Scaling Profitable Amazon Businesses from Scratch with Neil Twa

ABOUT THE GUEST AND WHAT'S IN STORE FOR YOU.

Today’s guest is Neil Twa, the CEO and Co-Founder of Voltage Holdings LLC, a company renowned for helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable Amazon FBA businesses. 

With over a decade of experience in e-commerce, Neil has guided clients to generate seven-figure revenues and achieve life-changing business exits.

In this episode, we’ll uncover Neil’s proven strategies for transforming a business idea into a scalable, profitable Amazon FBA enterprise. We’ll explore how entrepreneurs can leverage automation, avoid common pitfalls, and maximise profitability. And hopefully Neil will also share insights into emerging trends in e-commerce. 

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or an SME owner seeking diversification, this conversation is packed with actionable advice to fuel your success.

Discover more about Neil and his work with these links:

Website:        https://www.voltagedm.com/ 

LinkedIn:       https://www.linkedin.com/in/neiltwa/ 

Facebook:     https://www.facebook.com/neiltwa/ 

Instagram:    https://www.instagram.com/neiltwa/ 

TikTok:          https://www.tiktok.com/@fbabusinessbuilders 

X:                   https://x.com/voltagefba 

YouTube:      https://www.youtube.com/@NeilTwavoltage 

ABOUT THE HOST

My name is Dave Barr and I am the Founder and Owner of RLB Purchasing Consultancy Limited.

I have been working in Procurement for over 25 years and have had the joy of working in a number of global manufacturing and service industries throughout this time.

I am passionate about self development, business improvement, saving money, buying quality goods and services, developing positive and effective working relationships with suppliers and colleagues, and driving improvement through out the supply chain.

CONTACT DETAILS

@The Real Life Buyer
Email: david@thereallifebuyer.co.uk
Website: https://linktr.ee/thereallifebuyer

For Purchasing Consultancy services:
https://rlbpurchasingconsultancy.co.uk/
Email: contact@rlbpurchasingconsultancy.co.uk

Find and Follow me @reallifebuyer on Facebook, Instagram, X, Threads and TikTok.

Transcript

Intro  00:00

Welcome to the Real Life Buyer podcast. In this podcast, you will hear interviews with business owners, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, authors and technical specialists in their field. These professionals will hasten your development, accelerate your career, and broaden your business. Know how now introducing your host, Dave Barr, interviewing with a purchasing twist.

Dave Barr  00:21

Hello and welcome to the Real Life Buyer. Today's guest is Neil Twa, the CEO and co founder of Voltage Holdings LLC, a company renowned for helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable Amazon, FBA businesses. Neil is also the author of "Almost Automated Income with FBA: Build a profitable, lifestyle driven Amazon business. Exit for millions Even without any e commerce experience." He's also the host of the High Voltage Business Builders podcast. With over a decade of experience in E commerce, Neil has guided clients to generate seven figure revenues and achieve life changing business exits. In this episode, we'll uncover Neil's proven strategies for transforming a business idea into a scalable, profitable Amazon FBA enterprise. We'll explore how entrepreneurs can leverage automation avoid common pitfalls and maximize profitability, and hopefully Neil will also share his insights into emerging trends in E commerce. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or an SME owner seeking diversification, this conversation will no doubt be packed with actionable advice to fuel your success. So without further ado. I welcome Neil. Onto the podcast. Hi, Neil, 

Neil Twa  01:43

Hello, sir. How are you doing? 

Dave Barr  01:44

Very well. Thank you very well. Always excited to hear about business opportunities, and you've certainly had a very interesting journey, obviously from leaving education to become a CEO of Voltage Holdings and obviously been an authority on Amazon. FBA, Could you walk us through the kind of pivotal moments and those decisions that really shaped your path and how these experiences influenced the creation and growth of your company?

Neil Twa  02:14

Yeah, well,as I didn't have an experience in physical products growing up and I didn't grow up in an entrepreneurial household, it was something that's taken a half a lifetime of journey to get to the place where I'm at now it doesn't really take you that much longer anymore, due to systems and changes and access to knowledge and information that I had to fumble over because there wasn't any any of it. And when I discovered the internet, if you will, because it sort of discovered me during my college days or university days, I realized that the goal of becoming a musician was probably not going to make me as much money as becoming a businessman. So I jumped out of college and kind of rode the corporate train, because that's where the money was. At that point, I jumped into a startup called Sprint PCS, which was launching the first mobile phone. And then that startup we launched from 5000 or so employees, up to 80,000 employees. It was crazy, a crazy time to watch that growth happen inside the mobile cell phone industry, and see all the phones coming out and the technology and the infrastructure, and just the speed at which that was occurring was crazy. Right in the internet was a good component of allowing that to happen, and then that just left me as a really good practitioner in the knowledge management space and the information gathering and data gathering and consolidation and execution of all that. In Long story short, IBM kind of came in and saw what sprint was doing. And one of the partners there and I worked together about a year on a project together. And afterwards he said, Hey, why don't you come do this with me? And so he hired me into IBM. And so by the time I got to 2007 I was kind of like, now what? What next? Like do I want to keep rising the corporate ladder? I really didn't want to be here in the first place, but I came there because that's where the money was, and that's where the you know, the knowledge and was being spent, and you had to learn, and people were doing it, and there wasn't again education, and there weren't degrees, and you just had to go learn it, right? And I figured out very quickly it's who you know that gets you there and what you know that keeps you there. And then that relationship driven aspect. I said, Okay, I think I can build a business around this, if I can keep driving relationships. And I was really naive, because I didn't realize the amount of hats a business owner wears when you're protected in their corporate environment. And you know, and then you have to get out on your own. It's like, well, oh, now you're doing everything. Oh, well, look at these. These taxes don't get handled for you. And you have to understand who to trust and what to do with the taxes and all this stuff. And it just becomes a massive learning curve, especially if you go out, you know, yourself And so long story I got through, you know, the learning processes of that, and then that change and pivoting and positives and, you know, highs and lows, I ended up in more of the digital, online space, and then in the affiliate space of products that were not mine. And then I led to the, you know, that led me to creating products that were mine. So I can kind of control the whole thing. When I didn't control the pipeline, I finally controlled the products, and that was kind of the last piece of the last nail in the coffin, if you will, or the last piece of the puzzle, or probably better analogy, last piece of the puzzle. And when I figured that out, it's kind of cool, I own the whole thing. I own the product development. I own the cycle. I own the marketing. I own the business. I own an asset. I built this up, this became an asset. And the realization was, I was building brands that had intrinsic value in them, and they were worth something, and then years after growing them, they could be sold. And in that process, really learn a mechanism by which we build and sell these companies, and now we're acquiring them. So I've kind of gone full circle through the, if you will, the Kiyosaki quadrant, now into business investment, as the leader of Voltage, into operations and purchasing and acquiring and building so as we kind of incubate products in Amazon, FBA, which means we go to market and we prove, can we sell them in the largest marketplace in the world, the.com of the United States, and then, can I take it to places like Shopify? Can I take it direct to consumer channels? Can I take it to retail? Can I take it to Shopify? Can I take it to other locations? And create more of a holistic halo effect in my business, which increases the value? It starts with Amazon, FBA in my world, because that's where people are buying all the time in 30 seconds or less. And if I can get somebody to buy something on that platform and learn how to do it into repetition and growth, of course, doing it with profitability is most important in the business, then I can take it to mass market. And here we are. I've been on that platform for about 12 years, building and incubating brands and then taking them out to mass market.

Dave Barr  06:08

Fantastic. Out of curiosity, what's your music genre? What could you have you become?

