That’s Delivered Podcast
Welcome to “That’s Delivered” – your ultimate destination for all things trucking and beyond! Here, we take you behind the wheel and dive deep into the world of trucking, delivering stories, insights, and experiences designed to inspire, educate, and entertain.
Our podcast isn’t just about transportation; it’s about reliability, accomplishment, and fulfillment. “That’s Delivered” reflects the sense of completion that comes with meeting promises and exceeding expectations—whether on the road or in life.
Whether you’re a seasoned trucker, a logistics enthusiast, or just curious about the backbone of our economy, this is the place for you. We’ll explore life on the road, uncover how technology is reshaping the industry, and break down the latest regulations impacting drivers and businesses alike.
So buckle up, hit the road with us, and join a community that understands the journey is just as important as the destination. From personal stories to industry insights, “That’s Delivered” brings the best of trucking straight to your ears, promising every mile together will be worth the ride!
That’s Delivered Podcast
From Freight to Fortune: How Truckers Can Build Passive Income with Amazon FBA
What if your truck cab could double as a mobile business HQ—earning income even while you sleep? In this eye-opening episode, Trucking Ray sits down with Neil Twa, founder of Voltage Digital Marketing and expert in Amazon FBA, to reveal how truckers can tap into one of the most powerful e-commerce systems in the world. Neil shares how his own journey—through bankruptcy, brand-building, and scaling to help over 45,000 entrepreneurs—uniquely positions truck drivers to thrive in online retail. From mindset to marketing, he breaks down the exact steps to building an "almost automated income" stream using Amazon’s fulfillment network, all while still staying behind the wheel. If you've ever dreamed of stacking passive income on top of your trucking career, this episode shows you how to make that vision real.
Key Takeaways:
✅ Turn your cab into a command center — Run a profitable Amazon FBA business from your truck using Wi-Fi and logistics knowledge.
✅ "Almost automated income" — Amazon fulfills 7,000 units per minute, creating passive revenue while you drive, sleep, or rest.
✅ Truckers have the edge — With firsthand logistics experience and time between loads, drivers are positioned to scale online businesses.
✅ Neil’s “Five F’s” of success — Faith, family/friends, finances, and freedom are the pillars of building something meaningful.
✅ Brand over product — Focus on building a brand that can grow and last, not just quick-hit product listings.
✅ Product selection made simple — Start with items priced over $50 and aim for at least $12 net profit per unit.
✅ Tools for modern trucker-preneurs — With technology like Starlink, running an online business from anywhere is easier than ever.
✅ Now is the moment — Economic uncertainty is opening the door for what Neil calls a "generational wealth moment"—if you're ready to act.
✅I’ve got something special to share with you all. My friend Neil is giving away FREE copies of his book, and you can grab yours right now by heading to voltagedm.com/freebook and entering the code TRUCKINGRAY at checkout. The system will handle the rest — easy as that.
This episode is your roadmap for delivering more than just freight—start building a business that rides with you, mile after mile.
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🔗https://www.treeringdigital.com/delivered
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Welcome back to that's Delivered, where stories on the road meet innovation, mindset and real opportunity. If you've been with us for a while, you know that I love talking about ways to grow, whether it's behind the wheel or just behind a business, and I guess today helps folks do just that. Turn a side hustle into systems and systems into income that delivers even when you're off the clock. Meet Neil Twa, the founder of Voltage Digital Marketing, author of one of the world's leading experts in Amazon fulfillment by Amazon FBA. Over the past decade, neil has helped over 45,000 people start and grow to scale a successful e-commerce brand, and his new book, almost Automated Income with FBA, lays out how to build a successful lifestyle-driven business using the systems in place and strategies he teaches every day.
Speaker 1:Here is where we get interesting for all drivers out there. If you're a trucker and you're already moving freight, but you want to also own your own product, how do you do that? What if you could do that by delivering the loads and building the brand at the same time? That's where we're going to dive into this today and learn how we could do that. Turn your knowledge, logistics, downtime on the road and entrepreneur mindset into a business that earns while you roll. So let's get into it. Neil, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Doing great today, brother. Thanks for bringing me on. Yeah, it's great here. It's always great to have another podcaster on the show and talk about the great things you're doing over there. Man at Voltage. Man, you're doing great things.
Speaker 2:I'm having some fun, you know I've been. Uh, like I said earlier, I'm too stressed to be blessed or two, oh wait, no that's too blessed to be stressed.
Speaker 1:That's it right there Be stressed. I like that.
Speaker 2:Well, you know it's uh. Yeah, there's a lot of good things that wrap into that. My mind wraps around a whole, many, a lot of good things. I get to hang out with my family, I get to have fun, I get to be blessed to meet wonderful people like you, and, yeah, that's just a good thing and I enjoy it.
Speaker 1:Nice, yeah, I like it too. It gets the people going, it gets me going. It gets me thinking about ways that, hey, if they want to slow you down, yeah, add some stress to people, that'll really slow them down.
Speaker 2:So first of all, I want to see how you got started from the beginning. How did you get this going to in terms of technology and business and watching the internet come online, I was always fascinated by what it could do, and while a lot of my friends went into the technology side, the systems and support of it, I was always about how do I make money with it, make business, how do we create solutions that power things? And so it was so new you had to kind of jump in early, so I just jumped in and figured out how to do it, taught myself programming, and that just gave me sort of a passion for the technology and the business and eventually led me into doing more like leading and digital marketing kind of stuff. Affiliate marketing particularly. I was on doing mobile ads and I ended up with a dating app that turned out to do really well in the mobile space. But I just realized, as that started to change, I didn't control the offer, I didn't control the actual outcome. Affiliate marketing is a great way to start a little side hustle, promoting other people's products and getting a commission, but when you don't control the end narrative, you don't control the rest of the product, you don't control the ultimate outcome.
