Excelling on Amazon in 2021 with Kevin King, Ep #88

Excelling on Amazon in 2021 with Kevin King, Ep #88 00:00:01 All right. So it's exciting that we're heading into a new year as I record this, that usually we think of new opportunities and new things to think about. How do we grow our business? Where do we go from here? So to think about what's working on Amazon and what we can do in 2021 and beyond, I'm excited to have serial entrepreneur, Kevin King. So Kevin, thanks for coming on. Hey, I'm glad to be here, Kevin. I'm not going to mess up your name. All I got to do is just say, 'Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.' Right, exactly, exactly. Who's speaking? Kevin's speaking. Right, no matter what, it's going to be Kevin. That's right. That's awesome, man. Yeah, I think you're the first other Kevin, other than myself, on this show. 00:00:47 That's because we're pretty rare. People like us, you don't find too many Kevins out there because they're hard to come by. No, no, but there was an article in The Onion, for those who are familiar with Onion. com. It was a few years ago that the U. S. still led in the Kevin proportion. Sounds like something The Onion would write an article about, something so random. But yeah, so I'm excited to get into this conversation. Can you help people understand just a little bit more of your background in the whole e-commerce world? Sure. I've been doing e-commerce for about 25 years, back before there was even a Google. I remember when Google first came onto the scene, back when it was AltaVista and Yahoo and several others back in the day. 00:01:36 Started doing some e-commerce back then, and that evolved over time. I've been running e-commerce stores since around the late 90s, somewhere in 96, 97, somewhere in there. I have a big background in direct marketing, so the traditional snail mail you know, junk mail or whatever people might want to call it that still actually works today. People think it doesn't, but it still actually is very effective today. Uh, I got into Amazon space around the year 2000, selling as a third-party vendor under a program called Advantage, which is uh was meant for books and DVDs and that kind of thing. Uh, where you'd send basically in on consignment. Did that for a number of years, and then uh, I have some businesses off Amazon as well. 00:02:19 But then in 2015, I was like, man, I just need to pivot here. And I was kind of coasting off some other businesses I had that were off Amazon. And they kind of started to wind down a little bit. So I got to find something else to do. And I saw a course on Amazon FBA. I think it was amazing.com actually. That was running one of their, it's like an ASL three or four was running their big sales. you know their four-part webinar series they pay five thousand dollars at the end or whatever it was i watched that and i was like i don't need their stupid course uh it's not a 00:02:53 stupid course i mean they have a good course i didn't mean it that way but i don't need their i don't need to pay five thousand dollars for the course i know all this i've been bringing stuff in from china and creating products i've been doing e-commerce this looks like a good opportunity so stuck my head into it and put some money in and launched five brands in 2015 may of 2015 and then that just evolved into uh today where I have four different Amazon, five different Amazon accounts that I either own or I'm partners in with different brands. I actually, I own a piece of all those accounts, but I have different partners. Some are mine, some I have a different partner on. And then I also do training with Freedom Ticket. 00:03:33 I've partnered up with Helium 10. I'm not part of Helium 10, but I partnered with them to actually do the Freedom Ticket course, which is a course for new people. And then I have the Helium 10 Elite which you recently came on, thank you for that, and uh knocked it out of the park with a great presentation about expanding internationally, and uh that's more of a monthly training for more advanced sellers. I do the Billion Dollar Seller Summits, what's twice a year before the pandemic, it's a like a five thousand dollar ticket event for high-level sellers in Amazon, and uh in Austin, about 70-80 people uh each, each one of those. Also uh do a Product Savants with Steve Simonson where it's a We help people source and find and source products to sell on Amazon. 00:04:16 And I got a couple offline Amazon businesses in the calendar space and some other seasonal stuff. So as you know from today, I had to push this back for a couple of times. I'm pretty busy, yeah. I mean, I'm kind of worn out just hearing all of that. So how do you keep up with all that? I don't sometimes. Sometimes something has to, I mean, luckily some of it is seasonal. So you're like a billion-dollar seller, some it's twice a year. And I have someone that organizes all that for me. So I just line up the speakers and set the agenda and I host it. And then he does, takes care of everything else. So luckily I've got a good person that runs that for me. 00:04:51 So it doesn't take a whole lot of my time. And then like on the calendar business, that's seasonal. So it's only for like three or four months of the year where that really ramps up. So then it basically goes away. So I kind of juggle them, but it's getting to the point where it's, yeah, I'm getting maxed out. I don't have any BAs, any employees. I just partner with people. I mean, that's one of the reasons I did Helium, you know, partnered. People say, why did you partner with Helium Tim on your freedom ticket course? You could have just gone out there and sold that for a thousand bucks a pop or whatever, but they have the audience, you know, they're already out there bringing in tons of people and I could go out and do it myself. 