Neil Twa  06:14

Yeah so well, what could I have? That's a great question. I love the classic and ensembles. I went all stayed in Oregon and played the trumpet and classical. And then I really found my love in jazz. And I got a full ride music scholarship, because I played both classical, jazz and marching band when I went to college. So I was teetering the line of all that, and I was in music theory, which would have led me mostly to, you know, probably education, I most likely would have ended up being a teacher. Nothing wrong with that. We need some really strong and great teachers in this world, absolutely, to raise the kids up. But that's ultimately, I joked that I would have lived in a van down by the river, which, back then wouldn't have been so cool. Today, it would be like, super cool. So I just missed the window of time and relevancy to that trend. But yeah, I really loved, ultimately, loved jazz, Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis, Dizzy Gillespie, some of my icons that I followed into music, and absolutely loved it to still play to this day, usually on holidays and other things. I don't play as much in the trumpet as more, but I play like ukulele and other instruments.

Dave Barr  07:17

Yeah, yeah. So that's brilliant. My wife's a musician as well. So I kind of understand and relate to things you're saying. You know, she plays classical music predominantly. 

Neil Twa  07:27

Yeah well, music is so powerful in the mind, unlocks so much creativity, and I see it in my kids. I have four daughters, and they're all very musically inclined, and some have a little bit more affinity for it, in terms of doing it on their own than the others, but they definitely have the love of music. And my wife was a musician as well. And with that, the creativity and the thought process and critical thinking and imagination and creativity go off the charts. And when you take that into the learning world, they you know, they just want to consume learning, and they want to do things. And I And with that, we homeschool them all, so we're always around them in terms of what they're doing. And with that, we can kind of pour into their creativity and have them understand things so that maybe a little different as we mentor them and grow them up as kids and to adults. And they're tween agers now younger is the youngest one is 11, and the oldest 16. So they're all very close together. But music is creativity, and I learned that business could also be music, and you can make music in business. So that's kind of how I did it,

Dave Barr  08:21

Absolutely, because there's quite a logic to music, and it's quite, yeah, mathematical. Would you say there's a, what would you say were the key linkages between starting an Amazon type company, a creative of a, you know, creating a company, and that with the music, way of doing things, you know, the the structure, the logic, the mathematics.

Neil Twa  08:41

Well there's precision in music, as you know, if you're flat and you're not your key is not registered, right, or you don't have the technicalities, the music doesn't sound good when somebody nails all of those things together, just the harmonic resonance of a location you're in. When that occurs, if you're in a facility symphony, if you're in an individual playing on stage, and you hit those right notes, and the reverberation of that echoes across that everyone feels it. There's an emotional connectivity. You feel it, and then you can feel the instrument, you can feel the person, you can feel the emotion. You can feel it with business. It's kind of like that too. As things come into harmony, as they as they harmonize in business together, you feel and kind of that resonates. And the creativity resonates in the room. It resonates with the people. There's a certain energy level that occurs with music, that also occurs in business. And if it's not right and it's not harmonizing, you shouldn't do it. And there's the other aspect of that comes down to the creativity of what you're doing and who you're doing it with, and you know where you're going, because you can't do a good deal with a bad partner. And if it's just not resonating at that relationship level, if it's not, if you're not speaking the same language, if the harmony is it in it, it's not going to succeed. And in business, I've learned to start listening to that listening to that resonance, that frequency. Is this in alignment? Am I forcing things, or is it actually working? There's the technical aspect of the business and finance and operations component that has to be on point, because you need to know where your metrics are, and you can't run a business by the gut feel. And then there's the creativity of the flow of a brand and the products, and the way you do images and graphics, and the way you kind of present this entire thing, this world, to the world, this narrative. And that has a lot to do with the creativity of how you feel about and how it flows and the emotions to it, right, and all the way down to the commercials you might do in the 30 seconds you make of these, of these movies are that are meant to move somebody to buy your product, right? If they say, if they're crying, they're buying so the goal is to get somebody really to hit that frequency, to get that chill, and to see that image or the graphic or the video and go, Wow, that's that I need, that I want that that resonates with me. So music has really played a part in the idea of how these brands grow, and how this business grows, and how I overarchingly move the whole ship forward in terms of setting the tonality for everything that happens in the brand, around the brand and after the brand, and everybody that comes in that supports it. And then that way for me, business has become more about guidelines than hard and fast rules. That's where my creativity kicks in is where my partner, my business partner, for last 12 years, he is the guy who is the technical. He's very good at the technical. I used to have a friend like this in band. He would, he would just knock the technicality out, and he could win the first chair because he was so technical and but he just missed a bit of the emotion and connectivity because he was overly technical. And I felt like I could grasp the creativity side. I could grasp the emotional side more, but I was just not as strong and technical. And that's kind of a lesson in life for me. You know, it always, always been that way down to like typing, like I have tons of typos still, even with spell check and stuff, and I'm like, this just pisses me. It pisses me off because I can't fix it, but at the same time, that's just part of my creative brain going boom, and caring less about the typos and more about the message, yeah. And some people don't resonate with that because their grammar Nazis. They're like, Ah, you must be an idiot because you don't know how to spell. It's like, do it on purpose. But you know, that flows into the business. And you know, I realize, because of his nature, in person and others that are like him, there's nothing wrong with it. Of course, it just they see things more like, you know, to the point they see things more tactically, they see things more, they know, give us this mark. You didn't hit that note, right? And it's like, well, that's okay. It's all creative, yeah, it's all guidelines. There's no hard and fast rules, like, we can make this work. And, you know, that ends up being my wife too. I have a my wife and Katie, and we, uh, we've been there for a long time. I see, you know, 20 years together, 18 years married in March. And she is also, she's an RN by trade. A BSN went through school and has a very, you know, you know, this was male leaders. This is the way you do things. You can't do overdose people. You'll kill them. This is a process. This is a procedure. And I'm like, okay, I get it. I get it. But everything's creative. Everything has guidelines, and it just sort of, you know, they balance me out and because of who they are. And it makes sense, you know, to say that opposites attract, because truly they do. And in business, you know that's that's a reality, too, through the business, through the dealings, through the people you work with, if you can be creative with them, if you can see the differences in the way they are, if you can structure deals, if you can envision the opportunities, especially around products and physical products and branding and E commerce and stuff for that world, that just really resonated with me. It really resonated with who I am and what's created and the value that's created to the product that you give somebody. And then by process and mechanism, we've put in, you know, our procedures, we put in our playbook, we put in our, you know, operational standards that allowed us to grow. And kudos to my partner for helping us, you know, align and organize that structure. It's very much required in a business at growth, but we wouldn't also be the same size we are if he was the only one driving the business, and it just takes two of us to make it work, right? An island, not an island to ourselves, right? Yeah,

Dave Barr  13:27

it's really interesting hearing these, the similarities and your passion actually, between the two sides of of your brain, the really creative side, the really business focused side, the structured side, and how important it is to get all these things, you say, in harmony and resonance.

Neil Twa  13:46

It is important, yeah, and I can do the technical if I force myself. I have the technical practition. It takes longer for me. It takes more practice. It takes more mindset pushing. It takes more technical energy for me. It doesn't give me energy. It takes energy from me. I feel rewarded if I get those things right. However, that's just not where I feel my passion is at. Yeah, it's just not where I'm at, and that those are my strengths and weaknesses and and with that, I worked and eventually found, by the grace of God, people who balance me out their their weaknesses are my strengths, and my strengths are their weaknesses, and vice versa. So it's with that, you know, we we can help each other push I get to be the guy that jumps off the cliff with no parachute, and we build it on the way down. I'm like, and you know, my partner's finally figured out to pack a bag and have it ready to go, because the minute we jump, he's like, Okay, we're on our way down. We're building the parachute. We're building the plane on the way down. Great, we finally figured it out.

