Are you ready to sell on Amazon?! You might want to listen to this episode first. Amazon can be an incredible way to boost sales, build a brand, or reach a new audience. It can also be a nightmare, technically complicated, or even worse - it can be the death of your business! Our special guest Neil Twa has built dozens of incredible brands on Amazon, generating millions with each. Neil gets to the bottom of what's important for sellers when selling on Amazon!
For detailed show notes, Justin Varuzzo's after thoughts on each episode, and lists you can use to take immediate action in your business, check out the website at http://www.marketingandservice.com.
Are you ready to sell on Amazon?! You might want to listen to this episode first. Amazon can be an incredible way to boost sales, build a brand, or reach a new audience. It can also be a nightmare, technically complicated, or even worse - it can be the death of your business! Our special guest Neil Twa has built dozens of incredible brands on Amazon, generating millions with each. Neil gets to the bottom of what's important for sellers when selling on Amazon!
For detailed show notes, Justin Varuzzo's after thoughts on each episode, and lists you can use to take immediate action in your business, check out the website at http://www.marketingandservice.com.
Amazon may just be the tool that can make your brand, but it can just as easily be the tool that can break your brand. Today's guest is an absolute expert at building huge brands on Amazon. And we're going to dig deep into the underbelly of being a seller on Amazon, that and more coming up on the marketing and service.com.[inaudible] Hey Justin, Bruzzo here for the marketing and service.com podcast. The podcast to help you build your business by creating incredible customer relationships. Today, we have a special guest Neil. Neil is the CEO of voltage digital mark, and Neil and his team have developed a game plan. That's generated a collective hundred million dollars in sales on Amazon's FBA over the past eight years and has taken many of his clients from zero to seven figures in 12 months or less. I am so excited to have Neil on the show today. Before we jump into today's episode, please take a moment to visit the website marketing and service.com. Also, I want you to be part of the conversation. So jump over to Facebook and join the marketing and service.com Facebook group. Lastly, if you find value in this podcast, please, please like follow and subscribe. And if you are really feeling generous and want to do me an amazing personal favor, please take a moment and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcasting app. And without further ado, let's jump right into this Amazon discussion with Neil.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Justin. No
Speaker 1:Problem. Thanks for being here today. Now you have a, a really unique, uh, business that you're running right now. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've got going on?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in short order, we focus on launching, operating and acquiring e-commerce brains, uh, specifically focused on the Amazon market of private labels, otherwise known as FBA or fulfilled by Amazon. Uh, so predominantly again, launching is a, uh, creating brands, creating new products and opportunities for brands and segmenting them into businesses. And of course those businesses are worth a lot when you sell them, uh, in the end. And so we also, again sell, acquire those businesses, uh, as part of our model. So we're kind of an end to end deal if you will.
Speaker 1:Very cool. What is your typical client look like in this business?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, typically they end up being, uh, you know, people don't like to say it this way. Let's just be blunt. They typically have more money than time. They may have be in other business markets. They may have e-commerce in other stores, but not on Amazon. They may have decided they want it to diverge into e-com maybe as a wealth, without wall street alternative, maybe a way to invest some money and some capital, uh, they typically are looking for another stream of revenue. They don't want to create a full-time job. Uh, so they look at us and say, you know, you can help us make this go a lot faster. You can even make it more passive. And it's an asset driven business model that we know can be worth millions later on in 12 to 18 months after we sell it. So my people are typically business leaders. I've got Lieutenant colonels in the air force. I've got doctors and lawyers and I've got successful business owners and people who were big in network marketing. Um, but they typically have successes in other areas of business. And they're looking to diversify, maybe this is one of the seven or eight revenue streams that are building. Sure. So do the long-term do, do
Speaker 1:Clients usually come to you with an idea in mind or a functioning product in hand, or is it already something that's, uh, you know, had a proof of concept where they say, Hey, you know, I've been selling a, a thousand of these things a month, uh, on my, on my website, but I really want to scale it up and get it on Amazon and then ramp up the, uh, the offering or I want to take it globally.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, you know, it here up until 2020, like let's go backwards in time for just a second with a Wayback machine, or we can go Wayne's world back to 2019. And it was predominantly 80% of the people I talked to. You had businesses that were already doing e-commerce in some capacity or are, were already selling on Amazon and really wanting to expand, uh, fast forward 2019 and through the 2020 situation. And a lot of people realized I'm kind of a locked into my offline businesses, or I'm locked into my retail space or I'm locked into other areas. And all of a sudden in the last year, a two year, and what are we three months into the fi well, we five months into this year already. And it's like, how fast is this going? And it's actually flipped. I actually have about 20% of the people who approach us, want to grow and scale their businesses and Amazon at this moment, 80% of the people see the e-comm opportunity saw that they missed it or are just hitting the cusp of some areas of it and are really wanting to expand into that area and create diversity from online, bring their retail online, uh, bring experience from other areas and diversification and, and obviously creating a revenue stream of e-commerce and business building with physical products. So right now a lot of my people, uh, have never actually built an e-commerce store. Uh, we're training them as CEOs to build this company wow. For the next 12 months building it up.