00:05:29 Keep all the money, uh, you know, less the ad spend or whatever it took me to generate, but then I gotta deal with all the customer service, I gotta deal with all the people's passwords not working, whatever it is, I don't have to mess with any of that so I just show up and do my thing and so it's a could I make more money doing it somewhere else doing it on my own possibly but I just work smart on instead of trying to work harder I just work smarter and that way I can leverage you know, if you know when Amazon people are freaking out earlier this year with Amazon not being able to ship into Amazon, you know, critical goods like in April and May. 00:06:02 And it's like, yeah, it's no big deal. I've got other sources of revenue. I'll just roll with it. You know, so I'm not; I guess you could say I don't have all my eggs in one basket. Instead of taking my product on Amazon and diversifying to Walmart and all these other places people say to do, which is, I'm not saying that's bad. Instead of doing that, I'm diversifying to other businesses so that if one goes still around the same core. Selling on Amazon, but if one goes down or something happens, then another one picks up the slack, okay interesting so in the 25 years because you know I've talked to very few people that when they start talking about um selling e-commerce that the year didn't start with like a one, you know the years it started with a nine so you were in the 90s uh doing this so you've probably learned quite a bit along the way so it was kind of picking up the strategic partnerships, I guess would be the phrase. 00:06:55 Is that something you kind of picked up along the way by hook or by crook or trial and error? It kind of came that way, yeah. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, me and another guy, we did basically one or two things. I wasn't doing this many different things back then. And I was working my ass off and making a decent money. It was always just if something went down, I'd be screwed. And so different opportunities now have presented themselves. And I just decide, I cherry pick which one makes sense. And I have to turn down a lot, unfortunately, just because of my time. But it's part of what's putting me in the position to be able to do some of that. 00:07:40 In 2016, I mean I owe something to Manny Coates who started heating up town because in 2016, I was just having my head down; I was just selling on Amazon. I had my calendar a couple other things but I wasn't doing any of this training any of this extra conventions or extra stuff and I didn't really want to; I just wanted to sell products that's what I knew. But he, I posted something on one of his Facebook groups, I think it was called FBA High Rollers at the time, and I posted People were commenting about different things, and I posted my thoughts. I think I called somebody out and said, 'You're a freaking moron. You don't know what you're talking about. 00:08:12 You're saying this, and everybody's believing you, and be careful what you believe.' I said it nicely but it was basically like, 'You're full of shit.' Someone was saying this is the way it works. And Manny liked whatever I said, and so he called me up and said, 'Hey, would you come on my podcast?' I'm like, 'No, dude, I'm not going on a podcast.' He said, 'no', just come on the podcast. This was like. Spring of 2016, I think, and so he convinced me to do it, and I did it; really bad audio, I didn't even have a microphone, I think I'm sitting in my garage on my phone, so it sounds like I'm in a tin can, it's just horrible audio, but it turned out that it still is on that AM/PM podcast, I think it's like the one of the top two or three most listened to ever; uh, still to this day. 00:08:55 And from there, people other people heard me, other podcasters heard me, and that just led to speaking so... I spent about a year before I started some of these brands, I spent about a year traveling to all Amazon conferences, making creating my network, um, meeting all the different sellers and stuff all over the world; from Israel to Prague to you name it, uh, Hong Kong, China. Actually, I spoke to an audience of 15,000 Chinese in China so I was speaking about Amazon FBA. I did that for about a year. I got to the point where I could actually charge to show up. People would pay me five figures to show up at their conference and speak. And so I did that, but that built the audience. 00:09:32 And so then I was able to leverage that into the trainings and the other things. So some of it's very deliberate. And then I want to get back to my, so I was only running a couple of Amazon businesses at the time. They're kind of on autopilot. one of them was not paying much attention to it it was kind of going down and i was like i had some people approach me and say hey we've got some we got seven figures one best you know you know what you're doing let's do this and so we started some new companies um and with the the goal to exit i think if any amazon seller right now if they're not 00:10:08 looking at if they're an fba a prime a private label i mean this is different for wholesale or arbitrage but if you're a private label seller and you're not looking to exit i think you're making a mistake because that's where the money is and i made some fundamental mistakes in a business that i started in 2015 but it set them up right didn't have the right counting kind of let one of them kind of go a little bit so now we're starting from scratch and we're doing it right from day one to sell these three or four years ago because i've seen what some of my friends are doing where they're They may be making $200 ,000, $300 ,000 a year on paper in profit. 00:10:40 They're not putting that much. Some of them aren't putting that much in their pocket necessarily. Some are putting a lot more. But when they sell it, they sell it for $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, whatever. They put most of that in their pocket right then, and then they start to do it again. And the leverage that you can get in this business, it's crazy. I remember before there was anybody really buying Amazon businesses, there was a company called 101 Commerce, and he's the guy. I think he was the second person to actually do this. There was someone out of Chicago that started. A year before him, and they failed; he has since failed, but he kind of led the way. 00:11:11 This was two three years ago, and buying Amazon businesses; and now there's a whole industry that's cropped up with companies and big Wall Street firms that are coming in and just buying these businesses up. Uh, some of them are trying to get good deals and screwing some entrepreneurs, others are fair deals and people, it's changing people's lives. That's one of my goals now. What we're doing is to help anybody going into 2021; if you're not doing it already and you're doing over half a million dollars a year in sales, you need to start thinking about how can I sell this? And if you like doing this business, start over and do it again. But now you're going to be in a much better position than you were originally. 