#088 - Finding the Best Amazon FBA Products with RealizeProfits I The Amazon Wholesale Podcast

#088 - Finding the Best Amazon FBA Products with RealizeProfits I The Amazon Wholesale Podcast Speaker 2: All right, Paul, welcome to the podcast, man. How's it going? Speaker 1: Going on. How are you doing? Thank you for having me. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So you and I got connected through Instagram more than a few months ago, right? Quite a while ago. And I love the wholesale content that you put out there. Really, really good stuff. And I know that you run your own warehouse. I know you've got a team working under you. I know you've got a software that you're working on. So you've got a lot of good stuff going on and I'm excited to dive into it. Why don't you start us off with kind of your origin story when it comes to Amazon? Speaker 1: Yeah, so when I was 18 years old, I started selling on eBay with my buddy, lifelong buddy of mine. We were dropshipping. We're actually doing wholesale dropshipping. Speaker 2: Nice. Speaker 1: And that's how we started in e-commerce. We always knew that we wanted to do Amazon, but as probably a lot of people in the room, it can be a little nerve wracking. It's a really large marketplace and rules and everything like that. So we waited and then we eventually got banned. On eBay, uh, because we were selling like sporting goods, um, and eBay took us down. So at that point we were forced to pip and we took... Speaker 2: Wait, why did they take you down just for, just for sporting goods? Were they fake or like, what was wrong with them? Speaker 1: No. So we were selling like gun related things, like nothing. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Because the supplier wouldn't ship it unless it was like state regulated. But eBay just put restrictions. Like you'll meet things like, let's say, you know, um, like, um. Speaker 2: We've sold that stuff on Amazon too. And even the Amazon listings would get flagged. So that makes sense. Speaker 1: Yeah. And we did well. That was like the first case of somewhat of success in business. And then we got hit with that roadblock and we had to pivot. And it was either like, I either go back to school and continue to work in my restaurant management job or move into Amazon. So I took those same fundamental skills and I realized that there was opportunity on Amazon to start buying inventory out wholesale. And that's when I started my business in 2019, 2020 on Amazon with my same buddy, my lifelong friend. And we started from a two bedroom apartment with a few thousand dollars. Our first first order was terrible, you know, wrong items, products, like variational listings that didn't sell. And it was a really big learning lesson. And then we kind of were using prep centers during that time for about six to 12 months. Our first year, we were actually unprofitable. We thought we were making money, but we weren't making money. Speaker 2: So many sellers can relate. Speaker 1: And then year two is when we realized like, all right, proof of concept. We made sales. We just didn't make money. It's our fault. So we really went all in on Amazon. We grew our business to a quarter million dollars a month from my buddy's garage and shipping out full box trucks. My friends were working for me. It was such a cool experience. And then that's when we decided to move into our first warehouse and I quit my job the same time, the same month. Went all into Amazon and then I moved into my first warehouse and now I'm on my second warehouse. Speaker 2: Well, that's quite the progression and I can definitely relate, especially when it comes to the whole apartment thing, right? When I started my business, it was much more of a side hustle for me at the start, but I was doing it out of a, I guess technically it was a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago, but only one of those bedrooms was mine. And there were times when I'd walk into the room and you literally couldn't walk. There were just boxes and tape and stuff everywhere. I've been through that myself as well. I love how you mentioned the first PO was terrible because there's so many people listening to this and there's just so many people out there who Probably can relate, right? They try to get into wholesale and they place that first purchase order. Maybe it was for $500, maybe it was for $5,000 and it just didn't quite go as planned. So those are the learning experiences that hopefully people make on a smaller scale. But for you, what did you take away from it? What was the learning experience from that first really bad PO? Speaker 1: That honestly, I needed to invest in myself. I didn't do my due diligence and learn the information. Instead, I just went in to just doing it. I think that's great. Obviously, you learn, but those things could have been preventable mistakes. By educating yourself or besting yourself, I'm just referring to YouTube. And you know, like networking, social media, like you can like all the information's out there. You just got to find the right people that can help you. And then obviously if you wanted to find like some type of mentor or something like that, that's always out there in the world, but like you want to, you, you, you don't want to like have analysis paralysis. You want to try to inform yourself so you're not blindly throwing money into something without what you're doing. Speaker 2: Right, and I do think that there is a tendency for a lot of folks who are newer to the business to see a reel on Instagram or see a TikTok and then they watch maybe one or two YouTube videos and then they