Speaker 2:And as I got into 2011 and 12, that was one of the big things on my mind, and someone I knew had said, hey, I'm flipping some products. I saw it on Facebook market, facebook's page. And he's like, hey, I'm flipping some products on Amazon. And I'm like, hey, I hit him up, what are you doing here? How are you doing that? And it was like eBay. I don't want anything to do with it. I don't want to house him on my house. I can't be. No, no, no, no. They have this thing called fulfilled by Amazon and you send your products into them and then they ship it to the customer. And, as of 2009, they had bought a logistics freight management company that does plane, trains and automobiles and they were shipping products like crazy. And so Amazon bought them and rebranded them and turned them into what we know them today as those Amazon trucks that show up at your house all the time.
Speaker 2:And so I just thought the you know thinking forwards. You know solution oriented people in business who want to overcome problems, want to advance themselves in their life or their business or their family or their wealth or whatever. They always think forward. They think solutions. They're not big on thinking in the past. You know what do I do wrong, what happened in the past, and they don't sort of use that as a badge of honor. They're people who are tenacious and go-getters and they think about what they can do to solve problems and create opportunities. And that just happened to be something that, through time and troubles and major failures and opportunities, I kind of learned to become that person and kind of conditioned my mind into it. And so when I saw Amazon, I'm like this is future opportunity. I see where the road is, I'm packing here, I see where this thing could go and I just jumped into it full force and started launching products.
Speaker 1:Nice, that's really good. I like the energy when you, when you aim upwards, right that's as versus aiming downwards you you see good things, you see better outcomes, so great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you aim to fail forward, because nothing is a perfect process. You're going to fail at steps, you're going to fail at processes. As I tell my four daughters, as I tell them you know you're trying and doing things. You know you have to realize that your success is going to come through the failures. So just keep going, just keep trying. Fail forward, fail forward, fail up, don't fail out, just keep trying. And I'm trying to instill that in them every day.
Speaker 2:Wow, Four daughters man, yeah, we get to homeschool to do, um, we've, we've built a life around around what we call lifestyle by design. My wife stays home. She used to be an RN and BSN and after the first child we kind of retired her because she realized there's no way I'm handing this baby out the system, I'm not leaving this child. And I was like, well, that's fine, I'm, you know this cute, fuzzy, furry, little lovely thing. I can't let go of it either. So we'll figure it out. So we just made a choice when we were first married to do that.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Yeah, that's a good decision. And then can you break down what it means to almost automate income. Why is that idea such a game changer?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, at the end of the day, they created all these systems. There's technology, there's infrastructure. The platform we're riding on was an innovation of an entrepreneur who built a business around this platform, and so, you know, amazon had an entrepreneurial feel to it, still does in many cases, even though they've got some corporatocracy. And I'm not a total fan boy because I ride on their channel as what we call an incubator putting products on the market and determining can we capture the demand that exists for those products and then moving them into multiple sales channels and evolving a way we call a holistic e-commerce company right, not just a single sales channel. And so, as I was learning how to do that, one of the biggest components we discovered was the process by which we determine a product has upside potential, can sell and sell well and has a decently long life cycle to it, right. And part of that process of not flipping the products was realizing we needed to create brands If we married the brands and not our product. And every product we sent to market was an opportunity to find out if the market wanted it from us. Not smart enough to tell the market what it wants, but smart enough to understand what the market needs and wants and try to prepare something for the market and they'll buy it from us instead of somebody else. And with that kind of thought process, while I started it with the concept of a little side hustle, I really realized the opportunity was to think about it like a real business, treat it like a real business, act and function in the time, energy, attention and money what we call a team effort of making that go out and letting all of those aspects of that team effort work in favor of the business. So what that created was the opportunity to leverage systems literally that were being created, developed and billions of dollars are flowing into these systems across all of these platforms, online right, and leverage that to get my product to the customer, last mile to the customer, and not have to have my own warehouses and freight and shipping and trucks and people and all the other stuff that goes along with that, so that I could free my time up to be a part of my family, to do life, to create the opportunities that I wanted with my home and also to have the financial component of that be a reward for those efforts. And learning how to put that purpose and value first meant that, while profits are obviously a very important part of the business and we should talk about that what it ultimately, in the path of 18 years, literally getting to the point where I am now realizing that there's what I call the five F's and one of them isn't the F you think it is the first is faith.
Speaker 2:Faith in yourself that you'll keep going. Faith that you'll find the right people. Faith in God. Faith in things that make sense to you. I have a faith in Jesus Christ and that faith is what allows me to go out and realize that I don't trust the world for my confidence. I don't trust the world for my gain. I trust a faith in the heavenly father.
Speaker 2:From that I understand where my family and friends fit in all of that. Sometimes friends become more like family. Sometimes your family doesn't understand. Sometimes they're the most critical. Sometimes they're the hardest to overcome. Sometimes generational curses and problems with them are imparted on you, which makes it difficult for you to see the opportunity and to see your path forward. Sometimes friends don't do that. They don't have that historical thing. They'll lift you up, they'll pick you up, they may let you stay on your couch to help you get it done. Sometimes family doesn't do that, sometimes they do right, that leads to the opportunity for finances. Right, as you put that purpose and value forward.
