The Amazon Strategist Show

Do you know why most Amazon Sellers fail?

• The Amazon Strategist Show • Season 3 • Episode 81

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Unlock the secrets to Amazon success with Neil Twa, co-founder and CEO of Voltage Holdings, in this insightful episode of the Amazon Strategist Show! Join them as they delve into the art of operationalizing your e-commerce business, mastering risk management, and optimizing sales channels. Discover how to prioritize organic sales, manage inventory effectively, and overcome psychological barriers to business growth. Whether you're launching new products or building a community, this episode is packed with strategies to elevate your Amazon business to new heights. Don't miss out on these expert insights! 📈

Key Takeaways:
- Embrace risk and delegate tasks to operationalize your business.
- Hire effectively by understanding your strengths and weaknesses.
- Optimize performance by focusing on key metrics like advertising cost of sales.
- Scale sales on Amazon through effective inventory management.
- Prioritize organic sales over PPC for long-term success.
- Overcome psychological barriers to unlock business potential.
- Budget wisely for new product launches with significant investment.
- Enhance growth by building a community and training operators.
- Commit to strategic thinking in the evolving e-commerce landscape.

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Connect With Neil and Voltage DM
Website: https://voltagedm.com
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neiltwa
The High Voltage Business Builders Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@NeilTwavoltage

Connect with John Cavendish
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jgcuk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejohncavendish
LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/thejohncavendish

Know More About Seller Candy
Website: https://www.sellercandy.com
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/SellerCandyPro
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sellercandyamz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sellercandy/
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Speaker 1:

If you were thinking about being a side hustle or hobbyist with this business model, this is the pivotable year. You shouldn't be doing that. If you think you should be in retail and arbitrage and online, that was long ago, guys, that was a long time ago. You need to treat it like a real business. You need to deploy real capital and be very serious about approaching the business or don't approach it at all.

Speaker 2:

Hello, I'm your host, john Cavendish, and welcome to season three of the Amazon Strategy Show. The show that's all strategy, with no hacks, no silver bullets and no magic pills, just real, practical strategies to grow your Amazon business. Today, I am joined by the amazing Neil Trois. So Neil is the co-founder and CEO of Voltage Holdings. Voltage is specializing in launching, consulting and acquiring e-commerce brands, with a focus on launching Amazon, fba and other marketplace brands. He's been around for over 17 years in the space and launched five personal brands which we'll talk about since 2012. So he's generated eight figures in revenue and helped a thousand people through coaching and consulting, and some of us now. So, neil, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for having me on Appreciate it.

Speaker 2:

So I did actually make a joke when we were talking about this before, but five personal brands, is that?

Speaker 1:

your five personal brands or how's that work? Brands that we control? I know everybody's asked. Well, you know you talk about coaching and mentoring, but are you actually a seller? Do you run the operations? Do you do a daily and weekly? And the truth is I no longer run the operations. I have trained operators that do, so I can be freed up to talk with you and run the business, but we run our own brands, yeah, and we're deploying new brands to the market continuously. We've got a number of brands we're rolling out right now and excited to see those grow into this year.

Speaker 2:

Cool, awesome. So that might be an interesting place for us to start then, because a lot of people you know a lot of our listeners and audience you know coming from first stage to second stage in their business and trying to operationalize it sounds like you've got a lot of experience with that. So on that journey from you know single founder doing everything themselves towards operationalize, operationalizing their business, like what's the kind of path that you see people go on, that is the most successful.

Speaker 1:

Well, I mean, you know, one of the things that moves people through that path is their, you know, ability to accept risk. At the end of the day, sometimes they're not willing to accept certain risks or try certain things out of fear or whatever, or just simply maybe it's access to the knowledge or capital that limits them from their ability to do it. I've just never been somebody who was terribly afraid to fail and learn, and I've failed a lot in life to figure out where the boundaries were. And I was a single practitioner up until 2012 when I met a gentleman named Reed Larson and who just kind of fit with the other half of my brain, similar to the way my wife. She'd think a lot alike and they're kind of very opposite of me in many ways, but because of that they bring certain thought processes and stability and certain slowdown and I have to push them to speed up and they push me to slow down, and so it's kind of a give or take and it's good to have that second half of my brain, if you will.