go out and try and buy things, right? Usually, at least in my experience, it takes a good few hours at least of studying the business. Understanding what's important, how to read a keep a graph. I mean, even these things at the most basic level to have success. So, I mean, I'm with you as well, right? Like I did not know how to do my research properly in the beginning stages. And that's something that it's purely reps focused. The more reps you put in, the better you're going to get, right? Speaker 1: Absolutely. Speaker 2: What would you say is the most important thing you look for now when you're placing a purchase order, right? What are the green flags and what are the red flags that back then you wouldn't have even known to look for these things? Speaker 1: So I would say the first thing when it comes to buying is knowing the expenses involved prior to getting inventory. That's a great point. But like so many people don't actually understand their numbers when it comes to buying. So that's the first thing. And then it kind of correlates into a red flag for me, which is honestly, Looking at Kiva at the lowest consistent price and seeing if I'm buying at my floor. So let's say my floor is like a minimum of 10% net margin just to keep things easy. If I'm buying a 10% net, I already know just from selling on Amazon that that margin could shrink down just by the time it gets into Amazon. It could turn it to 9%, 8%, 7%. So when I'm buying on my floor, I'm not giving myself enough room for any mistakes to happen. So I would say that's the first thing to consider when it comes to buying. Making sure that you have cushion for mistakes, any variables that pop up. And then when it comes to actually looking at products, I would say a green flag for me is when the offer count is decreasing. I've noticed that the price has decreased because of the offers increasing. The price is going to spike up. You don't want to necessarily buy it on the price spike, but you want it Also understand that there was a correlation in the supply and demand of why the product was most likely unprofitable for a lot of other people because it was competitive. So if you can get there first, sell it for two, three months at a 18, 20% margin, it's probably going to happen again. But you can capitalize on that opportunity with a lot of products. Speaker 2: Well, your point about buying when the new offer count is on the way down is so important, right? Not always easy to time the market and get it to where you're selling right when that new offer count is decreasing. But in general, there's a lot of products out there where the supply starts to dwindle, maybe not rapidly at first. Maybe there's 15 sellers and then a couple of weeks later, there's 13. But then maybe a couple of weeks after that, there's only seven. And then it kind of keeps dwindling and the buy box price goes up as a result. It is simple supply and demand. There's a lot of money to be made sourcing these products that for whatever reason, maybe are harder to find, which is why there's not as many other sellers or maybe they're seasonal, right? And you get there first and you capitalize on a lot of that increased demand. There's multiple ways to do it. And I like that you kind of have an open mind when it comes to the sourcing. Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean, there's so many ways. And then for, you know, red flags for me, it would be something like When you're buying and selling products on Amazon, you want to think about you are buying the product, what it come damage to. For example, there was times where I sold paint on Amazon and those products just people might not like the color of the paint or just in transit from touching all the hands from going from my distributor to me to then to Amazon or going on a truck to then going another truck to then, you know, there's so many different logistical touch points that when you're thinking about buying the product, you want to consider that because that could eat into your margin and This business, at least in my opinion, really comes down to how you utilize your cash and trying to be smart. There's endless amount of opportunities out there to buy products. You never want to feel like that's scarce because it's not scarce. You need to just find better opportunities that really make sense for your business. Speaker 2: A hundred percent. And to further dive in on what your point about knowing every expense that you're going to incur to get the product from the supplier to Amazon. I mean, you're spot on with that being something that a lot of people just don't understand or they totally underestimate because what they don't realize is that every single time that product gets touched between when you buy it and when it gets to Amazon, it costs you money, right? Every single touch point costs you money, whether in the form of time or whether literally in the form of dollars transacted. One of the things to make sure that you do is to really factor in those costs. If you're shipping from your supplier directly to Amazon, then you know that your floor can be a little lower because your costs are less. There's much fewer touch points. But if you've got to ship from your supplier, Let's say to your prep center and then from your prep center to Amazon, that's going to be an expensive life cycle and you're going to have to, you know, you're probably not going to be getting as good of a price as some other people who are, who, who have a smaller logistics process, if that makes sense. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Would you agree with that? Speaker 1: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think also something that's important too is when it comes to buying is like understanding that If you're overbuying inventory, all the expenses that you are incurring are embedded in that product. So you're not just tying up your working capital, you're tying up all the time and energy that was involved with buying that product and not selling it the way that you anticipated it and it all adds up. Speaker 2: It really does. Yeah, it really does. And so for the audience, a lot of them, especially if they've been listening for a while, they've heard me talk for months, if not years at this point, about how much I love prep centers. The value of outsourcing. How I used to have a prep center, how I got rid of it. And as soon as I got rid of it, that's when my, or sorry, I had a warehouse, right? And as soon as I got rid of it and started using a prep center, that's when my business really started to grow. So, you know, they've heard me talk about the virtues of prep centers. And I know that you are someone who operates your own warehouse with a warehouse team involved as well. So I really want to hear from you. Why is it that you went the warehouse route when, at least to me, the prep center route seems so much more accessible and a little easier in terms of lifestyle? Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say that truthfully. More than 50% of people probably shouldn't get a warehouse. To be very true. Speaker 2: Good point. Speaker 1: I like having a warehouse. I like being involved in my business. I like seeing the inventory. I like finding products and being like, oh, this is a good item. Then I see it come on a truck. I like the process of seeing the growth in my business and seeing what's happening. But I think that a lot of people I ran the numbers and realistically saying unless you're doing like over three hard pay a month in sales, At Healthy Margins, it doesn't make sense to get a warehouse beforehand because you're just an employee of your business. You know, for me, when I moved into my warehouse, my business was doing around like $25K to $30K a month in profit. So I had enough push in there to be able to hire employees, get upon payroll and delegate my business in a way that it was just simply like I could leave my warehouse and still have their operating. But I think for a lot of people, like a prep center is the way to go in your business. You don't need to Having a warehouse is a completely separate business in itself. You need to create systems, structure, you need to manage inventory, you need to do all of these things. And then some people might be asking, well, Paul, why would you want to get a warehouse? And for us, the benefit of getting a warehouse is being able to have the advantage of our sales reps, brands. I've had manufacturers come and visit our warehouse before and we've been able to get better pricing just from- That's huge. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: It's opened up some doors for us that might be a little bit more challenging for other sellers, but like the pros and the cons between the two really comes down to, like you said, the lifestyle of what you want. Speaker 2: There's so many points to dive into there, but one in particular, again, I've always talked about how I hate warehouses and I've talked about the virtue of prep centers, but this is a huge benefit of having a warehouse versus a prep center is the ability to almost show it off to sales reps, right? Or to distributor reps or to brands that you're considering working with. I mean, it can be a huge asset in helping you land accounts. In fact, I had somebody on the podcast. I don't remember who it was exactly. It was about a month or two ago, but he was talking about how back when he had actually, I think it was I think it was Carl Jacoby back episode like 78 or something like that. But he had like, it was like 100,000 square foot facility, right? Because they were doing a large 3PL operation as well. But he said that his distributors would refer brands to him because of how big and how legit he was. So his distributor would almost go to bat for him and say, hey, I've got this guy you want to meet. Yeah, he's an e-com guy, but he's legit. Come to his warehouse, check him out. Because he knew that the distributor rep knew that my friend was going to buy through the distributor. Everybody was going to win in that situation. It can be a huge benefit and help you really look super legit. Would you agree? Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. And I would say like the main benefit that we have of having a warehouse is being able to control our costs. Like I said, I think once it gets around 300K is where the numbers start to maybe make sense, even a little bit higher. If we were at our scale using a prep center, our expenses would probably be higher than what they are today. We're able to save money and the more inventory that we are able to ship into Amazon, the cheaper it becomes to run our business because the warehouse rent isn't changing, our insurance really isn't changing. A lot of things in our business aren't changing, so a lot of our expenses are fixed costs. You can optimize, but at that same time, if your production decreases, well, then your costs increase. So it really needs to be like a balancing act of consistently buying and selling inventory. If you're someone that's just like, I want to sell on Amazon, let's say I want to make $100 to $200,000 profit a year, like it doesn't really make sense to get a warehouse. You know, you could do that completely remote with a prep center. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean really having the warehouse only makes sense if you are a super serious seller who's aggressively trying to scale, right? Because I mean, like you said, the biggest benefit of the warehouse is being able to have some of your costs be fixed. Whereas with the prep center, the more you grow, the more you sell, the more money you make, the more your expenses go up, right? Because it's a variable cost. Whereas with the warehouse, like you said, it's like, you know what your rent's going to be, you know more or less what your payroll is going to be, you know what your insurance is, and you have capacity to pump out more and more products each month while those costs stay relatively fixed, right? Obviously, they're going to go up over time as you really grow. Really, the warehouse life is for the hardcore sellers who are really trying to grow and really trying to scale. And that's not to say that you can't really grow and really scale with prep centers. You absolutely can. I've heard of sellers who do eight figures per year that work with prep centers, but those sellers are paying way more in terms of overhead and operating expenses than someone like Paul who runs a warehouse. That's kind of the way that I look at it. It's more of a lifestyle choice than anything, right? Speaker 1: It is. Absolutely. It's a give-take. You sacrifice a little bit of money, but in my opinion, I think time is realistically more valuable than anything else. You can always make more money. You can't get more time. So, you know, if you're someone that really values time and maybe you own other businesses or you just don't want to deal with looking at product, like, you know, there's nothing wrong with using a prep center. I would just say that you want to focus on higher ticket products. So the prep cost really isn't earning you on your margin. You're focused on grocery items. It's not a 15 bucks. It's going to be draining to find items to sell. Speaker 2: That's a great nuance and a great point, right? And that's, I think that's why my business model works well with prep centers is because a lot of what we sell is higher ticket. Like our average sale price is somewhere in the 60s. I mean, some, some weeks it's as high as a hundred dollars, right? It can get really up there. So, you know, that's something to keep in mind that if, like you said, if you're selling lower ticket products, like these groceries for $12, $15, $20, then a lot of times using a prep center is not going to make sense for you. There's just going to, there's just not going to be enough margin left. Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely. Speaker 2: Whereas if you have your own facility and you've got your costs more or less dialed in, that's when those lower ticket products can make a lot more sense. That's why, I mean, the biggest grocery sellers and the biggest, you know, like say over-the-counter medicine, like these, you know, lower ticket product, the biggest sellers in those categories are guys that have huge warehouses and they have them dialed in. They've got like a whole team processing FBA orders, like basically a massive in-house prep center more or less. So what's your goal there with the warehouse? How big are you guys trying to get and what's the plan to get there? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, honestly for me, I used to want to scale my business to like 30 to 40 million dollars in sales. Speaker 2: Honestly, I don't want to do that. Speaker 1: I'm not really attracted to it. I want to get my business to We've been doing this for 15 to 20 million dollars and stay there consistently. I think that's a very healthy range with this size in my warehouse and obviously with healthy net margin. I would say that would be my goal. And I got more space in my business because of floor space more than anything else. We spent time in our first warehouse using a forklift to just stack pallets and move stuff around. It took away so much time that when we ran the numbers, Increasing our rent a little bit and also having the ability to actually move faster in our business was actually more cost effective than moving stuff around and having to hire more people to just operate in a small space. Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. Yeah, by far. Not even close. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So, yeah, you said 15 to 20 million is kind of the goal there per year? Speaker 1: Yeah, even like, I would say like 12 to 15, you know, 18 million. Like I just want to be able to net 10 to 10 percent, 8 to 12 percent a year, whatever that number is. If we can do it at 12 and have healthy margins, I'm happy with that business. You know, I used to chase top line. I really, it's, for me, it's not really attractive anymore. Speaker 2: I feel like everyone does to a degree, right? Or at least everyone does for some point in their journey, usually earlier on. It's like they get so enchanted with the orange bars on the seller app or on the revenue screenshots and seller board, but they don't realize that, like you said, it's bottom line is really the only thing that matters. How big is the warehouse space that you guys have? How many square feet? Speaker 1: We have about 8,800 square feet. Speaker 2: Oh, wow. Okay. So you have a good amount of space. Yeah. 8,800 is a good bit. I mean, there's no reason you guys couldn't do at least, I would say 10 million a year out of that facility, right? Especially if you're selling higher ticket products and if they're higher volume, higher ticket products. Absolutely. No doubt