Shawn’s tale of rags to richesHow Shawn went from selling hamburgers at McDonalds to having sold 100 Million + in revenue generatedHow to choose a marketHow to brand build productsWhat products to not go forHow to source directly in china?How Shawn deploys strategies for launching new productsHow to use AMS or Amazon Marketing Services and why it’s importantProducts that Shawn goes for, high and low endMistakes and lessons learned from ShawnTrips Shawn take to ChinaAnd all the wisdom I was able to extract out of him within 1 Hour
Jeff Lieber is a 30 year old entrepreneur from San Diego. His company, TurnKey Product Management helps companies sell over $10,000,000/year on Amazon. In this episode we discuss Jeff's story, strategies, and insights in how Turnkey Product Management grows and develops companies. TurnKey Product Management helps companies quickly grow their sales on Amazon by offering the following: Full-Service Amazon Channel Management, TurnKey Systems For Amazon Online Training Program, and TurnKey’s Inner Circle 1-on-1 Coaching Program. To check out TurnKey’s FREE Amazon strategies or contact Jeff Lieber, visit: www.TurnKeyProductManagement.com
In our part 2 series, we reconnect with Aaron O' Sullivan Aaron is a serial entrepreneur who has been building brands on Amazon since 2013, scoring several million in product sales. He has spent the last 3 years building teams based in the Philippines, helping scale up one team to 45 staff by building all of the Amazon systems and processes to run multiple brands. Aaron has clients doing anywhere from $10k > $500k per month on Amazon / e-Commerce, many of whom have become the bottleneck in their business, slowing the growth of their company and preventing them from scaling to the next level. In this episode you’ll learn: Systems to build in your Amazon business System building strategies Tools to use for your systems building Best tools for systems Aaron’s mission in life and business http://systemscultureimpact.com/uploads/docs/The-Ultimate-Cheat-Sheet-For-Creating-A-Well-Oiled-Product-Launch-Machine.pdf
In this episode we had Meny Hoffman come on the show. Meny Hoffman is CEO of Ptex Group, an award-winning business solutions agency headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. A lifelong entrepreneur, he is passionate about collaborating with growing businesses to create winning strategies that allow them to lead and flourish. Meny is also the founder of the LTB (Let’s Talk Business) platform, which offers business education to entrepreneurs and business people looking to learn, grow, and lead. He is a proud husband and father of seven. In this episode we went into depth: Inside Meny's operation Meny's story on how he came to lead PTEX group How meny inspires and leads his team Team strategy, leadership strategy Creating systems and winning strategies Amazon brand strategy Marketing strategies In-depth on growing and scaling your company And much more. Show Notes: To learn more about Ptex Group product branding service, CLICK HERE. To download "7 Simple Ways to Build Your Brand on Amazon" CLICK HERE. Connect with Meny Hoffman on LinkedIn HERE
Since my last podcast, a lot has happened. It’s been literally almost 8 months since I last podcasted. I’ve gotten emails, like yo, david where have you been? Why aren’t you podcasting. So I haven’t been ignoring podcasting, or hating it. I’ve just been so deep into the grind building the empire, owning multiple channels, and scaling this business into something much bigger than myself. In the last 10 months, I’ve yet to tell you what’s been going on. To name a few, I went to China for 3 weeks. That trip was mind blowing, and for those that haven’t taken that jump into outerspace, I say do it. I now have a business visa, and will be attempting to go once a year. The Chineese are the nicest people ever, the atmosphere is so energizing it literally takes all the air out of you. And last of all, I built some of the greatest relationships by being there, from meeting multiple manufacturers, visiting factories, touching products, redesigning with cad engineers, and even meeting Americans, Canadians overseas. The trip was simply mindblowing . And best of all I ate everything, and it didn’t kill me. More on that trip and perhaps a dedicated episode to it. Besides China, if you’ve been following this podcast, your well acquainted with my journey into physical products, ecommerce. At the moment we are in the process of launching 22 products within the next 1 month or so, of which these products all have bene in development for about 1-2 years. Some are inventions, some are private labels, many have patents connected to it. This journey hasn’t just been one of launching products, sticking a price to it. It’s been a journey of ups and downs, massive failures in both financially and emotionally. I’ve had my girlfriend of 3 years break up with me, and that shot me into a low for awhile. But with failures and lows, comes highs and successes. The path simply can’t be downward. Especially if your persistent for wins. And in fact the last 10 months have been anything but that. Since the last episode, I’ve hired two employees which manage a lot of the operations. I’ve also hired two full time virtual assistants, with an army of contractors from freelancer, upwork, fiverr. These contractors are all experts in their field, and I leverage them for their talent, time. The biggest secret here, is we all have the same amount of time as Warren Buffet and Elon Musk. 24 hours. They have no advantage as us in the number of hours they are allocated each day. But how we task out, create standards of procedures, and leverage other peoples time, is one of the true secrets to being on the way to building an empire. In the last 8 months, my perspective has changed from building multi-million dollar business, to firmly believing it will be a billion dollar business. I don’t just say this out of pure thin air. I’ve worked it backwards. To build a billion dollar business, you only need to have a business worth of 300 million, because a 300M dollar ebita business will most likely get a 3-4x multiplier….in the event of a sale. And why would one ever sell that. Money is of no importance but a scorecard to keep track of. Our businesses should be built for the customer, and with passion and energy. They should be built with our customers and employees interests first, and our own personal needs second. Anyways to create a 300M business, it requires hard core persistence, this wiliness not to give up, to sell it to others, and a firm belief that it will get there. In the last 8 months I’ve realized the magnitude of the potential of the world we live in. For those who haven’t experimented, I dare you to. Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Shopping Ads, Email Lists, Email list retention, email list sequences combined with how active people are, enticing people with better offers based on how unactive they are when they open your emails. These are all massive opportunities of unlimited revenue, that I’ve recently been experimenting with and hav...
