They are big-time learners and love to glom on information, and they put it into action really quickly. China knows the largest wind energy producer on the planet. They’re getting there with solar in any other way they can. As a whole country, they’re taking steps by leaps and bounds from following the example of some people from over here that have started those programs that were revolutionized how we treat our planet over the decades. I know that there’s a lot of suppliers in Asia that are definitely focused on more sustainable practices. We deal a lot with smaller companies such as in Vietnam. There’s a lot of single village-based producers of goods. That’s a whole nother aspect of what we can do that’s better than just having a factory pump stuff out that doesn’t have any human touch to it. That’s a whole nother avenue.

Taylor Martin
[13:03] It’s like the people side of the Triple Bottom Line. You’re helping out a smaller community sell their product wares instead of just a big manufacturing in industrial city?

Patrick Kinkade
[13:13] Exactly, exactly. As my customers figure out what niche they want to sell in, I will with my long list that I mentally carry around with me of opportunities such as that. For example, baskets. Right now, basketry that you hang on your wall has gotten really popular of late. Some of the best producers of those are small villages in Vietnam that are producing these baskets. There’s individuals who are having their craft brought to a bigger space and they’re able to thrive as a whole village as a result. It’s just pretty cool when you can go source products from the individual like that. Amazon has programs in place to help with that. There’s Amazon handmade and Amazon custom-made products, and those all bring things down to more of a local or regional level as far as production goes.

Taylor Martin
[14:06] I love that. That’s a much better loop system from an economy standpoint. What about in America? How hard is it to find suppliers in the United States? You mentioned that we lost a lot years ago and now things are changing. How do you see that?

Patrick Kinkade
[14:21] Yeah. They are changing. More’s coming back here in a couple of different ways. The first way is that there’s a lot of companies that are getting really streamlined in their ability to import with the least amount of impact. They’ll pull their resources and do a lot more direct of shipment, let’s say by sea, and get just the right products that are sustainable in the way they’re made, but then bring them to brands over here instead of the brand here starting from scratch and going over and ordering, say, 500 units per product. That’s inefficient to bring over product overseas like that. The first way American companies are starting to help is they’re importing larger amounts of things to then dole out to a few private labelers here in the United States. That’s the first way.

Second way is manufacturing is returning in some sectors to the United States. Mostly, where we can take advantage of that with my clients, with my own brands of products is back to that, we’re not looking for the cheapest thing. We’re not looking to cut costs where we can make a difference. As an example, one of my clients, he’s been with me for a few years actually. His brand is all about natural products for babies. He’s really climate-friendly focused, but especially people-friendly focused with his products. He had historically been sourcing. He sells a toothpaste, for instance. He was sourcing his toothpaste tubes from Taiwan.
[16:00] Just recently in the last nine months, we decided to look here in the states, found a toothpaste tube manufacturer that was able to do it for him here, and it really didn’t turn out to be that much more expensive per tube to have it done here in the state. He immediately tried them out, ordered 10,000 tubes of toothpaste with his branding on it, and it’s working out great. It’s better for him because he has a shorter turnaround time as far as delivering from the time he places his order for the goods. He gets product to market faster. Even if it cost him twice as much for that tube of toothpaste for the tube itself, he’s still making up in the long run because he’s able to turn inventory quicker. That’s a big benefit for him, but like I said, it’s not much more expensive to have that specific tube produced here in the United States versus where he was having it done and shipped from overseas. That’s just one example.

Taylor Martin
[16:55] With a blockade of ships we have offshore trying to unload all their stuff, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to in business where they’re just like, we don’t know when the supplies are going to come in. We think it’s going to be next month, but it might be the one after that. That’s just nuts. Something like this where it’s within our boundaries, boom, it’s done. Then you ship it and you’re good. What about the actual – I mean, you talk about the raw materials. You talked about how some companies are just buying large amounts of materials. They want to make sure those materials are made in a sustainable way and they’re brought over. How is that changing – or I should say, is it changing people’s perception of products? Because then you can start labeling them made in the United States and things like that. I remember back when I was a kid, seeing it saying Made in USA, I remember seeing that a lot. Nowadays, you just don’t see that anymore.