Dave Barr  14:36

Now you've, you know, it's an incredible, incredible achievement to write a book, and obviously you've written the almost automated income with FBA book. Um, so congratulations on that. It's an incredible achievement in itself.

Neil Twa  14:49

Well, thank you. I give my kudos to the team for their technicality and helping me get it done.

Dave Barr  14:54

Now, a lot of people obviously should get that book, but for those, there's so many people interested. in E commerce. You know that lifestyle of sitting on the beach and selling products so, so so easily

Neil Twa  15:07

as it do that you can do that? Yeah, it's possible.

Dave Barr  15:11

So what would you say to somebody who's thinking about this, contemplating this? Is this the right thing for me? What kind of initial steps would you recommend for those budding entrepreneurs looking to transition or start their life in Amazon, FBA.

Neil Twa  15:26

Well you know, it's a it's a channel of sales that already has baked into the cake. It has people that want to buy products, right? And there are channels like Walmart or Etsy or even eBay that do the same thing in terms of driving an audience together for a product purchase. Thing with Amazon, though, is that it really with its infrastructure and its technology, it's outpaced the eBays of the world. It is a dominant online player of now, even more so than Walmart, they've just done a really great job with their infrastructure, their last mile, their delivery, their customer support, their you know, return process, the the the, you know, the confidence by which customers can use them and know how to deal with them. And having built a PL, three PL private label, you know, warehousing, and having 12 employees, and it was like 21,000 square feet, and we were running trucks every week, and having that whole operation under my belt, I very much respect the size and scope and enormity of the of what they've actually created. It's a it's a miracle the thing even freaking works. So with that, all of that knowledge and information, I thought, Okay, well, where's my place in this? And how do we define it, and what we use this sales channel for? And as a as they developed a fulfilled by Amazon or FBA, which most people don't know was it was a logistics a third party logistics company, a warehousing freight company, that they purchased and rebranded into Fulfilled by Amazon, which is a separate company that runs in the logistics world. Now. It has its own planes, trains and automobiles, right? And that's grown quite a lot since they built it over the last 12 plus years. But it's a it's a channel by which you know, you people are there to buy in 30 seconds or less. With that you know when you put a product in the marketplace with 8600 units a minute running through that system. And if you do the math, 8600 is a lot, you know, there's people there to buy your product, and that's one of the biggest problems most people with online have in terms of getting people to buy from them, you know. And it's not just flipping products like on eBay or Facebook marketplace. It's an opportunity to create a brand, leverage this infrastructure, leverage this large platform, Bezos has it has this pros and it's con. I'm not a complete fanboy. We can talk about all of that because I'm very pragmatic when it comes to the platforms all of them, frankly. But you can leverage that as an individual or a small business and get access to this traffic and this customer base and this buyer, and you can put your products in front of them and find out, well, what do they like, what do they not like, and how do I actually turn it profitable and make it grow? And you know, you got to deal with some of their again, idiosyncrasies, but you have a huge opportunity to reach a customer base of people that get you the opportunity to sell something you haven't been selling before, and actually get it to a place where you can sell it to a mass market of people you can leverage their brand, and then start your brand building off of it, once you understand what it is you're going to sell, and then you have the opportunity to build a direct to consumer channel like Shopify and stuff which is more technical in nature, because you have to create the audience conversation in demand somewhere through social media or paid traffic or whatever, and then you have to be able to convert it through your own channel, which is a little bit more technical about how you do the pages and how you write the copy and how you set the technicalities of it up. And things like Shopify help you get a little bit there faster, but just because you built a template on Shopify doesn't mean it's gonna convert. So you really have to get through the more technical and tracking aspects. And Amazon does so much of that for you. They don't have to worry about it. But I end up focusing on in my first channel, what I ended up helping people understand is what the heck to sell to this engine that's selling products to people. And when you invert the relationship of a of a product business. You know, you understand that a product based, you know, mechanism, can go to zero to 100 relatively quickly online. But to get it to seven figures, you need systems and processes. You need repetition. You need a playbook. And without that, you'll never make it to seven figures. And you know, you can understand these mechanisms. What you need to understand first, you're selling to an AI engine. Now, the years ago, we're selling products to people, but you have been selling information. You've been selling data sets to an AI engine for a long time. And if you don't understand how that works, you won't understand what the engine wants from you, when it wants it, and how it wants it. And if you don't give it, and you don't play right, you're basically fighting with it the entire time, and fighting with it is not going to get impressions and clicks and people buying your products ultimately what you want. And so many people end up fighting with that system and don't realize how much they're just pushing and tugging against it as opposing to give it, you know, giving it what it wants. So we don't sell products to consumers. The engine sells products to consumers. We sell data to an engine, and if it believes we have the best data, it will sell more of it to the customers. And when you start to invert that understanding and relationship, it's like, what are the things I should actually be doing? Is figuring out, is it profitable? Right? Actually buy the numbers and determine it profitable. Beginners don't always understand this. They're running a lot on gut feel and emotion. They have a high of emotional cycle, you know, growing of change. That's, you know, interest. And growing, and I want to make this work, and I want the money and all the hopes and dreams kick in of, what if, you know, what if it works? What if I could stay at home? What if I could homeschool my kids? What if I could, you know, be a stay at home dad or mom, or we? What if we had more time to do things? What if we had more money and I didn't have to worry about the bills, and what if, right? Or what if I had a new revenue stream of opportunity that overtook the other ones? What if I didn't have to do real estate flipping anymore, what if I didn't have to invest in Truro cars or some other type of mechanism? What if I could take this capital and invest it in another location, and maybe it works differently for me at different levels of growth. E commerce is an opportunity for everybody. I have 19 year old high school dropouts and fighter pilots from the military. I've got state reps and franchise owners and doctors and lawyers and you know, everybody in between. And it really gets down to, you know, the knowledge is important. And learning the knowledge, of course, is important, especially in something you are new, and wanting to invest in your in yourself, or your business, or you go invest in something, you know. And if you're working to look at E commerce, you should consider it, because it is a fast growing industry. It was the only double digit growing industry in the last five years to the magnitude that it is. It was a hyper growth situation during the COVID period, when a lot of businesses shut down and had trouble. We were scrambling to get as much product as we could, because the growth was off the charts. It does allow freedom for family, what I call the five F's, the faith, family, friends, finances and freedom. The five F's. Those come out of understanding that the profits you get from this business aren't just around the monetary aspect. It's about building something that is yours, something you teach your kids, something you can teach other people, something that can become an entire lifestyle. And as for me and with that, you have the ability to drive more purpose and value in the way you build companies and brand. With that you understand different mechanisms. In Amazon being a mechanism is simply just a hammer that we chose to build a house, an economic house, and the house is sellable. It's a sellable asset. So we always build these with the from the beginning with the end in mind, or we're growing them as they come in to a growth and scale with an exit strategy, as people who are acquiring these companies now anywhere between three to 5 million and EBITDA or solid discretionary earnings, that's profits we're looking for companies that have omni channel presence, Amazon, Shopify retail, other locations. The whole channel has created what's called a halo effect, and in that, I know that we're reaching a customer base anywhere we can possibly touch them, not just Amazon. And even if it originated on Amazon, it's now moving into multiple channel, you know, sales channels, and it's created more stability and longevity in the business. And there's a great value in that selling those physical products and assets. But we don't marry our products either, because when we first launch the product, so many people get emotionally caught in the product, and when I teach them not to get married to the products marry the brand. All right, Dave, that's why there's like, 20 burger joints and 20 ice cream joints and 20 pizza joints and 20 different brands for, you know, shoes, and there's 10 different brands of televisions, etc, because it doesn't really, you know, the products are just the fulfillment, the transactional relationship to that brand. And it would say, you know, why would I buy an LG or versus a Samsung, or why would I buy, you know, this or that, the end result gets down to your emotional connectivity and your experience with that brand, the product is just the thing that allowed you to make that connectivity. So if we really understand not marrying our products, our goal is to find which products in our brand are relevant to the customers that want them, and then sell more of that to them when they show up. And when you do that, these traffic engines like Amazon unlock it's like a giant river of traffic. It's also a tree of information, because it's a giant data set. It's a giant, you know, language, AI model. It's a large system, but it is like a river, and those traffic streams are flowing through there at millions of people a year, searching for one specific kind of product, right? They're searching eight and a half million times a year for a nugget ice maker. So if I'm going to sell a nugget ice maker, I have an opportunity to reach eight and a half million people in a highly converting system who might want to buy nugget ice makers from me. And with the kind of data intelligence we can get now, I can understand that there's 63 other people in that entire system, billion plus skews, who are fighting for that margin. And with that, I know that I could approach the top 10% in time if I get a stronger brand in the market, if I get a stronger product base. I'm not inventing anything. People get really confused by that. We don't invent. We innovate. Big difference. Okay? We simply do better with the ideas and customize the ideas that are out there. Most people have that, if you build it, they will come or that Shark Tank idea that's like, I need that 1% or no. One's gonna make money. We're gonna make millions of dollars doing this. And that's actually wrong, not everybody's an Elon Musk, not everybody's an inventor, but you can innovate, right? You can change. I think that's where that jazz component of me kicks in, because music is there on the page. But then you can always innovate. You can always be creative. You can always go off script and do things. And so that really resonated with me to always be off script and think, Is there a different way to do the product? Is there a different way to reach the customer with the product? And that whole thing sets you up.