Speaker 2:If you're not just thinking about yourself, the finances or the profit of finance will come. And all of these have profit in them. Right, all of them are profitable. Everybody hears word profit and goes straight to finances. But if you don't have a profit in relationship or faith or other things, you're not going to profit in the world, right? And the final component of that is freedom. It's the baseline that stacks up the whole pyramid, it's the foundation of all of these things. Without freedom, there's no choice. Without the understanding of the freedoms you have, you will not get to gain the rest of those things and you will fight for them. When you can see that they'll have done correctly, they'll be given to you freely wow, that's power pack man.
Speaker 1:That that's a book in itself. Right there, I mean a book in itself. Yeah, I can recommend one if you want to go read it. Yeah, uh, I was thinking that you know, faith, people have a hard time with that because it's something they can't really put your hands on. Yeah, it's hard to see it. Uh, you really got to train your mind to be able to absorb it. You do and accept it you do. I mean that's huge.
Speaker 2:Well, it is a whole lot about being an entrepreneur and a business person, as we put faith in our willingness to solve solutions or to find people that will help us solve those solutions, or to create opportunities for other people to be involved in that process. Create opportunities for other people to be involved in that process and to do it without the idea that it's the world as the only place where that opportunity can be valued. It can be valued by the people who are employed in, or the people who get the money from the logistics, or the people who get money from other components of the business, who have lives and things that revolve around it. It's serving more in a servant leadership than just yourself. And that's really hard to understand why, because you know, when I was an employee uh up to uh, 2007, when I worked for IBM, um, my faith was that they were going to keep honoring their agreement.
Speaker 2:What happens if they don't right Right? What happens if your number gets called right? Then, all of a sudden, your faith in the concept that you did the right work and showed the time and put the effort in is not rewarded by their willingness to continue to honor that agreement. That's a business. It's a role we play and when you have to step out of that role it's like the proverbial stepping out on the water. It's getting out of the boat and realizing that if you don't put your trust and faith in the world, there's something greater to put your trust and faith in. So then you have more freedom to go out and to fight the good fight in the world, because you're no longer using the world as your crutch or your excuse, and literally that means your opportunity begins at the end of your excuses.
Speaker 1:That's neat. I like that. It's almost like Peter walking on water. He fell in the water too.
Speaker 2:Right, so we all fall. The point is that we keep swimming. Yeah, he did, and he tried, he tried and we tried and I just don't. So many people are in the boat, right, yelling at the water to come to them. Yeah, right, they don't want to get out of the boat, they're just yelling for the water to come to them, and if the water doesn't come to them, it's all a scam, everything's scam. Nothing works, it's all fake.
Speaker 1:Everyone wants to take advantage of been victimized, but I have never been the victim of something I couldn't, uh, mentally control myself.
Speaker 2:And then, what can I control as I tell my children? What can you control? 100 of your emotions and 100 of your actions you can control accountability.
Speaker 1:I like that good, good father there. So, man, you, you've taught, you're doing great as a father. Like I said, you're admitting to challenges of life. The lessons for about 45,000 students. You've been a coach for them. What's the most common mistakes or mindset that blocks people from keeping them from succeeding?
Speaker 2:Well, to be fair, I've had thousands of students have about 45,000 followers on TikTok. No-transcript is to build people up. I used to make employees of people and then realize that's not really empowering and it's not a true relationship, any more than it was for me when I was an employee. So what I decided to do instead was change and invert the process and help people become owners of their own success. Empower them through tools, technology and people and processes to enable them, through my systems, to be successful as they walk the profit process of building their own physical product business. And then, when they become successful, there's opportunities to partner with them, to be an operator, controls with them, to help them with our business as we help them with theirs, and to give more upside and greater potential over a longer period of time with less people.
Speaker 2:So I have no courses or programs or and there's nothing here for anybody listening to this to buy from me. Today there is the realization that if an owner and an operator become successful and I've helped them do that then we have more of a level playing field in our relationship and then that opens the doors to all these wonderful opportunities we can do together over a longer period of time. So, as we mentor people and help them with our software and technology, I own nine brands. We run nine different product brand lines that we control within our business. So we are operators first and foremost, and with that, then we know how to build and grow these brands seven, eight figures and as I give people the opportunity to mentor and coach with us, they become CEO operators of their own brands. And there's a lot more that we can do together. I love it.
Speaker 1:That's nice, um, and success doesn't come alone Teamwork. Yeah, I'm a big advocate of that. When we work together cohesively, we can accomplish so much more.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's a win-win in that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I have what's called the first right to refusal for everybody who works with me that when their business is four and five years out and borrowing a term from real estate, we have a gentleman's agreement that if their company is ready for an exit and meets the buy box criteria then my company will look to acquire them.
Speaker 2:And I'm part of a company called Patriot Growth Capital and that is a veteran backed, veteran funded, veteran organized, veteran operated business that helped 16,000 veterans last year. You can check them out at Patriot Growth Capital dot com. If you're a veteran, you should. They're empowering families and veterans forward and as part of our initiative to buy companies and bring them under the control of our brand, then we are employing veterans into that, certain veterans who have an opportunity and proficiency to become a CEO operator after 10,000 hours of proficiency in about four to five years they have an opportunity to buy the company away from us, giving them a generational lift up, and we have a line item in our business to give them the capital down payment necessary to acquire that after five years.
Speaker 1:Beautiful, beautiful, great work there. So you're not just selling stuff online, you're actually building a brand. I like that.
Speaker 2:Building businesses. What's that? Yep Building businesses that are brand driven. That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Perfect. You know there's one strategy that listing tweaks or that makes a business impact early on. What would you say is the best strategy to go about that when they?