00:11:55 Take some chips off the table. Okay, interesting. So what are you doing differently this time around that you didn't do in, let's say, 15? The biggest thing is the accounting, the way the entire structure is set up, the way every decision is made. Because every decision, if we get to the multiples that we want, we want to hopefully get to about a 5 to 7x multiple. Wow, that's a pretty big multiple. We're looking to have an eight-figure gross sales, an eight-figure exit. So 10 plus million exit, if we do this right. So in doing that, every little thing you do, if you spend, If you're spending $300 a month on some fancy software package and you're hardly even using it, that's $3,600 a year. 00:12:42 That's at a 7x multiple, that's a $20,000, $30,000 difference in what you're going to get paid. And you multiply that over, you know, there's lots of little things like that, but I can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The structure, the accounting, the SOPs, the way everything's accounted for very precisely. So there's no questions, you know, top-notch accounting. Building actual brands. So one of our, both of our products have true brands. One of them, we were able to get a partnership with one of the top surfing companies in the world and doing some of their product stuff where they're going to have their influencers. It's a big brand, but they wanted us to have the dog license for all their dog products. 00:13:24 So they'll introduce us into Nordstrom's and there we got Shelf Space, you know, Nordstrom's and Macy's and all these top retailers. It's a high-end dog, high-end surfing company. And they have influencers, athletes, Olympic athletes and stuff that have three, four million Instagram followers. So as soon as our first products are coming out in the spring on this new company, as soon as those come out, some of them will promote it. That's an instant credibility. It's an instant audience for launching a product. When someone comes to buy it, we have the exclusives on that brand. If that takes off, that's worth something. It's almost like an IP asset that we have. So there are those kinds of things that we're doing. I mean, there's a laundry list of them, but those are just a few examples. 00:14:05 Okay. So what might you suggest if someone was, let's say they're at that 500,000 mark and they're like, well, you know, I probably could have set this up differently in the background, but I'm kind of like in the middle. I'm in the thick of it. I'm in the weeds. So what would you recommend they might do to have more of that mindset of an exit, whether two, three years or whatever down the road? Probably the best thing someone like that could do is start thinking towards that you can make this; you can pivot and make some changes, but talk to someone, I mean, like, like the guys at QuietLight Brokerage for example, they'll 00:14:38 talk to you for free, yeah, they're great if you call them up and uh, even if you're not playing the cell right now, uh, they'll spend a little bit of time with you and you can explain your situation, and then they'll say, oh, well, if you here's so, you know, here's 10 pointers you need to think about and start moving towards; let's get your accounting and get this and get that. So, that's what I would be doing and find out what you need to do and what you can do and the steps you need to take to not take you a year or something to get it or more to get everything cleaned up and turn around. But especially if you're growing, you need to take care of that right away. 00:15:13 If you're just kind of stagnating at $500,000, you might not be able to sell it. I mean, most buyers don't want to see an upward trend. So that's where I would start is with someone like them. Okay. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. I've had Joe Valley on the show here before and Walker Dybel, both great guys. Pretty much everybody over there, you know, like you said, they're not high-pressure at all. Like they, like they are the epitome of long-term focus. Like I really kind of look to them as like the guys that like really are thinking of like, you know, They're planting mustard seeds type of things that will grow years from now. So they're really all about the relationship and that if it works out because they gave you good advice, then you'll come to them. 00:15:57 If you don't even want to talk to them, I think they have a pretty detailed blog post about everything. It's like pages and pages of stuff you can read about what happens when you sell a company and what questions they're going to be asking and all that kind of stuff. Maybe, back to your point of if you're at that half a million, you're thinking about pivoting here to do that, read that. That'll give you some insight as well. It's a good education. Okay, good deal. Now, one thing you mentioned is what they've said before is buyers are looking for an upward trajectory. And I know for lots of different folks, maybe this was a really good year in 2020 because, you know, all of a sudden people are buying masks or whatever the case is, but maybe some of the trends they were on are maybe now starting to go down or they were, you know, let's say their products. 00:16:46 Was hit hard by COVID, the travel industry or something yeah, travel industry like that's a great example. So, for a myriad of reasons, maybe they're trying to get more into back into a growth trajectory or they're on a growth trajectory and they want a bigger growth trajectory. What are some of the things you would say would be the most effective things that you're seeing throughout your um businesses travel stuff? I would say if there's a lot of products out there, it's not just travel; there's a lot of products you can either repackage them for another need so just like a a water bottle, for example. Let's say you're selling water bottles and they just quit selling, but your water bottle has some sort of cool, unique shape or cool lid. 00:17:24 You could pivot that water bottle and just with some different marketing, different lighting, maybe a slight little graphical change, pivot that into a baby nursing bottle, a warming bottle that keeps bottle, you know, keeps baby's milk warm. Or something like that, you could pivot sometimes, you or if you're in the traveling disease some of your products you could pivot into school school supplies or office supplies or something like that, you're selling backpacks and that kind of thing so if there's that opportunity that's one thing I would look at. Um, another is I think there's going to be a Covid pass so if you're in the travel business, you know, you took a big hit um because of Covid or things changing Amazon as long as when things start getting back to normal, you're able to kind of recover, there I think from a selling point of view, you'll get a little, you'll get a bit of a Covid pass on that for the buyer's point of view, as long as you can recover. 