Speaker 1:

And when I met him, we were able to kind of split up tasks a little bit between each other in terms of marketing and business and development and operational and financial and the other logistical components of the business. And while he handled the logistics and stuff and more of a COO CFO, I handled more of the COO side, a little bit on the operations and marketing, and more on the CEO side and just kind of developing the business, developing the brands out and developing the channels of opportunity for that. So with that I was able to help delineate tasks and from there we were able to separate out those you know, separate those who would be more involved in the marketing and presentation and format of the brand, and he was involved in more of the technical, logistics, operational components of it. And since then we've built up, you know, teams and within those areas of focus to handle the specifics of daily, weekly, monthly tasks, which has kind of freed us up.

Speaker 2:

Love it Cool. So when you say accepting risks, say I came to you, I'm a seller doing a couple of million a year and I want to operationalize my business. Where would we start?

Speaker 1:

in the specific tasks that are required and to look at it as a force multiplier of things that they're good at but not strong or necessarily very focused on daily. They kind of end up giving only 30% of their brain here and 30% of their brain there and 30% of their brain there and 10% is left over for their family or whatever. So if they can focus out the particular areas and understand what they're good at and what they're not good at, then they should really hire those as fast as possible. They should move into places where, okay, I don't manage my calendar anymore, nicole does I don't manage my podcast outreach or podcast management, jen does I don't handle any of the logistics of our traffic and marketing or anything we do around Volt voltage on the consulting side. Lennon handles all that. So at this point there are different areas of focus for each person that has replicated again to allow that force to multiply.

Speaker 1:

I think a lot of business owners make an amateur mistake, thinking they're a CEO and they're not really that strategic just yet, and so they try to hire people to replicate things they don't know how to do, and that's actually an amateur move until they actually know how to do it well enough to define it into three components.

Speaker 1:

It's called an OKR, objective and key results. A lot of people talk about KPIs, but the simplest way to do this is just to come down to the three components that support a key objective. And if you can't simplify it down to those three things, then you don't know how to do it well enough yet. So go learn it well enough to simplify it down to three activities that have one executable and then hand that one off. Have a person create the standard operating procedure around that, based on their knowledge and expertise, and then do what a CEO does, which is get anything out of their way time, energy, attention or money to allow them to do that job, and then get out of their way, right. If you can't do that, you've hired the wrong person, so you need to fire fast. Hire quickly and fire fast, and I think people hang on to the idea that they can make more money by just simply hiring someone else and that person's just going to magically come in and fix all the problems when they haven't learned to solve it themselves first.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so OKR's Google's? Is that Google's framework OKR?

Speaker 1:

Google. It was developed by a couple of consultants. I don't know who it was if you're joking with the office space, it was probably a couple of consultants standing in a conference room somewhere, but I forget who it was that objectified it. But it got deployed into Google and became an industry understood standard of KPI management.

Speaker 2:

Cool. So your strategy when you're growing this is you get to know it to the level that you're competent enough to know the outcomes that you're actually going for. Find somebody so you can judge if they can do those outcomes, get them into the seat and then get them to create the SAP. See if you agree with it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, what I started doing in 2019 was actually training people who I believed could deploy the right time, energy, attention and money to the business in a one-on-one format, and then, as I went through a number of those people, the best cream of the crop rose to the top, and those in our community that rose to the top and became great practitioners of the business and followed and were able to replicate themselves. We just asked for a hand raise in the group. Who would like to partner with us or who would like to operate or become a CEO operator of some of the companies we are, and so we just leveled up the highest value individuals who already understood the KPIs were great operators, and so we just needed another target to go attack, and so we partnered with them, and in that way, they now run the operations and only require short term. You know meetings to talk about what's going on, and then they do it because they already know how to do it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and then, so you said previously, you know you've seen eight figure businesses with a founder, with a bunch of VAs who've kind of just leveraged themselves out yeah, two to three VAs.

Speaker 2:

I see, like I don't know about you, but I feel like during the boom you know, two, three years ago, everyone was selling for 5X, 6x of the business which had no quality operating team, just basically a revenue stream sold for profit. Do you think that's going to be the way things go going forward? So do you think people have to build up like a real operating team for their business to be able to sell?