Speaker 2:kind of get. Yeah Well, you know, honestly, the most successful companies that we run or have ran and based on the ones that we watched weren't successful usually come down to the aptitude of the operator. If they see things kind of future oriented and solution driven like, this is a problem I'm going to solve. This is a normal aspect of business. Problem solving is looking for opportunities to create value, to create a difference in the product or the brand. If they intrinsically kind of look more positively on the aspects of output, then they are typically more successful in building their business. If there's someone who typically laments about current situations or past situations and you hear them lament and talk about those more, they're typically more in the past. Therefore they're not future success oriented. It's in the language and lingo of their person. If they hang on to troubles and they use them as a battering ram for the problems they have, that's what we call commiserating. If, again, they're looking at solutions and focus. If they have no experience in e-com and have no product, we can teach them how to become successful in that process because by nature they are inclined to be problem solvers, to not see every problem as some brick on an imaginary wall that they keep building up in their mind. But they see every opportunity to go around that, to solve it, to be tenacious and to figure their way through. They just need the path and the opportunity and the right people to help them forward and then they turn into amazing operators, right. They turn into people who really understand the opportunity that's been given. So really it gets down to mindset.
Speaker 2:Whenever I interview somebody who's furious about talking to me in terms of a mentoring role, I run them through what's called a DISC profile. You ever heard of that? A D-I-S Well, real quick, you can Google the details, but it's a simple. It's a simple process by which they answer a series of questions. It takes about 20 minutes. The output is not like an INFG, feel good. You know what's my favorite color kind of stuff. I like long ones for the beach. No, this is like what's your aptitude toward business? How do you see problem solving, how do you answer the questions? And it categorizes it into four things D dominant, I influencer, s supporting and C compassionate.
Speaker 2:And in that way you see the output of their person aligning with a particular role in business and the output of that is to help them understand sort of a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threat analysis, things that might threaten their opportunity to be successful, the things that are opportunities that they can do well or even do better. Where are their weaknesses? So it can be identified. If part of their weakness is their consistency, then operating a business may not be the best way for them if they don't have an operator who can support them. Okay, it means that you need to understand where your strengths are and then you need to fill in the gap on your weaknesses. If you're great at selling and leading the ideas and pushing the business forward, then you're usually going to be very terrible at operating. The consistency, the follow-through, is going to be difficult for you If you're somebody who follows through, shows up, does the work, puts in the effort, but find it difficult to be the sales guy, the business guy, the one who goes out and drums up the business. You're going to suffer in business and I see that in a lot of smaller and mid-sized businesses. When they get going is because they try to wear all those hats. They don't really understand what they're good at and what they should be doing, and so they kind of fill all the roles with half the effort.
Speaker 2:So my strength in business, my strength in being the CEO and my position, the business development, the relationship, the seeing the path forward so we don't run into icebergs. You know staying at the top and kind of making sure that I see the waves, I see the boats, I see everything rolling. I'm trying to avoid the icebergs, I'm trying to move the whole ship forward. It's all our brands, all our people, all this engine. My partner is the guy down in the wheelhouse. His name is Reed and in 12 years of knowing the guy, he is the operations guy, he is the tactical guy. He pays attention to the details, he has a CFO mindset. He understands where the water is, he knows where we're going. It's his job to ensure the engines keep running. Everything is operating as expected, we're meeting our numbers, we're staying profitable, we're pushing the engine of the business forward. That's two people in one brain, right, and I see a lot of people try to do all of that from the very beginning and I know how that looks. Ask me how I know, dude.
Speaker 2:First, three to four years in my business after leaving the corporate world, yeah, I tried to do everything myself and I was failing at it miserably. If I sold the business, then I had trouble delivering the business. But then when I focused on delivering the business, there was nobody to sell the business Right. And so we ended up with this mantra over time, realizing that sales fixes everything. And when you start to sell the business and learn how to become the lead practitioner, if you're the CEO or the top end of that business, it is your job to sell that business. That is it. You need to figure out who can deliver it. You understand what I'm saying? You solve that problem and the rest of the other problems go away Right.
Speaker 2:Then, if you do it really well, you have a new set of problems, which is when the money comes and things go really well. You got a new set of problems like figuring out who to trust with your money, how to invest your money, how to be smart and keep more of it, how to empower other people to keep going. You got new problems to solve, but you should still be solving them on the top end of driving the business, and I see way too many business owners too focused on just the operations, which is important because you should provide a quality product or service, but they don't focus enough on selling the business. They don't know who to sell to and how to make sure they communicate with them really well and they lose focus on those offers and opportunities to drive that business forward and the whole thing suffers because they can't ride. As we say in the country, you can't ride two horses with one ass.
Speaker 1:So pick one, right yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I know a nice saying that was told to me. Yeah, yeah, I know a nice saying that was told to me. Nothing happens until there's a sale or sign on the line for a contract.
Speaker 2:When the money hits the bank. That's all that matters, and don't celebrate until it does right.
Speaker 2:Until then the deal is not done. You got to get them. Truck drivers Got to get that deal done. Can't pick that load, I've got to have that money. It's the way it works.