00:18:11 But a lot of people probably won't recover or they may not be able to sustain that long and they have to pivot into something else. Okay, gotcha. So for those who are already on the upward trajectory, let's say, you know, they're going gangbusters and they want to go even more gangbusters. What are you seeing as those most effective levers to pull? That you're recommending to folks for 20**1**? Probably one of the best. If you're advertising, if you're already doing gangbusters and your advertising is profitable, increase your advertising. I mean, if you're at a point where your tacos or you've gotten it down to 10% or under, I would be doubling down on advertising. I would be doing everything I could because that's going to increase your sales, increase your volume, increase your, in theory, should increase your profits, and increase your multiple. 00:18:59 So that's probably the first place. if you're already crushing it that i would take a look at this um going off of amazon could be another one if you're already crushing it if you're not already off amazon but the problem with that is that it depends on your buyer some buyers put a value on that some people say if it's over 30 of your business is off amazon and there's some sort of extra value to that other buyers that are out there don't don't give a rat's tail about uh whether you're off amazon or not so you could you can If you have a great opportunity, you might want to take it, but to go and say, hey, all right, we've done Amazon. Let's go and start a Shopify site. 00:19:35 The effort and energy and money it's going to take in most cases, it's not always the case, but in most cases to grow that to some sort of reasonable level is a lot of energy and a lot of money. It may not be worth it. When you're selling, it actually could penalize you because of the expenses it's going to take for Facebook ads, for setup, for everything. So I don't always advise that. I would rather see you expand internationally. The first thing you should do is if you are crushing on Amazon and you're not in Canada, it's just like what you preach. Get your butt in Canada. Add 5% to 10% right there. You already know the systems. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. 00:20:15 And then expand to Germany or UK or Japan or somewhere where it makes sense for your product line, where I would put the energy a lot more than I would the energy of, of starting a Shopify site or something. Yeah. I mean, you need a Shopify site. You need it for legitimacy. People are going to go there. I'm not saying don't do that, but to put a lot of energy into it. I mean, I have one brand now that, you know, we sell five figures a day on Amazon, on this brand, all those same products at the same price. Sometimes, you know, a better price or on our website, you know, instead of five figures a day there, we sell. 00:20:52 You know maybe 100 bucks a day; um, it's just, but it's there; I know people go to it; people are looking at it, but they're not buying; they're they're going there to see if we're for real or to get some additional information about the product or something, but they're buying on Amazon. Yeah, I totally agree; it's one of those things once you've developed the Amazon skill set, it's not the same where you just say, 'Oh, okay, I take you know keywords and I turn on Facebook ads'; Facebook operates very differently. Or even if you say, well, Google, it's search-based, so maybe the ads are going to be similar, but then you realize it's really not. I mean, a perfect example of that is launching a product. 00:21:30 Let's say you're launching a brand new product. You have a Shopify site and you have an Amazon. If you launch it on Shopify, you're going to have to run Facebook ads or Google ads if you don't have a huge list already. In most cases, you're going to have to run ads. Those ads most likely are not going to be profitable at first. um or if they are profitable they just may be not generating enough volume for you so in that case those ads are um you you gotta really make sure your ads are profitable because the long-term gain that's the guy comes and he buys unless you have a uh you know you're selling supplements or something they're going to be buying every month from you they buy once and they're done and it's done you no good you lost money on that sale what what good has that done you in the end 00:22:16 Versus the flip side is on Amazon, if you do the same thing, you go heavy on PPC or you do rebates or maybe it's even Facebook ads or Google ads to your Amazon listing, you take a loss because of your ad cost or maybe you've lowered your price on those first few sales. Yeah, you've lost some money there just like you did on Shopify, but the difference is on Amazon now. Those sales that you just made off of Google or Facebook didn't change your ranking or the algorithm too much on those two platforms. It'll change it some because both of those will look at like if there's conversions and whatever, but it doesn't change it to the extent that it does on Amazon. 00:22:53 Amazon, those first 100 sales that you took at a loss or maybe 1,000, whatever the number is, now have actually moved you up the rankings and the organic rankings on Amazon to where now. A lot of people hopefully are coming to buy your products that you didn't have to spend any advertising for. And you can leverage the infrastructure of Amazon. I mean, what they just say they spent $10 billion in this last year on COVID-related and infrastructure-related stuff. I think they just announced that today. And they said, hey, lucky for you, we're not going to raise your prices to cover that. We're going to cover part of that for you. Don't worry, they'll raise the prices. They'll make it up. They're just pushing the can down the road. 00:23:36 They'll get it one way or the other. But that infrastructure and the leverage that is just insane. I mean, just to leverage the FBA. I mean, unless you're selling jewelry or something, you know, very small little lightweights, you know, stencils or something, you can't beat FBA prices to ship it out. I mean, if you can drop in a little first-class envelope and mail it for a dollar and a half or something, you know, you can beat FBA. But for most products, FBA just rules. And the audience, the eyeballs, especially now with COVID, more and more eyeballs are going to Amazon. And it's the third-biggest search engine out there. It may become the second next year. And that's where people go first to shop. So basically, if you're not on Amazon, to a lot of people, you don't exist. 