Speaker 1:Very, very cool. Yeah. So I have a little bit of experience with, uh, with FBA and, and being a vendor, uh, I for Amazon and, uh, we all get used to the incredible front end experience of amazon.com, right? Ordering stuff from your Alexa. And there's just so many things they do just right. And, and really offer incredible service if you've got a problem. And I want to talk about this a little bit, because obviously this whole, this whole podcast is about really marketing and service and more that intersection between the two, how do you best serve your customers through marketing? That's right. And, uh, I can tell you on the other side of that is a very, very disgusting cause we had a scary place. Uh, if you're in vendor central, if you're in seller central, anyone listening who's ever experienced it, it is not like the front end of Amazon. Uh,
Speaker 3:You know, oh, no,
Speaker 2:Thanks a little more time to figure out how to use it. It isn't a, it isn't that the sellers are selling things to all people it's the Amazon has their prognosis of it's. Uh, we want to sell all things to all people in 30 seconds or less, right. So it's a very different experience for the customer than the person doing the selling. Yeah. And as
Speaker 1:You grow as, as, as you can attest to, as you grow on Amazon, the challenges of dealing with Amazon itself become exponentially more complicated, right. Really
Speaker 2:A little bit more complicated. Yeah. It is where you find yourself looking for people who have been in this business long enough to have the connections experience, um, and have already fought those battles ahead of you. You're trying to come in and fight that battle by yourself. And you don't have an experienced warrior and, and you know, your special ops team with you. Uh, you're going to find yourself in a lot of trouble, uh, getting into, uh, you know, seller performance all by yourself, which can be a big black void where we work with top 5%, top 1% ourselves as sellers in the marketplace and the people we contract and the people we network with and the clients that we have. Uh, we find we have a lot of inroads into Amazon, even down to seller performance itself, where we have connections to make inroads. Uh, we know which particular vendors can negotiate on our behalf. We've vetted them. They've already done it, we've hired them, or we've worked directly with those folks. And so we have a network that we've built up over eight years of people to connect ourselves very closely to that, to deal with those kinds of issues that others might face. We can take our clients and ourselves straight into that account reps and this kind of thing we can do directly to the,
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is awesome. Because I, as I said, I would have killed to have an advocate like you when we got started, uh, doing this Amazon business because, because weight in gold, I wish I would have to man, cause you know how many times I got screwed up and learning experience, it is
Speaker 2:Costly time and money. Uh, I tell everybody, look, if you're not building with a team of people who know what they're doing, you could spend half a million dollars doing something that wouldn't usually cost you 50 to a hundred thousand from the Dean over 12 to 18 months. Absolutely. You need to really look at the differences in the time and money value of, of getting involved with experts who are already doing this. Uh, that's like any other segment of market. If you want to be a marketing expert, you know, you need to follow some of the pros advice and get in there and really learn how to be an expert. Sure. And
Speaker 1:I think maybe it's worth taking just a minute to kind of break down those, uh, I guess you could say the three layers of, of being a seller on Amazon. One of course, just being your, your basic seller, uh, Amazon, you, you list your item, you sell it, they send you an email and say, Hey, you got to pack this up and you've got to ship it to this customer. And you've got to do it filled by merchant. Right? Uh, the next level in this would be, uh, what you refer to as FBA, which is fulfilled by Amazon. Uh, in this case, you're shipping your product to Amazon in advance and then they will ship the item when it sells. Uh, but they are not paying you for it. You're just giving it to them for free. And they're essentially warehousing it, uh, and then charging you, uh, for that warehousing space. And in addition to
Speaker 2:As big, what's called three PL third-party logistic firm. Right, right, right.