Speaker 1:

it. I don't think it's been that way for years. I think at the end what you have to look at is where can you replicate a first sales channel like Amazon FBA into a second and tertiary channel, right, I think that narrative should have been spoke more about in the last two to three years. I've personally been talking about it because I think we're into brand narrative again. We're into building a know, like and trust relationship with that audience. It doesn't mean you necessarily have to do Facebook marketing just yet. It means you really need to focus on a single channel at a couple million a year could potentially be four or six million if you develop the right processes for scale within that particular brand. And one of those areas we know is to go in and replicate the product type more and test out additional variations and samples within that market share. Because if you're doing 2 million a year on a node in Amazon, you're likely in the top 50%, but you're nowhere near the top 10% in terms of volume. So what you're actually missing still is the dialed in metrics to get you to 4 or 6 million a year. You've just missed the mark. You're not converting better. Your data is historically not better than the top 10% of sellers in your node. So what you need to do is go in and optimize your listing and your PPC first to start taking up more of that market share. And one of the things most people miss is the right target metric to make that actually impact the business.

Speaker 1:

In the second metric that's most impactful behind that one, the first one is ensuring that your advertising cost of sales, or total advertising cost of sales, is 15% or lower.

Speaker 1:

If my advertising cost is 15% or lower target sales, then my organic is going to pendulum swing up to 50, 60, 70, 80% and my PPC should stay around 20 to 30% of mine.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so organic is going to obviously be more profitable. I want my PPC. If I'm pushing sales so much on my PPC that my organic is only 30 to 40% of my sales, I'm not dialed in, my metrics are not better than the top 10% of sellers in my node and until I can get that listing dialed in organically, my PPC isn't going to be more effective. I'm going to be too focused on a cost and well, I have to keep it 30%. Well, I'm not going to keep it 30%. I'll spend 60 to 90% to acquire the customer and you're not, so you're going to lose it to me and I'm not the only one that's going to do that Then I'm not going to be able to maximize additional page ones or propagation across the system. And the second component of that is, if I can get that dialed in where I'm now, the better data set that is maximizing and my total advertising cost of sales is coming down and my organic is going up.

Speaker 1:

I have to level up my inventory. One of the biggest differences between sellers that are doing two to four million a year between going to four to eight million a year is they do not inventory enough on the system. They do not have enough checked in inventory. Amazon will forcibly limit your ability to sell through that inventory so that doesn't remove your listing from the system, which is a bad customer experience. So once I level up my inventory I can even double. I can see my sales double monthly, month by month by month double. So within check-in to 30 days later we can watch it double from 50 to 150 to 300,000 a month. Whenever our inventory checked in goes higher than the metrics of the top three sellers just ahead of us whose our data might be beating, but our inventory levels have not scaled past their inventory check-in level. Cool.

Speaker 2:

So when you say appetite for risk, is that one of the things you're talking about? Because I guess these founders, when you talk to them, are like oh really, you want me to order that much? That's all my profit plus potentially debt 100%.

Speaker 1:

Number one you want me to spend that much on advertising because they don't actually understand they've got to acquire their customer. They're not really focused on an AOV and they're certainly not focused on Amazon CLTV right, which is now $1,400 a year per prime member right. So if you're looking at it from 1,400, I either need to sell one product that's 1400, two that are 700, or so on and so forth in order to match up with Amazon's preferred metrics for a prime member and sellers that are servicing that prime member and those who service them the most and take the majority of that 1400 will win. It's Amazon metrics, not mine, Right? I'm just playing in their background. I'm playing in their yard.

Speaker 2:

Cool. So if someone's currently sitting at 70% PPC sales, 30% organic sales, what kind of strategies do you like to implement to take them more towards organic?

Speaker 1:

A very difficult, patient, meticulous optimization process. Okay, every three to five days you're checking something that you're changing and tweaking and adjusting. Every three to five days, then you're waiting to see every seven to 21,. Did it continue to propagate, great? And then you're going to do it again and you're going to meticulously go through every section of the listing, starting with images, and then you're going to go to your title and then you're going to go to their first bullet and you're going to go down to your A plus content and then you're gonna meticulously go through each of those and split test until your conversion rates go up and, up and up.

Speaker 2:

And then, because conversions going up your rank naturally goes up with your more, with more inventory, because I guess click use the number one, correct?

Speaker 1:

Because then your spending goes down, your increased in spending and customer conversion value goes up, and then the pendulum is going to start swinging back the other way. People are forcibly restricting their ability to grow in this system because they're setting unrealistic metrics that aren't necessarily tied to their brand and they're not willing to find out where are the actual metrics right? They're gonna say, well, I can't spend more than 40% PPC, and you know that's ridiculous. And I would say do you know you can make more sales at 50, 60, or 70% a cost? Well, no, I haven't tried it. Well, go find out. Go find out if you can make more sales.