Dave Barr  24:41

Yeah, it's just think about the product. Now, because a lot of people start off in searching for products from Far East companies, some of them develop those products or find the unique angle on those products. And some, as you mentioned, actually create those products from the ground up, find the right supplier to produce it. Just reflect on, you know, for the people starting out, would you say they should start more from the, you know, source it from Asia, buy it cheaps trying to sell it on. Or would you go for the other side of things, where you actually create a product, find a supplier to produce it for you, and then sell it? Which? Which route would you suggest?

Neil Twa  25:19

So I always go the find the data first that validates what the engine to trends the current market of products is in more of a blue sky or evergreen product base, not a seasonal product base, and determine the profitability, the unit, ROI, percentage, the availability of, as I mentioned, a an amount of customers that are available for that product, a competition understanding of roughly how many people you're going to compete against. To compete against and how they're competing with that product, and then take that data out and broker it within manufacturing to find one of those products that can support that customer need. Because when people are searching for products, they're actually searching for a solution, right? Exactly? They've got a problem. They finish some reaction in their head, something broke. Something needs fixed. Something is a safety concern. Something is a growth concern. I want to learn it, or I want to go faster and do better, or I want to get skinny or healthier or whatever. And so they're always in solution mode. They're not actually searching for a product. They're searching for a solution. The product just is the media. And so we have to understand the data by which they're doing that at that point. Then it doesn't matter where I get the product from, as long as I get a great product, because I need the reviews to be good. So if I do a really great job of selling this engine to the you know, this date of the engine, and it does a really great job of helping the customer find the product and buy the product, then the last thing I want is negative reviews. So when everybody says, Go find a cheap product. Not to belittle your words, but this is used a lot in that in that phrase, I want to find a good or even a product that can become great, but I don't necessarily want to do that at the first step. The first step is just to prove, can I sell it in the market, right? And that may be a product that looks just like another one in the market, but the customer doesn't know that yet. And in the first 100 units that I'm going to go do a market test, I'm basically going to ask them, Do you like this one or this one, or do you like that version, or do you like this version? And I'm going to do that in our five by five methodology, because I'm going to the goal is to get five products moving an organic amount of 25 units a day in sales. Once I do that, I have enough statistical data to say it's this product that I need to go get 1000 units of, and I need to take to the full product market launch, and I want to change three or four things about that product and innovate it, and then that may take me to a manufacturer of a different kind, or the one I originally worked with, no matter where they are, could be in us, could be other places, and then have that product taken to a full product launch once the numbers tell me that I should go that direction. If I'm going to guess by all of that, I will be wrong 99% of the time, not smart enough to tell the market what it wants. Again, that's invention. Innovation is smart enough to read the data, know what the data is telling you, and learn through experience and conditioning that this is the product set. I should ask what they want from, and then I should follow that data and sell them more of it. At that point, the product reviews should be positive. I should have a great product that's not breaking in the first five minutes. It has good packaging, it shows up as expected, and the customers a little bit as a little bit of wow factor to it, right? And like, Hey, I wonder if this guy sells anything else. I wonder if this, what is this brand again? Oh, this is XYZ brand. Oh, cool. I wonder if they sell anymore. I wonder if they have a website and they're going to curiosity, you know, engage the next level of product purchasing from you, and you should have something else to sell them. So as we expand that base out, we borrow from retail like Apple or Nike or whatever, we sell them more of the same product and different packaging until they find additional product skews that they want to buy from us. If we can just sit down and understand that simple testing concept, you will avoid all the heartache and pain of buying 5000 units of a product you hope is going to work and then trying to spend the next six or eight months trying to make that one product work with blood, sweat and tears, only realizing that you could have moved one mill two millimeters to the right and found the next product that would have done it by itself. It would have organically gone through the system of demand that is already there and created automation within your marketing and effort and using these systems that could 10x the amount of output with the least amount of time, and I'm the easiest marketer in the world, so I am always after that right product data set that just starts to go doing it at some point it's going to hit a hockey stick curve. It's just a matter of time and a little bit of luck in market that I stay there with that product that shows me the right data that shows that it's selling in the marketplace, and then I'm giving it more marketing, more inventory until it hits its moment. And it could be a competitor dropping off a time, and market could be a, you know, a demand for the product shifts higher in the market due to my, you know, competition and valid marketing of the competition, and all of a sudden, there I go. You know, I'm taking off through the roof, and I've seen it multiple times happen this way. But I think a lot of people make the mistake of buying these courses and opium and dreams thinking that this is a three, you know, to five minute opportunity, when it's a minimum three to five months. And we make sure people understand a real business that can make it through three to five years beats the 98 you know, 2% of businesses that fail, and having built many businesses that have gone past three to five years, there's a lot of similar. And the problems of why businesses don't grow past that point, and why you have to obviously understand the basics of what I'm telling you, the fundamentals of business, in order to understand the money and the metrics and the time and the energy and attention that go into making that business sustainable past three to five years.

Dave Barr  30:16

Yeah, this falls nicely into the pitfalls that people fall into. Perhaps they're not analytical, they don't look at the data. Perhaps they're not business aware. Perhaps they get too passionate about the product and, Oh, it must sell because of they don't do the market testing. You know, what are the key pitfalls you would say that people should be aware of and try and prevent them falling into?