about it. So what does the team look like, right? How many people do you have in there in the warehouse with you? Speaker 1: So I try to actually keep my business very, very lean. So I have one person on payroll and that's it. Speaker 2: Wow. Okay. That's way, like I would have expected you, I thought you were going to say like five, six, seven people. Speaker 1: So what we do, Hopefully this is beneficial for a lot of people hearing this is that I use like temporary employment. So it's just with Amazon, we dealt with this issue that we had to learn, which is when we had employees on payroll, there was always this sense of like urgency that we needed inventory in the building because people- You got to buy stuff to keep them busy. So we would justify or find criteria to buy an inventory to keep work. And I know that sounds terrible and that it really didn't like affect our business too much, but like we could have used our cash in a better way. So we realized, okay, we need to change what we're doing. So we have one person on payroll, that's our warehouse normal, that gets paid well. And everyone else is a temporary employee. So if we're getting deliveries throughout the week in our warehouse, We'll stage the inventory. We'll, you know, pretty much prepare it for production. And then once we're ready for shipment, then we'll get 10 employees for maybe two days and we'll flex our payroll off to six, seven people. But then it allows us to produce faster and it doesn't have a payroll of 15 to 20K having all these people on staff that we really don't need. Speaker 2: That's an interesting strategy. I've actually never heard of anybody doing that. So maybe two days a week you're getting some temporary workers in. Are these different workers every time? Are these sometimes the same people? What does that look like? Speaker 1: Yeah, so they're pretty consistent. 80% of the time it's the same people. They're pretty much like, it's honestly really, really good. We have net 30 with the temporary agency. All liability insurance and everything is on the temp agency. Speaker 2: Nice. Speaker 1: All those bills are actually gonna decrease because it's kind of based on their payroll a little bit. We pay a little bit of a premium, you know, $20-ish an hour for- Totally worth it. Speaker 2: Totally worth it. Speaker 1: For me, it's a no-brainer because if I'm paying someone even $17, $18 an hour, which is still fairly liberal wage in the United States, like not even that good, it's- With after all insurances and everything and payroll taxes, you're nearly at the same spot. So for me, I'm willing to pay a little bit more as a framework to not necessarily have that pressure and make sure that we're buying the best inventory for our business. And since then, we've actually sold less inventory, but we've increased our margins and our average profit per sale, which to me is a win. Speaker 2: A hundred percent. And that actually makes perfect sense to me. I've heard of some other bigger sellers who do the same thing, right? They'll use a temp agency. And especially around the Q4, right, or around seasonal spikes, depending on the types of products they sell, they'll have a temp agency pump them with, you know, five, 10, 15 employees for the holidays. Assuming they have really good SOPs, they can get them trained up relatively quickly and then they're off to the races, right? And if they need them around come the new year, they can keep them. If they don't, then they can go back to the agency, right? And a lot of times they'll hire those same people again the next year. So that makes perfect sense to me. I love that strategy. I like that. Speaker 1: And then I also have a decent amount of VAs. I have 70 VAs on my team. Speaker 2: Oh, wow. Okay. Speaker 1: And pretty much they're dedicated to specific suppliers and they're just constantly like all the purchase orders that are coming into our business or produced from our VAs. And then my business partner and I are pretty much like reviewing those purchase orders or moving items that don't make sense for our business. Kind of like that's what we're doing on the day-to-day for our business now. So yeah, that's kind of what that looks like. Speaker 2: And I love the concept of having, and I guess, I don't know if you'd call them a buyer or not, but I mean, more or less a buyer, right? Because they're sourcing from that supplier. But I love the concept of having one buyer per supplier, or not necessarily one buyer per supplier, but more so the concept of assigning a set of suppliers to a specific employee, right? So it's like, hey, VA number one or buyer number one or employee number one, you are responsible for these three suppliers, right? Your sole mission is to maximize our spend with these three suppliers. Obviously we want to do so profitably, but you know, if you can get them on that same page of you and kind of get them thinking along those lines of, okay, every day my goal is to Find something we can buy from these suppliers, then one, they're going to get really good at understanding that supplier's processes and their portal and that sales rep. I think that can be a really effective strategy. And that's kind of how you guys operate, you said? Speaker 1: Yes, sir. That's what we noticed is that when we had DAs bouncing around from all different suppliers, you take it in a rhythm. If you're sourcing a supplier day in and day out, at some point you're going to find proper products. We're profitable media brands that just like are terrible pricing, you just ignore it, you can't sell them, you're blocked. So like when you get really comfortable