Speaker 1:

If you can, then there's another problem to solve. And then what happens is they also broaden theirself out so much that they have like maybe eight SKUs that are selling, but they have like four of those that are making 80% of their profits and they're hanging on to the other four. With that they can't capitalize the inventory of the first four that are making 80% of the sales and they're dragging down their seller health account by keeping the low-performing SKUs inside of their seller health account, even though it's all green folks. There are other metrics that Amazon's tracking. That's going to reduce the hyper-relevancy of that seller account. You'd be better off letting those sell through or pulling them out of your seller account and then watching your whole seller account relevancy go up, including organic ranking.

Speaker 2:

That was great. That was great. So we're talking about categories a little bit there. So I know you like to talk about people starting selling or knowing where to go when they start. Are there certain categories which are better for this, because those metrics are easier to hit, For example? I imagine some of these are very difficult to hit.

Speaker 1:

It's probably easier to answer it in reverse which ones are more difficult to take over with this strategy? And that would be apparel, that would be supplements, and anything on the skin and in the mouth that would be electronics. That would be apparel that would be supplements, and anything on the skin and in the mouth that would be electronics. In this case, you need a huge war chest to come to market with. No matter what you do, right? No matter what you do, you need a huge war chest. There are plenty of other places to play on Amazon. They're a lot more fun.

Speaker 1:

All the other categories are really open for opportunity and at the end of the day, it's the same algorithmic engine that's working. And because we're working at a node level, right, and even down to a leaf node level, then we're competing with, say, five to seven brands max on the entire system. That's our entire focus, because they're owning, out of, say, 63 sellers in that node, more than 80% of the sales. So that's our entire target. Our goal is to get in and optimize above those seven sellers until we are taking over their market share, either through acquisitions or inventorying up levels. And that's where the biggest problem with most people is. They're setting it two to three million a year. They come to me and they're like hey, I can't hit four or six million. I tell them exactly what to do and they go. And that's what I meant by the risk factor. They're not willing to level up the risk to make that work. If they do, the business will grow. So who's actually stagnating the business?

Speaker 2:

Is it the marketplace? Is it Amazon?

Speaker 1:

Usually not, that's true, you know they say most business problems are psychological problems. Yeah, it sounds cliche and people don't like to hear it. It sounds like some meme on, you know, ig that's supposed to be inspirational or something. It's not. It's practical. It's business fundamentals. It is what others will do when you're not going to do and that's why you're going to continue to stay where you are or go backwards. The worst ones are when they come in and it's like well, I was at 4 million last year or two years ago, and then I was at 3 million last year and I'll be lucky if I break two and a half million this year. What am I doing wrong? I can't understand. And if you didn't grow more than 10% to 13% last year along with Amazon, you're probably in the same category. You're holding on your limiting beliefs and scarcity is pulling the business back. Sad but true man. I've repeatedly seen this over and over and over again.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we've all been there at some point. So if you're launching these days, you're launching a new brand or you're launching a new product, how do you budget? Um, cause, we've talked about cashflow and talked about how much inventory to get, like, how do you budget?

Speaker 1:

for that we don't budget less than 200,000 year one, and 200,000 in year one is going to be growth uh for year two. So it is all about buying share, validating market share, taking over and inventorying at the right level of test. Uh, and then this is what we do Now. If I'm going to consult with somebody directly at a smaller level, I'll tell them 50 to 100K in year one and then build through the process until the business tells you it needs $250,000 or whatever it needs. At that point, whatever the business demands, you need to be ready to level up that risk.

Speaker 1:

If you can't do that, there's others in the marketplace that will do it and it doesn't matter if you're on Amazon or DTC or anywhere else.

Speaker 1:

You're gonna run into the same problem at the end of the day. Right, this is a business problem to solve, regardless of which channel. Amazon just happens to have algorithmic rules that allow you to overtake market share in a free marketplace and auction and algorithmic ranking thing. That's very different than if you start upping budgets on YouTube and meta and stuff. Right, because the algorithm is responding positively to both organic and your paid traffic. I have a lot more manipulation over the algorithm to see the organic benefits and that to come out. So with that you know it really gets down to if I'm going to go to market. I'm going to go to market fast, I'm going to validate the product very hard, I'm going to have done a lot of due diligence in that marketplace and then we'll go to profit in year two out of growth within the first, hopefully 16 to 24 months, at which point we're shooting for scale in years three through five.