Neil Twa  30:40

Well when I have individuals who want to work with me, I give them a DISC assessment, a D, I S, C, assessment. The DISC assessment profile is not a, I, N, F, G, Myers, Briggs, how do you feel? You know about flowers, kind of test, it is mostly around the idea of your aptitude in business, whether or not you're dominant in the business, or your secondary dominance in terms of following somebody really great. If I'm a second, you know, person, I can be dominant in my control if someone else is there to help me, or I'm an influence, you know, influential person could be an influencer or somebody who does that kind of thing. Maybe I'm better at podcasting, I like to speak, or maybe I'm better at YouTube channels and videos, and I like to do influencing that kind of stuff. And I don't really like the tactical stuff. I don't really want to mess with it. Or it might be more of an S or a C, a stable or conscientious person who understands daily, weekly, monthly processes. You have worked it in a job. You worked it in a business. You have a business already that does some of that kind of stuff. So for you, you see the, you know, the understanding of creating a more of an operational business that has a strategy of multiple products and moving e com into the market, but it does have tactical things that occur every day, week and month, and you've got to measure the metrics, and you have to work with manufacturing. And you know, you should have an aptitude with computers. That's helpful. But you also don't need to know Photoshop, because there's plenty of great people that can do that. And you don't need to know everything about AI, but you do need to understand it has an applicable place in business now, and how it can be utilized. And you have a you really have to have a desire and a burning desire to be trained, to to want to learn that knowledge, to decide that this is a kind of business model you want to do, and no matter what you're going to get it done, because that tenacity and perseverance will outweigh any intellectual ability you have, any IQ you might think you don't have in this process, you will learn it over time. If you think you're so smart that you don't need help doing it, you will fail. I will tell you over and over again my highest level thinking individuals are my biggest failure individuals, my moderate thinking individuals who realize, well, I'm smart, but I'm not, like rocket science smart, but I'm also not the dumbest brick out here, and I'm not the, you know, I'm a little more than the sharpest tool in the shed, but they will be the ones who work and are tenacious and get it done, and are the ones that actually see the results in success, because they put in the effort of putting the effort of understanding and learning. They know that execution, and even failing up and failing forward in the execution leads to the experience thereafter. Right? An experience thereafter is a business that is a going concern that is making profitability and hitting them in the right direction, right? They know that that's possible. They just know it's going to come in time when they work for it and they understand that wisdom comes through that execution and experience, that they can't just glean it and have it and just say they, you know, don't trust it or don't understand it. Those are the individuals in the middle who really go in and they do the work they trust the process. They operate until they see their own results, and they become successful because they're willing to follow right before they lead. And those are kind of my highest performing individuals, and it's a group that's kind of a unicorn, a little bit there's somewhere in the middle. And that's why I don't have a course or program, because people get caught up in the idea that they can become an influencer of products. And it's going to be really easy if I just get on and make videos, and I don't have to think about all the finances in the business, and, you know, all that stuff, and then they fail at it because they don't know those things and they haven't been willing to learn it. And then you have the other people who are somewhere down at the bottom, and we only go there, but they probably shouldn't have been starting businesses in the first place, because business is not for everybody. It is a bit of a war zone. You have to be willing to fight. The biggest thing I tell people about business is we're problem solvers. At the end of the day, all we do is solve problems for other people who need products for their solutions or for the business itself to keep it moving to come problems. We have had problems. Amazon is like, not the greatest at it's its current systems of management. Let's say, when it comes down to the seller central performance, you can have a jerky situation, like we've just battled for the last month when someone made a false copyright or a DCMA takedown claim on our listings on Amazon saying we copied their content, when in actuality we didn't, and we had proof that they actually filed their request then updated their listing to match our copy, so that Amazon would look at it and say, Oh, you stole their copy, and then take us down completely offline. Now they didn't manage to get us completely offline because we had validity. We got legal involved, and we proved and they put the first two back online, and we're waiting for them to put the second two, but we've been out for we've been out for a month because someone made a false claim in that system and worked a loophole that caused a problem for us. Right now we're going to close that loophole and get it fixed, which we are, and then I'm going to go after them, because I'm not going to let them do that to somebody else, right? They did it to us. It's done. The whole goal was to get us to be down right, to remove us. From competition, which is totally unethical, and then to not, you know, not have proof that they could support or substantiate it. They just knew that when they did that, they were throwing us into Amazon's customer support hell, and that we'd be stuck in there trying to prove that we didn't do anything, and then we would be out of the market for a while. And that was the goal, ultimately, knowing they couldn't ultimately defend the claim, because it was not right, and we had proof that it wasn't. But that kind of crap happens, and it's solving problems, and you have to deal with it. It happens to everybody in business in some way, some shape. I've had my, you know, paid traffic accounts on medica, taken down for reasons that are just stupid, because they have a dumb process there too. I mean, just business in on the business of world and is a problem when you're operating in the world, you can have the same thing happen with your own host. I control all of my stuff. That's why I don't sell on a platform. Well, your whole website can go down, because if you're not hosting it on your own servers and your own server farm with your own internet connection, then you don't control the whole thing. And that's just naive. So you take these tools and you use them properly, right? You use them in the best way you can. You choose the best tools that you can, and you work with them as much as possible, and you build the house. Doesn't matter necessarily, whether you like this kind of hammer or another kind of hammer, or you prefer Milwaukee over to Walt at the end of the day, they're all tools that are going to build the house. It's just in the right craftsmanship and right skill set, it will actually become a great asset. And these can become great assets. You just have to work them properly.

Dave Barr  36:17

You mentioned some things there about risk as well. Oh, yeah, there's some scary things you just mentioned. But of course, people perhaps are not aware of the structure that Amazon expects of you, the procedures and processes you must follow, things should be packaged. There are going to be charges Amazon, funnily enough, makes money out of this, so they're going to charge you for their services.

Neil Twa  36:40

Yes. Oh,Amazon charges the most fees ever, and they're the worst you know, for charging ever, and you shouldn't sell on that platform. That's some of the most naive stuff I've ever heard. Right, being led by naive marketers who want to sell you something the end, they don't want to tell you the truth, and the truth is that Amazon has fees. Oh, no, yeah, you sell on their platform, they have fees. But Neil, they take like, 40% of the sale of a cost of a unit, yes. Why? Because they have infrastructure and cost and marketing and returns and they have you're using their platform and their customers they spent to bring in, and you're using all of their backyard, okay? They charged you a fee. Well, if I go over to paid media, okay? And this is the biggest lie I've ever heard, well, I'm just gonna get all this organic traffic. Well, if you could do that, why not just go do that? Now, I wait until later if you think it's so easy, because it's not that easy, to go get all this social, organic traffic that everybody thinks is out there and convert it into a selling position. Okay? It's very difficult, and that's a lie that's being sold too. It can happen in time with the right message and narrative, and a number of you know, tests that help you define it, but it doesn't just happen overnight. So you have to pay for traffic to get things moving more quickly, okay, you gotta buy media on one side, and you gotta send it to send it to your website on another. And if you're using places like meta and that kind of stuff, you have to get the campaign set up. You got to get the right metrics managed. You have to get the management of the campaign structure down correctly and find the audience that is inside those inside that data. And you have to get it to return a customer to you who actually wants to not just click, but actually buy. And there's a bit of technical and danger that has to occur in all of that effort. And most people don't always understand how much that's going to cost. You know, we will spend a minimum 30, $40,000 testing through advertising just to figure out how to make a single sale sometimes on those channels before we get it right, you may be running 50,000 a month on revenue on a Shopify store, and spending 15 to $20,000 or more to do it, because you're trying to figure out how to dial in the conversion of that customer. Well, that's more than 30 to 40% a cost of a unit good. So, and then you have to convert them at two to 3% if you're doing great, you'll convert them at 3% if you're doing average, you'll do it around two to two and a half percent on traffic. So you have to go through every 1000 you know, impressions, to get down to your clicks, to get down to your sales, to get two to 3% of those people to convert for you. And that's really good on the Amazon side, I get it at 10 to 15% right because of the mechanism and system they've built in at a high level of brand value and their clickability. It's 10 to 15% so it's really not comparable in terms of my ability to convert somebody on Amazon for that 30 to 40% than it is to convert somebody on a Shopify store for that 30, 40% and all the costs weighed over that. So in other words, there's lies being told about certain platforms, and all platforms have problems. But at the end of the day, you're going to pay one way or another to be a part of any of them. Yeah. So you need to, we say, in the country, you can't ride two horses with one ass. So you need to figure out which one you're going to ride and then stick with it, because they all have their pros and cons. I personally take new people to a platform that has built in traffic, has built in eyeballs, has built in organic traffic, and it has paid traffic that work in combination with each other. And you can't do that on other platforms, not at the scale you can on Amazon. So to get them to first level success, that's the best place to take people and then move them through knowledge and experience into other channels, where they learn how to develop other sales channels and round out their business model. That is not the easiest channel. None of them are quite honestly at the end of the day and but if you're willing to spend the time, energy, attention and money and doing it, there's a large upside to growing a private label brand where you own the intrinsic and asset, and that is, you can exit those things for millions of dollars. We do a great job. Yeah.