Patrick Kinkade
[17:48] Yeah. My clients and I are bringing that back. If you go on Amazon, if you pay attention and you’re doing a lot of searching for a lot of products out there – which I do a tremendous more than most people do. Just because of my research, I have to. That’s what I do. We bring in the Made in USA tags in our imagery, and in our bullet points, and our titles. We can only do that if it’s true. With the toothpaste example, he was already having his toothpaste made in the United States because with baby products especially. Especially baby products that we put in the baby’s mouths or on the baby, really, that’s a small group, a small niche that has always been focused, at least a good chunk of them, on safety when it comes to the products.
In fact, my first brand, one of my first products was just that because I was – I found it because I was looking for products for my kid and found that I was going to have to figure out where to get these things from in a way that was more friendly, definitely friendly. I found my way into a co-op of these products and we were – everybody was focused on getting something that’s safe. I’m like, light bulb. If I found this difficultly through a co-op system to find the product I thought was safe enough for my kid, what if I brought those types of products to market? That’s really been our focus as much as we can make that our focus. If it can be made in the United States, we do it. That’s the first place I always look for products, for a source of our products is from the US.

[19:27] Now, when you ask a question like, is that really mattering now? Do people really care if there’s a Made in USA stamp on it? There is thousands of subcategories on Amazon, and the subcategory is the small little niche. Handwoven wall baskets could be an example of a subcategory on Amazon. Within that little subcategory, there may be thousands of products for sale. In certain subcategories, the Made in the USA stamp will count, just like in the baby subcategory, in the baby, baby, baby subcategory, depending on the product.
There’s others that – I mean, there’s still a lot of stuff being sold on Amazon, a good chunk of it that is – nobody cares. They just want the cheapest thing. I will, however, interject and say that it’s – I learned this a few years back and did not even know this. When I heard it, I’m like, wow, that’s amazing. Forty-seven percent of the people who shop on Amazon make between $75,000 and $150,000 a year. They’re never looking for the least expensive item. Having learned that, I put that together with Made in the USA. It’s just better for everything and everybody. It’s just really come out ahead on all fronts. On your Triple Bottom Line, it’s really working out.

[20:42] It’s my new goal to bring this even heavier into the Amazon platform. Draw customers in to the platform and get in front of them with our products that are pointing to what’s not in the mainstream news enough, but it’s creeping up from below. It has been for a long time that we really need to pay attention to where we’re getting our products, and how many we’re buying, where they’re coming from, what they’re being made of, the people who are importing, the people who are making them, the people who are shipping them. All these companies need to come together and do things in a lot more efficient way if we’re going to get this tackled.

Taylor Martin
[21:22] It’s a calculator, all the different things that come into play to put a product on a shelf or in an Amazon shopping cart. When you were talking about people coming onto your platform and working with your academy, do you get any pushback, or are people – oh, wow, we can really focus on sustainability? What are you seeing in terms of the people’s mindset when you start to invite them into the sustainability landscape?

Patrick Kinkade
[21:50] I don’t take it for granted, but quite often, my clients come to me. They know that they want to succeed, usually for personal reasons. All business comes from a, I want to personally make more money in my business, and therefore, for myself. That’s where it all starts. I’m able to draw out a little bit more and draw their values out, and it’s one of the first things I do. Like I said, when we’re trying to find their niche, one of the first things I do is have them make a list of both their hobbies, and their interests, and their values. Is there some things that you value tremendously? I’m here to tell you, new seller, that you can bring your values to market, and it can be lucrative, and beneficial. I focus on that right out of the gates. Most people don’t realize that you can have both.

Taylor Martin
[22:42] When they get to that point, they’re like, oh, we can do all this and do that? That’s awesome. That’s great.