Speaker 2:But here's the thing about business. I think a lot of it. Just the last part of that comment with your question. When you don't know what you don't know, you're going to fall victim to the market. And I fell victim to the market when I wasn't willing to listen to what people wanted from me or make sure I understood what I was going to give to them, because I was literally in two minds I was in the mind of trying to sell and the mind of trying to deliver. When I started to focus on the mind, it says okay, I want to drive this business forward. They say that the you know mentor appears when the student is ready. Well, this guy appeared. His name is Mark. He worked in the town near us. He gave me a shot at a contracting job. I realized, as a small business owner, that he was doing those things right, and so I was like yes, I'll take this thing. I want to be next to you so I can glean information and learn at what're doing right. And he taught me the mantra of sales fixes everything. And he's a consummate sales professional and he had aligned a development and delivery team behind him for the products that he was serving and I saw he organized that. I saw how he actually made that business work and he was very good at it. And so he taught me the art of the sell you know from informed consent and from the opportunity to position the right person and the right offer at the right time and to not force sales or end up being scammy used car salesmen, with people being an offer of integrity and delivering with integrity. And that was the greatest lesson I ever learned. And in the five years after I learned that I had 10 management professionals now in my company who were doing the business. It was my job to sell and they were delivering. And as soon as I unlocked that comprehension, I was moving through.
Speaker 2:You ever hear of the Kiyosaki quadrants? You ever heard of that? Maybe somebody listening to this call has heard it. Rob Kiyosaki and the rich dad, poor dad guy. Yeah, okay, he also had the quadrants. You know the four quadrants right Of employed, self-employed, entrepreneur, a business owner, an investor.
Speaker 2:If we're progressing into business and we're considering business, not a side hustle or a hobby business. Even if we started on the side, even if we do something to move ourselves forward while we're maybe on a truck roll or doing anything else, the goal is not to think about it like a side hustle. The goal is not to limit your belief or scarcity that it's a few thousand extra dollars a month I'm shooting for just so I can make ends meet. It is the real understanding and if I put the right time, energy, attention and money into this, it will no longer be a side hustle. It could be a life-changing opportunity. And if I truly believe that and get out of the boat, that should be my predominant focus. It should be to turn something I'm doing on the side into that full-time thing, with the expectation that I'm going to leave behind and keep moving forward. If I'm only treating it like a side hustle or hobby business, I'm staying right where I am, I'm saying I don't want to move forward and therefore I'm limiting my upside potential, my opportunity, and I'm actually operating in a scarcity mindset.
Speaker 2:People will think, well, a few thousand extra months is abundance to me. Well, dude, I remember when I had $569 in my bank account and three young children and a pregnant wife. You don't need to talk to me about scarcity, okay, you don't need to talk to me about less. My back was against the wall. I get it Right. It's like pay the car bill or pay for food. Well, after three months of making those choices, guess what happened? They repoed the car. They came at 10 o'clock at night and pulled the car out with all the car seats in it and 10 o'clock at night, right out of my garage.
Speaker 2:So I'm speaking from a place of someone who knows what it's been like to have your back against the wall and taking that poor lady who was my wife down with our fourth child pregnant, to a bankruptcy to finalize that nonsense because we had gone too far, extended too much and had a lot of people who were like this is an idiot, you need you're an idiot, you need to get a job. Look, I told you he was all an idiot. Now he's proving he's an idiot. But my wife who stuck with me and went down there right, and you know all your family and friends. You want to find out. I think somebody famously said this once you can only find out who your family and friends really are. Go bankrupt, and then you'll find quick who my real people are, and that in itself is probably more depressing and heartbreaking than the bankruptcy itself. There's worse things that can happen, and that's finding out what people really think about you, right Not?
Speaker 1:what they think.
Speaker 2:I think but what they really think about you.
Speaker 1:I love that. You find the humor in it too.
Speaker 2:Oh, now I do. It's pretty funny now because I'm on the way on the other side of it, but it wasn't funny then, wasn't funny for my wife god bless her. We're going down there and doing the bankruptcy in this dank you know basement in the courthouse. It's all gray and there's 20 other poor souls down there. These schmucks are crying like the rest of us, all sad. And then you know what in the hell? And you think you're going into this thing it's more like a courthouse room and you're gonna go in front of the judge and he's going to say you know, you did these things wrong, boy, and you need to get this right. And why didn't you get this? You're so stupid. But in actuality we went into a conference room where there were 20 tables, 20 folding tables, all divided, with 20 judges all lined up, and you got a number and you walked in and they signed you a number to a table with a guy who looked at your folder, who was supposed to judge your entire life in 20 minutes and that was bankruptcy court.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very weird, right, like Joe versus the volcano Weird If you've ever seen that. When he's living in that basement it's all dank. It kind of felt just like that, right and and so you go through there and it's just horrible. My wife was the one person who stuck with me, right? She's the one person who was like we can do this, we'll figure this out. Like I trust you, you you'll get it done. You do what you need to do. Right now, I'm going to focus on the kids. You focus on what you need to get this done. And with that encouragement amongst the storm, with all the other people, that was what I needed to just put my back against the wall and go to work yeah, I got one of those too.
Speaker 1:I mean, maybe that's why they came out that mother day. They stick with you, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah they're willing to ride through that dude yeah.
Speaker 1:A lot of good.
Speaker 2:We're 18 years into our marriage now. Yeah, it's been a fun ride, absolutely. But the thing is, you know, automations and stuff, as you were mentioned, really come through the systems and with all the systems about now, there is so much automation that you can literally run this from a truck with Starlink. You can run it on the road, you can run it on the beach, you can run it on 50 acres 60 acres now in the country while you're homeschooling your kids and having podcasts with people using Starlink. Really, there is opportunity everywhere. If you can set aside the excuses, if you can put aside the fear, if you can put aside the what ifs. Okay, you play the what if this, what if that? What if there's no guarantee? What if the money gets? What if I? What?
Speaker 2:and what you're actually saying is I have no confidence in betting on myself, exactly right I have no confidence, or your team that's with you well, first up, I'm that I'm going to do the work, or that I know I'm going to do the work, or that I know I'm going to be willing to dedicate the time to put in the work.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to believe in you if you can't believe in yourself.
