#327 - Isaiah Fritz's Journey From 10-Year-Old Entrepreneur To 8-Figure Amazon Seller At 23

#327 - Isaiah Fritz’s Journey From 10-Year-Old Entrepreneur To 8-Figure Amazon Seller At 23 Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 327 of the AM-PM Podcast. In this episode, I'm speaking with Isaiah Fritz. Isaiah started selling on e-commerce when he was 10 years old. That's right, 10 years old. He started doing Amazon when he was about 15. He's now 23 and he's running an 8-figure business on its way to 9 figures. It's a fascinating story. He's got some great tips and insights. I think you're going to really like this episode. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Isaiah, what's up, man? Welcome to the AM PM podcast. Speaker 2: Well, I'm happy to be here, Kevin. I'm glad you invited me. Speaker 1: I'm glad to have you here. Yeah, I was at the ASGTG show last month in New York and just sitting there with I think Steve and a few other people just shooting, you know, just talking, talking in a shop and up comes this this young guy and he's like, hey, do you mind if I sit here? Like, sure, no problem. And that was you. And you sat down like, hey, guys, I'm Isaiah. Nice to meet you. What do you do? You know, and you just you were just there just just networking and it was and then we started talking. I was like, dude, you got to come on the AM PM podcast. You got a pretty interesting story of what you're doing. So did you actually know who Steve and I were when you sat down there or were you just just buzzing around looking for an empty seat to network? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I have definitely never seen or knew who Steve was. Now, Kevin, you had spoke earlier with your 30 cool hacks for cool kids or something. So I knew kind of who you were. But that was my first interaction for sure. And yeah, I brought up a chair and said, hey, I got to meet this guy. Speaker 1: Have you been to very many shows before or in the Amazon space? Speaker 2: No, the first show I went to in the Amazon space was Prosper last year and then I went to Accelerate and then I went to Pow Wow. So that was my fourth Amazon show. Speaker 1: And you're in Indiana, right? So you actually flew in for the show. Speaker 2: Yes, yes. Speaker 1: But it's not like you're new to this business and you're just like, oh, I need to go hit some shows. You've been selling on Amazon for like eight years, right? Speaker 2: Yes, since 2015. And it's been great. I learned everything. It's funny. A lot of people are like, how did you learn how to do this? I was like, well, one day I was looking on Amazon and it said, do you have one of these to sell? Click here. And I clicked here. And the rest is history. Speaker 1: That was when you were 15 years old, right? You're only 23 right now and you've been selling for eight years. So you started selling when you were 15. Were you an entrepreneur before that? Were you doing other, like hustling other stuff, mowing yards or throwing newspapers or working somewhere else? Or did you just, you saw that online, you're like, hey, this is me. What led into you hitting that button that said you have one to sell, sell yours here? Speaker 2: So I have my success is attributed to my parents. I was raised homeschooled, so I never went to public school. And part of our curriculum was eBay because my mom did eBay, right? So we would literally go to yard sales when I was like 10 years old, right? We're buying stuff and flipping and she's like, hey, you're going to learn math. You're going to learn language arts. You're going to learn, you know, how to communicate all these things. So it's so we I actually started I was around 10 or 11. Flipping stuff on eBay as part of my homeschool curriculum and my mom was a little nervous to get into Amazon, but I was like, yeah, we got to do this. We got to do this. I was actually wanting to get an Amazon a year before when I was 14, but I finally convinced her when I was 15 to say, hey, let's do it. Speaker 1: So, how did you get a grade? So, if you go to a yard sale and you find some CDs or you find something that you can buy and sell, how did she grade you on that? Was it based on the profit you did or how much volume you did or how did you get a grade from mom, the teacher? Speaker 2: You know, I guess part of that class was probably based off of profit and each one of my brothers. See, I'm the oldest of eight, okay? So, I have seven. I have seven siblings, six brothers and one sister at the end. So it took my parents a while until they got their girl. And so each one of my brothers have all went through the same curriculum and they're all entrepreneurs. And the next one under me, he has a home trim company and the other one has an excavating company. And he also sells stuff on eBay on the side. And my mom, she's Still hustling. She'll go to, you know, Goodwill auctions and buy pallets of stuff and flip. And so, you know, we all kind of live in the same area and we're all, you know, just entrepreneurs together. And so, yeah. So, I told my mom, like, this school thing is stupid. How do I graduate as early as possible? She goes, well, Why don't you take some of these college testing exams? And she's like, if you can pass a bunch of these college testing exams, we'll definitely, you know. Know that you're ready or something like that. It was kind of an interesting answer. And because I'm not doing this traditional curriculum, obviously. And so I went and, you know, passed all these college exams and got a bunch of credits that I never used. Speaker 1: How old were you at this time? Speaker 2: I was 15. It was right at that time when I completed that. So by the time I turned 16, I was done. I was done. I had already a bunch of college credits. I was ready to work. So I started a full-time job when I was 16 working at a non-profit. My dad, he works at a non-profit and I was working with my dad and doing the whole like Amazon flipping thing on the side, you