Today I’ve got another invincible king on the, Aaron O’Sullivan. Aaron is a serial entrepreneur who has been building brands on Amazon since 2013, scoring several million in product sales. He has spent the last 3 years building teams based in the Philippines, helping scale up one team to 45 staff by building all of the Amazon systems and processes to run multiple brands. Aaron has clients doing anywhere from $10k > $500k per month on Amazon / e-Commerce, many of whom have become the bottleneck in their business, slowing the growth of their company and preventing them from scaling to the next level. In this episode you'll learn: Systems to build in your Amazon business System building strategies Tools to use for your systems building Best tools for systems Aaron's mission in life and business And lots more, stay tuned for transcript. Note-worthy links: https://www.facebook.com/systemise https://www.facebook.com/groups/amazonpowerseller www.systemscultureimpact.com
Today I’ve got another invincible king on the, Murray Priestley. Murray is a partner at Global Private Partners, a private equity investment firm based in Asia and the author of the book The $1M Pay Day. Murray has a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering & Computer Science from Monash University. He has lived and worked in over 9 countries, and through his journey has been the executive And this is the AmzSecrets.com Show, episode 93! Before we jump in quick announcement. I will be in China on the 14th, and always looking to mastermind when I’m out of my castle, shoot me an email and I’ll try my best to meet up with you. What you'll learn: How to scale your Amazon business and beyond How to pivot when things are going wrong Murray Priestley's journey into entrepreneurship Mistakes along the way How to save $500,000 dollars How to scale your brand and businesses with you in the mix How to build an Amazon FBA business How to know what your good at Making critical decisions in your business Understanding mistakes and selling your businessAnd much more! Stay tuned for show notes. Show links: http://1MPAYDAY.com - Get his book :)
Today I've got Dr. Travis Zigler, who graduated in 2010 from The Ohio State University College of Optometry with Magna Cum Laude honors. He is the co-founder of Eye Love, eyelovethesun.com, whose mission is to end preventable blindness. Dr. Travis and his wife, Dr. Jenna Zigler, use the profits from Eye Love to fund free and low cost clinics in South Carolina and Jamaica. They also started a charity called the Eye Love Cares Foundation, eyelovecares.org, which provides exams, glasses and sunglasses for those in need, free education, and scholarships for students that align with their mission. Eye Love does an average of $180,000 per month on Amazon and Shopify. He has created highly engaged communities of over 2,000 people and growing daily. In this episode you'll learn, How Travis started his business How Travis acquired businesses and leverages them together How he's built a business from passion How to build a brand leveraging SEO and content The people behind Eye Love and the charitable actions of the company The growth and decisions behind the company Strategic decisions and business operating Lots of golden nugets. Did I say lots!? Transcript coming soon Dr. Travis Zigler 1. Business Igniters on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Business-Igniters-165108987349546/ 2. Facebook Profile: https://www.facebook.com/Dr-Travis-Zigler-261315727610737/ 3. Eye Love: https://eyelovethesun.com/ Ashlin Hadden Insurance Agency http://www.voldico.com/find-an-agent/ashlin-hadden/ DAVID ALADDIN: Great having you on the show, Travis. TRAVIS ZIGLER: Hey, David thanks for having me. DAVID ALADDIN: Can you take us to the beginning before you guys were selling on Amazon and Shopify? Where did your journey begin? TRAVIS ZIGLER: Now it began I mean back in college. I mean, we, my wife went to the University of Michigan, I went to the Ohio State University for under grad and we ended up meeting and started dating when she came to optometry school in 2007 and I was a second year she is a first year. We dated throughout Optometry school and started practicing in Columbus, Ohio from 2010 to 2015. And 2015, we worked for my uncle in Columbus, Ohio, and we decided we wanted to go off on our own and do our own things. So we actually pretty much quit our jobs, moved across the country to South Carolina and started two new practices from scratch and then with, whenever you’re staring up a new practice it tends to be a little slower at first while your gaining that initial clientele similar to your Amazon business. You’re not selling two to three hundred units a day—you're selling one to two units a day and you're building up from there and practices the same way. And so I was bored and we found the amazing selling machine was on its fifth version in May 2015 and we bought it and just went through the course and didn’t follow the training for picking out a product. Just did what we know and what we loved which is eyes, and just going to went from there. So May or July 2015 in when we got our first sale and we did the typical rookie mistake of only ordering a hundred units, selling out in seven days and realizing, wow, this is real. So then we brought in an investor and we dump about twenty thousand of our own dollars in and grew from there. DAVID ALADDIN: Okay. So like before the whole Amazon thing, you guys joined the practice for five years. When did you get the, you had this concept of just like living you know the safe area of the job and whose idea was it first, you or your wife’s? TRAVIS ZIGLER: My wife is definitely. She likes to be safe. Very, very safe so it was definitely my idea but probably back in 2012 or 2013, I read a book, called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which I'm sure a lot of you readers have read and I’m sure it has changed a lot of their lives. And so we got in the real state. We bought our first duplex about a year later and we still have the duplex actually.