Speaker 2:Well, if I can't push a button and magically have money, you know, come into my bank account, then it's, then it's all fake. There's no truth to this right. I used to have to go here Funny story I used to go out and when I was in college one of the things I learned about how I didn't want to in the winter in Sioux City, iowa, up into South Dakota, there, and I'll tell you what that is cold like you have never felt before. We had to quit. One more two mornings we had to quit. We were doing installation of speaker wire in new homes and we were building sound systems in these homes and we'd have to go out and when it was all framed up, then you would go in and do all this stuff. Before they laid the sheet rock and all the other stuff.
Speaker 2:And I was working for this little place called Flans Electronics and really cool owners and they let me do a three-month stint in between semesters. That was my break. Instead of going home, because I didn't want to go home, I went and worked for three months in Sioux City, iowa, installing in between semesters. I have never had hard work in my entire life at that level. I dug ditches before I'd done other things, but until you've actually stood on ladders and negative 40 degree temperatures and tried to install a speaker, why are you haven't tried that hard? And I remember these difficult times and I'm like man if I have to put thought down, if I have to get up and put effort in with my brain and the keyboard, then I got it pretty easy. And when I'm not out in the middle of the winter and negative 40 degree temperature is working with my hands in the cold, and I think everybody forgets that there is so much opportunity out there that they use these kinds of excuses to say they can't. They play that. What if game again, right? What if? What if? What if? Well, you're going to what if yourself to death and never actually know cause. You didn't try. But things are much harder than finding a product to sell on the internet. But things are much harder than finding a product to sell on the internet, right? So literally, it's get down to boat and they get down to mental roadblocks. At the end of the day, because all the systems, automations, ai technologies, people will deliver the products for you. Oh, my goodness, how rough is that? Right? The systems and technology of the internet are all online Now we all get it.
Speaker 2:I think what most people struggle with is like what we all get it. I think what most people struggle with is like what's the process? Because it can feel a little overwhelming. It can be a lot of analysis, paralysis, that kicks in when the opportunity is there. I found mine in physical products. I was doing digital and it just made sense to connect the physical side to it. So I see it. When I put money in it, I had a product and a lot of people get caught up in the digital because, well, there's not really a tacit response, a tactile aspect to it. There is nothing. Now I can pick up a product and I've got it in my hands. That makes a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's why I think truckers are built for this. Our listeners out there spend hours on the road. They understand routes, supply chain and timing, and so they kind of know a lot of that background criteria by which we sell is to make sure it's profitable.
Speaker 2:So we don't sell the product that has a retail price point lower than $50. And we need to make sure it has more than $12 in net profit per unit. Why? Because of Amazon fees, platform fees, marketing fees, the cost of the product itself. You have to stack those on the cost of goods so you know what your net profit's going to be. And then you have to do it in such a way where you can market and outmaneuver your competition.
Speaker 2:Then if other things happen, like you know, trade wars and nonsense with company countries let's just call it that. I don't want you to get a content strike if you put this on YouTube because right now they don't like the T word, the two T words, the air of their forever's T word and the other room T word. They don't like those. But the fact is it's happening anyways. And here's the thing, right, that is just a cost of business. If your products and business can't handle it and you're operating so razor thin because you're providing low value, razor thin product margins to your consumers, there's your opportunity right. Level up that brand, choose product that's 50 to 500 in retail price point, make sure that is a great product, but make sure that it's in demand. That's the number one thing we work on make sure it's in demand and then make sure you create a great product. And then just don't marry the product. Create a brand instead.
Speaker 2:Brands live on for so long, even if you're not attached to it. Dude like, do you smoke? No, okay, do you if I said the word lucky strikes? Do you know that brand? Unfortunately, yes, yeah, okay, marlboro, you're still in smoke, right? No, okay, do you understand the power of branding even though you're not a consumer of it? Look at that, right. Can you tell me all the different variations of the products of those businesses? No, right, but you know the brand? Yeah, brands live forever and products don't. So we have to remember not to marry our product, because there are plenty of girlfriends to steal, right, and with that, all products have a life cycle. So some products might last two years or four years or five years, but brands live forever. They really do. As long as the business is around, brands will live forever.
Speaker 2:So we have to focus on the brand component. There you go, because there are more than enough products. People say, well, it's saturated, there's too much competition. No one wants these products. There are millions of product innovation ideas. They get to go into these brands millions of them. That's not really the right thing to say.
Speaker 2:It's just an issue you don't know about, right To not realize how many there are. Everybody is an innovator. There's only 1% of people who actually invent right. 99% of product opportunities are innovations. They all are. So there's plenty of innovations out there and all kinds of products and opportunities. You just have to know how to get to that traffic. And that's why I take new people who are aspiring entrepreneurs into Amazon.
Speaker 2:First, why 7,000 units a minute are moving 24 seven. So when you're when you're rolling a truck, when you're sleeping in the cab, when you're at home, when you're on the road, when you're doing anything, those products are selling for you 24 seven. Right, you're making money when you sleep. That's the ultimate objective, right? And that system is running all the time and peak holiday times, like you know, prime and holidays are running at 9,000 units a minute. So it's an economic engine established already with the supply chain that moves the product for you to the customers. It makes money 24 seven.