Patrick Kinkade
[22:47] Then once they learn of how you can capitalize on these Made in USA stamp or climate-friendly, people safe, all these different things, and I point out to them that, hey, if we’re in that niche and in the sub-niche and we’re focusing on those people that not just are looking for baby toothpaste but are looking for natural, healthy, sustainably made baby toothpaste, and we can target those exact customers because we have what they need, then you can find your way into a custom sector of the market that you don’t have to worry about competing so much with some of the larger companies or the Chinese sellers on the platform, which is a whole nother discussion for the amazon.com platform. You can really make it easier to compete and provide great products at the same time.

Taylor Martin
[23:36] We were talking about manufacturing. Manufacturing in the United States local and everything is great, but I just think where the trend is going in general, I hope, is that manufacturing is becoming “more local”, more within 500 or 1,000 miles from wherever it is it’s being sold or needed. I know even businesses in the United States, they might have a manufacturing plant in East Coast and West Coast. When they get a little bigger, they might want to put one in the middle, just because it makes them easier to move their product around. As we talked about earlier, trying to get product to market sometimes, it’s much better to have maybe three manufacturing locations. They’re always highly efficient these days because we have the technology to do that. If one of them is out of something and the other one isn’t, then you can ship from that one and fulfill the shelves, or the need, or the request.

I think that’s a really great added bonus for how things are migrating to that. I’m very happy to hear that you’re finding more manufacturers in the United States. I’m saying that because I think just the environmental impact of that I think is wonderful. You mentioned something about – something I see on Amazon all the time, the Climate Friendly Pledge and some other badges that revolve in the sustainability space. Can you speak to those?

Patrick Kinkade
[24:58] Sure, yeah. The Climate Pledge Friendly, they call it, is a program that they started a couple years back. It uses sustainability certifications basically to highlight those products that are more focused on the natural world and being better for it. It’s a free program on Amazon. If you’re selling on Amazon, it’s a free program. Basically, they will allow you and help you to secure certifications for your products that are sold on Amazon. They just have to improve at least one aspect of sustainability. There’s a bunch of certifications available.
Amazon came up with their own certification called Compact by Design. It basically identifies products that have a more efficient design. That could be smaller packaging, so there’s smaller packages to ship, so they can fit more in a smaller amount of space. The products themselves may include less air in them, which makes them smaller by volume. It’s all about volume when you’re talking about shipping things around the planet, or even within the United States. The more volume it takes up, the more space it takes up on a boat or in a cargo container, on a truck, in the mail truck, or the whole kit and caboodle from cradle to delivered to the end customer. The less space it can take up, the more efficient it is and the less pollution is being kicked out. That’s Amazon’s answer to them. They don’t say you have to go with Compact by Design to be Climate Pledge Friendly, but they just give that as one option. So many of the certifications that are out there for various sustainable factors and naturally helpful products are available on the Climate Pledge Friendly platform.

Taylor Martin
[26:47] The Climate Friendly Pledge, I’ve seen that one quite often. What are some of the most common requirements that are necessary to achieve that badge?

Patrick Kinkade
[26:59] Really, they make it simple. You need to get, I think, only one certification. They have of course vetted the various certifications that are on that channel.

Taylor Martin
[27:09] They have a list of certifications. If you have a certification from this list, then that gives you entrance into it?

Patrick Kinkade
[27:16] Exactly, yeah. You just have to go through a questionnaire. As usual, Amazon requires you to submit documentation, and images, and everything that proves that this is your brand, you created this product, and you have actually passed these certifications, and then they match the certification with your brand and your business. Amazon’s really brand-centric. They have gotten more so in recent years. If you’ve got your brand registered on Amazon, it makes it easier to get additional certifications such as the Climate Pledge Friendly certification. They always want to make sure that there’s nobody cheating. They do their best and they’re continually making strides towards that.

There is a lot of third-party sellers. I don’t know if the listening audience knows this, but 58% of the products sold on Amazon are sold by third-party sellers, which could be your neighbor shipping stuff out of their basement into the Amazon warehouses. That’s more than half. The other 42% comes from either Amazon. Amazon, of those 355 million products, Amazon the company has only created 12 million of those. It’s pretty amazing how people think they’re ordering products from Amazon, the company. Yeah, Amazon’s shipping a lot of it, most of it, but the actual creation and being in charge of how that product is made is up mostly to companies that are not Amazon.