Dave Barr  39:58

So we talked. About the risks, but this equally said the business side of things, we've got to make sure that the quality of the product is there. It's available to be shipped exactly when it should be shipped, because Amazon doesn't want a bad experience for its customers when they want to buy your product, if it's not in stock, if it's not you know if they get lots of returns. So you know, it's not just as simple as finding the product, sticking it online and hoping that everything's gonna sell nicely and no problems.

Neil Twa  40:25

I've had corporations come to me that are doing 30 million a year on the DTC side, no Amazon presence, try to launch it, and in 12 months, come up with $16,000 in total revenue. Like they didn't understand what the heck they were doing. They couldn't figure it out. They didn't understand why the system wouldn't respond. Had all their listings up, they had this stuff, and they're like, why are we not getting any traffic? Why is nobody buying? This is ridiculous. This is a total waste of our time. And they came to us and we figured out, you know, what they were doing wrong is not hard when you have the right experience. And in, you know, four months we had them to 30,000 and then 50,000 and 100,000 a month in sales, we did such a good job, they fired us. Lovely as the other problem with working with people sometimes consulting, you know, it was, it wasn't a bad they got to the end of their contractor and they said, Yeah, we're not gonna, we're gonna take this back in house, because we were doing so well, they didn't want to pay us the money anymore. And so, you know, that was just a business decision. That's fine. Good Good luck. I hope they're still doing really well with it, quite honestly, I hope they are. But it is not just a system by which you throw up things anymore. I mean, that was 12 years ago. All right, we're into date year. And if you're, if you're watching this and you have tried a course or a program in the last three years, and it does not feel like it's up to date information. That's because it is literally changing week by week right now, with large language models and AI changing, and the way that the system is literally being restructured online, quite honestly, all across the internet, Amazon being a big product engine, it's changing across the board, where AI is now developing the way people search and the customer intent searching and buying is changing the way keywords are becoming relevant in places anymore, even on Amazon, and changing it into more customer base, intent searches, customer need searches, which is leading into things like Rufus and Cosmo on Amazon, leading the way for ranking of products now, and if you're if you cannot understand how to get that engine to build its own narrative and belief about your product and your brand and do it correctly, then it will set you in a pigeon hole that maybe is representing your brand completely wrong with the data that's wrong to the customer, and it will never take off. You basically have the AI thinking that you're one thing, when in actuality, or another, and with that, you'll never see the visibility or the light of day. And with these changes that are coming so fast, if you're not working on it, daily, weekly, monthly, like we are in multiple brands. We have nine different brands we control in 20 that we own and operate, you can't understand the scope of which it's changing and how fast it's going. I would advise anybody who's willing to sell today and looking at it to definitely see the opportunity and upside potential, because it is there. There's trillions of dollars coming online, and are going to keep coming online for the next three or four years, because it's shifting. It's changing. It's where the generational wealth is happening right that you're going to have to learn and pay the patients and time to actually get the knowledge and execution and do it correctly and turn it into an opportunity, or you'll simply just go in and get outdated information and flip stuff up and get your hopium dreams all up there and then find out it doesn't work in six months. That's terrible.

Dave Barr  43:09

Just thinking about all the clients you've helped. Is there a particular case study that you think is a really great way of demonstrating the kind of strategies that you employ to attain such rapid scaling. You know, what could you share with us today? You know, to inspire people?

Neil Twa  43:25

Well, that's a great question. I have a lot of them rattling around in my head. There's a couple, one that's new and one that was an existing business. Maybe someone named Daniel had come in about going on five years, four going on five years. Gosh, that's time. Spice fast. And right in the middle of COVID, he decided he wanted to launch a brand. He came to us. We started training him on it. It training him on it. It took him an extra eight months to get to market, just because of COVID, supply chain logistics and challenges with product and movement. But he he busted through that. His tenacity and perseverance overcame that as a golf course manager and a degree in theology, had no experience in ecom at all. He had experience a little bit with the online world due to his wife being a great seller in the young living space. And then, you know, online world with that, but that is a completely different business model than the one we run. And so she was the influencer, not the product peddler, you know, she she was very different. So he had to learn how to become the guy who also did the marketing and the engine and got the product manufacturing and stuff done. We taught him every step of the way. And he locked into a brand, and they worked around the table as a family. They did this as a whole unit, which is really cool to watch. And they used some of their family and friends to kind of help get things moving, just to get the get the thing off the ground. And so fast forward, he's done a great job of managing the business, a great job of being coached and listening and learning and understanding, and has taught others now to do the things that he does that brand in five years has grown over to over 10 million a year in sales. I think it was closer to about 14 million in sales this year, if I'm not mistaken, and has been a great brand. It's been a great ride. It's been a lot of fun. He's opening additional channels now so that he can move it into a saleable position, and it will create a generational wealth opportunity for his family when he exits and he came. Zero, no experience whatsoever. He watched a virtual live summit with us and joined the program, and then came and just crushed it. We did a few years of one on one, coaching with him and mentoring. That's kind of how we help our folks. We got into the trenches and helped to make sure that everything was done correctly. That's a great story. He did the work, and kudos to him for putting the effort and time, and obviously the risk and reward ratio was him capitalizing the business and putting the money in necessary to make it go. And so he did the things that were necessary to make it successful, and it grew extremely fast. I had another individual who came in who was already running an account on Amazon. He was doing about 30,000 a month in revenues, but he was spending around 25 grand a month to do it. So he was barely making it run. And he knew that it was, it was not profitable after taxes and paying himself and everything. He got that up in about six months into the process, and realized, you know, I either need to get serious help with this thing or I need to quit. And I know a lot of sellers get to that point when they reach this kind of frustration. Many Amazon sellers end up at this place mostly because they're the knowledge gap of the course and training program. It does not exceed the actual business knowledge and experience required to get to the next level. And he came on one of my shows and listened a while and did to his due diligence. And for a few months, he poked around to see if we were legitimate. And when he did finally sign up, he said, Hey, I think you guys are real and true. And I'm like, Well, I know that, but let's go see what we can do. And he said, I really need to get this thing turned around in the next five to six months. I said, Okay, that's a great window of time to turn this thing around. Let's get let's dig in and see what needs to be done. And so it really got down to he had a lot of great things with his brand that he was doing right? He was just missing a couple of key components. One of them was his understanding of strategy and how to apply that strategy to his business and profitability and the fundamentals of business and bookkeeping, and just the aspect of running his business correctly by the numbers. So that was one of the first things we taught him, it's really shifted his mindset right away from thinking tactically at the product level and ranking and doing all these off Amazon things to try to manipulate the engine, which was wasting a bunch of time and energy and not required, down to just focus, focused, intent on specific numbers every seven days, every 21 days, are you seeing these things and keep tweaking these Things, watching the algorithm, watching the changes, doing these other things. When the algorithm responds this way. Had enough experience with it, we could teach him how to do that. And all of a sudden things started to shift around. Right? The second thing wasn't really understanding how the whole thing works tactically. How does the system actually work? What does the engine want from him, and what was he doing wrong with it? And what happens is a lot of times people don't understand. Again, this is a river of information running 24/7, on a specific vertical in the system, down to the product, hyper relevancy. Someone coming in and winning a nugget, ice maker who goes and looks at the right, you know, ones. They look at the price point. Maybe they look at the intent, they look at the value of the product. Sometimes they're not always price sensitive. Sometimes they're not always review sensitive. They hit Add to cart that shows up. They love the product. They give it a review, bam. That's like a hyper relevant time. And it's just a channel of traffic run at 24/7 and if you're in, if you know that channel exists, but you're over here yelling at the stream, come over here. And you're throwing things at it, and you're saying, Come over here. Look at me. And you're not actually moving yourself closer to that stream of traffic. You're not gonna see the winds. And that was kind of him, there's a stream of traffic with his products. It was flowing 24/7 flowing 24/7 and it's not budging, because that's the hyper relevancy aspect of that platform, or the intent of that customer. And he's over here yelling at it, and nothing's happening, because the river doesn't move towards you, right? You move to the middle of the river. And when he finally understood what the algorithm wanted from his brand and what it was looking for, and how he could see it actually working. He went from 30 to 50 to 100,000 in five months. Turned his business around profitably, and we increased his profits by elevating his brand, by showing him that he was his risk for war ratio. Was thinking, I need to lower the price point to sell higher volume, but in actuality, was killing his profitability, and we raised his price and stopped subjecting the market to just price and discounting wars and more of elevated tier two brand status, which is, this is where you are. And now I know how to acquire a customer at that level, and how to speak to them at that level. And then you fast forward now at 1824, months after that, and he's at over half a million a month in sales. He's over 50,000 a month on his Shopify channel, because he's opening, excuse me, opening that now he had to play an exit in two years, but we've already started discussing the current exit at about 6 million a year, in which we're going to talk about acquiring it and getting him to 15 million in two years, and having him come along for the ride. So he's in the process of talking to our guys right now about a structured acquisition where we can step back into the business as owners and help him run the operation controls and grow this up to a higher exit, and he'll kind of double dip on the exit. So we're talking to him right now about that process,

