In Depth with Kevin King

In Depth with Kevin King Hey guys, welcome back to Seller Sessions. Today I bring in a special guest and a good friend of the show, Kevin King. We're going to do an in-depth today. So Kevin, how are you doing? I'm doing good, Danny. How's everything over in England? Yes, it's good at the moment. The weather's been pretty good. Moving house pretty soon. But today is all about you, young man. So we're going to take it way back. So let's talk with regards to going back to like your childhood and stuff, I mean, from my understanding, you've never had the traditional day job. Is that right? Yeah, I've never worked for a corporation. I've had two jobs, two paying, actually three. One of them I only did for a few days, but really, two jobs where actually someone wrote me a paycheck where I had to actually fill out, I don't even know what you call it, W-2, I guess, in the U. S. It's like how much taxes are going to take out. I had two. So, I worked at my first job in high school was working at McDonald's. And right after that, I worked briefly in a deli, but not for very long, in a grocery store, cutting, slicing ham and cutting cheese and things like that. And then I delivered pizzas for the first few years of college. And that's pretty much it. And before that, I've been an entrepreneur. You know, I was the guy when I was three years old, going with my mom and buying one pence or one penny bubble gum. And selling it to the neighborhood kids for two cents. Back before there was an internet, we had something called magazines. For those of you that are a little bit older, you know what I'm talking about. You could advertise in the classifieds or something in the back of a magazine. I would advertise at a stamp business where I would stamp some coins. I would collect stamps and coins and advertise in the back of that. Low yards. I think when I was 10 years old, I was 10 or 11 years old, I had like 13 or 15 lawns that I was cutting the grass for. Back then, it was like seven bucks. People charge $30, $40 for that now, but $7. I was making, as an 11-year-old, $100 a week. Video games did exist when I was a child. This was back in the day; we felt these Ataris. Little handheld Ataris and Pong. So I was a cool kid because I was able to afford little handheld video games, little Atari games and stuff like that. So all the kids would come to my house, and I was making so much money. You know, $100 a week for a 10-or 11-year-old is a lot of money. Even back then, you know, that's like $200, $300 now. So my parents would make me save half of it. So they'd only give me half the money to spend, and the other half they put away. They gave that back to me when I was in college as an allowance. So when I was in college, they didn't want me working. They wanted me to focus on the studies, but I worked anyway. But they would give me what it was, $100 a week, and that was that money I earned as a child. I did everything from painting numbers on street curves so there'd be some new neighborhood be built where I lived. I'd beg my parents to take me and drop me off at 3 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, and I'd walk around with a bucket of paint. And some stencils and go door to door saying, 'Hey, would you like me to paint your address, your numbers?' You know, if you lived on 123 Main Street, I'd go and put the numbers 123 right on your curb in a bright color. I did that. I'd go pick up aluminum cans on the side of the road and take those in, you know, to get 20 cents a pound or whatever it was back then. So I was always trying to make money no matter what I did. So I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. So what was the drive behind that? Because there must have been a reckoning, a reasoning behind that. You jumped out, we call them nappies, but your diapers, and you're off working, right? You're out making money. Where did that come from? Were your parents, were they entrepreneurial? No, not at all. My dad, he worked for the government, super conservative, even to this day, super conservative, no risk. My mom. It's a little bit more of a risk taker, but no, neither one of them owned any businesses. My mom was a school teacher and worked for American Airlines for a while. So nobody in my family owned businesses. It wasn't like a grandfather or an uncle or somebody had a business. You know what? I don't know where that actually comes from, where I got that. I was always a very independent person. Maybe it was my dad was ex-military. Maybe it was because he was very strict, and that was my way of being rebellious. Happen you know, do have money to do what you want? I'm not, I'm not sure where that comes from. It wasn't in my family at all, yeah, no. It's interesting like you said, like normally there's a there's a gene pool, there's a pattern isn't there to to the reasons why's and stuff so even at that age, obviously you were good at mathematics and stuff, you're working out, you know I'm going to put some of this money away or your parents were saying that and you know you had the other half to spend. Were you frivolous with that kind of money that was left over? Was it like you were high-rolling with your games and stuff with the other kids? Yeah, yeah, I was pretty high-rolling. Um, and even when I was delivering pizzas, you know, when I was 17, 18, my dad didn't like it because you're putting uh, you're putting miles on your car and I didn't care, and I would uh, I worked at this pizza place and uh, it's called Mr. Gatti's and I grew up in the Dallas area, Dallas Texas area. I live in Austin now but I grew up in the suburb of North Dallas and this place would pay the delivery drivers a minimum wage. I think it was $3. 35 an hour back then. And then you'd make your tips, and they'd give you, I don't know what it was, $0. 75 cents or something for every delivery you made to kind of cover the gas and wear and tear on the car. And I remember there would be four or five drivers on a Friday night, and I was so good, like you say, on the math, and I had the streets of the city almost memorized. I could look at the orders that were going out. Let's say 10 pies were coming out of the oven. I look and see where they're all going. And I could figure out in my head that, okay, if I take this one, take number one, take number four, take number seven, take number nine, take number 11, I can go on this one path on the road. And, you know, this one circle, or if I go here, I go there, go here, go here. And I could be back before one other guy delivers one pie. So I would be taking like seven of the 10. And I was just crushing it. And I was doing so well that the owner even gave me five bucks an hour. And he quit hiring people. So instead of having five people, he'd just have two drivers, me and somebody else, because I figured out how to game the system and how to maximize it. So I was making some nights with tips and everything. I knew every little trick in the book. You know, I'd pick up the newspaper. You know, as you're walking up with a pizza and the newspaper's sitting on the driveway, you pick it up and give it to him. Or if the little kid comes to the door to give you, you know, he's got 20 in his hand to pay for the pizzas because the parents were watching TV. I wouldn't accept the money from the kid. I would ask them to go get their parents because the kid doesn't know to tip you. So I would be like, 'I have to give these are hot, you know, I can't let you touch them.' And then, you know, when you tip, if the price is, you know, I mean, when you give change and the price is $13, $13 and 20 cents, and they give you a 20, you don't give a $5 and a $1 and some change back, you give six ones. Because in psychology, when someone has six $1 bills in their hands, they're probably gonna give you two of them. Versus otherwise they're just going to keep the five and give you the one, so I, I had every little trick in the book and I was making two or three four hundred dollars a night, uh, just driving pizzas, you know, yeah. So even back then, like, how did how did that work in terms of relationship with like the other kids around you because that's like kind of independent thinking there, you're more of a maverick, you're futuristic in terms of where you've seen things are landing it's very mature for that age. How was that, you know, with your friends? Did you have other friends who were like that, who drove you along? Or were you very much an individual? No, I was very, I mean, I had some good friends, but they weren't that way. And sometimes when I was working with people, you know, at the pizza place, it pissed some people off, you know, because once Kevin got all the stuff and making all the money, and it's like, well, you gotta work for it. You work for it. You do it right. You know, you can make the money too. And people, some people had rubbed them a little bit wrong. But as friends wise, no, I didn't really. I didn't have any other entrepreneurial friends back then. You know, I have a lot more entrepreneurial friends now in this Amazon space. People that kind of understand the same thinking that are hustlers or whatever that I've ever had in any business ever. Yeah. So did you find it also, you know, like you, obviously you have the guys in the pizza parlors and stuff there. They can't kind of keep up with you. Did you get frustrated with others? Cause some people, I mean, for a better way to put it, you know, I think if you look at people like Steve Jobs and stuff, In his early days, when he was younger, he would get very frustrated with people because he was so quick off the mark with stuff. He was waiting for the world and other people around him to catch up. Did you have that problem as well? It's like the people around you just, they didn't tick. They just, they couldn't keep up with your pace. Yeah, yeah, I did. It did bother me sometimes. I see a lot of people as lazy or unproductive. I'm always looking for ways to improve the system or do stuff more efficiently. It carries over to what I do today. You know, I do seven figures on Amazon. I've got six businesses that I'm involved in right now, that six sources of revenue. You know, some people with Amazon, their Amazon businesses, their only source of revenue. I've got two, I've got two different, I've got Amazon, my Amazon business. I have a separate Amazon business with some partners that it's kind of off the radar. It does really well, you know; I don't, I don't publicly talk about a lot. I've got The two trainings that I do with Helium 10, the Freedom Ticket and the Helium 10 Elite, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And then I have a calendar business. And then I do this thing with the Kevin and Steve thing. And all those are six or seven figure businesses. And people say, how do you do that with no VAs? How do you do that with no employees? It goes back to the same kind of thing I did with pizzas. I see the roadmap and how to work smart. I mean, I do work hard. I work smart first, and I partner with people where I see the patterns and I try to maximize those and beat that. And so it goes all the way back to, I mean, when I was in college, I had so much money. Well, another thing I did in college is there was a class called Banner 217. I went to Texas A&M University, which is about an hour and a half outside of Austin. It's a big school, 50,000 students. Big rivals of the University of Texas, which is in Austin. Very good school. I graduated with a degree in business there. But while I was in school, I delivered pizzas a little bit the first semester or so. But after that, there was this class called BANA 217, B-A-N-A, Stanford Business Analysis 217. Every sophomore student, this was in the 80s, late 80s, had to take this class if you're a business major. There were about 1,000 kids or so; there were sophomores every year, had to take this class and taught you the basic computing language. So not the stuff that we use today, but the language