know, just buying from anywhere, liquidation, retail arbitrage, you know. Just flipping and so that's kind of the origin right there. Speaker 1: So are you competing against your mom? If she's doing this on eBay and now you're doing it on Amazon, were you all going to the same places and like competing for lots and competing for things? Or would you share like she would put it up on eBay and you put up on Amazon and see who sells it first? Speaker 2: I was pretty independent so I had my, you know, it was funny. I got my driver's license as early as possible. I remember the first place I went was this local store called Ben's Bargain Center. It's for retail arbitrage. I remember just thinking how fulfilling it was to drive myself to a store and do retail arbitrage. It was the first thing I did with my first car. I bought a car for $500 off Craigslist. I was very independent. We weren't really competing. I did my own thing. But I guess when we went to the same yard sales, I always kind of went for the electronics. She always went for the dolls. So, you know, there wasn't a lot of crossover. Speaker 1: So how are you picking the yard sales to go to? You know, when you look on Craigslist or you look on the neighborhood apps or whatever or Facebook, do you just look in for the people that posting pictures or listing like this is what we have for sale and that's how you would make your list to go target them? Speaker 2: Just neighborhoods, right? And you always look for your neighborhoods or what we found out actually, so you do neighborhoods strategically, right? But there's also The whole value to those country yard sales. So we're kind of in a rural area-ish. So those country yard sales, a lot of people that are older, they've had a lot of past and so they might have They usually have a lot more antiques, older things. They're more mature on the things that they want to get rid of and they're also a lot cheaper prices because if you go to a neighborhood with a new family that's just bought this house, they know they just paid for that product that they're trying to sell their yard sale three years ago. A lot of times it's a A little different dynamic. So we would also try to focus on those like older people country type yard sales. We'd find a lot of good things at one sale where neighborhoods it's a lot of yard sales and you might find here and here and there some good things. So that's kind of the strategy with the yard selling. Speaker 1: So you're like that TV show, American Pickers, finding old Coca-Cola signs and old oil cans and that kind of thing? Speaker 2: Whatever we can find. And you kind of find your niches that you kind of know about. And we could talk for an hour on how to flip stuff at yard sales. It's such a fun thing. And like I said, I mean, I go out and I do it just for fun. I'll make $1,000 on a weekend. And it's like, I don't need to do it, but it's just like, hey, why not? Speaker 1: What's one of the coolest things that you found? Tell me a really cool story about one of the items that you found. Speaker 2: I guess the first thing that comes to my head is, I don't know why I was always into electronics, but I found a record player and I'm trying to think who made it. I don't remember who made it, but it was a Japanese company and it was right when CDs came out. They were trying to compete with the CDs. It had a CD-like tray for this big record and it played on both sides, so you didn't have to flip the record. And it was kind of a niche thing, very rare. And I bought it for 15 bucks. And it had a broken belt. I hired my dad. I said, dad, you know, I'm not the most mechanically inclined, but my dad was. I said, can you fix the belt on this thing? And so my dad went to eBay, bought a belt for $10. I paid him $50. So I had whatever that was, like $75 in this thing, and I flipped it for like $500. And I just remember that was a cool flip. Speaker 1: That's cool. I think you told me you're doing 8-figures now on Amazon and it's grown quite a bit since then. When did it start actually getting into more like the bigger brands and stuff? When did it quit becoming let's go to the local dollar store and flip something and become more like, okay, hey, I got something here. I need to expand this out. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I worked full-time at the nonprofit until I was 18 and But I was I was doing the whole thing on the side How much were you making roughly on the side? Speaker 1: You probably make it more than you were at the nonprofit, right? Speaker 2: I was making more those on the nonprofit. So I mean, oh my I was getting paid $275 a week for 40 hours, you know of work so I am I I was definitely making more. Speaker 1: That's like minimum wage. Minimum wage. Speaker 2: Which is cool. I think everybody should work a minimum wage job to start. You learn. I was digging holes too. It was the bottom of the barrel stuff. But anyway, I did that and then I started full-time the retail arbitrage. I hired a guy and said, hey, we're just going to do this full-time. When I was 18 years old, we probably did I'm gonna guess around seven, eight hundred thousand dollars gross and we're making crazy profit margins and I know we sold 14,000 items that year and then I got an email says your account's getting suspended. So, but yeah, you know, my account got suspended and I said, Wow. Okay. And so I wrote some appeals and they said, Nope. Wrote another appeal. Did the whole, you know, email Jeff. Nope. Nope. Nope. And I'm like, okay, I have a guy that I hired and my, I have, I think it was like close to $40,000 locked up at Amazon. And they said, we're going to keep your funds indefinitely. And I'm like, I'm in debt because I'm like, at the same time I'm building a house and I built a, a house that is a warehouse house where it's, you know, I have a three car garage with a dock at my house. Speaker 1: I do. Unknown Speaker: I have, I have the only. Speaker 1: That's awesome. That's awesome. Speaker 2: My neighborhood, right? My mom. You're not going to use that doc. And I'm like, I'm going to use that doc for sure. Unknown Speaker: You know, I'm like 8-year-old. Speaker 2: I built this house, right? And I have an apartment. That was a square foot apartment, right? And I get this one guy working out in my half-finished barn house, full barn house with a doc. And, you know, and my account's suspended on Amazon. I'm like, okay, I'm in debt. Speaker 1: Why did they, why did they suspend you? What was the reason? What reason did they give you? Speaker 2: Inauthentic complaints. Three. Just three out of the 14,000 items. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: Yeah, it was rough. It was really rough. And so I tried and tried. I hired one of those companies that are supposed to get you unsuspended. And yeah, the company, you know, didn't help. I didn't have any money. So I had to lay off my guy, which was the worst. But I said, hey, forget this whole Amazon thing. And so I was like, well, I'll just do eBay. So I'm flipping some stuff on eBay. I went and I bought a whole bunch of cell phones. I bought a couple pallets of them and made $20,000 in a couple weeks. That was able to float during the eight months that I was suspended. I started trying to get a real estate license. I was like, maybe I'll just get into real estate. I partnered with another Amazon seller friend that I had and I started buying stuff for him, just trying to make ends meet. And then finally, I'm at a trade show working for this other guy, buying stuff for him and learning the whole trade show game of, you know, how to go buy wholesale, right? Because I'm working for this other guy. And I meet this VP at this trade show and this VP tells me how he grew his company exponentially and he was selling these products. I'm like, well, how'd you do it? And he's like, well, I sent free samples to all these, you know, big retailers and they started buying from me. And I'm like, well, how did you get the guy's names to send the free samples to at the retailer? She's like LinkedIn. And I'm like, Oh, LinkedIn? And he's like, yeah, you can reach anybody on LinkedIn. I was like, oh. So I went to my hotel that night and I went on LinkedIn. I created an account and I went and I made this form message and I sent it to every Amazon VP, whatever manager I could find on LinkedIn, my story. I just said, hey, I've been suspended for eight months. You guys are holding $40,000 from me. Speaker 1: Plus some inventory too, right? Speaker 2: No, they sent back all the inventory. I had to pay the removal fees. Speaker 1: Okay, okay. Speaker 2: So, yeah, all that came back and that was crazy. The UPS driver's like, what is going on? Why do you fill up my truck? You know, sending all this inventory back, right? Speaker 1: At least you have a dock. Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a dock, which is good. Speaker 1: At your house. Speaker 2: At my house, right? And, you know, I was building my house with money I was making from the business. So, like, I mean, it's amazing to, you know, when you really appreciate an air conditioning system. Like as you're making money to build these things, you know, yeah, it's like or insulation. Like I didn't have insulation when I moved in. I'm like what I was camping. Speaker 1: So you send out these emails to all these Amazon people on LinkedIn telling them your story. Speaker 2: And I get a call from corporate, from Amazon Seattle, and they said, hey, we're so sorry for what we did to you, and here's your account back. Here's your money back. And I was just like, what? And I ended up hitting Amazon Jeff Bezos technical advisor. And so at the time, I didn't know what that was until I just read this new book. I think it's called Amazon Unbound. Are you familiar with that, Kevin, this new book? Speaker 1: I haven't read it, but I'm familiar with it, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm in the middle of reading it. And so what Jeff Bezos' technical advisor is, is every year Jeff Bezos would have someone to shadow him. And this guy, they call this technical advisor, would shadow him for a year and download everything in Jeff Bezos' brain and then Jeff Bezos would put him in charge of something. And so at the time, this guy, I don't even remember his name, was his technical advisor. And so he got it done for me. So that was great. And so I hit the right guy, the right hand man to Jeff Bezos during that year. And so that was great. So then I was like, man, If I'm going to do Amazon, I need to have invoices because that's what Amazon wanted. They wanted invoices and from manufacturers or distributors. So I started knocking on doors to manufacturers near me. I just want to Google manufacturers near me. And I started knocking on doors and saying like, hey, literally knocking on the door, like showing up in person or cold calling or in person, I would call and be like, we manufacture car dashes. And I'm like, can we sell them on Amazon? They're like, I don't really think so. It would just be random companies. I didn't know what I was doing. I run into this company that's making candles. I'm like, oh, this is cool. Nobody opened the door. I went back and the dock door was open. I jumped the dock. I got in and I found the CEO. Speaker 1: You're just like walk in the hallways. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: And this was like what, 2018, 2019? 2018, right. So you're like 18, 19 years old. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: And I'm like, hey, you guys need help selling on Amazon? And he goes, well, I had just a guy two weeks ago that's going to help sell stuff on Amazon for me. And I'm like, oh, OK. And I said, maybe I can sell another line or something. He's like, OK, we'll make a deal. He goes, I used to be a door-to-door salesman. So he's like, I really appreciate you knocking on my door. And I was like, oh, cool. So he liked that. So he was like, you know, we got in. And I mean, like within the first month, I sold a thousand candles and the other guy sold 18 that he hired. So he's like, I'm going to keep you. And so we grew that into a two million dollar Amazon business over the next year. And that was that was like my first big win. And so after that, I said, wow, I can scale this. I'm helping manufacturers sell their products on Amazon because I learned manufacturers hate Amazon as much as I did. They got shut down. They had issues and all this stuff and so I started hiring some smart corporate people and now I got a whole team. I've been growing really a lot last year, my team. I've been investing all my money back into hiring my team and infrastructure because I really am wanting to grow this thing. At Online Selling Partner, what we do, we just Partner with good manufacturers that have a good brand but don't want to focus on Amazon like this guy with the candle company. He sold plenty of candles outside of Amazon but he just didn't like Amazon. He was shut down too. And so we remove resellers. We control distribution. We grow your keywords and organic rank and PPC and we do everything and we just do it off margin. So the key is that we got to partner with good brands. Speaker 1: You're doing this through their account and managing their account or are you doing it through a master account that you have or do you set up a like a partnership and create a new account that's a kind of partnership between the candle company in this case and you or how does that work? Speaker 2: It's all through our account. We just want to make it as easy as possible. So we just purchase the inventory and take it from there. So we just do it all through our account. Speaker 1: And so how many different SKUs are sitting in your account right now that you're managing? Speaker 2: 1,000 active SKUs and 50,000 FBM variations for a certain client that has a lot of FBM stuff. Speaker 1: But 1,000 FBA, so that's the real, the 1,000. Are you shipping those FBMs or he handles that? Speaker 2: Both, but mainly the dropship client. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: Just with a big SKU catalog. But yeah, it's a headache to manage that big of a catalog, by the way. I don't know if I recommend it. Speaker 1: So you just buy, so you're not doing a, like, it's not like a management deal where you're taking a cut. It's, it's straight up. You're like saying you're negotiating a price, like with a candle guy, you negotiate a price and then you're, you're determining what you're, what you're going to do with the listing, everything. And what about like brand registry and stuff on that? Do you have to go work with them to. Speaker 2: Agreed. Yeah. The brand registry, they create a brand registry account and give us access and we get selling benefits and all that. And we become the brand for Amazon. Speaker 1: So, how are you, what's the methodology? People are always, that want to do this method, they're always worried about like someone else jumping on the listing, like you do all this hard work and this guy, you know, back to the candle example, he's selling the candles to other people and maybe some other store that he sells the candles to decides they're going to list, you know, they're buying wholesale from him, they're going to list on Amazon and up pops, you know, another seller on top of you. What do you do in that case? Speaker 2: That's why a big part of our work is controlling distribution. So we have an exclusive contract with the brands and it's all, you know, written out. I mean, Kevin, I can... Speaker 1: And Amazon exclusive, you mean? Speaker 2: Yeah, Amazon exclusive. And then we communicate that all out to all the retailers that they sell to and say, hey, you can't sell on Amazon. If you sell on Amazon, we're not going to sell anything to you. It's a big deal. Speaker 1: So you're the wholesaler then to the other people? No, no, no. Speaker 2: We communicate it through the brand. We help the brand do this, right? So we say, hey, this is what you need to do. You need to communicate to your accounts that, hey, this is what we're doing. We're managing Amazon now. We don't want anyone else to sell on Amazon. And if you do sell on Amazon, we're going to stop selling to you type of thing. So, you know, a lot of people, a lot of brands like the whole methodology is with retail is sell to as many retail stores as possible, right? But with Amazon, you want to do the opposite. You want to control it. If you're going to control it yourself, sell through your own account or sell with a partner, you can't do the whole brand registry thing, the whole advertising unless you have a buy box. It's hard to update content and everything. These brands are realizing they need to be on Seller Central. I'm controlling it either through their account or through someone else's account. So it's been a real big shift and a lot of your major brands are shifting to this model that we provide. It's a lot like if you think about How the cloud works, where when Amazon AWS first came out, everybody thought it was crazy. You're like, hey, I got IT guys. I have servers and all this stuff. Why would I pay Amazon to host my servers? And then come to find out it was a lot cheaper and easier. You wouldn't have to hire internal employees. You don't have to have internal equipment or processes. All you have to do is Hook up to the cloud and all your needs are done. So we see us as the future of the cloud in this space where companies will find it's a lot cheaper and easier to just pay us, which we work off low margins anyway, than it is to build all the infrastructure, hire employees and I do all the headaches and pay for helium 10 and all the other expenses that come with managing Amazon. Why not just give it to a company that can do it better and cheaper? Speaker 1: Part of it too is some of it's exactly like what you just said that they just don't want to mess with it Yeah, and a lot of them don't understand