Speaker 1:Yep. And of course the, uh, another level of this is to be a direct vendor to Amazon where Amazon is buying product from you, and then they're stocking it and selling it on their own.
Speaker 2:No, you're also missing one. If you didn't get to it yet, I don't want to cut you off. No dramas there seller fulfilled prime as FP. Fill me in on that one. So seller fulfilled prime is one of those, a hybrid of FBA that also isn't FBM. It's not that I necessarily ship in the same timeframe of say three to five days or seven to 10 days. And I'm not using prime mechanism, which is the FBA platform. And they ship it for, you know, in an hour to two days, depending upon prime locations for your product seller fulfilled prime is when you actually become the prime vendor, you actually ship at the same level, uh, and service level metrics at Amazon does, but you ship the product yourself. It's called seller fulfilled prime. Very cool.
Speaker 1:I've learned something new, every podcast I wasn't aware of.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you got to maintain Amazon standards. So unless you have the ability to ship at certain times and you can't fall pass because they hold you to a higher level of standard even hold themselves to right. There is opportunities there. If you can manage that and, and, uh, and, you know, get that product moving at the same rate in which prime does. Uh, and for some people that make sense based on the size, shape, and volume, uh, or oversized version of the products they're selling, uh, based on over sized fees and other things, when you get into the numbers, sometimes it makes sense to go ahead and do that. Um, most people can't keep up with that. So your best option at the end of the day, uh, is FBA is fulfilled by Amazon, right? Getting that product to them and letting them get it to the customer and take responsibility.
Speaker 1:Very, and this is why Neil, it's so important that people hire you because I said, I've been doing this for a long, long time and I, I wasn't even familiar with it. That was an option. Yeah. Was I was doing
Speaker 2:A lot of fun things lately that, um, we could talk about in terms of new options and opportunities, for sure.
Speaker 1:Well, one thing I, you know, I'm glad you brought that up, talking about new things, because one thing you had mentioned when we spoke earlier, uh, you had talked about, uh, the success that you were having with video. Yeah. Delve into that a little bit, because you don't, you know, that was something you did not see, uh, you know, anyone who shops on Amazon knows that most of the listings always look the same and usually look a little archaic. Uh, there, there was something, you know, years ago that was the A-plus listing where you'd start to be able to have some pictures and stuff. Uh, and again, this was something that was, uh, uh, very elusive and no one was quite sure how you actually get that A-plus listing at some. And I don't even know what it is now. I know at some point they were charging some absurd, like thousand dollar per ACN number to create an A-plus listing if you wanted to. Uh, and they gave you like two templates to pick from, and it was, you know, a or B take your pick and give us a thousand dollars. Yeah. They've
Speaker 2:Kind of changed a little bit. So let's go through that cause there's some power behind that. And it really helps you understand about where Amazon's going. And literally for two plus years, what we've been talking about and our videos and our own YouTube channel, other places where we can get anybody to listen to us, frankly, um, is where Amazon has been moving towards brands, brands, affinity, and really pulling itself away from the garage style version of eBay, which they don't want to be, which is, you know, fulfilled by merchant has become that playground of garage sales that is borrowing the premise of retail, arbitrage, wholesale arbitrage, wholesale, and this kind of stuff. And they're really pulling away from that fast because it's dragging down their market share, right? And they don't want to be eBay. They don't want to be Walmart either, which means they don't want to just build low cost brands. They don't want to just be seen as they, uh, aggregator of low cost brands. They want to build affinity for brands. They want to become kind of the premier branded place. And so they've really pushed and actually doubled their brand team and moved brand sellers into certain levels of affinity. For example, uh, when you receive brand registration to dot, oh, you can now get a plus content on your system, uh, for your listings, you can get it in and get it applied, and then you get approved. And once you do it unlocks a whole lot of really cool features for your branded content that segments you away from the typical listing, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which, which clearly a lot of people do not take advantage of you about, let's just use