00:24:26 is leverage that and double down there figure out like you said if if you're not a master at amazon figure out what you don't know especially on the ad side the amazon post there's all amazon keeps introducing all these little tools some of them are a waste of time uh but some of them you know they can all add up a little here a little there all adds up to to something great and can blow you up and then you can leverage amazon too you know if you do want to expand off you're successful on amazon have a lot of reviews there's retailers that look at amazon you know big retail chains like we 00:24:57 need a we want to diversify our toy line or whatever what's the Hot selling thing on Amazon, they see maybe it's your product and they're like, 'Hey, this is a pretty cool you know jigsaw puzzle somebody or board game that somebody invented; we should put that in our stores, you know.' Look at all the reviews, they're positive; we'll take it as long as you know. And there's other retailers that look at Amazon. I remember I was at the pet show in Las Vegas a couple of years ago and I was trying to, I had some dog bowls that I created that were slow feed dog bowls that were really cool looking. I was trying to find distributors and stuff for it. 00:25:30 And one of the first things that everybody's mouth at that show was, 'Do you sell this on Amazon?' So yeah, it's sold on Amazon, not interested. Because some of them, a lot of these dealing with mom and pop shops, they see Amazon as major competition because people are coming into the shops using it as a showroom and then just buying it on Amazon cheaper. Or their credit card was already stored on Amazon or whatever. It's just easier. So a lot of them didn't like it. So there's a flip side there too. But I think more and more, this was a few years ago, I think more and more people now are realizing that Amazon's here to stay; it's not going to change. 00:26:05 And sometimes maybe people do want to touch it or buy it out of the store. So there's plenty of opportunity there. Yeah, I mean, you said a lot there that we can unpack, but I agree with you that, you know, just the general mindset of I think a lot of kind of more traditional brick and mortar retailers has always kind of been Amazon is their competition, whereas they were never really looking at it. I think what Amazon truly is was Amazon was just the mall or, you know, whatever the shopping center space is, really. It's just a virtual version of that in an essence. That you know instead of us paying rent to Simon Malls, we're paying commission based on each unit we sell to Amazon, which really isn't that different; and so like I've sometimes we'll go to local networking events like here in the where I live in Florida, and I'm amazed when I still tell retailers like well if you already have you know these relationships with suppliers. 00:27:08 And as long as it's not against your contract, you should be selling these products on Amazon too. But it's almost like they're just disgusted by the idea of giving money to Amazon. Like, no, it's you're, you're just offering it there. Well, that's part of it. They could share the buy box, you know, the buy box rotation, but some of their, so it depends on who they're buying from. Their distributor may actually have no sell on Amazon, or somebody else has the exclusive. But then there's a lot of places, you know, these, in these tours, towns, especially you know, you have somebody that started a candle shop, you know, they're making their own candles or making their own little crafts or what have you, and they're hoping for all the tourists they're passing by, uh, to buy. 00:27:46 And I'm like, 'Why not put your candles on Amazon or whatever, you know, whatever?' And you see some of them, you know, a few years ago, a lot of them were trying, but Amazon just doesn't work, you know, I don't, I can't sell anything, I don't understand it. That's the key; is they don't understand it; they don't know. Most people have no clue how these algorithms work. I mean, still to this day, I've got someone that put in seven figures in one of my companies and every couple days I'm getting Skype messages like, 'Hey, uh, we just got the buy box back on this one thing, can we now send some FBA?' And I'm like, 'No, they're, they have nothing to do with each other.' Um, and so there's constantly answering questions about them, just don't understand, uh, how it works. 00:28:27 And that's why it's difficult to find good these big corporations there's. an opportunity now these big huge fortune 500 companies would love to hire some of these amazon sellers to come in and run their amazon business because they've got right now they've got a someone they're paying they just got graduated college paying them 40 50 60 80 000 bucks a year that has no clue how the guerrilla marketing how the backside how everything works and then the people that do most of them They're ex-Amazon employees that really don't know. They know more than someone else, but most of them have no clue. And they're very corporate oriented. But you got the guys that are out here grinding and that are selling their businesses to Thrasios and those type of things. 00:29:12 They're doing seven figures that actually know what they're doing. It's not wasn't just luck. They don't want to go work for somebody else. They can make more money doing this, being their own boss, having their own freedom and then selling it. than they can if they went and worked for somebody else. And so that's a problem with these big companies is in hiring talent that's really talent. It's hard to get a Tom Brady to come in the Amazon space unless you're going to pay them millions of dollars. Yeah, I mean, that's the interesting thing is that, yeah, the corporate mentality is so different than the entrepreneurial mentality. But to your point, I am seeing more and more of maybe folks that, you know, whether they're a big company or even like, you know, they were a seven or eight figure e-commerce store owner who is always like, I'm not going to sell on Amazon. 