Speaker 2:

Cool. So yeah, long play and like what's a good indicator to you of the business is going to be profitable in the long run.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's going to be profitable because the numbers will have told me it all is from the very beginning, or I won't watch the product. So the product begets profit. The brand is profitable when there are multiple SKUs that maintain profitability. Of course the business itself maintains profitability as long as products, recent services, cost of goods, landed cost and setter, all within a certain framework of growth. So for us we can't launch a product that has less than $12 in net profit per unit. We prefer they have fifty to seventy five dollars in profit per unit. With those minimums we simply won't launch a product that doesn't have that minimum.

Speaker 2:

Cool, love it. And just to touch back on something you said earlier about community so you said you had a community back in 2019. Can you tell me a little bit about your community and how that works?

Speaker 1:

So I did a little bit of the core stuff, which I kind of regret to some degree, but then again I wouldn't change anything to get where I'm at. But I did that until around 2016 and then stopped. For the three years we stayed focused on the business objectives we were after in 2019. We set out to become an aggregator. You and I talked a little bit about this in the green room, so I went off on raised capital. I formed Voltage, the holding side, in order to build up the portfolio and take on the capitalization, and by 2021, I had had the capital of two home offices committed at 50 million apiece to start buying up companies with a goal of 50 that we were going after November 2021, we turned it down and walked away from it. We saw the writing on the wall. We saw where Thrasio and the market was going. We saw that they were overbuying brands at extraordinary prices. They were pulling up BlackRock in the aggregator market and just offering way too much for things that weren't that value, and so we just stopped and didn't want our name and business involved in it and didn't want to get into it.

Speaker 1:

We are practitioners, we're operators. We are understanding of the specific focus and intent of individuals who know what they're doing. It's very difficult to just hire as a random person into this, and if they're going to do it, and do it extremely well, they're going to do it themselves, which made it very difficult for anybody to hire. And they had 150 average Dobreks open in most of those locations and so, as they were overbuying and trying to fill with bad people to fit into SOPs who had no experience whatsoever in this market, it just was bad all around, so we stopped. So in that process I had a lot of people that were coming and I was turning them down like we don't do consulting, we don't do this stuff. And then, just when we backed out of the money, they were all like now what? And we said, well, let's train a few of you, because I'd like to switch the model into pure operations, so let's start training people one-on-one to become operators. And so that's what we did.

Speaker 1:

We started training people at a very high level with a high-level buy-in, so I could only get the most serious people who could deploy the cash necessary to run at the speed we wanted them to go. And so we started small and I had about 275 people since then. So some months I look for about five individuals and I don't always find them. I'm looking for the right individuals to work with the right businesses. Sometimes they run out, sometimes they're in Amazon already Mostly they're not and wanting to get involved and be trained, which is great because I like a blank slate if they're willing to be looked at and grown. But we have a lot of existing Amazon people we train as well.

Speaker 1:

The difficulty sometimes is people are entrenched. They've thought a lot of things what's different about you? They want me to justify why we're different and what do we know? That's not the same, etc. And I just I let my case study speak for itself. Right, and they can go check that out. Of course, at the end of the day, my operators are very strong. I know what we're doing, where we're going and when we're going to get there. And since we're very big now into the reacquisition space this year and under LOIs to acquire three new companies in our portfolio, we've gone back to market. Now the market is going down because now it's time to buy. When there's blood in the streets right, and everybody who's paying attention to the Amazon market should know there's blood in the streets. This is the time to make moves. So we're making some moves on acquisition now.

Speaker 2:

Oh, very cool, Nice. And so how do these people, now that you train, how do they find you?

Speaker 1:

Mostly referrals and podcasting. That's basically how we do it A very limited retargeting campaigns. I'm not out there again trying to build course or programs. I'm really looking for operators who want to understand how to get growth and scale out of this business, how to open omni channels and then really value the company for a successful exit. Since we are acquiring, we do look at what's called a first right of refusal for my clients as part of our goal to get them into a saleable state so that we can look at acquiring them. So anybody who works with us is a very conservative effort to put them into a saleable state. So we speak to them as a buyer and tell them what to fix, how to grow it and how to make it more profitable so that it becomes a great multiple of exit we all win. So that's one of the reasons why I even do it. I have a full acquisition team working over here on finding companies in the marketplace, but we've had to kiss I don't know 250 frogs just to find three that were worth even looking at an LOI process. So it's very tough deal. We went through all last year looking for these businesses and so we're just now finding the ones we think are worth acquiring. I found it actually easier to train up the right operators, build the loyalty and their growth and brand or help them change their business, like David LeBlanc he's on my podcast, you can go check it out on the High Voltage Business Builder podcast who was a turnaround. Doing about 30,000 a month on Amazon Couldn't make it profitable and we helped him turn the business around. 18 months later he's at half a million a month on Amazon. He's doing about 100,000 a month on Shopify.