Speaker 2:A very broad 80 20, because everybody understands the 80, 20 comp uh, condition within business. Right. Um, quite honestly, uh, it is the standard metric by which so many different bullet points can be attributed to Amazon, right. Uh, 80% of the sellers make less than a million dollars a year. Um, 80, you know, somewhere between 60 to 80%. It's not an exact figure because Amazon holds, uh, two, as some people like to go a little higher, I'd rather just go a little lower, but it's between 60 to 70% of all of the.com sales or our third party. Right. So of the 35 million or 6 million, I think it is, they're making a day right now about 18 million of that goes to third-party sellers. Um, probably a little bit more than that. Um, cause I'm doing math in my head. Scary, no question. It's a very powerful platform and powerful literally. Yeah. I mean 10 products, you ordered 10 products, six to eight of them are coming from a third party seller. That's how powerful it is. Right. But you also understand that about 80% of those sellers have no real experience in marketing business or management. Uh, the 20% of the sellers that do, uh, the majority of them are people like us. They understand marketing a business and they understand they're going after and being tenacious. And then there's a subset of that 20%. That's actually corporations that are trying to become brand or be big brands or the Nike's and others on the platform. But they're also, uh, because they're corporatized and frankly, they don't even have a clue what they're doing. Um, most of us can outsell them and beat them at their own game. We can even beat Amazon at their own game. People say, well, Amazon has, it's still, still your brand. And majority of the time, again, they don't do that. Especially if you're brand registered, your contents registered and you have a brand trademark which really differentiates you, right? Uh, with that unlocks certain marketing features in the system, uh, more than it's like 70%, uh, I think it's 76% to be exact, uh, jungle scout did survey and of their users. 76% of their user base had five skews or less. So what you need to understand is there's a metric inside of Amazon that kind of unlocks you as a brand. And it's typically more than five skews. So the majority of sellers on Amazon who are selling, excuse me, don't even have enough product in the system to be defined as a brand. Um, so you know how an opportunity to go, uh, past five products, we call it our five by five game plan that literally teaches you how to follow a mechanism of developing five products into your brand that lead to five more products and then the next five products. And then it's an exponential increase of numbers at that point because we're just running it by data. So when you understand that concept and you understand the value proposition of the A-plus content and brand registration and stuff, you start to unlock certain marketing opportunities in the platform. And that's where it gets to be really fun. Yeah. And this
Speaker 1:Is, this is what I wanted to jump into for a second because I I'm sure some people are listening saying, all right, you're, you're getting into these technical, uh, you know, nitty-gritty about how to sell on Amazon. Uh, but the point, the point here is that the goal is always to make it really easy for a customer to accept your brand, to recognize your brand and to take a chance on your brand when they make a purchase. Um, and that is serving the customer the better you provide content, the better your pictures, the better your customer support, uh, the better your descriptions, the better the layout of the listings, uh, whether it be on Amazon, eBay, your own e-commerce website, wherever it is, obviously the more comprehensive you can be, uh, the better you're going to serve that customer and the better their expectations are going to be based on that. And in the end, I think you're just going to have a, a happier experience all around as the customer buying from a brand that you can trust. And that has been transparent in their, in their advertising.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, that's where we love the platform of Amazon, right? Cause we, we define it like this. If you double and double the understanding of your customer, you'll double your revenue. Okay. And Amazon has hands down figured that out. So as you go in and look at the way they orchestrate their systems, the way they set up their ACE plus content and stuff, they're the most split test funnel in the world, right? Um, they want to sell all things to all people in 30 seconds or less. So you don't even have to question whether or not the thing, the things you're doing in the listings and stuff will convert. What you need to do is work on your understanding of the customer. Okay? Because the mechanics of this don't make the money. It's the numbers that make the money, right. Um, and as you get forward with the marketing and Amazon starts to promote it, they'll do things like cart, abandonment, email follow-up for your products, they'll email blast you into their prime users list. We had one of our products, one time show up on ESPN. I got a call from my buddy. He's like, dude, I think I just, I just saw your product. And it was at XYZ on, I just saw it on ESPN. I'm like, cool. So they had taken our product and market it marketed it for us. Why? Because they really want to support brands. Uh they're even now in beta testing, uh, very shortly to be released for email broadcasting. So all of my customers and Amazon can get an email broadcast from me about my latest product. Great. Um, so we'll be able to market to them, which is great. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I know just, just for people who are not familiar with Amazon, emailing customers is always very contentious and a big no, no. Yeah. I mean, I, Amazon always wants to keep control of their customer. They want to know. Yeah. And they don't want fluff in the box. They don't want your business card. They don't want a flyer for a coupon code on your website. Uh, these are all things that they generally, yeah,