Today I’ve got Jamie Davison on on the show, Jamie and his co-founders Jason and Brad combine to sell over $60 million per year on Amazon. He is the co-founder of AMZ Insiders, a coaching program focused on helping new sellers create their own successful Amazon business and provide insights and tips to existing sellers. Selling on Amazon How to build an Amazon business How Jamie and his partners business scaled very fast Jamies path to getting where is today How he quit his job and why Amazon strategies and secrets How to scale an Amazon business How to grow an e-commerce business How they are divvying tasks and diversifying Important networking tips How they plan to double their business And much more Free Video Training: www.AMZInsiders.com Blog: www.AMZInsiders.net Free Facebook Group: Amazon Insiders – FBA Sellers https://www.facebook.com/groups/AMZInsiders/ Email: Jamie.Davidson@AMZInsiders.com DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Jamie. JAMIE DAVIDSON: Hey, thanks David. Great to be on and I appreciate you having me on. DAVID ALADDIN: Yeah. So can you take us to the beginning, before selling on Amazon? Where did your journey begin? JAMIE DAVIDSON: Sure, yeah. My journey I guess, everyone has a different path, of course. On my end, I was, way back when actually a military officer, had attended WestPoint and so. In my 20s was kind of had the military background eventually jumped into the corporate word and probably like a lot of people’s careers kind of worked up the corporate ladder the best I could so I had a—I was in banking early on, I’d been recruited over to Home Depot, so I had some retail experience there for a few years running a Home Depot store and then, I kind of fell into the education space with a big test preparation company, Kaplan. DAVID ALADDIN: Oh, yeah. JAMIE DAVIDSON: Yeah, yeah. And so then which great education minds and could use some help on the business side so I kind of found that space and stayed in there for a good while. Had some success there and again, worked my way up through just kind of a Senior Executive there and then was part of some private equity deals. We brought in as a Chief Operating Officer and a CEO of another company where essentially, these private equity companies are buying the company. Basically about 50 million dollar businesses or so and they hope to flip them in about four to five years. So I was kind of the hired gun through that approach, so, yeah. So I was kind of—I felt like I had this big title but at the end of the day I was a hired employee, just a senior employee to help kind of lead businesses in these spaces here. DAVID ALADDIN: I feel like when people amass so much money, they just create so much more money. I mean, 50 million, equity deals, and then they’re trying to flip it to 200? It’s pretty insane. JAMIE DAVIDSON: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They’re trying just to take it across the river and in four or five years, probably at least sell it for double, if not more. DAVID ALADDIN: So, how long was this before you got into Amazon? What year, you think? JAMIE DAVIDSON: Yeah. So I was in 2000, I mean, kind of the education run I think with Kaplan and a couple of these other companies was 2000’s, early 2000’s, up through 2013. DAVID ALADDIN: Okay. JAMIE DAVIDSON: And actually even through the last couple of years. Yeah, so for a while, I came down to—I’m in Atlanta here but I came down to Atlanta in 2011 and that’s where the kind of introduction to Amazon begun so to speak, yeah. DAVID ALADDIN: Nice. You’d say like 2015? JAMIE DAVIDSON: Yeah, I mean, actually I had full-time jobs up until this past year. DAVID ALADDIN: That’s awesome. JAMIE DAVIDSON: But my co-founder Jason, he jumped in 2011 is what I’m sure we’ll talk some more about that but so I kind of was following that path while he was in it full-time,
Today’s I’ve got on the show, who is a CPA and the founder of CPA On Fire, a tax and accounting firm specializing in working with online entrepreneurs. Over the last few years he has been working very closely with Amazon FBA and other eCommerce sellers to help them with the challenging aspects of accounting and taxes specific to eCommerce sellers. What you'll learn: Can you take us to the beginning before you started your accounting firm, where did your journey begin?What’s the story of how you became the official cpa for entrepreneur on fire? How many employees he has How Amazon sellers should setup their business. How to big sellers legally save a lot of money on taxes What’s tax deductible in our e-commerce businesses How Donald Trump Saves on Taxes Distributions to owners vs. payroll Sales tax and set the record straight. Should we paying sales tax to all the states where FBA is at, or just our state tax What software tools do you recommend a seller should use. And WHY And lots more. Show notes coming soon. DAVID ALADDIN: Welcome to the show, Josh. JOSH BAUERLE: Hey. Thanks for having me. DAVID ALADDIN: So, can you take us at the beginning before you started your accounting firm? Where did your journey begin? JOSH BAUERLE: Yeah. So I kind of worked in several different accounting fields, I guess I did work at a Fortune 500 company out of college, doing some cost accounting. I moved into public accounting doing taxes for bigger businesses. I did some financial advising and I finally realized that all these jobs weren’t the problem. I kept thinking if I got this new job that would be the job I’d like. But I finally realized that I just didn’t like being an employee so by 2012 I went out and founded my own firm and I started specializing in working with online entrepreneurs and that’s kind of slowly evolved into really working closely with eCommerce sellers and especially Amazon FBA sellers so we got here. DAVID ALADDIN: How long were you doing the job thing for? JOSH BAUERLE: I did, let’s see. I did two years out of school at the Fortune 500, I did another two years at a public accounting and then a year at financial advising. About five years. DAVID ALADDIN: Five years. JOSH BAUERLE: Yep. DAVID ALADDIN: So 2007-ish? JOSH BAUERLE: Yeah. Roughly. Yep. DAVID ALADDIN: And so when you were like wanted to quit your job was that at that time one of the hardest things to do? JOSH BAUERLE: Yeah. It kind of came up random. It actually when I was doing the financial advising, the guy I was working for, he wanted to acquire other financial advising firms. And I said, hey, I have my CPA license why don’t we just acquire another CPA firm and we can turn those into financial advising clients. He was all on board for that and we found one that we really liked and he then kind of got cold feet and backed out at the last second and I was like, you know what? I'm still going to go through with it, I'm going to take it over. So I was working with this guy and it was kind of, he was an older guy, he’s looking in to get out of his practice. He basically just let me run the whole practice and I get x’ed him out of the total whole revenue that came in. Then he said, and beside if you want to build your own stuff on the side you can keep all of it. So I started doing that for him while just slowly building my side business and it get to the point where he kind of wasn’t being reasonable for what he want to charge me to buy his, but I felt I've built mine enough that I could finally go out of my own, so. DAVID ALADDIN: Yes. JOSH BAUERLE: It’s kind of a hybrid way of going out on your own. DAVID ALADDIN: So it was a totally different like industry going on while we’re all building our eCommerce businesses. JOSH BAUERLE: Right. Yeah. It’s a little different. DAVID ALADDIN: What—if you don’t mind me asking,