Taylor Martin
[28:37] Just to clear that up for the listeners out there. When he said Amazon FBA at the beginning of the show, that’s Fulfillment by Amazon. That means you might have your private brand, and then when you do have it, you ship it off to all the different locations that Amazon tells you to ship them to. Then that’s where they ship from, depending on what your product is because they’ll know where best to put that product in the United States and how much of it to put there.

Patrick Kinkade
[29:05] Exactly.

Taylor Martin
[29:06] I want to skip back and go back to your course to kind of – can you walk us through what it’s like for a new course to start and how – like if I was a new student, what would I see? What would I do?

Patrick Kinkade
[29:19] I only open up new entries once a quarter. I take new students once a quarter. We’ll be coming up on another new group forming – the first classes will be first part of July. I’ll be running an invitation acceptance period in the latter half of June. If you decide you want to go through a six-month hand-held experience where you come through the end of it with your own private label brand on Amazon with your first product up and launched and beginning to be scaled, then you would start taking classes in the first part of July. I have 150 plus video trainings that I have created myself based upon what I’ve learned from my mentors, what I learned from being in the trenches in those first couple of years.

Up until 3 a.m., after my newborn went to sleep – my work hours were like 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. for a number of months there when I was teaching myself how to do this. Because when I started, there wasn’t learning, there wasn’t coaching, there wasn’t all the help that we have now. It was less competitive. It was, some would say, easier but not because we were doing everything by hand. If you get in my masters program, you’re getting from start to finish. I’m taking you through the Amazon Selling Blueprint, which is my own seven-phase plan of how to sell on Amazon as a third-party seller selling private label products.

[30:50] Each week, you would have a series of videos that you’re going to watch and you’re going to do some homework that’s assigned in those videos. I’m going to introduce you to all the resources you’re going to need throughout. Then each week, we get on a group call. I do a deep dive in whatever the subject matter is for the week, and then I do – I have hot seats. If you’re in the group for that week, for that session, I’ll put you right in the hot seat and we will go through whatever we’re working on together.

For instance, this last week, we’re just starting to get people’s niches chosen. My students this week are showing up to class and they’re going to have that list of interests, and hobbies, and values, and then they would have also shown up with, because of the trainings, also some of the subcategories that would match up to those in the Amazon catalog, so we can start dialing in with their niches. I’ll go through them right there on the call with everybody watching, so bringing my expertise alongside what they have done work-wise in the last week with their training and stuff.

We go through that for – you’re with me for six months. Then throughout that six-month free time, there’s a few key points along the way that you’ll have a one-on-one call with me to make sure that you’re nailed down with the important parts along the way. There’s three important steps that you really need to have right. The first one of course is your niche and your first couple products chosen. You need to have that nailed down well. I’ve been doing this so long that I can quickly look at what choices you have and what you’re going for, and tell you, okay, let’s do this. Let’s not do that. Oh, here’s this idea you have here. Oh, look, I know that we can source this out of Utah. Let’s get that one to the top of the list, so when we go to the next step and we’re looking for someone to be our supplier, we’ll already have that in the starting gate. That’s just one example of when we get on a private one-on-one call to make sure that we’re all going along at the pace we need to, so we come out the end finishing as a winner, so to speak.

[32:55] That’s the Amazon Selling Masters program. There is some great – there’s a couple of very large training programs. It’s all-encompassing. We’ll teach you the whole Amazon third-party seller process. Mine is the only one that I know of that is accessible because it’s not $40,000. You get the one-on-one coaching calls from somebody who’s been coaching one-on-one with people for five, six years now, five years and four months – sorry, I can’t jump to six yet. You get the training library that comes with the Master Private Label Academy. You keep that forever. You’ll get access to that for as long as you’re in the space selling.
I really developed this group program in the last couple years. It really came into being this year. It’s been a long time in the making. I’m really trying to impact more people and allow more people to have the experience though. My favorite part of the day is when I’m working with a client and that lightbulb goes on when they actually see that, oh my gosh, I can not only take a hold of this Amazon FBA opportunity that most people come to me already know that there’s the opportunity there. They have heard either through a friend or through their own persons in their Facebook group or whatever.