called BASIC. And it was kind of a weed-out class, and a lot of people just couldn't understand the logic of how do you code or how do you do BASIC. Well, it turns out back in, I think it was about when I was in the ninth grade, so whether that had been like 14 or 15 years old, something like that, the summer between the ninth and tenth grade, I bought, because I had money, I bought one of the very first, it was actually made by Xerox, the copying company. It was basically like a computer, you know, a desktop computer. You know, you had little floppy drives and this thing cost like a fortune, like $5,000. But I taught myself how to code. I made some little games and stuff, like little Dungeons and Dragons games. And so when this class came along, this was like a natural to me. I knew how to do the basic language. People were having trouble. So, what I did was I started tutoring. I put up little signs around campus. You know, tear off this little number and call me you know for five bucks an hour; you know, I'll tutor you well. That it started to get grow, people are tearing off these numbers, and I had like 10 students. Next thing I know, you have I have like 20, and so I can't do this one-on-one. So I started renting out a room in the library for free, and I have 10 people in there, and I teach them how to to do this the stuff that their their instructors weren't teaching them in a way that they could understand, uh. And then that evolved into: Before each test, they had three tests per semester. And just coincidentally, all the professors, like three or four professors, they would do the test on the same day. And it was like a departmentalized kind of test. And so I'd learn, at the beginning of the semester, I'd find out when those tests were. I would then go to the registrar's office. And under the Sunshine Act in Texas, I could actually get a mailing list of every kid taking that class. So I'd go in there and say, 'I want to know every kid taking BANA 217.' I want their address. Here's my $30, and they would give them to me on labels, like little address labels with the kid's address. I would go down to the local print shop, have a flyer made, and say, 'Come to the College Station Hilton on this day, like the night before the test.' If the test is on September 30th, say, come on September 29th, and I'm going to teach you everything you need to know to pass the test. And I was getting 500 people at $15 a head. Half the people taking this class would come to these things. So I was making really good money doing that. And so because I had, and I was living with four other guys, three other guys, four of us in an apartment. And we loved, you know, in college, it's almost like Animal House. We love to party. So, I went and took a bartending class and I learned how to bartend. But when you learn how to bartend, you learn because, with fake bottles, you know, you have the real bottles of rum, the real bottle of tequila, but inside it's just water, colored water. And so I was like, to heck with this. I want to know what this stuff, these drinks taste like. So, I went out, bought a bar, put it in the apartment, like one of these portable bars, big portable bars, put it in the apartment. Went and bought $1,000 worth of liquor. And, of course, now we became the popular place, you know, for all the college kids that come to because Kevin's place, you know, we have a full bar. I was like, at first it was kind of cool, but then everybody started coming. I was like, look, I don't want to pay the bill for, you know, sponsor every single party. So I had a little Apple II computer that my mom had given me, and I coded a little bartending program on there. I had all the recipes and had a way to keep tabs. So every time someone would come in, you know, I want a Hurricane, I want a Rum and Coke, I want whatever. I'm like, okay, I put it on their tab. It was basically a cost, but that way I wasn't footing the bill. And I developed that program, and I then developed it into something like I could sell this. So I put it advertised in the back of computer magazines like Computer World. You know, get this-this bartending program for $39 on floppy disk. And, you know, so I developed this whole program, and then I was using the computers, uh, computer, uh, the school's computer lab to make my manuals. And I was printing out little, you know, how-to instruction manuals and stuff, and using their laser printers and printing out, you know, a hundred manuals, 200 manuals on the school's laser printers. And I got in trouble for that. And I actually called to the Dean's office and said, 'Hey, no, no doing this stuff anymore.' Um, so you know I've always been uh been entrepreneurial, yeah. So is that was the with the the software there was that your first business per se? Obviously you've done the pizza parley, you've done other bits and pieces, you've done boba job in the area, curb painting, all those kind of stuff. Was that your first foray into entrepreneurship and starting your own business? What um I mean, that one, I didn't really even form a company. I would say that would not be the first time I officially formed a company. And even with the teaching stuff, you know, it was just checks were made out to Kevin King. There was a series of hustles that are leading to you building your first business, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what was your very first business? What was the type of? The very first official business where you're incorporated and have the whole nine yards and you're doing it properly was actually selling trading cards, baseball cards. Okay. Tell me more about that because, I mean, that's getting a bit more popular now. I know that Gary Vee and people talk about this even to this day. Do you want to just go into it? Sure. Back in the – this was early. So I graduated 1990 from college and so then I – My dad wanted me to get a job and use my degree, and I didn't. I moved from College Station to Austin, slept on a buddy's couch for about a year, and we sold T-shirts. We actually went out and sold on the University of Texas campus. They're an American football team, happened to be doing good that semester. So that's right around the time that MC Hammer came out with a song, 'You Can't Touch This.' Yeah, 'You Can't Touch This.' And so what we did is we made a shirt that said, 'You Can't' on one line. touch this on the next line in the words the u and the t but it's the university of texas it's university at ut so we put that in a different color a buddy of mine had a had a was studying engineering at ut so we're able to get permission if we donated a certain amount of the shirt sales uh to the engineering engineering some club or something that he was in we could actually set up on campus and set up these tables at strategic places around the university of texas campus and sell these shirts and we would do that and It grew big. During a game day, a college football game on a Saturday, we would have a table there, and we would strategically put it at all these different places around the stadium, outside the stadium. We couldn't go inside the stadium. And these two of the guys that were doing this with me were engineers. And so if you're sitting at a little fold-out table and you've got a crowd of people, 50,000 people walking to the stadium, they can't see you. All they see is a few people huddling around you. So they built these catapult systems that would completely collapse down flat. But we could raise them up and they would hang shirts at the top. So it's above the crowds as you're walking, you know, 200 meters, 300, 600 feet away. You see these shirts hanging up there that have these slogans on them. And we would do on a game day, $ 30 to $50,000 selling t-shirts. And then we just, that evolved. So, that whole semester evolved. And then from that, I said it was cool. So I was like, you know what? I don't want to go work for somebody. So during the spring, when there's no football, we would go and hit all the spring break locations, all the beach bars around the southern United States, from Texas to Florida. I'd just pack up in the station wagon, and we'd go sell T-shirts to the stores. And then we also did some of them. We had a Calvin and Hobbes. A buddy of mine knew some guy that was up on the East Coast of the U. S. selling Calvin and Hobbes T-shirts and Simpsons T-shirts. This was right when The Simpsons just came out. And he didn't have licenses. These were totally illegal T-shirts. And so we actually went and were selling these t-shirts and we would go, me and my buddy, we'd just pack them in the back of a car. We'd drive from campus to campus across the Southern U. S., get a cheap motel, stay there for like three days, go flyer all the dormitories with a flyer that had a little 1-800 number. Someone would call that, we'd say, 'We have these shirts for sale.' They had cool little slogans and they're funny. And they would call that 800 numbers buddy of ours back in Texas would say 'yeah, you want it' and he'd take their credit card, and then we would go deliberate like he would say, 'okay, today we gotta go this dorm', and so I did that. Uh, I also did uh care packages uh for college students where I would get what age group is this? So sorry because I want to keep a timeline as we get sure still uh this is right after college, right okay cool yeah, so I'm like 23-24 years old at the same time I was doing um, I came out with a due care packages for college students. So students are studying for their finals. And so I would get the mailing list of, because my background is direct mail. So I'd get the mailing list of all the parents of the students at different universities in Texas. And we would send out a flyer to them saying, 'Hey, take care of little Johnny or little Susie.' It's a stressful time for them. They're studying for their finals. Why don't you send them a package, a care package that you care. And one, we had one that was healthy and we would literally go down to like Sam's Wholesale Club or Costco or one of these big wholesale clubs and buy the stuff and assemble it. And another one was a cookie. And it was like a cookie in the shape of a heart, a big cookie, a chocolate chip cookie. And a buddy of mine worked at a pizza place and we would go there and cook them all hours of the night, and cook these cookies and take them to them. And so, I mean, we did that kind of stuff. And then that evolved into my first true business. Came through that, which was incorporated. It was called the College Lifestyle Company, and I developed a catalog. And this catalog was a full 16 pages, small catalog, but in there, I was going to all the trade fairs in the U. S. I was 22, 23 years old. My mom worked for American Airlines, so I could fly for free. So, I would fly up to Chicago or fly out to Atlanta to all these different trade shows. And I would look for products that were geared towards the college market. So, people, college kids would buy it-could be t-shirts, could be little basketball hoops that you're going to play games, it could be beer types of games. No textbooks, just dorm decoration, fun type of stuff. And I put together a whole collection of, I don't know, 30 products, bought them wholesale, brought them in. We rented the apartment below us. We had an upstairs apartment, two-bedroom apartment below us. A two-bedroom apartment that was empty. We rented that from the landlord. That became our office. One bedroom was the phone bank center with three people answering the phone, 800 number. The other bedroom was the warehouse. And then the living room was the shipping area. And so, we would send; I would get mailing lists, rent mailing lists from schools or from these agencies. And we would send out thousands of, tens of thousands of these catalogs. And people would call up and order, you know, give me a, you know, or they would mail the order in. We had a whole employee manual. I developed an 80-page employee manual. That was a proper