it and selling selling on Amazon is not easy Yeah, people paint it as this easy thing, but you got to know a lot about a lot of things It's about marketing logistics keywords you know just there's there's so much that you have to know and a lot of these companies they're focused on what their core business is and A lot of times they'll go hire somebody off of LinkedIn or off of wherever, some recent college MBA graduate, and they don't know what they're doing. They're trying to figure it out and learn, and it's costing the company money. It's much better to go to someone like yourself that knows this, that lives and breathes this, that's got the experience. There's not a lot of people like that, to be honest. There's a lot of people that pretend to be like that. But there's not a lot of people that have that kind of guerrilla entrepreneurial instinct that it takes to really succeed on Amazon as a third party seller. And I think that's a key point there. And I think it's a major opportunity. And the good thing is you're probably getting terms from some of these guys. So you're not having to, you know, unlike a private label, you're not having to come out of your pocket for everything. And you're getting credits for anything that's bad, you know, returns and that kind of thing. It's actually, it frees up a bunch of cash flow and lets you focus on what you do best. The margins might be lower. What's a tip? I mean, I know like in wholesale, in private label, people always shoot for a 20 to 30% margin. They say if you can hit 20%, you're doing good. If you can hit 30% or higher, then you're doing really good. But in wholesale, most people are working on a 10% or less margin. Is that what your experience is? Speaker 2: Kevin, is that net you're talking or gross? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's net. Speaker 2: Okay, yeah. So with us, we're happy at 10. Okay. So 10% net. So it's a complete volume game. We've always been profitable from day one. So we do it right and I'm super happy for that. But I mean, if you look at like Scott Needham with Buyboxer, His vision was to do what we're doing. I don't know if you guys know Scott Neum, but he was one of the big players in the wholesale space for a long time. He lost money a lot of years. He made a couple points and scaled the thing. But he was doing like 50 million a year and making like a million dollars or something. So it wasn't good. So it's so important if you're going to have a model like what we have is Making sure that you're cutting costs as much as you can, making sure that you can do it efficiently. It's not rocket science. It's not like we have a lot of secret sauce. It's more just like we're doing everything and focusing on everything, every little thing to cut back expenses so that we can make a slim margin of 10% net, which last year was a lot lower because we were obviously investing and everything. So yeah, it's a hard model, but for me, it's not going to work unless I can do $100 million in a couple years, and that's kind of the goal. So if I can do $100 million and have a 10% net, we'll see if that happens, then yeah, it's worth it. But if not, and you're good at private label and you're making this 20%, 30% margins and then you can exit because you have equity. I mean, that's a great model. I think the guys that do the private label is great. It's just, it's really hard to scale a private label to 100 million in just a couple of years. So the nice part about My model is I'm leveraging the brand and their equity and what they've done, and I'm just doing the Amazon part, so I don't have to do all the branding and all that stuff. I'm leveraging that. It's already there, and I'm just making, I'm cash flowing, right? But with private label, you have to do both, and you're trying to scale it, so it's really hard. That's kind of like the difference, how I see it with models. Speaker 1: I would say what you're doing requires a lot of operational excellence. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: And what you're doing, like you just said, that's a good point. There's nothing wrong with either model. There's so many different ways to make money on Amazon. But what you're doing is, you just said it, is cash flow. You've got to get to $100 million in sales so that you can hopefully take some chips off the table versus if On private label, I don't need to get to 100 million in sales. I can get to 5 million in sales with a 20 or 30% margin, then take that and actually sell it for a 2 to 5X depending, you know, right now it's a little difficult, but that's going to come back, but a 2 to 5X and I can take more money off the table. I'm building an asset. So private label, you're building an asset. You're building cash flow. And so that's the big difference between the two. And it's going to be more difficult for you to sell your company if you decide I'm done with this and you're like, I want out. It's going to be much more difficult for you to sell than it would be a private label person who's also doing well. So there's advantages and disadvantages to both sides, but you can operate yours. Uh, with, with a lower investment and you can, you can use that cashflow to build it, build it, build it. But you also look at like the, the company, I'm forgetting their name right now. It's one of the biggest on Amazon was basically doing, doing what you're doing in Brooklyn. Uh, and yeah, pharma packs and they just, they got in over their head and just, and they tried to raise money and they yanked the financing from them. They tried to sell, nobody wanted it. That's the risk too. And you know, you could always, your biggest brand that you're selling right now, there's probably, you probably have, you know, out of those thousand SKUs, there's probably, I don't know how many brands it is, but there's probably a handful of those of your companies that you work with that are generating most of the cash. And if, if one or two of those says, Hey, we're