Speaker 2:Generally, but if you're a brand that's registered trademark and your website is in their system, you can get away with a lot more of these things. Not just get away. You're in compliance. I made it sound like, well, you can get away with this illegal. Actually you can get away with these things just fine. You can put flyers with codes in them. You can do certain things on the platform. You can't create a poor customer experience in the process, right? And as Amazon sees you as a brand, they allow you to do those things and they consider it white hat. If you are attempting to circumvent their systems and navigate the customer away from Amazon, then you're going to find that they don't really like that very much. But if you send them to say a card that has a YouTube video, that's a, how to video that shows them how to use the product. They're actually really okay with that because it creates a better customer experience,
Speaker 1:As long as you're not stealing the customer and
Speaker 2:You're not stealing the customer, but even then you can have a little fly thing on the bottom that says, Hey, you know, would you like 50% off your next order? You know, come to our website and grab your coupon. Right? They're okay with that. Right? Because you're creating a good customer experience for them. It's all about that experience. So when you think how to create that experience, you get the opportunity. Now you can also build lists and do other things. The email marketing capabilities that are coming are, are fantastic ways to touch those customers. Um, you know, we talked about sprung, a sponge around videos as we wrap up. Yeah.
Speaker 3:We didn't get into that. Then I went on a little tangent and I apologize.
Speaker 2:So as you got your A-plus content, you got this going, obviously sponsored ads are available to anybody prior to being brand registered. But once you become brand registered, you get access to sponsored brands which unlocks a video marketing capabilities. And in beta right now, one of the things that you do, right. You create.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're huge. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I will say on this podcast, probably the last four guests in a row have all talked about video, uh, being by far the most powerful marketing tool in their arsenal. And the problem is, is as a guy who does video myself, it is not easy to do good video. Uh,
Speaker 2:That's a good video. You know, we were talking about this a second ago, right? Does it have to be in high definition? Does it have to be production, quality videos? And quite honestly the less quick production quality, the video, but more sincere, genuine, and problem solving the video. It gives to the customer to overcome any objection they have about right size price, shape. Why would I buy the platinum one versus the stainless steel? Why would I want the red one versus the blue one? Yeah. People really respond to those videos that are real. Okay. They re they don't need high production, quality videos. In fact, they actually fail more than they win the videos we do that actually the biggest effect on the customers are, are usually shot. I'm going to give away this usually shot on an iPhone camera and high definition. Okay. Uh, turn sideways with an external microphone plugged into it. Yeah. Just so the audio as well enough. Okay. I got a nice light of the area. Just demonstrating the product and the differences between the products now with product targeting opportunities that are available now in beta, you can actually take a video and targeting to your customer and to your, excuse me, your competition's listing. So let's say they've got the platinum version of this product for$250 in your stainless steel version is$199. Well, you get a video that basically shows the two of those products talks about the differences, the price, and the difference between stainless steel. And you basically pulled them off your competitors listings, right? Some of those target videos with keywords are absolutely crushing it. And I'm talking about eight to one ROI on those videos. You can't beat that to death because people are like, well, okay, well the stainless steel ones, like, you know,$50 cheaper, or I can see all of India's benefits. So they kick over and hit click and we have really high click-through rates. Right? And
Speaker 1:I'm, I'm sure that video content also really helps support and embrace the brand that it really does.