business with taxes taken out and set up properly. That was my first true business. That one didn't quite succeed. I was undercapitalized; I was robbing Peter to pay Paul. I was unable to get investment at the time to continue that. Then, that evolved into this baseball card business. But it wasn't baseball cards or sports. It was baseball cards with pretty girls. And so back in the early 90s, there was a trend to put pretty girls, everything from Sports Illustrated models to Playboy Playmates to local strip club girls to whatever it was on trading cards. And it became a big business of people that would buy those. And it was a hot collectible one. This is right around the time the internet was just coming out; I think it was CompuServe and AOL online, so I remember going on AOL. 798? Are we talking this or this? No, this is like '92, '93... oh, right! Okay, way earlier, yeah, yeah, yeah- '92, '93, '94, somewhere in there. And so I would go on and there was bulletin board systems for like uh where all the dealers from all the comic book shops and uh all the uh baseball card shops around the U. S. And you can go in there and say, 'I have a case of these or a case of that.' And we were doing trades, and that became big business. And that lasted; we did licensing. But the way I saw that is, you know, there's about 20 different companies doing this. And I was like, 'How can I,' you know, 'I can average, even a whole magazine came out called ACCQ, I think it was called, Adult Card Collector Quarterly, that had a whole like printed magazine just about this, you know, just like a Beckett's or something would exist now for regular baseball cards. We would advertise in there. We were voted the best company because of our customer service and all kinds of stuff like three years in a row. But I wanted to grow the business. And so I would go out and all these other guys, they had these inserts, you know, what we call package inserts these days. It would be like registration cards. This is before the internet. So people would get a card in there and say, 'Fill out your name and address and send this in to register with us.' Well, I would call these guys up. What are you doing with your registration cards? Oh, they're just sitting in a shoe box over here. I was like, 'Send them to me.' I'll type them in and I'll send you back on a disc, all these names-just give me the right to use them. And I got almost everybody to do it. So instantly I had a huge mailing list of people that are buying this kind of stuff so I could cross-sell. So then that evolved into not only me selling mine, but I started wholesaling, buying wholesale from these guys, all these other guys. And I create a whole catalog-like a one-stop mail-order shop. There's no internet site. This is before the internet. And I would mail that out. And we had a huge warehouse with tons of inventory. I had two full-time shipping guys. Another guy, all he did was sort stuff. Two people answering the phones to take orders and process the mail orders that people had mailed in, checks and money orders. And then that evolved into, I was like, how can we extend this? So we extended it into calendars and started doing like wall calendars. I mean, you're doing calendars still today, aren't you, in some shape or form? Yeah, the calendar business, you know, the trading card thing was more of a fad. It disappeared after three or four years. And then, but the calendars still exist today. Yeah. And so that's a very good regular, like a recurring income. Is it a seasonal business, what you do with the calendars? Or like specific times of year when, January is when people buy, is it, or December? No, it's November and December. Selling calendars is like selling milk. It's not like if you have trading cards or a book or an Amazon product. If you don't sell it now, okay, you can probably sell it later, but calendars are dated. And pretty much on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, calendars go half price almost everywhere. So they lose their value even before the year starts for the most part. Now with the calendars we do, because there's a collector mentality, we can't hold the value a little bit longer. But you pretty much have a window. We start selling in October and it's done by early January usually. And so the calendar business, I've been doing that since '95. That's why this Amazon business is perfect for me because I've been importing. We print the calendars in Korea. Used to print in Hong Kong, but now we print in South Korea. You know, landing cost is about a dollar and a half and we sell them for $20. And we charge 10 for shipping, and it only costs us $3 to ship it. So you can see the margins there are ridiculous. And then we wholesale those out to some, you know, like calendars. com, which is the biggest calendar store in the world. They have all the kiosks in the malls. We sell on Amazon. We sell in some other places and then direct. And so some we manufacture with those margins. And then because I have the audience, I also go out to everybody else that makes those types of calendars. From Europe, we bring in a lot from the UK. All the big UK celebrities and the page three girls, and all that kind of stuff, we bring in from Australia, from Eastern Europe. We have 140 or so different ones. I buy those wholesale. My cost is $9. 52. It's more of a 50% margin or something on those, but it's free money. We have guys that buy every year. Uh, about half the orders still come by mail. So they still come checks and money orders. We don't, I don't take any phone orders. I have no phone stuff anymore. Uh, so it's either go to the internet website or send in a check or money order. About half of them come by check or money order in the mail. And it's kind of scary every year, you know, we'll send out the, uh, the, we send out a catalog and we send that out, and the post office sometimes will return. So I'm saying this one's undeliverable. Uh, and it was usually marked 'reason why the guy moved' or whatever, but sometimes it says 'deceased'. You know, it's a little scary. This is a guy you recognize the name because he's been ordering for us for 20 years. Like, oh man, they're Sam's just dying. That sucks, man. You know, you almost like, even though you never met these people, you feel like you know them because you've been doing business with them for so long. And so the average order, you think, okay, calendar, someone's ordering a calendar to hang in the garage or hang on the tool and the tool shed or at the office or whatever. No, our average order is five calendars for a hundred dollars. And a lot of these guys are collectors. We have some people, I have three customers in particular that every year order more than $2,000 worth of calendars. And they're not reselling them. They're just collectors. And so I'm going to order two of each calendar, one to open up and one to keep in the shrink wrap. And so it's a whole different mentality. It's almost all men, some women, but almost all men. And it's a very good, lucrative, easy business. It's like on autopilot now. With that, like, sorry to butt in there. With that, is there because you've done a whole lot in the 90s, you've got to the calendar company. Was there anything before Amazon or is there a long stretch where you just focused on the calendar company? Yeah, the calendar company evolved. I mean, it started in '94, '95. It still goes today. Obviously, the trading card size off, but the calendar company evolves into mid-90s because we're shooting at a partner's – I have a partner in this business who's a photographer, and we were shooting different girls and shooting all kinds of stuff, so we had this content. And so we started creating some DVDs. This is not pornographic stuff, just to be clear. This is not pornographic. I mean, some religious people might consider anything with a pretty girl pornographic, but it's not pornographic. We're talking like Playboy or something like that. Playboy, Page Three, yeah. And so – I'll read – sorry. Yeah, go. Yes. So we started doing like a video, you know, just like behind the scenes video, you know, kind of like a sports, making a sports, if you've ever seen a making of Sports Illustrated, Swim Toot issue or something, kind of like that. And we started doing DVDs and had a DVD club. And that evolved into, we had someone reach out to us that was an agent for pay-per-view television. And so not the adult channels, but like the channels that would show boxing or wrestling. When they didn't have boxing or wrestling going on, they needed to fill the airways. They filled the airways with bikini shows in the beginning. It was just strictly bikini contests and stuff. We had some of that type of stuff, so we started doing that. This was on DirecTV and Dish Network. They had relationships with all the big TV providers in the U. S. and some in Europe. We could send them a show. They charge $10 for it or something, and we were getting 30% of that. And so in the beginning, 35% actually in the beginning. It evolved. Now it's like we don't do it anymore, but now because that market's kind of died, it's like 10%. But we were getting $100,000 a month off of some of these shows as our commission. And so we were able to evolve into that. So we were traveling the world producing all this kind of stuff and producing calendars and had a website around it. We ended up doing print magazines like coffee table books, like hardcover books, like really, really nice. Some of these were like a Victoria's Secret lingerie type of thing. Nice enough where we had a lot of women would look at them and go, 'I want to buy that outfit or that outfit.' It wasn’t just horny guys looking at it. So, we did that for a long time until basically YouTube was the start of the end of that. Because, we now jump from the 90s to 2005-ish; yeah, 2004. Yeah, we did this for a long time. We did a model search, you know, all over the world-a million-dollar model search. Uh, we had an HD net, Mark Cuban's company approached us to create content when HD started coming out. Uh, we ended up doing all kinds of uh, crazy deals. Um, it was good and at the same time um, yeah, it was generating good money. I had a big office with all 16 people-three full-time video editors, two assistant editors, you know? It was a big production. And our shooting was not cheap. Uh, we were doing huge budget uh, shoots and video productions all over the world. And so then when YouTube came out, um, after YouTube, then a lot of these other websites uh, started coming out and just basically giving stuff away for free. And that kind of killed, killed the-why would someone pay 10 bucks to watch something online? I mean, sorry, you know, off of direct TV when they could basically see similar or the same thing for free, you know, on the web. May I ask you, sorry, because like, this is about learning moments as well. With that kind of Disruption that kind of change you've had since childhood-you've had a good run, you've had lots of mini home runs. If you like, do you see what I mean? Because there's like, I know from my career and other people that I've interviewed, you had them darkest hours just before dawn and stuff like that. So with this business, with the disruption of YouTube, what kind of impact did that have on you and your business, with like 16 staff at that time? Well, we we had to adjust. So 98 we had 16 staff, like 2005, when YouTube first came out, we had 16 staff. By 2010, we were down to four. To back up one step, when we were building the trading card business, it hasn't always been fun and giggles. When we were building the trading card business, I also had a big staff. When we expanded into other products, we had a full-blown catalog that we were sending out. 64-page catalog printed and uh, we were uh, it was really good, but we were completely self-funded; no outside investment. I didn’t come into this with uh, here’s a hundred thousand dollars; my partner didn’t have that. We were generating cash flow from within, and one of the things that we were having to do is we had a bunch of employees – I forget, maybe back then it was like 10 when we would on their paychecks, uh, when we would uh, pay them, you know, let’s say they made a a thousand bucks for the two weeks. We’re supposed to take taxes out to pay the U. S. government. And maybe the taxes were, I don’t know, a thousand bucks or 200 bucks. And we’re supposed to remit that to the U. S. government. We didn’t remit that to the U. S. government. We actually kept that for cash flow and kept that to grow. And after about a year and a half, that caught up to us. And we got a big knock at the door from a bunch of government agents saying, ‘ Hey, you owe us a bunch of money because you’ve got employees that are filing tax returns saying that this is how much they paid in taxes, and the books don’t add up.’ We haven’t received this money from you. This is the worst of the worst. I didn’t know this at the time, but this is the worst of the worst. You’re basically stealing because it’s not just avoiding taxes, which is a bad thing. When you try to avoid taxes or tax evasion, this is actually straight-up stealing. And so we had to pay a bunch of money, and we got out. Nobody went to jail or nothing happened. But as a result of that, it kind of hurt us. So I actually had to declare bankruptcy. So in 1998, because the business was mostly in my name, sole proprietorship, wasn’t LLC, I declared bankruptcy. And then we just started, you know, declared bankruptcy one day and sold the assets of that company for a dollar to a new company and started up a whole new company the next day and built it back up. But I did go through a personal bankruptcy. And so for 10 years, that stays on your record in the U. S. for 10 years. That affected me. I couldn't buy a house. I couldn't do a lot of things. And I was having to pay off a lot of back taxes. So it wasn't all roses and honey. But that's it. I mean, the journey isn't; most people isn't. People don't see. I thought with yourself, your hit ratio is far superior to a lot of people. But that learning moment there, you couldn't buy a property for 10 years and stuff. What other things did you learn in that moment? Because obviously it's made you better at what you do today. Well, that's one of the things is I don't hire, I don't just, I'm very careful. Like I'm very lean, you know, because I had a lot of employees and when something like that happens, both that and when the, you know, the YouTube, you know, when YouTube basically is a disruptor, and a few years later, that's changing your business. You've got, you've got, you know, 16 people who are working for you. That's, you know, if they're married and got kids, that could be 32 or 50 mouths that you're feeding. And they're depending a hundred percent on you. And I remember even at one point, just to cash flow, you know, our paydays were, I think, on a Tuesday. And we would always pay like every other Tuesday for whatever reason. We would pay at 4 o'clock on Tuesdays that our checks were distributed. I remember sometimes I would actually deliberately not be in the office at 4 o'clock on a Tuesday, be out running some errands, to come back at like 5:30 just so that I could give the employees their check so that they could not take it to the bank and cash it that day, just to buy an extra day of float. I also was doing something, you know, I had a guy that owned a check-cashing business and I didn't have any outside investors. And so sometimes we'd get in trouble on cash flow. So I could go write him, I would play the float. So I could go write him a $9,000, stay right underneath the government limits of $10,000. I could write him a $9,900 check and he would give me cash. I would take that cash, put it to the bank or to pay bills or pay payroll or whatever. He would hold the check for a day. Then deposit it and then back then it was about a two or three day float if you did this on a Thursday, you got the whole weekend so you got extra mail orders coming in, extra people on the phone. You could I had to get creative gaming the system, yeah, and you know at one point that that's almost like a Ponzi scheme in a way, you know, at one point that came crashing down, uh, and I had to build out of that. So that's the thing that I, that's the learning thing is like look. You hear people even on this Amazon business that have grown it. They're not talking about the pains that they've had to go through in the background. I mean, you did a really good job. You had a recent podcast on Seller Sessions that I really think every freaking person should listen to. There's a buddy of yours who doesn't, I forget his name. He's trying to get to 250 million bucks. I think the title, it's like something, how to grow your business, 250 million or something. Yeah, Ash Simpson. He's at 24, do 40 next year, but his goal is to reach 250. I thought you did an excellent job that I've never heard of anybody. I've actually commented to, I think I mentioned this to Manny and a few other people that you did an excellent job because the guys like you question, I don't remember these specific details. So correct me if I'm wrong. How much money did you start with? And I think he said something like $5 ,000 or something like that. And you're like, so how did you go from 5 ,000 to 24 million? No one ever asked that question. They're always like, oh, you start with $5,000. So people hear that and they're like, oh, I can start with $5,000 too. But the next thing out of his mouth is like, yeah, that's what we started with. But I had a buddy that had $30,000. So we had $35,000. And we were able to grow that to, whatever he said, something like $100,000. But we had to do this, and I didn't take any money. And we went to $100,000. He lived off $10,000 for the year at that period of time. He then had investors in each individual product. So it was almost like, I don't know, a portfolio. Like a cash portfolio. So if you invest in this one, you can choose which product you want to go and there's your return. So you never gave up on the equity. In the end, they got it to the stage where he'd done partnership with a factory and stuff. I think they put in about a million in total from day one to now and they turn over 24 million. Which is about what it takes, and no one ever talks about that. I mean, I commend you for pushing that and for sharing that because that's very, very important in this business. No one ever talks about that. And that needs to be told. People always make it sound like you can start with nothing and grow to this. It's bullshit. Yeah, absolutely. Most people don't tell that story. They would answer the question. I started with $5,000. Oh, wow. And now you're going to do $24 million this year. That's incredible. That's awesome, man. Congratulations. And they leave it at that. And they don't tell, you know, and he said a few other things were. You know some struggles he had and some other stuff in there, quite surprised how graphic he was talking through every step, every bit of income that came in, that led to up to that one million. You know he's very graphic in how he structured deals and stuff. If people want to go back and listen, yeah, no, you should-everybody listening to this if you have not listened to that episode, it's about an hour long or so, go back and go back and listen to it; it's a very good educational uh episode on how this really works and the pains behind this. You know, not to say that there are some people that start low and they just-they have a winning lottery ticket and they just right place, right time, but those are few, very few and far between. Not many. Let's say Brock Johnson, he did very well; he was very clever of how he leveraged stuff to get the sales that he did on the Eclipse sunglasses. It's a constant leverage to get up. I mean, my question is: can you repeat that? That is so. So, that's great for him and congratulations to him. It's awesome that he's able to do that. But I don't know. I think he's actually tried with something else. It's very difficult to repeat that. You have people that started this business 2012, 2013, got it at the right time when it was much easier. And there's some people in this space that have courses and that are considered thought leaders. I'm not going to name any names, but some people-one of them I don't respect at all; that is telling people what to do. And I'm like, dude, you have no freaking clue. You were right place, right time. You made a lot of money, congratulations, but you don't know shit. And so there's a lot of that. You just gotta be careful. But back on the story, that is; yeah, so the lessons are, that's why I won't expand. That's why I've changed the way I work and partner with people. Rather than me going out and hiring a bunch of people, why don't I partner with someone like Manny, and Guy at Helium 10? And I could go out and do my own course, for example. I could go out and do my own course and I could go out and hustle up affiliates. I could have an affiliate manager; I could have an office girl, a customer service agent doing that. But why should I do that? Why not just go to them? They already got that in place. Let them do that. Let them use their traffic. Let them use their customer service people. We split the revenues and we both win. And I save hiring people and having all those headaches and stuff. The same thing with the calendar business. I don't have an office for that. I do that out of either a storage unit or sometimes it's even out of my garage. I hire a temporary worker. Usually, it's a friend or last two years it's been a cousin of my wife. It comes up and helps us work for like three months. We just jam through it. So that's working smart and keeping costs down. And having a good return. The same thing with Kevin and Steve. Why should I go out and try to do all this stuff? Steve, he's a master. He's got the people in place. Let me do what I do best, and we both win, rather than having all these employees and all this overhead and all this stuff. That's what's changed me the most. It's taught me, in the beginning, it's all about 'I' want to make money, make as much money as I could. But now it's more of a lifestyle thing. I was lucky in 2007 because we were traveling and shooting all these models and all this stuff all over the world for the calendar business and the TV shows. I enjoyed that. It's almost like every guy's dream to go to some Caribbean island with a bunch of half-naked girls for a week and hang out with them and be on the set watching the photo shoots and all that stuff. I was more of a producer; a camera guy, but I was a producer. And sometimes I would do a little bit of video or something behind the scenes, pick up the camera, but that was work. So, we would go in and, you know, a month before we were going, if we were going to, uh, St. Lucia to do photo shoots, we would go a week, a month before, do a week-long scout where me and the photographer are literally going everywhere with a, with a local television guy showing us all the nice houses, the nice beaches, the nice, whatever. So, we like, okay, this is. This is what we need to do. We go back, develop the costumes, develop the whatever. And then we come back a month later with the models and it was work. You know, it's fun, but it's work. And I was like, this is kind of cool. I would like, there's places. So, we would sometimes choose places that we wanted to go. We're like, ah, where's a cool place we want to go? Ah, we want to go to Prague. So, we've said, okay, let's do a photo shoot in Prague. And so, we actually took five models to Prague in 2004 and 2005. Did a big photo shoot and big production in Prague shooting on the escalators of the metros and shooting at train stations and shooting at all kinds of really at the military base with all the fighter jets and the Jeeps and all kinds of really cool stuff. It was fun, but there's places I wanted