Dave Barr  49:25

I think incredible. Just give us a sense of the kind of commitment people need in time and possibly money. Yeah, if they're starting out relatively new, you know, what are your expectations? This is not for the faint hearted. No, this isn't. So what must they be prepared to give up in some respects.

Neil Twa  49:45

You know, time is a is a question that I always like to ask back. You know, how long is a piece of string? Dave, and it's relative to whatever length you're going to cut it. If you cut your string too short, you know the old saying, you're cutting yourself too short. The end result is give yourself whatever time is necessary. When. Jumped out of a business that was controlled and structured for me, as those of you who are in the w2 world will understand this. You don't know every piece of the business, or you don't ever, you know, operate every piece. You operate your section, and realize it's a part of a wheel. You're part of a, you know, an engine that runs your one section of the whole thing. When I stepped out, it didn't quite understand all that. It took me a few years finally to realize, you know, I have to see the whole picture. I have to run the whole business. I have to understand the whole thing. And so with that, I had to understand the pieces and components I didn't know, and I had to go learn them. So it was going to take me whatever time was necessary to get the knowledge in my belt and hire the people and do what's necessary to find that. So with that, I also had to realize that we needed to restructure the way we were doing our life in order to give me the time to do that. And so I went to my wife and we, you know, God bless her. She's a great partner, so she's just like, Honey, whatever you need to do, we'll do it. And so we sold a house that we had built that we planned to stay in for a long time. We had our first baby in the same year that we left to do the business. So we packed up all this stuff and a little baby, and I said, we're out of here. Sold the home, which is awesome. And, you know, got got down to more time because it was a time that was needed to go it. And what I learned through the process, though, it would take a lot more money than I thought necessary to make that work. And I don't think everybody appreciates that. So the thing I want you to do is, if you're willing to do this, you're going to take whatever time is necessary. Do not set time constraints on it, or you will set your risk reward ratio in the wrong mindset. You will treat it like a side hustle or a hobby business. You will never actually make it to true business. You'll never get the results you actually want. You'll limit yourself out of scarcity and limiting beliefs. It's baked into that cake, whether you realize it or not, listening to me right now, it's exactly what happens. So to move into an abundance mindset, you start to have to just start thinking that money is in abundance. And if you're paying attention to anything in the world right now, you realize that there's so much money, billions and trillions of dollars. And we're talking about in the United States a lot right now, about where it went and who took it, and all this stuff. And you realize there's so much money that it's just not that it doesn't exist. It's not that it's not available. It's just not next to you. Right now, you understand, and once you realize that it's not next to you, it's like that river again, you have to figure out how to move closer to it. So as Mark Cuban said, If you don't have the resources, you have to be resourceful. So one way or another, if you're going to get this done, you have to find the money that's required, and you're going to take whatever time is required to get it done. Time is the only commodity we ever have that's the most precious, so use it extremely wisely. If you keep putting it off into the future, time will eat you up. You will wake up. The next month will be here, and you'll never have gone and even tried to get to your goals. That's part of that risk reward ratio when it comes to capitalizing a business, what I learned finally was, if I'm really going to capitalize a business, I've got to do it at a big scale, okay, if I'm going to compete with the market now, if I'm going to get into any kind of business in this world right now, that isn't so net new. No one's ever heard of it. And by the way, the internet's been on for a long time. Okay? So many of all these business models have been online for a long time, and they've only been maturing more and more since you haven't gotten involved, which means you need to know exactly how to deploy the capital, okay, at whatever level it's going to be in the right mechanisms, the right revenue generating activities, so that you don't lose the opportunity that you seek to go get. That means for us, anybody who joins what we do in our voltage Business Builders needs at least a minimum of 25k in capital to deploy into the business minimum. Okay, we have our five by five process, goal oriented of getting them to three to $400 a day in profit to show them. And so done with you. So you are consulting with us. You own your business. You own your responsibilities. So show up with your your hat on in the right way. Okay, you own an outcome positive or negative in any business at the end of the day. Don't let anybody dissuade you from that. Okay? And don't fall into those traps, of those Amazon automation traps and scams and all that crap, right? You own the business. You must own 100% of its outcome. Okay, don't give it to somebody until you understand what the heck you're actually doing. You get to deploy 50 to 75 if you want to go faster, you could play 100 to 250,000 if you want to go faster. Just know that when you deploy it, not upfront is more important, and getting access to that capital is extremely important. As you grow something, right? As you grow something, you have to capitalize it, especially in a physical product world. It's like real estate, and that way, if I want to get more doors, I've got to take more risk, even if I'm not putting the capital out to get the loan, I may have to put the 10 to 20% out to get the mortgage down, to get the, you know, get it into a position of cash flowing. So I still have to put that risk out, and that's an inventory level. We're in a physical product inventory level. So to grow these, you have to capitalize the inventory. And not everybody really appreciates or understands what that's what that means. So they can get selling and get maybe, like David, three or four or five months into this thing, and then realize, well, the business is now telling me I need 75 grand to market and inventory these next level of products. And it's not that it is a hard and fast requirement. You can choose not to do it, and the business will slow down or die. You can choose to take that risk to reward ratio and say, Okay, I'm going to incorporate that into the business. I'm going to get that next level of inventory. I'm going to go after that marketing. Because everything tells me I should it's already working. I see it happening. So I'm going to take that next level of risk. And if you can't do that, you won't become a Dave. Become a David. If you can't do that, you won't become a Daniel or a Katie or a matt, because you won't be willing to take the next level of risk in a physical product business. And then you have to again. You got to think about money very differently. You have to think about it like a tool. If you hoard it, it builds nothing. Okay, you can hoard a bunch of hammers. They're not. And imagically go out and build a house for you, right? You can take a couple handlers, or three or four and get a work crew and go out and build an amazing home that's worth a lot of money, but you have to be willing to get out there and actually get it to work. And money and time are just the two aspects of the tools that are required to build these businesses.