Today I’ve got Nedjc Voraic on the show, Nejc is an entrepreneur who started learning selling on Amazon about 1,5 years ago. With help of the knowledge of his mentors, mastermind group and a lot of trial and error, he managed to build a serious business. The beauty of his philosophy is that he does not put much focus on conversion, ranking and listing optimization. He has now scaled to over 140.000 € a month, mostly from selling in Europe. In this episode you'll learn: Mistakes Nedjc made and how he pivoted How much he started with How he has grown his business How he scales his business How to build an amazon business Tools Nedjc uses Mentors Nedjc uses What worked for Nedjc and what didn't His morning routines His business strategy How to source outside of China Tricks and secrets Nejc uses And lots more. Transcript coming soon How to Contact Nedjc: Mail: nejc87@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nejcvolaric 15 min free Skype call where I share our methods 1 on 1 and answer your questions https://calendly.com/nejcvolaric/15min DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Nejc. NEJC VOLARIC: Oh, thank you, David. Thank you. I am really, really honored to be here. I have listened to your podcasts and I have learned a lot and now I have the privilege to be here, to be speaking to you and sharing my knowledge and thank you for having me. DAVID ALADDIN: Welcome. Can you take us at the beginning before your online success, where did your journey begin? NEJC VOLARIC: Ah, before the online success? Okay, I can just share a little bit of my background. I have opened a company in 2002, this was after my college. I have a Bachelors Degree in Economics and a Masters Degree in Psychotherapy. I wanted to be a psychotherapist but then I've decided this is not for me and I opened a company and I became a professional photographer. I was shooting mostly weddings and with that business or a job I should say, I started developing a statistical analysis business who does statistical analysis for students and companies. And this was one and a half year ago or maybe a little bit more, I've decided I want to do something more internationally, because statistical analysis business is only for— DAVID ALADDIN: Right. NEJC VOLARIC: Slovenia and that’s what I've discovered Amazon, it was a promotion for ASM course and I've seen the results of people who’re getting and I've decided I wanted to give it a try so I outsourced my statistical analysis business completely or hire employees that I've set up systems, and you know, I had a little bit of spare capital and after I outsourced it and set up systems for the business, I had a lot of free time and then the learning process began. DAVID ALADDIN: Hm. So you went to school for Economics? Looks like that has helped you out a lot and you did the statistical analysis for 13 years, is that correct? NEJC VOLARIC: Oh, no, no, no… I did this, I mean my staff, my employees are still doing it. DAVID ALADDIN: Hm. NEJC VOLARIC: But I've started this in 2013. DAVID ALADDIN: How many employees do you have doing that business? NEJC VOLARIC: In that business I have three employees. DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool. And so compared to the Amazon business that you currently have is it doing better? Worse? What’s that look like? NEJC VOLARIC: Oh no, it’s not doing as good as Amazon, you know. DAVID ALADDIN: Yeah. NEJC VOLARIC: This business brings me a good salary in Slovenia, you know monthly pay, but it’s not something you couldn’t reach from because it’s a micro niche in Slovenia and it’s only Slovenia. Slovenia is a small country with two million people so the business is not as scalable as Amazon, so that’s why I decided I want to go for Amazon because I have reached a peak where I couldn’t progress anymore so I wanted to do a little bit more things...
Kevin has been an entrepreneur his entire life. It's been 30 years since he last received a paycheck from someone else. He has created, developed and guided hundreds of products from inception to market. In 2015, he started five private label brands on Amazon. Together those brands have grossed more than $3,000,000.00. His goal is to reach $4,000,000.00 per year on Amazon alone by the end of 2017. In this episode, you'll learn: How Kevin pulls 3 Million+ sales a year How Kevin picks his products Types of products Kevin has had success and failed with What most sellers do and what not to do How Kevin uses tools, strategies and knowledge to grow his business How he is expanding outside of Amazon Inner workings of his business, his execution and mindset Why he has 5 brands How he markets his products What he did before selling on Amazon and e-Commerce How he creates molds for products How much he started with And much more! Stay tuned for transcript Notable notes: Link for how to add two products to cart: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/cart/add.html?ASIN.1=XXXXX&Quantity.1=1&ASIN.2=XXXXX&Quantity.2=1 DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Kevin! KEVIN KING: Glad to be here, man! DAVID ALADDIN: Can you take us to the beginning before your first million, before Amazon? Where did it all begin? KEVIN KING: Well, like you said at intro there, I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life. I think the last time I got a paycheck from someone I was like 17years old, and that was about thirty years ago. So, (inaudible) back when e-mail first started, so I’ve been involved in this for a long time running several different sites, e-commerce sites, fulfillment stuff. So, the Amazon stuff. I’ve been actually selling on Amazon for 12years. I was actually using Amazon almost like e-Bay in the beginning where I would just…I would be one of those high jackers. If I had something, some old DVD player, or something laying around the house that I was like just throwing it up on e-Bay, sometimes I would throw it up on Amazon, just jump on somebody’s listing and sold it as used. And then I’ve been also doing some wholesale to Amazon through the Amazon Advantage Program which is their program for DVDs, books and that kind of thing, and so audio tapes and stuff, it’s like a special program. So, I’ve been doing wholesale with them for almost 20years on a line of calendars that I do, it’s seasonal product. So, it’s almost like vendor central, but they issue purchase orders and then we ship them in. But then I started the private label stuff on Amazon in 2015 and like everybody else, I think I saw one of those AMS adds come across my e-mail. I was like "this looks interesting". So, I took a look at it, but…and then I said: “you know, I don’t need to take the course, I already kind of have this background, let me just jump right into it and do it”. And I started listening podcast and researching everything I could, and that’s where it went from there. DAVID ALADDIN: In 1997 you’ve started, kind of -ish? KEVIN KING: Yeah, ’95 I think it’s when I when I’ve sent my first e-mail. And I started my first selling online, first e-commerce sight, I think ’96/’97. It was in fact before there was a PayPal even, you know, people had to like…I think I used plug n pay or something back then. It’s still around today, but there were the first guys to actually take credit cards online. So, yeah, I go back. And I think Amazon was…I haven’t looked. I have daily withdraws on my Amazon account, so I am one of the…so, it’s an old school account, so I think maybe ’99 or 2000 probably is when I did my first Amazon stuff. DAVID ALADDIN: Do you know why they removed daily withdraws? KEVIN KING: I have no idea. Someone told me they took it away in like 2011/2012, and so any accounts after that. But it probably had to do with…I mean, you know, just protect themselves against returns, I mean,