They know that the Amazon opportunity is there for individuals or small companies to sell product on Amazon. They know that that opportunity is there. I love it when the lightbulb goes on when I show them that they can actually bring their values to play as well and to make a positive impact, as well as being taken advantage of being a part of the largest e-commerce platform and shopping platform basically on the planet. That’s just really where this came from.

Taylor Martin
[34:47] I would love to see in future case studies on your website, because I’ve looked in the Amazon FBA and I haven’t really seen a lot of coaches out there that are specializing in sustainability and being able to provide. Because as you just mentioned earlier, like when you talked about putting people in the hot seat, I think that’s wonderful because then you have all these different minds and perspectives, these different lenses looking at your problem or your product to make it better. I think it’s the same way.

Having somebody like you and focusing in on the sustainable aspects of the selling on Amazon, and then everybody else supporting those efforts, I think that’s great. I wish you all the best of luck in pursuing more of that and having it grow because as you just mentioned with the niche, which I wholeheartedly agree with, you are having your niche with Amazon’s coaching because your niche is dealing with people that are working and focused on providing sustainable products on Amazon. I think that’s great.

Patrick Kinkade
[35:52] Thank you. I appreciate that. Really, I do. I look forward to reporting back to you with some numbers down the road, because I’ve been moving more and more into this. Really having this be my exclusive only niche is really keeping everybody in there focused on the sustainability and bringing that to the big platform of Amazon. It’s refreshing to me to hear you recognize that out loud that you have not seen any other coaches who are focusing on that.

Taylor Martin
[36:20] How can our listeners reach out to you and where can they find the Master Private Label Academy?

Patrick Kinkade
[36:25] Easy. Go to masterprivatelabel.com, and there’s a few opportunities there right on the homepage where you can schedule a free strategy call with me, where I’ll get on a call with you. I’ll just see where you’re at as far as what you know about the Amazon platform, and then we can quickly – I’m pretty good at getting quick to the point of things and seeing if it’s the right move for you. If it definitely is the right move for you, I could tell you exactly how I would go about it. Not everybody I talk to should be going through my group program. There’s other ways if you want to get started slower, or maybe you don’t want to consider the group program for little ways down the road. I really pride myself upon not just selling what I have to sell. I want to make sure that you are going the right direction for you.

Taylor Martin
[37:12] A good fit.

Patrick Kinkade
[37:13] Yup, exactly. That’s what that free strategy call. You’ll come away from that with a plan for the next year if you truly want to go onto the Amazon platform, how to go about executing that based upon your time that you have available and your resources, especially your cash. It does cost money to get started on Amazon. I also teach people how to get started with less than 100 bucks. That’s how I got started. I got started with less than 100 bucks.

Taylor Martin
[37:40] Patrick, Amazon definitely is an enormous beast. You can’t avoid it, it’s there. I’m glad there’s people like you out there that are trying to make it more sustainable. I know Amazon is doing the best it can to help facilitate companies, and businesses, and brands being more sustainable with these pledges, and these badges, and things like that. It’s an effort from all of us that we have to do. I commend you for doing that and I wish you all the best of luck in your future endeavor, sir.

Patrick Kinkade
[38:12] I certainly appreciate it, and I appreciate you having me on the program today, Taylor, and I hope your listeners have garnered something from our talk today. It’s been wonderful. If anybody has any questions that they just want to ask quickly, you can just email me at patrick@masterprivatelabel.com and I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

Taylor Martin
[38:31] That’s awesome. Again, it’s masterprivatelabel.com, everyone. Headed out. Check out Patrick and see what he’s doing, and connect with him, and see if you guys are a good fit. Over and out, everybody.

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[38:43] Thanks for tuning in to the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is Founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you’re logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.