Speaker 1:

So most people they think it's tactical but it's not. You can teach it to a 19-year-old high school dropout. I've taught it to my 16-year-old daughter. They're missing the right strategy, the right strategy for implementation. They're looking for growth hacks. They're looking for tweaks.

Speaker 1:

They've been told to put all this off Amazon traffic onto the system and it's going to magically change everything, but they don't actually realize they are not optimized. They change everything but they don't actually realize they are not optimized. They're not relevant. Their scores in Amazon are not high enough for them to even take over rank until they'll do promotions and it goes up and down and it goes up and down or their ACoS goes up and they can't figure out why their ranking's not going up. They're literally fighting against the algorithm. Literally, they're trying to coax the river over to their shoreline, instead of them actually getting into the water and figuring out where the middle of the river is. They got it all backwards. They focus way too much on the product, which is cool when it's necessary for the review, but not enough on the selling of the product, and sales fixes everything.

Speaker 2:

Sounds like it might roll into the next part of our podcast, because now we always ask for a controversial take. I'm not sure if that might be it, but do you have a debatable or controversial opinion related to the e-commerce industry? That?

Speaker 1:

you want to share, that might be it. I know that sounded pretty controversial. I just dropped it. No, I think that this year, if you are not considering yourself a pro seller in the world of e-commerce, if you're not attacking Amazon with true fundamentals of business and metrics, the amount of capital being deployed into acquisitions and deployed capital into the business because, guys, while the money may not feel next to you right now, it might not feel accessible, it may not feel achievable in your business, there is billions and billions of dollars being deployed into the market right now. It's just not necessarily near you.

Speaker 1:

So, with that bit of controversy, I would say, if you were thinking about being a side hustle or hobbyist with this business model, this is the pivotable year. You shouldn't be doing that. If you think it should be in retail and arbitrage and online, that was long ago, guys. That was a long time ago. You need to treat it like a real business. You need to deploy real capital and be very serious about approaching the business or don't approach it at all. You are not going to win in the market of fees and changes algorithmic and just business-wise that are shifting so dramatic and so fast and so much capital is coming in that it's making it more difficult for just everyday people to get involved, without a right strategy to do it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'd identify with that. I mean, if anyone comes to me and says I'd like to achieve what you achieved selling on Amazon, or make a bunch of money selling on Amazon, I'd say, well, it's no longer the golden easy money opportunity. It was 10 years ago. I would go into something else if you want easy money.

Speaker 1:

It is not, not even three years ago. But it is certainly an opportunity, make no mistake, or I wouldn't be playing at it. It's just the way the opportunity has transitioned is more sophisticated now, and you have to be more sophisticated than the way you approach it. If you don't have the knowledge, then you invest in the knowledge and the knowing, and if you don't, you invest in something you know. That's what I continually tell people, that's my hot take.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. So if people want to learn more, potentially work with you, become one of your operators or just sell their business and go to you and live on a desert island, what's the best place to reach out?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, go to VoltageDMcom, voltagedigitalmarketingcom, or check me out on the web. We've got our podcast. We've got ways to connect with me and the information. Just know if you're coming in, be a serious operator. I take the time to do your due diligence. Take the time to understand the difference. I'm not going to get on a sales call with anybody and convince them to work with me. That's not how this works. I qualify people to be invited into what we do, and I only want to work with the people that are most serious. I don't need them otherwise, and so I would like to work with only those who are serious about selling a business, and if you're running one or want to grow one to sale, that's exactly what I'm looking to help people do, because ultimately, that's my big, hairy, audacious goal is to buy these companies.

Speaker 2:

Love it. So, neil, thank you so much for being here and thanks to all of our audience, thank you for sharing so much value. So if you are watching this podcast right now, please go like it, subscribe. Any rating basically helps us up the rankings, so, whether that's on Spotify, whether that's an Apple podcast or whether that's on YouTube, just helps us go up. So thank you so much for being here, neil and everyone watching. See you next week.

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John Cavendish

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