How I will save 40,000, by automating my customer service on Amazon, ebay, Walmart Jet and beyond. What’s up guys, today’s episode, episode 87, is on How I will save $40,000+ by automating the customer Service in my Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Jet, and website support tickets. Today’s episode brings a huge golden nugget so stay in. One of the hardest parts of running an e-commerce business is the customer support side. It’s not just a lot of work providing the best customer service possible, it takes a lot of the founders time, all the meanwhile you have to add more products, scale the marketing and grow to the moon. I believe, if it wasn’t for the AmzSecrets show, I wouldn’t have gone this far to force myself out of the trouble that I was in. I would wake up each day, spend 1-3 hours checking eBay, checking Amazon, checking facebook channel, and then checking my email inbox for my website. WHEW. It was a huge time waster in terms of founder energy. Every few months I would post in our facebook group, AmzSecrets.com/fb, how is everyone doing their customer support? And some people would say outsource, but not really go into detail. The problem with spending even 1 hour per day on customer service is you really don’t know how those hours would be spent differently if you otherwise had them. Before this episode, I had hot-keyed customer responses directly into my keyboard. It was pretty awesome. It saved 10 minutes per response, and gave the perfect response. It was pretty optimized, it was cool. And then recently I spoke to John Jonas, who has outsourced every task to 17 different virtual assistants, in episode 86. This really changed my perspective and evolved my business a major step further. I probably wouldn’t be spending time doing this podcast right now, if I hadn’t built out my customer support. I’d be answering tickets, and closing out those spam ticket responses. I started looking at FreshDesk… I created an account, setup my email forwarding, It was very solid, however I realized it still had one major issue: How do I have customer support answer questions everyday without giving them access to my account’s sensitive data? Now that is a golden question. And it took me over 10 months to figure out. Freshdesk was great, because it offered centralized support tickets. I could thus forward emails all to one spot, and freshdesk would create support tickets out of each one. The problem however was freshdesk was too general. It didn’t pull order information from Amazon or eBay. So I canceled my free trial of freshdesk and when onto querying e-commerce support desks, which led me to xSellco. And no this is not a promotion of xSellco, or affiliated to them in any way. XSellco is pretty awesome, it pulls e-commerce data from both the e-commerce channels and aggregates them all into one spot. It’s like a freshdesk or helpdesk but for e-commerce. Now that I have pulled the order # per email coming in, and the customer address, I can now get a virtual assistant to assist per customer order. Now this led to the next part, and I really owe thanks and gratitude to John Jonas from episode 86, who mentioned to “create videos step by step on how you currently do customer service.” It takes a lot of upfront work, but after that it gets easier. Yes that is really time consuming. And a pain in the butt. But once you get it done, you have opened 2-3 hours per day every day. You have also untied yourself from the desk of the computer to do the brain thinking part of your business. Once I had xSellco, driving support tickets from multiple channels, all in one spot, I knew I could automate the whole entire shindig. This first process took about a week to feel comfortable with support tickets going all into one spot. I had to check to ensure that they were correctly being loaded, the data was accurate from the respective channels, including my websites channels.
Today we're going learn how to outsource our businesses so we can take it to the next level. I’ve got John Jonas on the show, He’s the CEO of OnlineJobs.ph, the largest website for finding Filipino virtual workers, with over 250,000 Filipino resumes and over 100,000 employers from around the world using it. He works about 17 hours per week, choosing to spend his time with his family rather than working. What you'll learn: How to outsource tedious, repetitive tasks How John Jonas build his foundational framework to grow his businesses Strategies and plans he executes on How much it costs to outsource The country he uses to outsource work Why to outsource to the Philippines What John worries about What led him to outsourcing How he has grown his company and only works 17 hours a week And much more! Contact John: http://onlinejobs.ph DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, John! JOHN JONAS: Yeah, thanks for having me! DAVID ALADDIN: So, can you take us to the beginning before your online successes, where did your journey begin? JOHN JONAS: I graduated from college in 2004 and I had a job out of school for ten months. And I am a terrible employee. My only goal at that time was to quit my job, that was all I wanted! Because my wife, we had our little boy, he was about a year old, and my wife would call me while I was at work and just…she would say: oh, you just missed what he did, and this was so cute! And I hated it! I hated being away! And then I…working the job for me it doesn’t work super well. Like when there’s not an incentive to do good work, if I don’t make more money for doing good work, then I just don’t do good work. So… DAVID ALADDIN: What job were you doing, if you don’t mind me asking? JOHN JONAS: So, I graduated from college in computer science. I was doing programming. DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool! JOHN JONAS: It was fine. It was fine, whatever! DAVID ALADDIN: So, that, you know, like… I went into engineering and I don’t do that anymore. And so, you know, those types of degrees take a lot of work and effort. Did you have any regrets going into college for all that and then just quitting? JOHN JONAS: No, I don’t, because it set me up really well. I don’t do any programming now. When I quit my job, I still did programming for myself. It just wasn’t…it wasn’t until I realized…it wasn’t until I learned I can hire someone else to do it for me for very, very reasonable cost, that I realized that programming doesn’t make money. Marketing and sales make money. And if you do programming, you can’t do marketing and sales. It just…programming is just too consuming to allow you to do other stuff. DAVID ALADDIN: It’s interesting that you said it because, you know, programming takes intense amount of time, and it’s not even…it doesn’t even lead up to the sale actually. And it seems like you figured that out right away, and you went straight to the sales. So, what sales did you go into? JOHN JONAS: So, I’ve been running online businesses since I quit my job. And the stuff that I was doing twelve years ago, it doesn’t work today. DAVID ALADDIN: What was that? JOHN JONAS: It was kind of giving out schemes that actually worked. And I didn’t get rich with it, but at least I saw. I started making money with it pretty quickly. It was building websites and getting them into Google, and getting them to the top of Google, and… DAVID ALADDIN: That was a big thing. JOHN JONAS: Yeah, it was. DAVID ALADDIN: Create a lot of neat sites and ranks for those keywords, those long-tale keywords. JOHN JONAS: Totally! Or even like major, major keywords. I was ranking like number 1 or number 3 for like wrinkle cream or car insurance, or work from home, or home based business, or… I mean, there was so much stuff. DAVID ALADDIN: How many websites did you have up at a given point at time, at the peak? JOHN JONAS: A hundred thousand…