00:30:05 And all of a sudden they're like, I really should figure out this Amazon thing. Cause they just realized they're missing the boat or even, you know, these local mom and pop type stores. And I realizing like, you know, I had to close my store for a couple months. I really should figure out this Amazon thing. So it's one of those things that's causing more competition, but. One of the things we talked about in the presentation that I did with the Helium 10 Elite group was just the fact that I'm seeing in my own numbers and comparing notes with others that in international marketplaces, for example, it seems like the growth is higher, but there's not as much competition. Everybody around the world is starting to look at Amazon.com. 00:30:47 Then there's these other Amazon sellers that people are just kind of leaving alone so like that's another opportunity so it's just I think there's just so many opportunities especially in the Amazon ecosystem to just keep growing, it's amazing what what they started a few years ago is like yeah let's let a few people sell outside of us and now the whole ecosystem that runs around it with all the you know lawyers that specialize in it people that specialize in translations people specialize in going international People that only do loans for third-party sellers, there's this whole ecosystem that's I don't know what the value someone should add up with the, maybe Marketplace Pulse or something, or add up with the value of that whole ecosystem is, but it's got to be huge. 00:31:30 Outside of just the sales they're having on Amazon, it might be, who knows, it might be a billion-dollar ecosystem outside of that that's been generated of just consultants and software tools and whatnot. I wouldn't doubt that for a second. You know, really when you think about all that, because, you know, one of the things is that, you know, for an Amazon seller, you know, small changes really can be huge when you compare it to like, you know, the mom and pop shop that's selling candles, you know, they might sell two, $300 a day in sales. And like, they're hoping that like their sales will make up for like their rent for their spot. I mean, I'm looking at, sadly, you know, if I walk into a Subway restaurant, And I'm looking at this, the guy that bought this franchise for Subway, I don't know what the franchise costs for Subway, but probably franchise fees build out everything. 00:32:19 You're probably looking at at least a quarter of a million bucks or so. I'm just taking a wild guess here. Somewhere in that neighborhood, maybe a little less, a little more. Quarter million bucks. He's got his Subway on a good little place. He's selling six, $7 sandwiches. And you can do the math on that. They're open, what, 12, 15 hours a day. When they start opening for breakfast, probably that's why. But say they're open 15 hours a day. And they're running a hundred, you know, they got their rush times at lunch where they're cranking through a lot and then it goes dead in the afternoon and what have you. But let's say they're running a good subway is running $1,500, $2,000 a day on average through there. 00:32:56 So it's a $50,000, $60,000 a month business with multiply by 12, you know, you got $600,000, $700,000 a year business. Maybe some subways with more, some are less depending on location. And I'm looking at that like what they had to go through with rents and overhead and labor and dealing with kids quitting all the time and having to retrain them and everything to generate a couple grand a day. You know, I do that in the morning before I wake up on Amazon. And so it's like, I don't know why more people don't. I mean, we need those subway guys so people can eat their Subway and stuff. Right, exactly. So we can go have lunch. Exactly. It's amazing. 00:33:39 I mean, in the history of business, there's probably never been anything like this. It sounds easy. I mean, on the surface, I'm like, yeah, just make money while you sleep sitting in your underwear. I mean, both of us are making money right now while we're doing this. Right, exactly. And we don't even know who just bought it. We don't even know who they are. But at the same time, it's not easy because this business, you've got to know a lot of stuff. It's not a field of dreams. I mean, you've got to know about shipping and marketing. Product selection and inventory management. And there's a ton of things and there's always some new challenge. And so is it, is it actually totally easy? 00:34:19 No, but you gotta wear a lot of hats, but the upside to it is probably greater than almost anything out there. And the only thing, you know, maybe, you know, some of these investors who hit on, you know, hit in the early days of Uber or one of these, you know, Airbnb or that guy on like. ground floor one of the first raises on something like and they can multiply that to huge earnings but there's nothing else like like it and then something something where people would come in and eagerly buy it from you um it's it's crazy um so the opportunities i think you know people always say this is selling on amazon this is dead i think the opportunities are only getting better and better uh but they're not easier they're not getting easier and easier they're getting harder like you said there's more competition there's more to know more moving parts 00:35:05 But if you can hit, I mean, I've got products right now in the calendar space that can do, you know, I don't have to do any advertising. I literally just put them up on Amazon. I don't do any advertising, any launching, nothing. And they sell thousands and thousands of dollars per day. And the profit margins on those, you know, the Atlantic cost is $1 . 50 out of South Korea. And I sell them for 20 bucks. Amazon takes $3. $3 of that as their fee, and then another about $4 for fulfillment. So I lose $7 of that $19 plus the cost. I lose $9, so it's a $10 profit on every one I sell. And some days, you know, we're selling hundreds a day of a single one of these. 