going to take this over internally, we don't need you anymore or what have you, you're, you got scramble as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why we don't enter into anything without a multi-year contract. Yeah, so the cool thing about my model is it's very sticky because it is really hard for these big brands to replicate what we're doing quickly. They can't just switch to another agency quickly and easily. So when we sign a contract, it's a marriage. We're expecting minimum of two years when we get into a relationship with these brands. So it's very long-term game. So that's what makes it better than an agency and also the margins are a little higher than a lot of agencies but obviously we have inventory and stuff so there's more risk but it's also a lot more scalable than an agency in my opinion and also less competition in my model because it's so much work. Speaker 1: Now, are you carrying this inventory or are you having them ship it directly to Amazon, the people that you work with, say, hey, ship, can you? Speaker 2: Depends on the partner, but we do both. Yeah. I mean, it all comes down to the numbers. With mine, it's business. You've got to watch the numbers so closely. But like I said, I'm really playing the long game. I really think this is the future of established brands. I feel like established brands are really going to go I don't think there's a lot in the space. I mean right now you have just a couple and even less that are doing it well. So my goal is, because I'm young, is I want to build a good cash flow asset that I can cash flow for 30 years. You know, that I can build and say, hey, this is a hundred million dollar plus company that's that's cash flowing for 30 years. And it's just it's working. And then after getting to that point, I built a machine that I should be able to learn from all these giant established brands that I could probably produce and do private label way better than anyone else. Speaker 1: I was going to ask you that. You're getting a lot of data now. Are you seeing opportunities? Man, this one thing right here is crushing it. I could just go private label this and sell it myself. Or you could go to that company and say, hey, you should do this. Speaker 2: We're doing both of those things and that's definitely the future. My goal is to build this core machine cash flow thing that I'm not going to sell, but hey, it'll just be a flywheel effect like you said. Build private labels, help, you know, it's just a whole, it's a whole flywheel. That's the ultimate plan. Speaker 1: But now you've gotten to the point where you've had to kind of pivot in what you're doing because you've grown to eight figures. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: And like you said, you hired a bunch of people. I don't know if those are local people or if those are people all over the world. But now you're having to become more of like a general, you know, a CEO or whatever, and less of a guy who's down in the weeds. And how's that pivot been for you? Speaker 2: Great question. That is a huge pivot and most people can't do it. I know a lot of small business owners that have been small business owners for 20 years and they They just, they can't make the transition and so I'm super, super glad that it's been going. I feel like, you should probably ask my employees, not me, but I feel like it's been, it's going well. So realizing, I think one of my, having good mentors is very key and I could go into a whole session on how to find good mentors, but just connect and talk to successful business people. One of the biggest things they said is that at the point where I'm at and what I'm trying to do is it's not about me anymore. It's about my team because I'm just a small part of my company now. Telling everybody like this is the vision. This is where we're going. My team is doing the execution and it's all about them. So like when I'm having that transition of when I'm in a meeting or when I'm doing things, you know, not just saying it's all about me. Hey, I have the best idea. I'm the king or whatever. It's about how can I help my team? How can I lift up my team? How can I genuinely care about my employees' goals and how can they align with the company's goals? That is the key. If you can get that, then you're going to be extremely successful at anything in life if you give more than you get. And the more you give, the more you will get. Speaker 1: I think that's important that the employees know they don't need to be experts or know every little thing about how the business runs, but they need to know like the basic stuff. It's just like DoorDash, you know, the delivery company. I think they have a requirement that every executive spend one day delivering. One day a month they have to go out and actually get in their car and deliver food and stuff to people, just like their employees, just so they can understand and they can see how the process works and it makes them better managers. Do you ever get any Any pushback since you're young? You know, you hired, like you said, your CEO's 56 or people are like, oh, you're just some young kid. You don't know what you're doing or do you get a lot of respect because of your experience and because of how you're doing things or has that been a struggle at any time for you? Speaker 2: That's a good question because I'm very self-conscious. Not only do I am young and I am dumb, but I look young. So that was probably another reason why I didn't get out and network a lot because Definitely people would dismiss you initially, but it has been great. If I can get a conversation going, I get two different types. I get the type of people that have tremendous respect and say, wow, that's amazing. I wish I was doing that at your age. And then I get the people that are just, I don't know if it's jealousy or whatever, but they just, they completely dismiss you. Speaker 1: What are you doing now? I mean you went through that pain of having your