and familiar with an industry and who sells in the industry, how you can capitalize in the industry, you can make more money. So we used to go so wide and just like find many products and then we realized, okay, we need to get more narrow with who is going where and why are they getting assigned to a specific place. Speaker 2: Again, I love that approach because they're more focused, they understand the industry, they understand the brands, right? Because a lot of times the same brands can be sourced from similar suppliers, right? So maybe you even assign them like a category. You are responsible. And like, well, that's what I've done on my team, right? So Griselda on my team, we have four main tool distributors that we can buy from. And so right now she is solely focused on just tools, right? And sourcing from these four tool distributors. And anytime she finds a product from one of those distributors, she then goes and cross-references it with the other three, right? Who was offering us the best price? Who has the most units in stock? Who can we play against the other in order to get a better price, right? So, I think that is a type of synergy and the type of focus that comes from having a buyer dedicated to either one category or one set of suppliers or even one supplier if it's like your biggest supplier and it's one that you're doing a ton of business with. You know what I mean? Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: Awesome. I love that. So do you have any plans to ever add prep centers to the mix? Have you ever used prep centers strategically or do you think you'll be 100% warehouse? You don't see a need to add a prep center to the mix and that's how you're going to go? Speaker 1: We've thought about doing prep centers and widening our distribution, which I also think for a lot of newer people, using a prep center widens the ability of how many catalogs you can get access to, which is a huge leg up. For us, we have these relationships that are really solid in our business. For us, where we are right now, the next step is going kind of like brain direct activity. We really haven't opened up any new supplier accounts recently and we have too much opportunity in front of us to even go and find more suppliers. Speaker 2: I love that you're going deep before you go wide and that's something that took me so long to learn. And in fact, I was talking to somebody about this recently. I'm like, I literally have a list of like 50 and like no exaggeration, 50 different suppliers that I bought from over the years. Because back then, and this was like over the last five years. And the reason I bought from so many different suppliers is because I just didn't understand the concept of going deep. We'd land a new supplier account, we'd buy something, it'd be profitable, it'd be great. It's like, all right, now we've got to go find another supplier, right? And that's like, dude, just keep selling more of that same product and while you're at it, maybe ask them what other products they have and look through their other brands. It seems so simple to us now, but I just didn't get it back then. And there really weren't nearly as many people like me and you talking about this type of stuff either. So as a result, I legitimately bought from like 50 different distributors over the years. And it's just crazy. So I guess I've got a solid database of legit suppliers I bought from over the years. But aside from that, it's like I would have We've been so much farther ahead and had so much more results to show for it if I would have just picked the top three out of those 50, for example, and just gone super deep. Speaker 1: Yeah, you really only need like four to really only like one to six solid distributors that are really good at wholesale business. We've got a wide net of suppliers. Once you find a few proper products, you need to go deeper into that relationship and establish a relationship. For a lot of sellers that get into wholesale, even brand direct, it can be challenging to start finding products. It's because you've got to realize that there's a relationship behind Those sellers, right? Like the suppliers that they're buying from, there's a relationship and then you need to break through. You need to get through that door. Like the first door is opening up the account and then there's more doors you need to get through. But that's not self-profitable. It's because there's a barrier. And once you can build a moat around a relationship, it's a lifelong thing. Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's why, unfortunately, a lot of people, I think, fall off so quickly is because they're not able to hang in there long enough to build that moat or to let that relationship compound over time because this is absolutely one of those businesses that, one, gets easier over time and, two, is basically more profitable and better over time, right? Like, yeah, you'll make money in year one, right? You'll land some good relationships in year one. Like, you should if you're doing it right. But once that year one relationship compounds over year two, year three, then year five, and then year seven, that's when you have a single person or a single supplier or a single relationship making you six figures per year in profit. Or some people, seven figures per year. It's not unheard of for bigger sellers. Again, it just goes to show that I mean, you truly are only one relationship one supplier away from having a really successful business. And I mean, we only buy from I mean, one to four main ones, right? And if we wanted to, one of our brand direct relationships could be our entire business if we had enough capital to support it. So it's just a lot of opportunities still left. Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. I personally believe that there's more opportunity today than there's ever been. And I really, I mean, like, like, yes, is wholesale maybe getting harder or the more fees? Of course. Every single business has changes. You need to adapt. And if you walk into any other business, like let's say a restaurant, they had rules and regulations, like a pallet, like they can't put cases of food on the ground. If somebody comes in, they're going to be like, hey, fix this. Otherwise you're going to lose your license. Like it's the same thing as Amazon. If you're not doing the correct things, you probably like need to figure it out a little bit. Speaker 2: You need to not be doing that. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And then on the other side, there's people that are quitting. I mean, obviously, there's other opportunities out there for people, whatever's best for them. But that should be a green flag for a lot of other people in the room. It's the same thing as looking at the Keeper Graph and seeing the offer count. Speaker 2: Literally, the new offer count on Amazon sellers is going down. That's what we're saying. I love that analogy. Speaker 1: Amazon's only got bigger. Over the course of the past five, 10 years, and brands today need more help than ever. Speaker 2: Right, dude, that's such a good analogy. Because yeah, when you think about it, right, like Amazon as a company in terms of revenue profit, every metric Amazon is up, right up into the right. And then Amazon sellers now more than ever are quitting and falling off. So it's like demand is going up. Supply in the form of Amazon sellers is going down. That means if you're in the game and you stick around and you are a legit seller, you're going to make more money than ever. You're going to do better than ever. 2024 for me was one of my best years yet and really didn't work any harder. I think it's because we had some relationships that had compounded over time, exactly what we're talking about. I truly think that, you know, people see, oh, a lot of people are quitting, right? And they see that as a bad thing. I see that as a great thing. If you look on Google Trends right now, Amazon FBA as a search term is at its all time low compared like it's at its lowest since I think 2022 or something like that. Interest in Amazon selling and Amazon FBA is down. That's a great thing. I love that, right? People are just falling off and there's so much room for people to thrive who are serious. Speaker 1: I talked to my sales rep today from a brick and mortar distributor. They service a lot of brick and mortars and they're like, yeah, brick and mortars are really struggling. Speaker 2: Yeah. It's like the perfect storm of everybody's incentives are aligned for Amazon sellers to make a lot of money, for brands to get helped with a good partnership, for customers to get a good deal, for Amazon obviously to get a cut of the pie as they always will. There's a lot of good things. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. So what else is on the horizon? Anything else you got in the works? I know you've got, obviously you've got the Amazon business. I know you do some coaching on the wholesale side as well. Very active on social media and putting out content. What else? Anything else? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I've been working on a software in the background that I'm excited about will be coming out soon for Amazon businesses. I mean, it is definitely geared more towards like wholesale brand direct. And it is other businesses, but I mean, you could use it or like OA, stuff like that. But I've been working on it for the past two years. I pretty much taken all of my systems on how I've scaled to, you know, over eight figures on Amazon and implemented into a software to not only help me scale my business, but hopefully help other people scale their businesses too. I haven't touched the Google Sheets since September. And it's what's feeling in the world. So that's kind of something I've been working on in the background. Speaker 2: That's cool. That's awesome. Yeah. I'm excited to see what that looks like and potentially try that out. And I'm sure I know that we were kind of talking, it's going to be, you know, hopefully I'm not spilling anything by sharing this, but you know, going to be more on the, like the inventory management and kind of like purchase order creation slash organization, I guess might be a good way to say it, uh, front. And that is a tool that we, you know, if done right is sorely needed in our space. Right. And one that I think I'd be using for sure. If it meets the needs that we talked about. So that's awesome to hear, man. Well, with that said, where can other people find out about you? Where can they go and follow you when they want to hear updates? Speaker 1: On Instagram, RealizeProfits. That's really the only platform I'm on. You can go on TikTok as well, but that's really the main platform I'm on. Speaker 2: On Instagram, you said? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Awesome. And then guys, for those of you watching on YouTube, be sure to give the video a thumbs up. For those of you watching on Apple or Spotify, if you enjoyed the episode, give an honest rating. It doesn't have to be five stars, but I'd appreciate a five stars. It helps get the podcast in front of more people. So Paul, with that, thank you so much for the time and I'll talk to you soon, man. Speaker 1: Thank you. Take care.