Dave Barr  55:14

Brilliant. Now before I ask for a very brief my last question, how do people understand more about your teachings. There's obviously the book to go out and buy, but where else should they seek you out?

Neil Twa  55:25

Well, if you're a reader who wants to learn and understand the book, it gives you 15 chapters of guest experiences from my podcast around the five by five structure, talking about finances and money and research and the business mindset and wealth creation and building wealth and keeping wealth is a part of that, as well as the case studies and processes by which we do it. It's a strategy guidebook. It's not a tactical guidebook, because guys, at the end of the day, tactics can be taught, like I said to a 19 year old high school dropout. Okay, so at the end of this, it's not about the tactics of an E commerce business that can be trained. It can be built in. It's not where the money is made. It's made in the strategy. That's why I wrote a strategy book, because when you understand the strategy, you understand your time and capital deployment correctly, then you can make this a going concern that could actually reach the goals and opportunities that you saw and want is a part of that entire process. Just know that when you show up, if you're interested with us, there's a process by which you will interview with me. You will go through a process of evaluation. Not everybody makes it because they're not qualified to do the things we do at the level we do. And with that, I don't take everybody on, maybe three to five people a month if I find them, if they're qualified, if they make it through the application process, because we only invite a three to five people a month to join us. They're very, usually high level. We're a conservative group in nature. There's about 279 people at last check this morning that have been in my group since 2019 so I'm only looking to work with the best of the best are those who really want to become the best of the best. And with that, I have the time and energy and the team behind me who are operators that were trained up in this process, like Daniel, who know Coach, the other people who come in behind them on the exact process they follow to success. So I have coaches who are like mercenaries, who are running businesses today, who then consult as CEO operators with those who want to become CEO operators, and they do it in our voltage product playbook, and follow the same processes and the same software and data we use internally that we built as proprietary data for ourselves to go through our green light process and find those products and get them launched and get them tested correctly. You can go to voltagedm.com, check that out. Voltage digital marketing.com Check me out on the web. My last name is to three letters, can't miss me. Voltage, one word can't miss that either. What you won't find is a lot of negative reviews and nonsense about me out there, because I keep it pretty tight and I only work with people that I'm most agreeable to work with who want to work with us. But make no mistake, it's a business, and you're going to run it like a business. If you've been looking for a serious mentorship or a business, and you know that you've gone through some of those other, you know, funnels or whatever nonsense is out there, and you're like, Okay, these all really feel like opium gurus. This all feels too good to be true. There's only practical business being done at voltage because we're actually acquiring the companies when they reach a certain level, like David's. We actually have first riser refusal to look at acquiring that company. So as I raise up these operators and raise up these businesses, my big, hairy, audacious goal, so be very clear, is to acquire my clients businesses away from them when they reach a certain point and or we bring them in as a higher level operator to the next exit, where I sell them to our private equity groups, and one of those is called Patriot growth capital, which is a veteran owned, veteran backed business is a mission that helped 16,000 veterans last year in the United States through all processes and walks of life. We're hiring them into the companies that we acquire, giving them operational training and getting them to the point within three to five years, if they want to acquire the company, we're building up a war chest inside the company that will help them acquire that company for their for their families after five years, when they reach that point. So we're going to be supporting the veterans more in the business and growth and operational components of what we're doing. It's a business as a mission, if you will.

Dave Barr  58:38

Yeah, fantastic. So very quickly. The last question for running out of time you mentioned earlier on, and we all see around us, the pace of change is colossal. 

Neil Twa  58:48

Yes, sir. 

Dave Barr  58:49

f you had to imagine 10 years from now, what do you kind of think our landscape would look like?

Neil Twa  58:54

Gosh I can't think 10 minutes from now. If you're paying attention to America right now, everybody's on the edge of their seat wondering what the heck is happening today? What's going on tomorrow? It's quite crazy in the world of America. So I honestly, you know, I hope that there are I hope that there are better opportunities for folks. I hope that those who need help get the help they need. I hope that the businesses become more accountable to the needs of the customer. I hope that, you know, those who have opportunities to reach health, who are sick, you know, get what they need, and those who have, you know, business opportunities, will take the risk and reward and see themselves 10 years from now. I hope that the technology doesn't outpace us, overtake us and try to kill us all, because AI feels like it's, you know, it's on the precipice of reaching self awareness if it hasn't already, and that's always Terminator style confusion. So I hope we're not all dead or being controlled by robots at that point. So this is my pessimism, but optimism wise, I believe that we are going to see that the skill sets you need are going to be the ones in which you have the strength to control those things. You have the strength to. To manage them and use them in the business by which you're learning, like E commerce, we bring and they're using AI and technologies and innovations into the processes we had already developed. And instead of spreadsheets, we have now systems of automations and agents that goes and finds these days and compiles and comes back and tells us what it's seeing, and it's getting more intelligent. And that way it does that, because it's learning, and we're helping it learn, and that's making our business and each component of the business process go faster and easier. Because as that data gets stronger and more relevant, we can see that it becomes more accurate, and with that accuracy, we could move more quickly. We can time compress two to, you know, two weeks worth of activity down to, you know, sometimes two hours and certain tasks. And with that compression, it frees up bar time to do other things, which is cool, and I like components of that, right? I don't think I'll have a robot in my house in 10 years. I don't think I feel like that will ever be a good thing, and I think that's gonna happen. I don't think I know. I don't live in a city, so I'm in the country, and I definitely don't want cars trying to come and pick me up, like some sort of automated thing that might happen in the city. Most likely, I don't want that. I like my gas powered cars, and so I really hope they're still here in 10 years, powering things. Is that answering your question, I feel like I'm getting off.

Dave Barr  1:01:05

Well, no, it's very difficult question to answer.

Neil Twa  1:01:08

Well, it's a crystal ball, right? Hope all my girls are married and happy and that they're all maybe some of them are involved in the business, or have businesses of their own that they're helping with as we train them up, maybe even grandchildren in 10 years as possible, I guess with with health and happiness, definitely. Yeah, health and happiness and structure and family will be a component of my five F's as you will. So I want to keep that structure and turn it into my children so I can watch the next generation become part of it.

Dave Barr  1:01:33

Thanks very much, Neil, you've imparted a vast amount of knowledge today. Really do appreciate it. Hopefully. Look forward to see Voltage having an incredible success in the next five to 10 years. 

Neil Twa  1:01:45

Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. 

Dave Barr  1:01:46

Take care. So there's another Real Life Buyer podcast. I do hope you enjoyed it, and it has given you some ideas and inspiration for greater action and achievement. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes and a five star review would be most appreciated. If you would like to discover more about me and what I do, take a look at www.thereallifebuyer.co.uk, bye.