to go that just didn't make sense to actually go there and shoot. So I was like, you know what? In 2007, I'm going to travel for the next year. So I set up. to companies where I could be in Austin for two weeks and I could be on the, I could be on the road for two weeks. And I made a list for a year. I want to go to Bali. I want to go to Egypt. I want to go to Morocco. I want to go to, you know, to Antarctica, all these, all these places. And I'm going to, I'm going by myself or in some cases, friends or family could get off their job or whatever, and they could go with me. So it was a mix. And so for that one year, I literally for two weeks out of the year, I was traveling. I wasn’t backpacking. But I wasn’t staying in the Four Seasons, but I was staying nice. But I had the company set up to where it was running. And we were making enough money that I could do that. I didn’t have a wife, didn’t have a dog, didn’t have any obligations, really. That one year turned into seven. Because the more I traveled, the more I was like, you know, there's a big world out there that it's just the best education you can get. And that's probably spent half a million dollars or more traveling. And people at the time were like, 'Kevin, you're crazy. You know, you should be investing that money.' At that point, I still had that bankruptcy, so I couldn't invest it. I couldn't do certain things. I had a tax lien on me from the bankruptcy that I had to wait out. I was able to actually get out of it legally, but I had to wait my time. So I had a really good lawyer that showed me what to do. So I couldn't show a lot of assets or whatever. I was traveling and that's the best education I've ever gotten. I mean, just because, I went to, I've been to a total in my lifetime of 92 countries and all seven continents. It's nothing better. I understand cultures. I understand people. And I did it at an age, you know, my early forties that I could still able to move around. You know, a lot of people, they do it when they retire, when they're in their sixties or seventies; you might not be able to walk up the Great Wall of China. You might not be able to do some of the things that, that I did. And so that was very eye-opening and educational, and it changed my whole perspective on the world and on business and on people. It eliminated a lot of any prejudices I might have had or anything like that. And so that's different. A lot of people are trying to quit the corporate job, doing this Amazon, because they want to travel. They want that. But the thing I value most about all the businesses that I've ever done is the freedom. And so since college on, I've had the freedom to do what I want to do, because I'm my own boss. And if I want to organize the business in such a way and structure it a little bit differently so that I can do what I want to do, I can do that. And that's what I value. And so it's making enough; it's not about having a Lamborghini. I don't have a fancy car. I don't have a nice boat. I don't have; I've got nice stuff in my house, but I spend my money on experiences. I'm not afraid to go spend a couple thousand dollars on a meal. I'm not afraid to go spend some money to stay in a hut in Bora Bora over the water with fish swimming underneath the bed at night. That to me are things I'll never forget. And that's, that's where, that's, that's what I want in this business. It's not to make a hundred million dollars and have a flashy car. It's to have the money to do what the heck I want. And to be, and that's, that's my focus then and now. So that's almost like that whole traditional lifestyle business, but obviously with a lot more finance wrapped around it in the sense that you want to have decent money, you know, because people could have a lifestyle business, which is, you know, at least low income, they enjoy what they do and they live a very simplified life. But you want a lifestyle business where you've got that reduced stress, not loads of people around you, but still have the funds to not look at your bank account and to do whatever you want. When you want, if you want to get in a chopper, you want to get on a plane without restriction. If you want to take first class or business class without restriction, that's what your end goals are-is to buy experiences. That's true. Now, one of my weaknesses is probably because I've always been able to make money. You know, I remember there's a friend of mine. I went to Columbia. My wife is from Columbia and we were dating long distance for a while. And I went down there and spent like three weeks back in 2011. Taking Spanish lessons and salsa lessons and stuff like that. And I had a private chef that would come and cook for me once a week. So I was like, 'Hey, why don't you come on down and meet my girl and cook for us, cook a nice meal or something for us, and you can cook for me.' And so he's like, sure, if you're paying, I'll come. So I brought him down. And one day we were going out snorkeling. And I was like, hold on a second. I need to make a little bit of money before we go out. He still tells this story today. And he's like, how are you going to make money? You're sitting here in Colombia. I said, I'm going to send out an email. I got to draft this email. And one of the things that we did is we had, because of the calendar business and the trading card business and all the TV, we had all this content. Content is king. When you own content, you can do a lot with that content. And I'm someone who I will try. It's kind of like the movie business. You know, the movie business starts out. Usually they'll take the; they'll create a feature film. It goes into theaters. They make X amount of money. Then it goes from there to pay-per-view. Then it goes to DVD. Then it goes to regular television. Then it goes to the airplanes. And then it goes to wherever. They repurpose this content and make money on all these different streams, similar in the music business too. Well, the content business is the same. So we would put these images on calendars. We put the images in the trading cards. We use them on TV. We use them in the books, the coffee table books that we were doing. We licensed them for posters. We did whatever. But one thing that – When everything started going south and we had to lay off a lot of people, I wasn't ready to buckle down and I didn't know what my next venture would be. I could see the writing on the wall while I was doing all this traveling, but I took this content and I said, 'Look, my guys, knowing your customer, my guys are collectors. They want to make sure they have everything in their favorite model or everything that we've ever done. They're a fan of our work.' I was buying hard drives off of Amazon. I go on Amazon. and see who has the best deal on like one terabyte hard drives. Some of these times back then you can get them for like $39. I'd order, you know, 50 hard drives off of Amazon at a time at 39 bucks a piece because it's cheaper to buy off Amazon than it was from a local wholesaler. And I'd buy; they'd send them in. I had, I created a hard drive of all the past photos, all the past videos, all the content we had and put it on this massive hard drive, all these MOV files and JPEG files of all this content. Send out an email to those guys and say, 'Hey, maybe you missed something or maybe we got some extra pictures of your favorite girl that were left on the cutting room floor or whatever.' Buy this hard drive for $399 and you'll have everything at your disposal. No waiting for long download times. No worrying about you're missing anything. Have a complete collection that took off. And so, this customer list we've built from the calendars-that's leveraging a customer list that built from the trading cards and the calendars. For this type of buyer, we sold thousands of these things. So that's how I pivoted from, you know, as sales went down, I immediately found another revenue source using the same content and repurposing it in a different way. And that enabled me to continue this travel as everything else started tanking and tanking and tanking. And I would, as one would do well, you know, I had seven computers in my house, literally take eight hours sometimes to copy one of these. I'd just be copying all night long. And then send these things out. But you can see the margins, $39 hard drive, sell it for $399. It's pretty much content's already paid for. It's just, it's pure margin. And I would get creative. I'm like, man, okay, we had a thousand people buy this one. I need to sell another one. How can I sell another one? Well, let's dig around the drawers, dig around the archives, see if we can find something else to add. We ended up coming up with like, and then I went out to other photographers that I knew and said, 'Hey, would you like us to do this for you?' Give us your mailing list. I had one big-time guy had a list of 200, 000 people that had bought through his website, where I said we'll sell these hard drives for you, but I want your mailing list that's because I'm gonna do it straight to your mailing list. He's like, 'Okay, sure and we gave him a cut, and that was boom, another bunch of money, so I was able to ride that wave for a while too, and so that's this, roughly from 2009 to 2010, about 13 years. Yeah, yeah. And so I was able to ride that wave and that enabled me to travel. And, uh, you know, I, I would just say, and I would do these promotions. So my friend, the chef, he was down and said, 'You know, I was like, look, I need to make some money. I got some bills. I need to.' So I just sent out an email and he always said, 'When I send out an email, we come back from a snorkel trip. It's like, so what I'm checking the computer.' So how'd that email do? I said, 'Yeah, it made me $12,000 so far in sales.' He was just baffled. He was just like, 'This sucks, man.' I'm like, 'So we're here slaving to make a hundred bucks and you just made 12 grand or whatever the number was.' And so that's how you work smart and you repurpose content. And that's how you get the money to do what, what, what you want to do. But at the same time, because it's, it creates a problem. I've really never talked about this because, because I've always been able to make money. I'm not always, I'm willing to spend. So, you know, if I've got a $20,000 in the bank, some opportunity comes up, a trip or whatever that's going to cost $18,000. I'm not like, no, I can't do it because I'm only going to have two thousand left. How am I going to pay rent next month? I'm like, sure, let's do it. I'll spend the 18 grand knowing that, okay, it kind of puts pressure on me. It's like, okay, shit, I just spent my rent money; now I've got to regenerate it. So I do the fun thing. I come back and think, what can I do that's creative to actually replace that money? And I'll do a hard drive email or I'll do something, and so that's what I've been able to do that my whole life. From delivering pizzas, I had cash every day; I never really had to budget, so every day you're getting tips, you know. Every day in selling, there's money coming in the mail every day, and uh, you know the first time I actually had to go to work waiting to get paid was when we were doing the pay-per-view television. There was a three-month lag, um, you know, but that was the first time. But those were nice checks, you know; it's nice when you get a hundred thousand dollar payment all in one swoop, and so that kind of uh gave me some of the the planning I needed for the Amazon business. But I'm lucky in the Amazon business; I don't wait two weeks either. I have daily withdrawals; I have an old Amazon account. So, have you got better with this because obviously part of your story is that you were leveraging payroll for cash flow? Yeah, no, I am better, yes. Yeah, and then you've got that stage where you go away; you've got 20K sitting there as an example, arbitrary number. You tap 18 of that because you know you're good at making money. So yeah, we're getting to that