Speaker 2:And there is where the biggest problem can be solved for people when it comes to what the heck do I sell. You go to the place where 49% of America buys its products online. 49% of America buys his products on Amazon. The other 51% are direct and retail or online channels, websites and other platforms right, or they go to retail. But 49% it's a huge market share. So I take brand new people to where the market is right. It is 10 times greater than the other marketplaces combined, like Etsy and Wayfair and others, and it is now a model that distributes on revenue par or just greater than Walmart Right, and behind that there's Target and a couple of other retail places that Amazon eats their lunch. All three of them combined don't make up Amazon's revenues.
Speaker 2:So you go to the place where people want to buy products sales fixes, everything Right and then we find a product that's in demand and we provide that product to them. We have it manufactured, so it's ours. We sell it into a business, not our personal account, and we trade it like a real business. And we say, hey, do you want this product? And if they go, nah, five sales a day. Okay, well, what about this product? Oh, 25 sales a day. Oh, look, I'm on the target. Now what am I going to do? I'm going to hedgehog into that product and say, well, what about these 10 other variations of this product? Do you want one of those? And I was like, oh yeah, I want one of those too. Why? Because people are brand driven when they start to get connected, like if I tell you all you know, apple, iphone people are fanboys and all Android people suck Like. Somebody listening to this right now is going to get pissed, right yeah? Because all of a sudden you're taking offense, you're hitting their brand right Like oh man, android people.
Speaker 2:Iphone doesn't have the camera. Android had the camera 10 years ago and iPhone's just catching up and you all have a bunch of families. I don't care, it's a phone, it makes phone calls, right. But the end is that Apple has done a much better job base because they made it really easy for people to use and really easy for them to understand. So they'll buy the iWatch, the iPhone, the iMac, the iPad, and then they give one to their significant other or their spouse and then their kids have one pretty soon. They're an Apple fan, you know 20 devices deep. So we do right. So we do the same thing with our brand. We do the same thing with our brand. Once we launch onto that product, it says hey, I want that product from you. Well, I'm going to give you 10 other versions of that product until you buy more product from me, right? Um, and it's kind of oversimplifying the process, but that's the game in e-commerce is to just provide.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people get caught up that there's some other complexities of course to that, which is well, how do I sell on that platform? But that's a tactical thing and I could teach that to a 19 year old high school dropout, which I did, and he makes multi seven figures a month. Or I can teach it to my 16 year old daughter, who also gets it. So the only there's not a limiting belief by age that these things can be done. There's just your limiting belief that you can do it. And if you don't try, the fear of failure will be represented when you give up too easily and say the whole thing is a failure because you didn't fight the process until you got successful. You've probably seen that meme out there with the guy who's swinging the hammer and he's like one swing away from the diamond mine. Have you seen that one? That meme out there? It's like it's right down to the last moment and he gives up at the last swing.
Speaker 2:I went for my first marketing campaign in the digital marketing world. I was 299 campaigns deep and about 30,000 in the hole before the first one took off profitably. Campaign number 300 took off. Imagine if I'd given up at 200. Yeah, that's rough. People want to give up too easily. There's such a low hanging fruit of opportunity right now, with the systems and technologies we've had since I watched the Internet come online, it is easier than ever for people to make these businesses work. They just have to be willing to try to believe. Like you said, they just got to believe, they got to try and they have to go. And if they failed some process, if it doesn't work exactly, if they made a mistake, then you just fix it. You fix it and you keep moving forward. And those are people who become successful in business and literally anybody who's willing to get that mindset, adopt that mindset and retrain themselves or they're inherently a part of that mindset already and they're just looking for a path. They will be successful in business and just going to take some time.
Speaker 1:Wow. So looking ahead, e-commerce world is fast. What's coming in the future for Amazon sellers? What can they prepare for? I mean, right now, everything's on sale, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, it feels like it doesn, it, um? But here's the thing. I mean, there's still a huge amount of inventory moving. There's a lot of fear and scarcity because people are paying too much attention to the news. But let me remind some people, cause we'll go back in the way back machine for just a second back in 2020. Everybody remember that, cause it wasn't that long ago, but it feels like a lifetime, right?
Speaker 2:We were paying $3,900 for a container in December 2019. By the end of the first quarter December 2020, that had risen to $25,000 per container. Okay, $3,900 here moved to $25,000 per container. Do the math on that, right, what they're talking about. Tariffs just came down from 145% down. It's going to bottom out somewhere around 30%, which is nothing compared to what we were paying in 2020 and 21 and 22 before that all came back down.
Speaker 2:But the problem is, everyone was focused on the news and pandemic and all this other stuff over here and they weren't focused on the stuff that we were facing at the traction level down in the weeds. And now that no one has any of that and all they're doing is focused on the media and being all polarized and politicized and watching too much freaking MSN, they're all like oh, the products, my products, john, I can't get my slave labor to make my products anymore. What am I going to do? Like they're freaking out? Like, come on, people pull together. The end result is that it was never more expensive and there are like 53 ships on their way into Los Angeles right now. So there is no real degradation of product. You haven't seen it disappear from the markets. It probably won't. So it's all going to right size. It's just a big hullabaloo which is next is going to give us opportunity to onshore more product creation, maximize our ability to do economic trade and bartering.
Speaker 2:The table right now is set so that China becomes somebody we can move all of our products into, which we've never been able to do. This has always been a one way street the European Union, others are all capitulating as well very quickly. So we're going to start sending products into that. So not only will we have the United States, we're about to have 10 countries open up to us excuse me where we can make real money moving products into those countries. Never seen that before.