Speaker 2:It really does. Cause it builds a, uh, an ability for the customer to have an experience with you where that's been missing with others, right? And they have an opportunity to see and hear who you are as a brand, having an emotional connectivity to you, and then, and understand this solutions that your product is presenting. And then really understand how quickly to go get that product value off. Um, and a really simple video strategy for somebody listening, who might be able to do this is to literally go into the listing of your competitor that you want to target or the product you're targeting. Right? Because remember in Amazon, a very simple phrase, similarity and F plus familiarity, equal trust, okay. So if your product is similar or familiar to another, but your objections, your product, objection, issues overcome their objections. And you can say, well, my button is bigger and easier to turn, right. Or it has this soft squishy thing. So you go in, here's a simple thing. You go in and mind their one-star reviews. And you look for the reviews that are basically saying all the negatives about the competitor's product. You build a video that comes back with the, your product solves these problems. What competitor has, you know, customers are saying, this button is too small. Well, my product has a bigger button and it's easier for hands. They want to turn, you put that video on there and guess what happens still all their customer traffic ethically. Yeah. Yeah. And when you have enough product profits, cause this is very important. I have to always say this right. Revenue is vanity. Okay. Profit is sanity and cash flow is king. Yeah. So whenever we get down to the bottom line of any of these topics, I just, I always want to reiterate the, the profit is the whole business model, paying yourself, paying the business for growth is more important than, Hey, he made seven figures in business, right? If I spent all of that, making the business run, it's not really successful. Yeah. Right. The profit is important. Now we only understand bottom line and profit, but you have to understand how much more important that is with Amazon because of their fees, marketing, and other things you have to take into account cost of goods. Uh, the what's called the landed cost, the whole cost of your product to get one unit of it sold on Amazon. You gotta be very smart about the numbers and people miss this. Sometimes. Yeah. It
Speaker 1:Might be worth mentioning with Amazon. Uh, you know, another component, if you're a seller is their, their ad network. You you'd mentioned the sponsored videos. Uh, there's all sorts of advertising opportunities. It's almost like Google ad words, uh, uh, you know, on the Amazon platform where they will grab another five, 10 or 15% out of your pocket, but they can get you in front of a lot. They
Speaker 2:Can, well, you know, about five years ago, Amazon started hiring away Google, um, ad creators who built the ad-words platform. They started shifting their ads platform towards it, in conjunction with updates that they made to their system that now basically allow me to rank a product in Amazon and see it rank for the same keyword over in Google. Right? Because it has the highest domain authority you'll find online. I take that same keyword. Here's a pro tip when it's running on Amazon and it's ranked on Google, take the same keyword and go to YouTube. That's all I'm going to tell you. Okay. Yep. So you go do what you want with that video in that keyword. And you'll figure it out real quick. Uh, but the profit at the end of the day, we're keeping it in very simple terms. Justin, if I'm going to go compete with you and I have a great video and it's overcoming the objections that your product and people are not liking about your product and I'm sticking that video right in front of those people, right? If my product has$20 in profit and yours has$10 in profit, I will spend$18 of my profit buying one of your customers away from you. Right. You can't do that. And then I will stay there long enough until my cost comes down and my organic ranking goes up. And guess what? You're never going to catch me. It's funny. I will outrun you.