stage now. We're getting towards Amazon. It's been a nice flow to get there. So let's talk about Amazon because it is a cash flow business. Yeah, Amazon is a cash flow business. And when I first started, I came into it with more money than the average person. I took some of my own money, but I wanted to do it a little bit differently. I was selling on Amazon in 2001. I was doing arbitrage stuff, and I tried some different things. But the FBA model, which is what most people think of, I started in May of 2015. And my first product went live in August of 2015. And when I came into it, the way I – The other businesses were going down. The hard drives were like, I can't come up with another idea for a hard drive. Shit, what am I going to do? I got a real estate license because that still is kind of a freedom business. You don't have to work for a man. I was like, I don't know if I want to do real estate. I dabbled in a couple other things, and then around that time, I stumbled across a video for ASM, and they were doing one of their promotions. It's a four-video series where you watch four different videos, and the last one pitches you into the course. So I watched those four videos and then they pitched the course was, I don't know, five grand or something like that. The heck with this. I'm not paying five grand for that. I don't need that. What I, what they just showed me is usually in these videos, you want to give away enough, uh, you know, that makes people feel that they got some value. And I saw what the process was. I'm like, shit, I've been doing this my whole fucking, excuse me. I've been doing it. I was like, shit, I've been doing this my whole life. I don't need their course. I've been doing calendars, you know, going to shows, sourcing things. I've been creating my own graphics and Photoshop and Quark and making catalogs. And I know package inserts and I know shipping and I know marketing. I know direct mail. I know all this, the cash flow. I know it all. So as my mom says, it's almost like a perfect fit of all my past experiences all into one. And Amazon is like the perfect. It's almost like the stars were aligning. This is like the perfect thing for you to go into. So I didn't take any courses. Consumed every podcast I could at the time. There was only three or four of them back then, probably. I consumed them and read a bunch of blogs, read some Facebook stuff, saw some of the guys on Facebook saying what to do, didn't know what the hell they're talking about, and misleading people. And there wasn't a ton of courses. I think it was ASM, maybe three or four others. It wasn't like a thousand of them that there are now. And so I started. I started with my money and I got a silent investor. And because what I did is I started with five brands. They always tell you start with one. Do one. Don't go in too deep. Learn the system. I was like, no, I want to start with five. So I started with five. And two of those were custom from the ground up. Because of my background in developing products, you know, high-end collectibles in the trading card business, we did all kinds of fancy stuff. I mean, I have experience with that. So I developed two products. One is a slow-feed dog bowl; one was in the shape of a bone. And another one was an Apple Watch charging dock. And I went on right in 2015. Back then, I didn't know the difference. I looked at the top 100 best sellers because that's what ASM said in their little video. So I looked in there and I saw that there's like five or six Apple Watch docks because the Apple Watch, I think, was about to come out; the first one, I think, around that time. And they're all garbage; they're all like bamboo or just junk. I like I want an Apple Watch. I have Apple products. I wouldn't want that sitting on my desk. That's just freaking ugly. And so I'm like, I'm going to develop what I would want. So I went and found a manufacturer off of Global Sources that for $1,000, they would do all the CAD work for me and give me $1,000 credit towards my first order. It was an MOQ of 3,000 units. I developed an Apple Watch dock that had a built-in charger. It had a built-in nightlight. It would charge four different devices at once, your watch, your phone, your iPad, and, you know, Samsung, if you want. A second generation of it had a built-in Bluetooth speaker. It hid all the cables, so there's no cables hanging all over your desk or wherever. It hid everything in the bottom. And I had them develop that made me do all the CAD work, send me STL files. I would take those STL files to a local guy here in Austin. He would make 3D prints of it. I would take those 3D prints and make sure the cables would fit in the little grooves, make sure the wrappings were all right. Take them to the Apple store and say, 'Please, can you open the drawer of all the watches?' I want to take every watch band and make sure it doesn't, when it's hanging on here, it doesn't touch the light. And then I would make some changes. They made the product. Well, my landing cost on those was around $20. And I was selling for $89. Christmas 2015, I was doing $15,000 to $20,000 a day selling that one item. And I had other items up too. It was doing really well. But that created a cash flow problem. And because it's a $20 landing cost, and I'm selling 150 to 200 of these a day, that's an inventory cost. That's upwards of $10,000 a day just in straight-up inventory cost. And I was like, 'Holy cow, this is just doing well.' What do I do? I need $5,000 more, $10,000 more, whatever. I don't have the money. I called a factory. I'd only placed one order at the factory. They're not going to give me much better terms. They still want their 30%, 70%. So I'm like, man, what do I do? My investor, she put in all the money she had to help get it going. So back then, there was no good lending options. You go to the bank, they laugh at you. This is impossible. You're sitting in your underwear at your house making this kind of money. This doesn't work. They don't understand it. And there wasn't all these options there. You know, cabbage and a few of those guys, but they were like, 'You haven't been in business long enough. You've only been selling on Amazon six months.' We'll give you 10 grand. That's good for one day of sales or whatever. So I had to go to MCA lenders. It stands for Merchant Cash Advance and Merchant Cash Advances are typically for normal businesses that have credit card processing. And what they basically do is they will advance you money on your credit card processing. So if you look, show them like, 'Hey, I'm running $2,000 in MasterCard Visa per day.' They say, 'Okay, we'll give you, you know, the next, whatever, four months' worth of MasterCard and Visa transactions upfront.' Well, you're going to pay us back all your future receipts. And they charge ridiculous rates. They don't call them interest rates. They call them factors. But so in my case, I didn't have the credit card processing, but they will give you the money. It's not, it's not actually a loan. It's actually a; we're purchasing. future revenue the way it's written up it's very sneaky and uh in the state and most of these come out of the state of new york because it's a very friendly court in new york that uh will protect them but before they give you the money they'll give you the money in 24 hours usually they just look at three months worth of bank statements look at your history and so in my case they saw what i was doing they said okay we'll give you 100 g's so i could buy you the next batch and so i'm like okay cool i'll take the hundred thousand but they're like oh by the way There's an underwriting fee. There's an ACH bank setup fee. We're only going to put $92 ,000 in your account. I'm like, whatever. I need the money. I got to keep this thing going. I'm making so much money. I did the math. I said, okay, this is going to cost me this loan with the interest rates because I had to pay back about $140 ,000. They're giving me $92 ,000. I got to pay back $140 ,000. It's ridiculous. I got to pay that back in 75 days. They're giving the money on a Thursday. On Friday, they start taking daily withdrawals from my account for $2,000 a day. And they're going to take that for the next 75 business days, including holidays. So if it's a holiday, they're going to take a double on the next business day. And so every single day. So I'm like, that's fine. I did the math. It's going to cost me an extra. The interest is – I forget the exact number off the top of my head, $4 or $5. My landing cost is $20. I had to pay $18,000 to air freight these over. So that bumped the cost, you know, another three bucks on these next run plus their $4. So it's 30 bucks cost. I'm in at $89; you know, I'm selling this for $89. No problem. I have the margin to do it. And so I did it. Well, everything went great. The factory, you know, they sent me photos of the workers sleeping in cots next to the production line. They work 24/7. They're air-freighting these over. Right when I ran out of stock in Amazon, I had the next batch going in. It worked out perfectly. And so in the January, I was still cleaning house. On page one, if you have brand analytics, you know that these kinds of things these days are at the top-just doing really, really well. And then in January of 2016, someone posted on one of the Facebook groups, saying, 'Hey, you know, Amazon misplaces merchandise.' Sometimes, you know, you send in stuff and you say you send 1,000, but they say they only got 990. Or people return stuff and, you know, things get damaged. They don't always pay you. Here's how you download these spreadsheets and you can reconcile them and you can make a report to Amazon. This is before, like, Helium 10 had their tool. It doesn't exist yet. These other services that charge a fee and stuff do it. This is before all those guys existed. So I downloaded this stuff and did this process. A couple of my products, boom, $1,800, $1,000. I'm like, awesome. I did it on my Apple Watchdog. It was a case where I'd sent in like 1,000. They said they got nine, nine is 10 missing. Next day, my listing suspended. And I'm like, what the heck? Why is the listing suspended? I call up Amazon. They said, we're doing a bend check. I'm like, what the heck is a bend check? Like, well, we got to go to like two different warehouses and do an inventory check and like do this reconciliation. So we have to stop the sales while we do this. I'm like, the heck with, I was like, the heck with that. Just forget about these 10, cancel the claim. You can swear, Kevin, don't worry. If you want to say to fuck with that, that's absolutely fine as well. So I was like, fuck that. Just give me the, just forget about these. Put the listing back up. It's doing crazy numbers every day. And they said, we can't. It's already in process. We got to wait for this one warehouse, check it quickly. There's other warehouse, I didn't check it. I was down a few weeks. And back then I didn't know the close of listing. I didn't know all the tricks and things I know today. But I literally went from page one to like no man's land, you know, because there's all these other competitors coming in. In the meantime, I'm having to pay $2 ,000 a day. So I call it the mafia because one thing I didn't say earlier is before they give you the money, before they get wired $92,000 to my account, they make you sign a judgment. So they actually make you sign, it's called a COJ, a certificate of judgment. And this certificate of judgment basically says I'm defaulting on this loan. You have to get it notarized. You have to send it to them by FedEx overnight. So they have an original copy. That way, if you don't pay or you close your bank account or something, they basically have you admitting that you didn't pay. They can take that document straight to the courthouse and bring it to the courthouse in New York, file it immediately without having to file lawsuits or anything; immediately get a judgment on you, and then go