Speaker 2:There is a generational wealth moment occurring right now that you can see tactically from my vantage point that most people can't see. So we're bullish. We're moving millions of dollars of product into the market by the fourth quarter. We are buying companies that are product heavy and ready to go to market. We got our first letter of intent on one right now and we are being bullish and those who are paying attention coming along with the ride my internal client base they're doing the same thing because that rubber band is pulling back and it's going to snap, and when it does, we're going to see a generational change opportunity like no one has seen in this country before, and I'm here for it, man.
Speaker 1:Let's go. That's amazing. I love the opportunity and the way you talk about it, the way you spread that joy. I mean that's amazing, it's contagious. I think a lot of people need to pick up on that, if they can, versus the negative because, like I said, it's going to slow them down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you think there's no product opportunities, you're not paying attention. If you think it's too costly for people to buy the average purchase price on Amazon right now is $69. Okay. If you think that it has slowed down economically, it has not. What's usually happening is money shifts. It's like a river. It flows as a current, it moves and changes directions and sometimes it feels closer to you in life and sometimes it feels farther away, and sometimes in business. You see it, you have to move and shake, you have to change things up and the money just flows like a river, and right now the river is changing course. It is starting to go a different direction.
Speaker 2:For those who are willing to take the risk to get out there and start a business, maybe even in the physical product business world, the slingshot ramifications of this are going to be huge. One of our clients started a business in the middle of that whole thing in 2020, took him about nine months longer to get to market than would normally occur, but he stuck it out because he saw the opportunity. Five years later, it's a $15 million a year business. He rode that slingshot up the backside. When everybody else was too afraid to go into the market. He went into the market. His brand and many of our brands have all doubled and tripled and quadrupled and gone through the roof because we were willing to be bullish, and I see the exact same happening right now.
Speaker 2:So if you're on the fence about a product, an opportunity, a business, if you're thinking physical products and maybe starting your own e-commerce company, this is your window. Folks, even Bank of America, forrester Research and the Department of Commerce have predicted there's about 21 trillion in assets that are coming online in the next 10 years. The swap is happening. It's happening in real time. The economic systems, the trade, the cryptocurrencies and utility currencies to power that industry are already coming online. There is huge wealth coming for those who are positioning themselves, taking some risks now to see this come in.
Speaker 2:And I would just warn everybody to be cautious, of course, and to not risk money that's required to keep the car payments going or whatever's necessary so you can keep things rolling. Trust me when I say I know that, but to also not be so afraid that you don't take advantage of it. You're either going to be in it as a consumer, and that may be your, your choice, but you could also potentially be a producer and have even greater outcome. If you're willing to do something for three to five years that no one else is willing to do, then you can live like nobody else can after that I love it, man.
Speaker 1:a lot of truckers out there that depended on a company company drivers and yeah, for something that they could do, um, you know that could grow and create a better future for themselves, instead of relying on a company that, like you said, you don't know when your time is up. You mentioned that about IBM. You feel secure, you're getting that paycheck and you're thinking everything's going to be okay, doing great.
Speaker 2:All of a sudden, bam number's called Great yeah One of them is, you know, being a victim and another one's being empowered.
Speaker 2:You know, if you have a chance to start that thing, get your mind going, get that thing going, get it rolling. If something happens to you, you're going to feel empowered to just double down on what you're doing to see the results faster, versus waiting for that moment to occur. And then it hits you like a ton of bricks and then you go into panic mode and you start making bad decisions. It just happens. We've all been there. So I would just caution you by listening today that if you're thinking about making the effort, you better get going. It doesn't happen.
Speaker 1:You don't try. Like you said, listen to the right people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, get some help. It doesn't hurt to get help. I'll tell you what. There's a lot going on and it makes it hard to make decisions these days If you don't have some experience or camaraderie around you. You know to, to build that network in the area you're focused on and in whatever you're doing. If you want to run a side hustle that you think might be a business, if you're going to sell a software or do affiliate marketing or run physical products, whatever you're going to do, find the company, get in with whatever they're doing, listen and learn, because it's who you know that gets you in and it's what you know that keeps you there. And if you're willing to put in the work you get. The right networking can change everything.
Speaker 1:Wow, hey, you're saying all the right things, you know. I thank you so much. Uh, everything you said is very insightful and also practical for many people out there listening, and you know they're going to hear this and realize that they've already have they got the mindset that they just need to do them, learn the method.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, the boat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the fricking boat man. Yeah, the freaking boat man. It tested out. Have some faith. Yeah, those who want to learn more and grab your book, can you tell us a little about most almost automated income with fba?
Speaker 2:that's right now on amazon yeah, well, I don't have an audiobook, so if you have a chance to grab one, don't drive and read, please, uh. But there's a copy of it on amazon. If you feel comfortable grabbing it there, you can go to my. There's a link, I believe, in a called a voltage dm. If you feel comfortable grabbing it there, you can go to my. There's a link, I believe, in a, called a voltage dmcom forward slash free book and there's a code, I think, that will be given out, if I'm not mistaken, for 10, 10 free copies of the book. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, so we're giving away 10 free copies. There'll be a code below you guys. Go check it out If you want to be readers or voltage dmcom to learn more about, about our strategies, who we're looking for as operators and owners to take up that mantle and create a great business, and then maybe you get it to the position it becomes a saleable asset and we have a conversation about acquiring it.
Speaker 2:That's the upside. Potential for anybody in business is to build an asset with the meaning and end, and build it from the beginning with the end in mind, because it is worth more on the end than at any time during the business building phase. Build those assets.
Speaker 1:Right there you go, All right. So, truckers out there, you know you guys are on the move, moving freight. Now it's time to own your brand too. So if you're ready to build something that works while you roll, this is your sign. So thanks again, Neil, and until next time, keep rolling, keep growing and keep delivering more than just freight. So