Speaker 1:I like that example because there's actually two things I can, I can personally tell a quick story about myself. Uh, two things that I bought, uh, in the last three days from Amazon that came from sponsored video listings, uh, one was a, a holder, a key chain holder for air tags. You know, so I just got these apple air tags are pretty cool. I want to clip them on everything and anyone who buys cell phone accessories or any of that, you, you know, there's, there's millions of brands on Amazon and they tell pretty much most of them usually always the same vendor. It's the same product with 500 different brand names, all, you know, within 30% of the same price, all with varying review, how do you know which one to get that's saturation
Speaker 2:And its biggest form as you described it, right? I'm all only going to look at this point and decide, okay, well, can I trust the brand that sorta known and is the reviews look good? And the price point match up because now you're just doing a little bit of a race to the bottom, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Th th this, this one listing had a nice video that came up as a sponsored listing, right? When I searched, it showed both sides of the product, showed it 360, as opposed to just one picture where I wasn't sure is this thing, is this even materials it rubber? What am I even looking at here? And I, and I bought it, uh, the, you know, the video clips sold it. Um, and in the same thing happened with the grill brush. Yeah. Same type of thing. There's a millions of grill brushes. I don't want metal bits in my food. What do I get? Uh, there was one that was double the price, all the others. It had a really good convincing video. I bought it. I'm happy with it.
Speaker 2:Well, you make up a very important point there, right? Cause one of the things we don't do is sell products that are less than twenty-five dollars. And that's where I know a lot of people teach people, you know, to get started at that low price point because you don't have a higher inventory. And of course, I don't want anybody breaking, you know, piggy banks and stealing from 401ks to launch a product by the same measure. You need to understand that after eight years of competing in this marketplace, I can tell you that you will die on that hill in all the other saturation and high competition areas with hardly any profit margins. I see it time and time. Again, people get married to other products in four months, they come in and they're complaining and whining. Unfortunately, I feel very bad for them, uh, that they're trying to sell a$25 product. And after all cost of goods landed fees and advertising costs are making like a buck in profit. And they're wondering why they can't keep the business going. So we recommend products that are literally selling 50 to$300 in retail and then have a minimum. And by minimum, I mean all your cost of goods, your advertising costs your Amazon fees and all, this is actually what I put in my pocket for every unit that is sold as a minimum of$12. Right. Okay. I have to make some money. I have to pay my taxes, my family. Right. And, but it gives here's the thing. People stop and go, well, there's not that many people on Amazon who want to buy 50 to$300 products. And they're where we got to get into some of the mindset a little bit here, right? Uh, between scarcity and abundance, right? Because you might not realize it, but just as many people are buying 50 to$300 plus products as they are buying sub$25 products. Sure. And you've got to understand that there's just that many people out there and because of the profit margins at the lower product price points, there's this misunderstanding that, well, I sold a hundred and it wasn't terribly profitable. So I need to sell a thousand. If I move a thousand or 2000 units a month, I'm going to be successful. Right. The profit didn't change. Anything. Your troubles just got more exponentially bigger.
Speaker 1:Probably just spent a fortune on ads that have now eaten into here.
Speaker 2:And you got more inventory logistics and costs and operational cost on top of that dollar profit. So actually you're going to be in a lot more trouble. So the idea that if I can make, you know, five bucks on a product or just under, after my cost and this, because I sell a thousand or 2000 of them a month, I'm going to hit all my dreams, goals and my beach house in Lamborghini. It's not actually going to work out that way. And I'm sorry to say that, but let's be very truthful here. Transparent. If you are making more than$10 in profit, you can actually build a really successful business on Amazon. You have the money, you can pay yourself and you can buy more products and grow your business. Very important components of the whole business model business model in general, just Atmos to apply itself to Amazon at this time. Cool. So,
Speaker 1:Uh, let, let's go with, uh, you know, everything you said is awesome. I definitely need help with video. I want to get started. Uh, what's the process? How do people, uh, how do people get in touch with you and start, uh, start getting involved?