00:35:53 So, I mean, that's seasonal, so I can't do that all year, but you can repeat that process with a lot of different things. And that's a lot of money. You can make more in one month selling on Amazon than the average American makes in a year. And the opportunities are great, but you can also lose your ass too if you do stuff wrong or don't do your inventory management wrong. You can be upside down really fast too. So yeah, this business is something special. Well, what would you say? Cause like you said, like it's, it sounds easy on the surface, but there still is a lot you have to know. So what would I suggest to folks is like, okay, this is the skillset that most people should probably focus on going into 2021. 00:36:47 Like what should they develop? Knowing your numbers. Most people really don't know their numbers. They know they're looking at the Amazon screenshot or they're looking at a tool like Heatmap and one of these others that shows it, you know, your profits and loss, but they don't really. Follow all their numbers, what is your exact return rate? What are you losing on return where are you losing on damages? What is your true duty cost and your true shipping cost over on a skew level not on a general p. l at the end of the year but on an individual skill level. I think most probably 95 percent of most successful Amazon sellers don't actually know that number, they can give you they can spit out something my profit margins are 40 or 20 or whatever they say, but I'll challenge any of them show me put your PN put your numbers down in front of me and let me tear it apart and I bet it's nowhere close to that. 00:37:34 Um for a lot of these people so that's know your numbers know where you're spending money know where you're wasting money. I think that's the number one thing people need to focus on, um it's too many people get caught up in the game and ship of this thing, you know used to be you don't see. This much anymore, but a few years ago, you'd see a lot of people posting screenshots of sales and stuff, and that's kind of you don't see as much of that anymore. But those are meaningless. You know, I don't care if some guy is selling five million dollars a year on Amazon; I know people that sell five hundred thousand dollars a year on Amazon and take nice vacations and have no worries. 00:38:10 That makes more profit than the guy selling five million. It's all about how much can you take away at the end, take at the end of the day, not how much are you make, not how much is the top line; it's the bottom line that matters. Too many people don't understand. The numbers so that's That's where I would focus. Number one is getting a good grasp of that. And if you're not a numbers person or that bores you to tears, partner with somebody or hire somebody that's really good at it. Gotcha, gotcha. If you were looking at someone's numbers, what's the first thing you look at? I look at whatever their claim and their profit margin is. I don't believe. I hear people on podcasts, some of my friends on other podcasts, and they'll get some guests on there. 00:38:51 Well, what's your profit? I get 40% margins. I'm like, do you? I bet you don't. Maybe that's your gross margin, you know, between after Amazon fees, you know, I mean, if you look at, but what is your net margin, you know, after all your costs? Are you factoring in this and this and this and this? And most people don't. I mean, in the freedom tickets, there's a. I think it's module 20. I only know that number because a lot of people ask questions on that, but there's a spreadsheet it's like a seven pound spreadsheet that I give to people that outlines all these numbers. It makes you make you think through everything; it's not what somebody showed you on a YouTube video or a webinar – uh, that's driving a Lamborghini and saying look at! 00:39:36 I can buy these spatulas for a dollar in China, selling for 20 uh, Amazon takes a 15% commission and I'm making $ 18 on every one of them. They forget to tell you what it costs to ship a man. What were the duties? What were the shipping, the FBA fees? What did it cost to ship into FBA? What did it cost you to create your graphics and marketing? How much did you spend in advertising? All this stuff gets skipped over. So it makes it seem to a lot of people that there's high profits in everything and that this is easy; they do this in their sleep and they're traveling all over the world, nice vacations. And that's just, there are some people who are able to do that, but it's very few. 00:40:13 And that's, that's been a problem you know back in the days of infomercials on TV; like not TV, you see all these guys selling real estate classes and real estate get rich in real estate-that's kind of what they get rich in selling on Amazon. There's there's a big trend for that a few years ago, um, and still going on now, um, and a lot of these people who are they're selling the it's the gold rush, you know; Amazon FBA selling as a gold rush, and you can make a lot of money selling the pickaxes and the forks um versus actually looking for the goal of yourself. So a lot of these people that are teaching either have never sold on Amazon or they did for like three months. It didn't work out. 00:40:53 They're like, 'What am I going to do?' Well, let me start a YouTube channel and let me start this and I can make, I can sell digital hair, you know, instead of having to have product inventory. And that's what they try to pivot into and do. And then some of them are excellent teachers and are great, but most of them fail. And then leading people astray. What would you say is one of the things that people are led astray on in that environment? Number one is how easy it is. I mean, the perfect example is what I just gave: the profit margins. Yep. And, you know, they'll show a screenshot. Look what I did in the first two months. You know, we went from zero. I started with, well, there are two things. 00:41:39 The first month, they'll show a screenshot or some student or something that their first two months or three months, they did a hundred thousand dollars. Here's the screenshot. Look, but what they don't tell you is that screenshot from Amazon. Yeah, they, they probably did a hundred thousand dollars, but 85,000 of that was, was giveaways and rebates that are showing full-price sales, that that's never mentioned. You know, there are all those kinds of little misleading things. And then, um, a lot of people will say, 'You could start this with a hundred bucks or 500 bucks.' And I think that's. Not not fair, I mean you, you can't start with 100 bucks, you can start with 500 or a thousand but you got to understand that they they make it look like you can start with that and grow into some you know multi-million dollar company and that's just not going to happen. 