Forget excel sheets! Ben, Chris, and Dana are Amazon sellers from San Francisco who got frustrated managing PPC by hand and set out to automate the whole process with Prestozon. The founders met at our last company which was a supply chain finance and einvoicing company targeting large enterprises. As the company grew we decided we wanted to be on a smaller team again and set out to sell on Amazon and use our software and data backgrounds to automate the process where possible. We launched our first product ASAP (and made a bunch of mistakes) so we wrote software to help us find a better product to launch. Once we started doing PPC for our products we were amazed nobody had a good solution for handling it, so we set out to write Prestozon to automate the whole process. We did this while Dana and I were traveling in Asia (China, Sri Lanka, Bali, and Thailand) and Europe and we're 100% bootstrapped. What you'll learn: How Prestozon was founded Why they started Prestozon How to optimize your Amazon PPC How to decrease Amazon ACOS How to increase ad spend and profits How to tweak product advertising settings Techniques to improve your Amazon advertisements Negative keywords and how they affect Amazon ppc And much more. Show notes coming shortly. Get in touch with Dana,Ben and Chris and learn more: http://prestozon.com https://www.facebook.com/prestozon/ DAVID: Great to have you on the show, guys. BEN: Thanks. CHRIS: Thanks. Good to be here. DAVID: Can you guys take us in the beginning before Amazon, where did each of your journeys start? BEN: We actually all met at the same company building Enterprise Finance Software and we wanted to do another kind of smaller thing and we all decided to get into Amazon FBA. DANA: Yeah, we’ve all worked in software for most of our careers. All that you… CHRIS: Yeah. DANA: And we started in Amazon and then we then realized that Amazon software space is… there’s a lot of tools that weren’t available yet, so were like, all right, sound great. Like, we need these tools as sellers and we love building software so it’s kind of natural fit. CHRIS: Actually, we started from a different perspective first, so in FBA. We actually have this idea, like we want to start it automating from the scratch, so we actually built a market analyzer to figure out like if we start like what would be the best products to go with and that was kind of like our first attempt. But then, pretty soon, after we’ve figured out that there are a lot of other steps in between too that have gaps in how the tools work right now over this availability to make it easier for you as a seller. So we basically just started working our way through that. DAVID: At this enterprise companies, I'm guessing it was a corporate sell company. How many employees were, was in that company? BEN: Actually it was a start up. We… I joined when there were 60 people. CHRIS: I joined when there were 30, but when we left it was… DANA: Yeah. BEN: 200? CHRIS: ... 250 or more? BEN: Yes. It was still a small company but… DAVID: Right. DANA: The Company’s name was Taulia and it’s enterprise because we built software for the largest companies in the world. So, Coca-Cola, like Home Depot, I don’t know. CHRIS: Pfizer. DANA: Pfizer. So we built software to handle their financial electronic invoicing. Payment. We handled like massive, massive data and they’re like really secure conditions so that set us up well to deal security with Amazon data. DAVID: And was that like your guys’ first gig right out of college or just, you just went right into it? DANA: Oh no. CHRIS: No. I actually started working for a software company in Asia first. I'm originally from Germany as you can probably tell from my accent.
Bernie built an 8-figure electronics business, wrote the book "Flywheels and Feedback Loops: A Guide to Success for Amazon Private-Label Sellers", and released the tools he used to automate the building of his own brand on Amazon. These tools are available at efficientera.com In this episode, you'll learn: How Bernie grew his team When to add team members to your growing amazon business When to buy and puchase more inventory Critical decisions that led Bernie to where he is today Payroll, accounting Why he started his e-commerce company, and where he is taking it to Hiring decisions Inventory control and strategic advice Where he see's the e-commerce space going How he's up against massive corporations His customer support is killer And much more! DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Bernie! BERNIE THOMPSON: Oh, thanks David! Glad to be on! DAVID ALADDIN: Can you take us to the beginning before pluggable, before everything? Where did your journey begin? BERNIE THOMPSON: Yeah, you know, actually, I have actually always been interested in technology, so, I got a computer science degree, worked at IBM in the 1990s, and worked at Microsoft in the 2000s, and started an electronics company in 2009 selling on Amazon. And that’s led to that being a pretty successful business and also we developed a lot of tools to make that business successful and now I’ve got a second business offering that tools to other Amazon sellers. DAVID ALADDIN: So, why did you decide to leave IBM and Microsoft in the first place? BERNIE THOMPSON: Yeah, yeah, you know, I think, you know, every job has its pros and cons. Actually, I love big companies. Big companies are cool. You know, you’ve got a big support structure around you. You know, at IBM I worked on OS2 which is an operating system that probably everybody’s forgotten about at this point. And at Microsoft I worked on tail end Windows NT and Windows 98, and worked on tail end Windows XP and Vista. So, you know, I was a cog in a pretty large machine, but I got…my stuff got seen by a lot of people. But I love small companies. Especially when small companies are successful there’s nothing that beats it in terms of good experience. DAVID ALADDIN: So, in 2009 you decided to quit and you started a startup that just started launching products on Amazon, is that before FBA was launched? I believe so, right? BERNIE THOMPSON: No, actually FBA had already kind of been opened up at that point. So, we were able to bet on FBA from day 1, which was a key part of it. You know, I really wanted to focus on the technology, on the customer support, and not have to think about the other things. You know, frankly I am terrible at sales marketing. And so, being able to, you know, kind of hand that off to Amazon and the significant part of the logistics which is something I had really no experience in physical goods. I am a software guy. So, being able to handle in most of that physical goods aspect to Amazon, you know, it was a big deal. I mean, it really enabled me to focus on what I was good at and that probably made the difference in terms of the business being successful. DAVID ALADDIN: And when you left your job, did you just put everything behind you and you just moved forward with the startup, and how much…how much capital did you have when you started the startup? BERNIE THOMPSON: Yeah, you know, electronics is a pretty brutal category. You know, if you are going to do anything interesting or you know, even kind of innovative a little bit, you need to have pretty high MOQs and the average price that you are paying is pretty high. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it wasn’t quite a million dollars, but basically, you know, just under that was sunk into the business with cash by the first year or two. And it actually took five years to the point where I could get cash out of the business, which is, you know, it’s a long time.