Speaker 2:Well, they can go to voltage, dm.com, which is where they can check out our website for Amazon growth consultancies. Um, you can hit me up on social media, on Facebook and Instagram. You can get me on LinkedIn, got a short little last name. So if you just type in TWA to any one of those channels that you won't miss me, I'm all over the place mean. We got some resources and simple videos that really explain in detail, uh, you know, who we're looking for and who we can actually help. I can't help everybody. Justin. I hate to say it in a way that may sound bad or exclusionary, but the truth is I can't help everybody. I can't try to, but I will help those who are really inline with the opportunity of e-comm and see what the future of it means because these businesses are worth a lot. When you build them correctly, in the end, they can be worth millions of dollars. You're building an asset driven business model. All in fact, I have four or five. I lost track right now, about four or five people in my business builders program who were actually, uh, dads and moms building with their kids in the business. We have the 16, 17 year olds in the training with us, uh, and their parents learning how to build alternatives to wealth, alternatives, to education alternatives, to the future. Wow. Um, building alongside and learning this business model become with their parents, which is really
Speaker 1:All right. So we we're, we're running out of time. I got to wrap it up. Okay. So to ask you the two questions I ask everybody, uh, the first question is what's the biggest mistake you've ever made in business? Obviously everyone talks about their successes. No, we usually don't want to highlight their failures, but we learn, I learned from mistakes. I'm sure everyone else does too. So let's hear it. What do
Speaker 2:You got? Well, you know, if you never push the boundaries, you never know how far you can go or how big you can crash. And once upon a time I pushed the boundaries, uh, in the financial realm of how far I could take a startup company before I said uncle, uh, and I pushed it all the way to bankruptcy. Um, so I, I can say here that, uh, I have bankrupted a company and by proxy, uh, due to some of the issues with that business, I had the, uh, you know, get indemnified. The, I walked into the office one Monday and found out my partners were keeping two sets of books. And the lawyers were like, you know, you're heavily leveraged in. I put a lot of money into this startup. I got patents on these amazing technologies out of the oil and gas base in Oklahoma that no one's ever going to hear about. I mean, they're very cool patents, but because of that, we had to go bankrupt. So there you go, I crashed and burned and you
Speaker 1:Learn that it's not worth making 10 cents on a, uh, on a$5 Amazon. So
Speaker 2:You gotta get it leveraged and add a C people, uh, for, you know, different ways and how to experience business on a completely different way and push a boundary that, you know, most people fear, which is bankruptcy. They think it's a SU you know, suicide of finances, let's call it, uh, or financial suicide. But at the end of the day, there's worst things. A lot of success. Yeah. It's got to happen.
Speaker 1:Uh, so then, uh, to flip that around, what's the best piece of business advice you've ever gotten, that it doesn't have to be business, which is the best piece of advice. Oh gosh.
Speaker 2:You know, uh, in simple terms, there was a book by Susan Jeffers called feel the fear and do it anyway. And that has stuck with me forever. And in that process, I am willing to test more and try more things, uh, than maybe others have been willing to do. And for that, it seems like I have more successes only because they're equal to the triple or 10 times the failures I've had to get that single success because at the end of the day, entrepreneurial-ism is really defined as you're jumping off a cliff without a parachute, trying to build a one on the way down with one arm tied behind your back. Right. And if you don't recognize that, then you understand that the testing and testing and testing and feeling that fear and doing it anyways, and just pushing your own boundaries are going to lead you to the successes you always wanted. They're just right on the other side of that next failure. You just gotta keep going.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Great advice. I love it. And I know fear is always a, a common theme on this podcast as well, overcoming it, imposter syndrome and all the things that come along with running a business. So, Neil, thank you so much for being with me today. I really appreciate it. We'll of course, put in the show notes, all the links to your website and the places that, uh, listeners can contact you. And again, I, anyone listening, you want to talk to Neil, if you want to do anything on Amazon, I, it can be an incredibly challenging landscape, but as Neil has explained, it can also be a really rewarding landscape. If you've got an advocate on your side who can deal with all the headaches, because it is endless headaches. Uh, and, uh, I've heard plenty of horror stories, but I've also heard many, many more success stories. And I do believe that having someone like Neil on your side is going to make that process go a lot smoother for you.