Amazon account shut down for eight months Yeah, and now that you go on this big business What are you doing to protect yourself as the best you can to keep that from happening again? Speaker 2: number one guys make sure they have solid invoices from the manufacturing distributors a Make sure you are responding to all your account health stuff. I mean all the basics guys. I mean Amazon You know they will send you emails. Respond. I've literally had stuff shut down for days and did a deep dive on it and all it was is Amazon sent us an email and we had to reply yes and we forgot to reply yes because somebody missed the email. I mean it's literally stuff like that that it's just the devil's in the details like it's all about the details. This business is just one little you click the wrong button or whatever it is and it's it's all about the details so make sure You know, you're paying attention to all those things and trying to create SOPs around those things and that's what I've been doing. Speaker 1: Awesome. So what's next? You said you want to grow to a hundred million. How long do you think it's going to take you to get there? What's your plan for that? Speaker 2: We're projecting, I mean, you know, you never know. I mean, we're projecting 2025. We'll finish off with a hundred million. So that's what we're thinking. Speaker 1: How many additional clients is that that you're going to have to add to get to that or is that just growing your existing base? Speaker 2: No, it's additional clients for sure. Our average client size right now is around $2 million on Amazon. We're trying to grow that average client number. We're trying to push up. We're not accepting small clients anymore. We're pushing that up. But if we keep that, obviously, you're going to need around 50 to do that, I'm saying average new clients, not existing, but average new clients, to be able to, 50 in total by 2025. And so it really doesn't take a lot of clients, but they're deep relationships though. So it is tough to sell what we do. Like it is a tough sale. And our sales cycle takes, you know, on average 90 days. So it's work. For sure. Speaker 1: So for someone to do 2 million on Amazon, for one of your clients to be able to do 2 million in sales on Amazon, what do they typically need to be doing off of Amazon in their current channels? So you're only going to businesses that are doing 5 million plus already or is it somewhat, or is there kind of a yardstick number there that you look at? Speaker 2: It depends on the category. I mean, Kevin, I mean, if somebody sells a very, a grocery product, I mean, you know, grocery online, Amazon, you know, traditional FBA is probably what, 2% of their sales, 5% of the sales. It's very low. Where, you know, something like in the electronics category, it could be, you know, 80% of their revenue. So it's very category. It depends on the category. But I would say on average that We should be able to at least, at least do 50% on Amazon of whatever they're doing everywhere else. Speaker 1: I've always wondered why someone hasn't focused on Shark Tank. You watch Shark Tank? Why someone hasn't actually focused on the guys and gals that go on Shark Tank that have their little product innovations and sometimes you'll hear them say, oh, we're selling on Amazon, but it's like a joke or they're not selling on Amazon. They don't know what they're doing. I've always wondered why someone doesn't just say, hey, we're going to take Shark Tank products and that's what our specialty is going to be and blow those things up and actually show them how to do it right. I think there's a huge opportunity there. Speaker 2: I've thought about it, obviously. That's been going through my head for a long time. I would say the biggest reason is because Shark Tank products aren't always great. If you look at the data, they always get an initial bump when the Shark Tank episode airs. But then after that, if it's a bad product, it's just a huge lull. Then the episode airs again. Then you get this bump. Then it's just like this lull and this bump, lull and this bump. Speaker 1: A lot of that's because they don't know how to take advantage of that bump. They're just sitting back waiting for those bumps to happen and they don't know how to take advantage of that for ranking purposes and optimization purposes and all that kind of stuff. That's where I think there could be a huge opportunity. Speaker 2: That's true. Still, if it's a bad product though, I'm not going to buy it. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. If bad product's bad product, there's no point. Are any of your clients, you don't have to name any names, but well-known brands, the Nestle's of the world or those type of things? Or are you all more just smaller operation stuff? Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of them are smaller right now. I mean, we're moving up the ladder, especially this year. We're talking to more and more bigger household brands. One of the most recent ones we just got was a company called Pure Lean Cookies, and they're these rolled wafer cookies in these tins, and they do about $50 million a year in retail. And they're a very well-known brand. It's one of those brands that everybody's like, oh, who are they? But then they look at it, and they're like, oh, I know what that is. I have those. I've been eating those for 50 years. But yeah, you can just look them up, like rolled wafer Pure Lean Cookies, and they pretty much dominate. They dominate. They're the leader in that market for sure. Speaker 1: One of the things you could always do, too, with these bigger brands or anybody, if they've already been selling on Amazon, like if you approach somebody and you're like, hey, we'll take it over, and they've been selling on Amazon, whether they're a big brand or someone smaller, you could always sweeten the pot. I don't know if you do reimbursements. You have someone like Getida or Seller Investigators or someone like that that