attach it to your bank account or to whatever they want to do. It blocks your account from trading, yeah? Extreme leverage. Yeah, they go after your PayPal, they go after your Stripe, they go after. If they know that you sell on Amazon, they freeze your Amazon account. They freeze any bank account that has a branch in New York, all the big banks, Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo. It's easy for them to walk in and do it; they look around where you live. If you live in Texas and they do like a 20-mile radius and they hit every bank within a 20-mile radius, they send us form. It's like they're just fishing. They're serious. I call them mafia loans. So I don't want that to happen. So I'm going to pay $2,000 a day and cover this off of my other products. So I'm rubbing Peter to pay Paul, keeping everything going. And I get the product back up. Sales are dead. I'm not $15,000 a day anymore. Now it's $3,000 a day, $2,000 a day, whatever. Luckily, I have the daily payments. That saved me because I'm having money coming in every day. Eventually, this product, which was in January, got it back up. That's the top of page two; get the sales back up to five or six thousand a day. And then I get hit in March with a, you know, I guess the listing is suspended again. This is in 16. Yeah. 15, January 16. And now you're in March. Yep. Yeah. Listing, it's suspended again in March of 16. Uh, because I had a little graphic on the main image, you know, I'm supposed to have a little graphic. I like, uh, it wasn't, it said like 'Best Voted', 'Best Watch Stock' or something like that. A little like first place graphic, so I was like, 'Okay, I just fixed that. Got it back up. I was down, you know. I thought you had to do a whole POA and all kinds of stuff back then. Turns out, all you have to do is just answer a couple questions. It's back up in 15 minutes. I didn't know that then, and replace the image, uh, but, uh, so I was down a couple days. That hurt me. But it took me until October of '16 to actually get it back up, to actually get through the rest of that inventory. And by then the market had completely changed, and I just had to throw in the towel on that product. That was a big learning curve and lesson in how intensive cash is, how much cash you really need in this business if you're successful. There's a lot of factors out there that are out of your control. You always have a huge amount of risk. It completely changed the way I source products, completely changed my risk model. Some people say, This is a perfect example why you shouldn't have all your eggs in one basket on Amazon. You should be selling in Walmart and everywhere else. And I still disagree with that. I sell in Walmart and eBay. That's a joke compared to what Amazon can do. And so I don't even focus on those anymore. I quit focusing on my Shopify. I have a Shopify site. People can go there and buy stuff. I have stuff on Walmart and Jet, but it's so small. And the time it takes to try to go build that. I can go spend a bunch of time trying to build my Walmart site up and maybe I'll get it. I can maybe get it up to 5% or 10%. Maybe if I'm lucky, 10% of my business. If I put that same effort into Amazon, despite the risks, I can grow it way more. I'll go into another market. From you've got the Amazon business and then you've got your courses, your education, all that kind of stuff. So when we talk about diversification, some people misconstrue diversification as being yourself, you know, like you said, just Walmart, or something. And on your Shopify, I've watched people burn lots of money on their Shopify stock because they've gone, they've got suspended for being a bit naughty, then they've gone 'fuck you Amazon', I'm going to Shopify, blow 100 grand. It just didn't work out for them, and then take their eye off the ball from Amazon, the sales have gone down, then they've gone back to Amazon to build it back up again. But I suppose the bit you're going to get to is that the diversification comp should become your revenue streams from different types of businesses, even if they're related to Amazon-there's selling on Amazon and then there's these other businesses as well. That's why some people say, 'Hey, you're a good friend of Leron or something.' If you're so successful selling on Amazon, why the hell are you teaching? Why the hell do you have a software company? It's diversification in different areas. One's not going to affect the other. You're right. Like I said earlier, I have six different sources. I have two different course things that I do: Freedom Ticket for New People and the Helium 10 Elite for Advance. I have the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, which is for seven-figure sellers and up; it's a high-ticket event that I do twice a year. And then I have the calendar business, which is a healthy – it's not a seven-figure business; it's close to it, but it's healthy margins. The average person could definitely live off of just that if they wanted to. Then I have the Kevin and Steve, and then I have this other – two other – my own Amazon business and another one that I'm building right now. That we're building it from the ground up the proper way. I've learned through this process, through the people I've met, through speaking, I also get paid to speak at events. I've made more than what most people would make in a year just in speaking fees this year to speak at events. So, I'm one of the only people, I think, that actually gets paid to speak at events in a space. And so I've been able to leverage that. And through those connections and through all these things, and through all these experiences, I now know that my mistakes. And so, just one of these companies that's in the process of being built right now, we're doing recycled products made of recycled ocean waste and some other stuff. I've got partners in that. Some people putting in seven-figure amounts, you know, putting in a lot of money into that business. It's a seven-figure line of credit. And I've got the best people in the business on my team. We have the best legal and e-commerce legal guy. We have one of the best forecasting guys. We have people sell businesses. We have some of the best sourcing people, and we have this really good team, and it's being built from day one. When I first started my Amazon business in 2015, I had a partner. I wasn't thinking about really selling it. You know, I wasn't; it was just like, 'Hey, this is a great way to make some money and some cash flow.' And, uh, and, but now we're building this from day one to sell this for 20 to $50 million in three to four years. And so, and I know exactly what to do. I know all the mistakes, excuse me. I know all the mistakes that I've made in the past. And so I'll avoid those in this, and we're doing everything to a T right. Is it going to be successful? Who knows? We may not meet our targets or we may exceed them. But the whole idea is, and it's going to be using Amazon. And because I'm very good at sourcing, and because of differentiation of this product, we have some exclusives. I'm not going to be afraid to go into some competitive markets and compete versus if I was just the average guy on the street. I would rule out some of the products we're going to be doing because there's no way to really compete. But we have a strong competitive edge on some stuff that I think, with a little bit of positioning, will do well. And so all roles lead to one thing. And the mistakes you make and dealing with the mafia; but as a result of the mafia loan, I know I've taken probably 20 or so odd different types of loans. For my Amazon business, including having an investment. I know every in and out of every type of loan, how they work, and how you can use this one to pay that one. I know all the tricks. And so, I'm actually, because of that, it's almost like when you want to hire a security person for your computer company, maybe you go and you hire some guy who was a hacker before, because they know all the inside tricks, and you put them on your team. I'm not saying I was a hacker. It's not like that. But because I know all the tricks, I know all the systems, and I'm on the board of directors for a company, not 'board of directors', the board of advisors for a big company that's about to launch, that's got this very special underwriting program to help Amazon sellers get money when they don't have a year's worth of track here. They've got this really cool algorithm that can take a look at as little as three months' worth of selling on Amazon. And they can predict with about 99 point-something accuracy, if this guy can pay back a loan or not; or I don't know how they're doing. It's very sophisticated. But I'm shooting holes in their theories. And they're like, 'What about this?' And what about this? I'm like, 'No, you need to think about this.' What if the guy does this to you? What if he does this? And they're like, 'Oh, shit, we need to change a few things.' And so, you know, that could turn into something for, you know, a little bit of extra pocket change down the road too. So it's open. One thing opens another door and all these experiences are all leading to one big thing that maybe three or four years from now, if we're able to build this one up and I'm able to cash out, I'll have eight figures in my pocket. And along the way, I've been able to do what I want, have the freedom that I want and enjoy the process the whole way. That makes total sense. So where do you think the whole Amazon community thing is going today? I mean, I still believe that we're on the ground floor, you know, in terms of the possibilities of growth. I'm sure that there are going to be other trends that won't just be Amazon in the future. But what's your prediction? Give me your crystal ball analysis. Where can you see things going over the next two years or so? Well, I think Amazon right now is people always say, 'Hey, I missed that boat.' Is that ship sailed? What's the next shiny object? And I say the shiny object is still Amazon. There's nothing better right now than selling on Amazon. It still is the best opportunity to gain leverage and to grow a business. You've got a billion dollars of funding out there looking to buy Amazon products or businesses. The opportunity is immense. Amazon's doubled in sales since 2016, and it's continuing to double, even if they get broken up; you know, the antitrust thing. Or something. They're still definitely going into additional markets-UAE, Turkey, and all these additional markets. It's just going to keep expanding, so I think it's It's a real business now. It's not a 'get rich quick' thing; it's not a passive income like some people try to make it out to be. Can we talk about it? I've just done a show with Michael Hartman about passive income. And we're kind of talking about the bullshit that goes on in our community. I mean, it's a lot better now. I mean, my take on stuff is I try and do my best to bury that crap with what I believe to be. Higher quality content to give people more choice rather than going after those people and attacking them, my thing is like, let's just keep getting the best content out as possible to advise people in a different way, I mean what's your take on things which unfold? I mean, you've got courses so you know that area can be quite fierce but like you're like a no-nonsense Texan, that's what I like about you. Yeah, that's why I originally did the Core, the Helium 10 Elite. It used to be called Illuminati Mastermind, and it got changed in February of 2019 to Helium 10 Elite and kind of rolled into Helium 10's package where now they get software and stuff. But I did that with them because it's high-level stuff, and you get to meet other high-level people. I mean, you know us. Doing a podcast, you get to network. You get inside knowledge, and you get to become friends and network with people that you otherwise might not have ever met. And you learn a lot that you can apply in your own business. And