00:42:22 It's just sorry it's not going to happen. You might start with a thousand and if you're successful you're going to have to get money from somewhere, you're going to be taking it from from your rich uncle, from loans, from credit cards, somewhere. They don't tell you, yeah, three months from now. I started with $1,000, but three months from now, these things were going good. And I was like, holy smokes, I've got to find some more money. They don't mention that. So they make this rags-to-riches story that's hogwash. That's just not true. And there's other people that started with $1,000 or a few thousand bucks, and they just need to understand you can do that, but you're just not going to grow it without additional capital from somewhere or the magic charm to get net 90 days, net 120 days from your suppliers or something. 00:43:10 You're just not going to grow it to seven or eight figures. It's not going to happen. But that doesn't mean you can't do it. Some people are happy to keep their day job and just make an extra $20,000, $30,000 a year selling stuff on Amazon. Take a nice vacation. Buy nice presents at Christmas or whatever. There's nothing wrong with that. So it just depends on what you're trying to do. Yeah, all very good points. Very good points. So any other closing advice you would give to folks other than knowing your numbers? I mean, on Amazon, there's lots of ways to make money on Amazon. I mean, you can make money on Amazon as an affiliate marketer. If you're good at SEO and setting up websites. 00:43:55 Most people don't realize when I'm looking to buy a new vacuum and I type in 'best vacuums of 2021', most of that's not a consumer reports level review. It's independent. It's mostly affiliate marketers that are listing that stuff with links to make money. So you can make money selling on Amazon that way. You can make money doing arbitrage online or retail. You can make money in the service industry, creating graphics for people or software or managing their accounts. You can make money. So many different ways but the best way that has the most potential the highest profits and the most potential to actually have an exit uh is the uh three is the private label picking products either developing products or finding products that you can sell on Amazon and it comes down to everything starts with that product selection so you you've got to know how to pick products that have a demand on Amazon And not just a demand, but a demand where you can compete. 00:44:54 Where there's some sort of unique angle that you can take and compete. And I think you're going to start the trend over the last 10 years has been find something on Alibaba or go to China. Maybe make a slight change to it and stick your name on it, your label on it. And there's still some people that will have success with it, but I think that's going to be less and less. And I think you're going to have to develop your own products. There's going to be more and more of a trend towards brands and developing truly stuff from scratch. Kickstarter, Indiegogo-type thing, and then making sure you got all your IP locked up, and then translating that over into Amazon and growing something there; um, I think more and more people need to be looking at that. 00:45:33 Yeah, that is such a good point because it's like, you know, I think people just kind of leveled up over time the uh, slapping the logo on the barbecue gloves is uh the joke used to be when I first got into it. Because, for example, I was um, Well, this will come out after Christmas, so I won't be spoiling anything, but I bought my wife a massage gun. It looks like a drill, but they all look the same. A Theragun. Yeah, a Theragun type thing. But they all look, there's so many of them. They all have like 2,000 reviews, all five-star. They all look like it's almost the same base models; it's just maybe the color is a little different or something. To your point, at a certain point, it's hard to pick. 00:46:17 So you got to figure out ways to develop a product, but a product that people are actually looking for. It can't just be because you're hoping Amazon's your demand generation platform because that doesn't work either. You got to go with kind of what people are looking for and make the mousetrap better, not just another mousetrap. And then that's back to the case of brand. You know, in your case of these massage guns, their gun is, I think, the big one. I don't know if they're the original or not, but that's one of the big official ones. So you go on Amazon, you see all these massage guns and they got brand names like NX23-97 or whatever. Whatever the Chinese seller could get a trademark on easily, that nobody's going to have. 00:47:01 Um, in some cases, those are pieces of junk. In other cases, it's a direct it's coming from the exact same factory as Theragun, but you never know and you can't trust the reviews on any of those, and so that's but where you can't trust is as a brand if you know like hey, this one here looks like it's a Chinese guy or some brand I never heard of, it's $199, and the Theragun is 249. I'm myself personally, I'm going to go with the Theragun because I know I'm going to trust it, so if you can, you can use Amazon and start off as a no-name nothing. But if you can evolve that customer demand into a true brand, then you can be off to the races and actually have something not only on Amazon, but outside Amazon. 00:47:43 Yeah. And just as I'm looking down, Anchor, I think, is a good example of that. I think I might have even bought this at Target, even though they kind of, I think, started as an Amazon brand. Yeah, they did. That's probably the number one success story. Yeah. doing that. But there's plenty of those types of opportunities out there. Awesome. Awesome. Well, if somebody wanted to follow along on my journey, where would they go? Well, probably the best place is just look me up on Facebook. Just Kevin King on Facebook. And you'll see that the one that there's probably a bunch of Kevin Kings, but the one that looks like he's an Amazon seller or looks like me, you can just hit follow there. And that's probably the best way. I don't post a whole lot, but I post important stuff from time to time, or if anything I'm doing, uh, usually you can find it there. Awesome. Awesome. Well, appreciate having you on, Kevin. I'm glad to be here, Kevin. And it was a pleasure. Anytime. All right. Thanks.