will actually go into the account, because most of these guys have never done that. And sometimes there can be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions of dollars just sitting there. And if you went in as part of your sales pitch to a Nestle or someone like that and said, hey, let us take over your brand. But before we do anything, we have an idea where we want to get you. It's usually about 3%. So if they say, yeah, we're doing We're already doing $5 million a year on Amazon or whatever. You could go in there to them and say, well, let me, 3% of $5 million would be, what, $150,000? You could go into them and say, hey, and some of these guys have never done it before. It's more than 3%. Let me just, I just want to give you a gift. I don't know what it's going to be. I just want to give you a gift to show you that we know what we're doing. You don't have to tell me anything else. Just give me access to this and two months from now, we're going to send you a check for, you can't promise an amount, but we're going to send you a check for whatever and you send them a check for a hundred grand. They're going to be like, holy cow, this guy, where'd this come from? How do you do this? And you're like, that's what we do. You know, you could probably win a bunch of clients with some sort of cool, clever marketing like that. Speaker 2: I don't know. Speaker 1: It's just an idea. It just came to my head. Speaker 2: Kevin, I got to ask, can you do that for Vendor Central? Because most of our clients use Seller Central. Can you do that for me? Speaker 1: The bigger money is in Vendor Central. Some of the reimbursement companies actually can do Vendor Central. I know there's a couple of them that can actually do Vendor Central where there's huge money. I've heard stories where someone got like $10 million back or something. It was a crazy, crazy, crazy number. They were just thrilled to death. Speaker 2: I'm totally in. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I didn't even think about this because most of my clients are vendors, so that's awesome. Speaker 1: But vendors still, there's still money there too. I mean, you should be doing it for all, if you're not doing it for all your thousand SKUs right now, you should be. Speaker 2: I'm doing it for my, on Seller Central. Yeah, we do it. Dude, we've tried all of them, but Getida, Seller, Sniper, whatever. But, but yeah, but you know, and ourselves, we have our own SM. But, but yeah, you're right. I mean, if I never, never thought of that. Kevin, if this is the only thing I got from the podcast. I'm going to go do all my clients' vendor centrals. Speaker 1: Yeah, and the rest of you listening, if you're not using a company, there's several of them out there. You can take your choice, but if you're not using a company to check for weights and dimensions errors, for lost inventory, for people who ask for a refund and never send the thing back, but Amazon took the money from you, it can add up to serious, serious cash. It's something that you definitely need to be taking a look at. Speaker 2: Yeah, I have look but I think we're pocketing like what maybe like 10 grand a month or more right now just from Gatita and all those guys. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's found money. It's like, especially on someone that's never done it before. I remember I was at ASGTG a few years ago speaking and I mentioned something I think about Gatita and told some, and there's a guy in the audience that they were a big, big seller. And I remember the next year I saw them at the event and they came up to me and they said, thanks for that tip. We got $1.3 million back. Speaker 2: Oh my goodness. Speaker 1: And I was like, that's awesome. That's really awesome. Speaker 2: Kevin's like, hey, you want to give me 1%? Speaker 1: I didn't get anything off it. I wasn't an affiliate or anything. I was just publicizing what I believe in. That was it. It's been awesome speaking with you, Isaiah. This has been great. I'm sure, like you said, we could sit here and talk for a long time. If people want to know more about your company or maybe there's a brand listening and they want to reach out and have you help them, how would they find you on the interwebs? Speaker 2: Yeah, so just onlinesellingpartner.com and LinkedIn. If you want to connect with me personally, LinkedIn, Isaiah Fritz and I come right up and yeah, that's the way. Speaker 1: Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate your time and I look forward to seeing you hit that $100 million sooner than later. Speaker 2: All right, Kevin. I appreciate that. Speaker 1: There's so many different ways you can make money selling on Amazon as Isaiah just showed you and it doesn't matter your age. He started learning e-commerce at the age of 10, started selling on Amazon at 15, ran into some issues. And now he's crushing it. So no matter what you do, Amazon is still one of the best opportunities that's ever existed in business and to be able to leverage their platform and their technology and their distribution and their audience is something that's just not heard of in the last hundred years. So hopefully you found a way to maximize what you're doing and can figure out a way to make some money on Amazon. And speaking of making money, if you're looking for some additional tips, some next level strategies, some things that we don't discuss on podcasts like this or in any other trainings, you want to check out the upcoming Billion Dollar Seller Summit. There's a virtual one happening in just a few weeks, February 22nd. And 23rd online and go to BillionDollarSellerSummit.com to check that out. Hopefully you can join us. It's a live virtual event. It's not pre-recorded. You can do it from anywhere in the world. So check that out to February 22nd and 23rd. And today's little nugget is something that Isaiah actually touched on. The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. We'll see you again next week.