Jonathan Foltz shared tons of golden nuggets. This is a definite listen for those who want to explode their business off the Amazon channel and diversify their business. He leverages the Facebook Advertising platform and pulls millions. I will probably be re-watching this a few times. He is a digital entrepreneur that has started 16 companies and does not intend on stopping. He has built a couple million dollar companies and his marketing agency, Digital Age Business, runs 4 separate Shopify stores of their own. As a philosopher and futurist, he has been speaking around the country about the new Digital Revolution that is upon us and how we can take advantage of it. In this episode, you'll learn: How to create successful Facebook campaigns Strategies that Jonathan leverages with Facebook Ads The future of technology Futurism & singularity discussion Step by step Facebook strategies that work today Testing Facebook campaigns and ad sets How much money to spend when testing What works better, video ads or image ads And much more. Transcript coming soon. Get in touch with Jonathan: Digital Frontiersmen DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Jon. JONATHAN FOLTZ: What’s going on, brother. How are you? How’s everything? DAVID ALADDIN: Good. Good. Take us to the beginning before things got crazy. Where did your journey begin? JONATHAN FOLTZ: Well, my journey definitely has been pretty crazy. But I think it first started off when I was a kid, you know, like I think when I was like 14-15 years old that was when entrepreneurship started to come into play. I was lucky enough that I got my father to buy us a computer that had like a CD burner in it, and what I was doing back in that day, just like a lot of kids were I just happen to be one of the first ones to do it. We’re making CDs for other people. We’re just like download stuff in the internet. At that time, obviously, it wasn’t the right thing to do but like, this was before everything started coming down. Kids didn’t know better. I was 14-15 years old, downloading music and then selling it to our friends for 5 – 10 bucks. Little CDs. And then I was selling baseball cards, basketball cards, and I had a little bit of success then. I had made one specific CD and I brought it to school, and I think this was around 9th grade or something like that, and I brought a boot bag full of CDs to the school and I literally sold out every single one. Very next day every single kid in school was like going after something that I did, and it showed me like that was my first step of like, man, you know, entrepreneurship is bad a**. You know, like I don’t have to rely upon my parents now for money. I can do this on my own. So that started the whole entire journey that I was on. So, that’s just one thing and as soon as I got in high school, I graduated at Palmetto High School which is the same high school that actually Amazon, what’s his name, Jeff Bezos do. Believe it or not, there’s a lot, it’s crazy because it makes me feel good too about the trajectory because we’ve had actually some incredible technological entrepreneurs come out of Palmetto High School. There have been a lot of them. So you know, that’s something like, man, that’s pretty amazing. Is it something in the water? DAVID ALADDIN: What are they feeding you? JONATHAN FOLTZ: What do they feed us, you know, like what the … is in those? There’s some nuclear water in the system or something, but yeah. Anyway, it’s just, it could also be coincidence at the end of the day, but right after high school I went to Deberi University which was very business and technology oriented which basically I am very much so right now. And I ended up quitting school, because I have a scholarship, I ended up quitting school just to go back into more entrepreneurship. I was running like a little pet shop and then a few little b...
Today I’ve got two invincible kings on the show – Wilson who is the founder of Mindbay, a specialized Amazon brokerage firm who has handled over 50 transactions in the last 3 years. Wilson has been an online entrepreneur for over 20 years and has operated an Amazon shop himself. Hameed Hemmat, also a partner in Mindbay, has a background in App development specifically with iOS apps. He sold his app business recently that he was running for 5 years. He also operates a successful eComm store in the indoor grow space. In this episode, you'll learn: How to sell your Amazon FBA Business How Mindbay sells Amazon and App businesses When to sell your Amazon FBA Business Why to sell your Amazon business Best practices for selling your Amazon Business Getting acquired What you need to do before getting acquired A very detailed step by step process that is involved And much more! Mindbay Exclusive - Free quote on your Amazon FBA Business http://amzsecrets.com/82 DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, guys! HAMEED HEMMAT: Thank you for having us! WILSON: Thank you! Nice to meet you, Dave! DAVID ALADDIN: By the way, this is the first episode where we’ve had two guests on the show at the same time. Can you guys take us to the beginning before Mind Bay? Where did your journey begin? WILSON: Hameed, I’ll let you start there. HAMEED: Yeah, let’s see… Well, I started in the app business… I am going to get to how me and Wilson met… But I started in the app business about five years ago. This was during I guess you can call the gold rush of the risk-in era where anyone who’s somewhat familiar with app development started in 2011/2012. Me and a friend of mine, we partnered up, we built about seven portfolios, meaning seven developer portfolios with over 400apps. Just recently… The way I met Wilson actually was through a brokerage because I was looking to sell my business over the past year. And Wilson ended up buying my business, so…which ended working out great, and then we became really good friends. And then we saw, you know, I guess you can say a gap in the marketplace with brokerages. And no disrespect to the brokerages, I worked with these guys, they are great. But we just saw that we could offer a better service and help other business being able exit their businesses. So, we decided to partner up, plus we became good friends and that’s kind of how we got to where we are at today. DAVID ALADDIN: What about you, Wilson? WILSON: Okay, so yeah, my background…well, my educational background is in engineering, so I have a system based background. But my career really started to focus on entrepreneurship and so I’ve been involved in probably over fifty different businesses at different level ranging from the CEO of one billion dollar plus firm to a total startup. So, I’ve done a lot of different things. Really my strengths are really systems based implementation, so, picking a business and scaling it, specifically in the sectors of ecommerce, Software and also marketplaces. So this is kind of where I’ve dedicated my focus. Mind-Bay was founded because I realized at one point that in order to sort of find business opportunities. Building it was why I started it, but it was hard to do because I guess setup of any business takes time. So, I just decided that the best way to approach being a serial entrepreneur is to acquire the business. And what I did was I created Mind-Bay primarily as an acquisition for acquisition. Through that process of working with sellers like Hameed I built relationship with them, because a lot of them are very talented. You know, people who are willing to build a business from scratch usually have a certain, you know, profile which includes, you know, highly motivated personality, also willing to take risk, a lot of different skills. So, I tried to work with those people if they are right and really tried to...
Today I’ve got an invincible king on the show, coming live is Ed Kohler, who’s 43 years old has been selling on Amazon for 3 years and is now doing 7 digit sales for more than a year. What you'll learn: How Ed built his 7 figure amazon business Channels he uses including one big golden nugget How he expanded into office space Multi-Channel Fulfilment Wholesale strategies Wholesale problems Ed faces Predictions and analysis of Amazon landscape Amazon wholesale strategies And much more! DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Ed. ED KOHLER: Thanks, David. DAVID ALADDIN: So, can you take us to the beginning before Amazon, where did your journey begin? ED KOHLER: Well, I guess as far as songs of our line it goes back quite a ways. That should have, I think I’ve set up for eBay at around 10 years ago, so I’ve sold stuff online for least that long. I think that’s a lot more tedious at that time because you’d have an auction closed and then you’d have to wait for a check to arrive in the mail, wait for the check to clear before you ship stuff out so that was pretty slow. But actually back then I also ran a small sporting goods software clothing company, where I’d sell stuff for a cross-country ski racers. I’m up in Minnesota. We have snow and so I built my first website around ’97 and actually I think I built it using the Aishima editing within Office ’97 which is tedious, but you know I learned something from that. But didn’t go into ecommerce in any larger way until recently. But it was still pretty fun at that time. DAVID ALADDIN: Did you get like www.ski.com, or one of those crazy domain? ED KOHLER: That would have been awesome, but yeah, I somehow missed the land grab-on on domains. That would have been cool. But actually, the product I sold was pretty fun. It was called the hand, and it was wind proof jockstrap for cross country ski racers because when you’re skiing wearing lycra ski suits and it’s 10 degrees or colder outside, there can be some issues for guys. So this product was four fleece jockstrap. Basically they had like a soft flex shell on top of it so it cut down on the wind. So anyways, it was called the hand because it was black with a white handprint on the front of it. So it made it kind of fun. But I’d get emails from moms of high school cross country skiers saying, can you make this without the handprint on. Yeah, yeah. Of course the kids want it with, because it was cool. DAVID ALADDIN: So how much did that like retail for? ED KOHLER: Like 17 bucks. DAVID ALADDIN: Pretty good. ED KOHLER: Yeah. DAVID ALADDIN: It was a one product website? ED KOHLER: Yeah. DAVID ALADDIN: That how it started? ED KOHLER: Yeah. I’m creating a bra. A sports bra called, The Hug. DAVID ALADDIN: How did you get into that? ED KOHLER: So, well, when I was into cross country skiers this is like the product to have. And I… DAVID ALADDIN: Oh. ED KOHLER: I don’t know. I have always been a little bit unto girls so I called up the guy that, who happen to create the product. He happens to live not too far from me. And I asked him if he wanted someone to be a rep for him because I travel around the country racing a lot. And he said, you know actually, I’d be pleased if you’d buy the company from me. I’ll just sell it to you if you’d like, because it started to come a little bit of a hassle for him so this is before things like [Inaudible] existed and so you’d have like the biggest holiday rushes like red roll on a holidays and so it’s like, it’s the last thing you want to be doing was going actually, physically into the post office as a huge stack of packages like, which was tedious. But, so I think for him, it just became a hassle. So then it became my hassle instead. But it was so fun. I learned a lot about just like an entrepreneur like, just everything that you might need to know how to do,
Coming live from StarBucks his name is Brandon Young, who has not one, but two amazon businesses that pull over a million dollars yearly. He does cross platform, and is international. In advanced, our audio had some background noise and was not 100% perfect, but the amount of golden nuggets and insights in this episode is invaluable to all amazon sellers and e-commerce sellers. In this episode, you'll learn: How to build brands into the future How to scale your amazon business How Brandon dealt with multiple amazon suspensions How persistence is key Strategies to selling on Amazon Diversifying your Amazon business into Walmart, Wish, and Wholesale Many of the ways about navigating an Amazon suspension Confusion with Amazon suspensions Our frustration with Amazon suspensions Growing an Amazon Business to newer heights And lots more! DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Brandon! BRANDON YOUNG: Yeah, thanks for having me, I appreciate it! It’s a little bit of an awkward day, because, you know, Fridays what I do is I take my son down to school in Miami and I usually work remotely down there, but today he had the day off because we have a few doctor appointments, so he’s hang out with me. DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool! BRANDON'S SON: Hi! DAVID ALADDIN: How is it going? So, you are live from Hollywood, Florida or Hollywood, California? BRANDON YOUNG: Hollywood, Florida! DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool! I am from Naples by the way. Can you take us to the beginning, before your first company? Where did your journey begin? BRANDON YOUNG: Well, I mean… So, for the few years before I started ecommerce and online, I was doing consulting for startups, so I would help people that had ideas formulate those ideas into viable businesses. So, a buddy of mine actually reached out, said that he wanted to get started with a business, leave his job. He had some job insecurity issues and told me that he was very interested in doing the Amazon thing. We had a couple of buddies that were doing Amazon and doing really well for, you know, previous year or two. And so, you know, the two of us started looking into it, I started doing some research and we would share some ideas back and forth. And they were doing retail arbitrage stuff. At that time I, you know, I was looking at more of a way to make it a sustainable business and scale it rather than, you know, doing retail arbitrage. Just simply because, to me, RA is more of a job than a business, if you are not out there sourcing and you are not home processing things, then you are, you know, you are not making money. And so, I started looking at wholesale, liquidation, private label. I realized that private labels are a little bit further down the growth curve, but we started pretty much with liquidation and, you know, finding some sources. We get a little bit of online retail arbitrage. We reached out to some brands. I used some of my previous contacts within the, you know, an industry that my parents had a business when I was growing up to reach directly out to manufactures and directly to suppliers and seeing whatever their own margins are. And so we started growing the business from there. So, that was about July of 2015. DAVID ALADDIN: Oh, very cool! So, two years into this, right? BRANDON YOUNG: Yeah, not even two full years into it now. And at the time I was, you know, dating my now wife (poor Audio) actually from China. When we were looking at the private label side everyone was like: China, China, China! You know, to quote Trump, right? And so, we decided to start looking at what connection we could make there with the strength of having her on the team. So, we went to China last April, we went to fairs, we went to electronic trade shows in Hong Kong, we spent about a month there. We visited factories for couple of weeks in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan. And we decided to pull the trigger on launching o...
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