so I did that. The Freedom Ticket, which is for the new people, I was never planning to do that. But in 2017, I was getting frustrated with all the misinformation on Facebook. Someone saying, 'Hey, when you're about to run out of stock, be sure to raise your price.' And 10 other people after him would say, 'Yeah, that's the best thing to do. Raise your price.' I'm like, 'You freaking idiots.' Or someone would say, 'Never send traffic to Amazon without a landing page. You hurt your conversion rate.' I'm like, 'You're a bunch more stupid idiots.' Um, and just all this stuff. I was like, 'You know what?' I'm going to put out a course, uh, just to straighten this up, sum this up. And, and so that's why that's where the Freedom Ticket came. I enjoy helping other people. Everybody needs the hand. Everybody needs a little bit of assistance. Uh, and there's so many people being misled. I think it's just wrong. You've got all the Lamborghini guys and the, uh, people who have courses or YouTube videos that sold $10,000 on Amazon in their life. And now they have a video or a course and act like they know everything. They don't know squat. Most of the courses are very shallow. They don't really go into detail. So I created the Freedom Ticket to go into detail. It's not a cookie-cutter. Find a product that weighs this much and is under this price and this BSR, and can air freight. It's not about any of that. It's teaching you how to think for yourself. And the Freedom Ticket is very, very detailed. I have a lot of people that take it, who have taken ASM or they've taken other courses. And I'm not saying ASM is bad. It's not a bad course. But they say that. It leaves stuff out. Mine fills in all the gaps, and they feel a lot more confident and comfortable in doing this after taking the Freedom Ticket. And that's what I want to see is because so many people will just go course to course, or they try this, and because they took the wrong course, they listened to the wrong YouTube video, they fail. They don't do their cash flow. None of these courses, zero except for mine that I'm aware of, shows you how to do a cash flow spreadsheet properly and how to pick products properly. They show you how to go use Jungle Scout or X-Ray or whatever, but they don't show you. How to properly do it and so so many people fail and say this business doesn't work and they're just wrong; they're not doing it right if you do it right, you have a great chance of success. For some people that may mean it takes a little bit longer to build to where your goal is-you shouldn't be quitting your job next week, it may take a year or two before you quit your job or you might never quit your job. But The opportunities are huge; but you've got to know how to do this and treat it like a business. And I have that experience because of my background, as you can see, that most people teaching don't have. There are young 22-year-old, 23-year-old kids that don't have those experiences. Or there's someone that was right place, right time in 2013 that has a course that they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground; They were right place, right time. And they're misleading people. Big time, do you think that's as well because they didn't have that diversification so they had their their hit products back then they had a nice easy run at it and so they've only got one look, they've not failed with a product, they've never diversified types of products, not seen lots of different accounts, you know, yeah, I think I think that's part of it, um, that and so it's frustrating all this misinformation, all this is it is it passive for some people, sure there may be a few people out there that They're happy making $50,000 or $100,000 a year. They got three products that are just – they got them launched, and now they're just taking it easy. And they're happy making $20,000 a year profit. But I can tell you all products have a life cycle. That passiveness is not going to last. In 2013, it might have lasted for a couple years. And you see a lot of these people back in 2013, 2014 got started when it was easy. They were right place, right time. Things that worked back then you're able to do a lot more things you can't do now, that it gets now, that it gets in terms of service and stuff. Um, they're failing on everything else they launch because they don't know the fundamentals, they don't know the basics. I see some of them coming back to courses like mine, like I don't know what the hell I'm doing! I've done two million dollars a year in sales and I really don't know what the... I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, uh. You know, there's a really good book comment, uh, by Cindy, I think it's Thomson, called 'A Profit First for E-commerce.' There's a book called 'Profit First' that came out in 2014 and she took it. It's a quick read. I read it on an airplane on a three-hour flight to LA for e-commerce. And it's very, very smart. And I recommend everybody go out and check that book out. In fact, we just re-recorded the entire Freedom Ticket course. Version 2. 0 is coming out in October. And this book is in there with, along with some of the spreadsheets she has, it can make a huge difference, even for. for new sellers and experienced sellers, and talking with her, she even says, 'Look, I get guys doing $5 million a year that don't know what they're doing. They have cash flow, but they don't have profits and they don't know what they're doing. You know, some of these guys don't have two nickels to rub together. They're doing that kind of money. So there's so many people doing this wrong and that's frustrating. And so if I can help people set them straight and guide them to be more successful, that's, I enjoy doing that. Do I make a little bit of money in diversification? Sure. But where the industry is going, I think it's only going to get better. And I think there's going to be a lot of changes more oriented towards the brand registry type of stuff. And Amazon is going to open up. I think they're going to start sharing more information with us. I think some of the software, you may see a consolidation or some of these guys just get weeded out because there's like a thousand different software companies. The course people, they're going to be popping up all the time. Most of these guys are selling these courses; they've sold 10 of them or 20 of them, but they haven't sold very many. They're running Facebook ads. It's difficult, even I'm well-known. It's difficult to run a Facebook ad and actually make money on it selling a course. There are a couple of people that are really good at it, but usually their course is not very good. I see that continuing. I see more and more people still jumping into it, still more information. Amazon's just going to continue to grow. I see it as a great opportunity. I think you're going to see some major disruptions in this business, and something that's going to be happening later this year may completely disrupt the course business. We'll have to wait and see. Some things I know that are on the horizon. There's going to be some major changes. I mean, that's the one thing about Amazon is it constantly changes. And it's probably changed more in the last year than it has in the previous four years. Oh, yeah, definitely. Even on the sponsored product side, like the suite of tools you have now compared to 18 months ago. It's a paradigm shift. Yeah, everything. I mean, with the brand analytics and the demographic stuff they're providing, they're having to do some of that because Amazon's getting in trouble. It started in Germany and now California. But they're getting in trouble for using it. Our data as third-party sellers to find what products they should sell, and some other things that they're doing and they're getting called out on that. So they're having to open it up more and share, share more with us. And as, as that continues, you're not going to need to buy reports from black hat people. But, you know, and the black hat is a problem. I talk about that in, in, in, in the Freedom Ticket to Portland is an entire module talking about the Chinese; it's mostly Chinese, there is some Eastern Europe and some Americans do it too. But, primarily, a Chinese problem, and I talk about that, and I don't think that's going away. Amazon can close some loopholes, but they'll find another one, and they'll find another one. You can't build your business on hacks and beating the system. You've got to build a strong core business with a really good product and really good marketing and really good customer service and a true business, and there's nothing better than Amazon to do that. Even with my calendar business, one of the things that I'm worried about is I'm worried about Amazon as they take over more marketplace taxes. I don't know what the count is right now-15 or 20 states, Amazon's actually collecting the tax in marketplaces. I think that's going to probably expand to all 45 or however many, plus whatever the number is, all states in the U. S. eventually, maybe even by the end of this year, that's going to happen. When that happens, Amazon, I think it's going to shut the door on giving us some of the customer data. They have to now, but my biggest fear is they're going to shut that door. And so you're going to have to get more creative with your product inserts and your stuff to try to capture some of those customers and stay within the terms of service while doing it. But right now, because we can download that data, it's super valuable. If you haven't downloaded that data, you need to go do it. I think you go back a year and a half. You've got to do a month at a time, but you need to go download that data because, like, even my calendar business, you know, every year I sell five or 10,000 calendars through Amazon. Say 10,000 units a calendar, that's 10,000 potential customers that I can send my other catalog to or cross-sell. It's a super valuable lead magnet. And I don't think that's going to change. So what you're talking about, all orders, the orders doing 30-day cycles to download, because obviously first-line software is no longer allowed to display that. You sell a legend and they've got it clearly written in there. You're not able to have customer data. So what you're saying is if you take all orders, report last 30 days and just keep going back in 30 day increments. Yeah, it's your fulfillment reports. You can get that as of now, but I think that's going to shut off. That's valuable data to have for custom audiences, valuable data to have for all kinds of things. That's one of the biggest assets. Your mailing list is one of the biggest assets you have in business because just look at it; take my calendar business as a perfect example. Because I had a list of customers from trading cards, I could leverage that into calendars. I could leverage that into DVDs. I could leverage that into hard drives. Because I had that data, I could cross-sell to them. And that's a mistake a lot of Amazon sellers make right now. They know how to put a product on Amazon, but they don't know how to repurpose it. They're not repurposing, and they don't know how to go back to the well a second and third time. It's a lot easier to sell a previous customer than it is to sell a new one. So many people just focus on those new ones, and they forget that there's a lot of money in the well. And my calendar thing example is a perfect example. I was able to milk that. I'm providing value. I'm not ripping people off. I'm providing value in what they want. But really knowing your customer and knowing what they want, and cross-selling them. It's super valuable. It may not be your product. If you're selling spatulas on Amazon, maybe you shouldn't be trying to think, 'what's my second product going to be for these spatula people?' Maybe you should find a product on Amazon, and on your blog or on your website, or even in your package inserts, you could cross-promote someone else's as an affiliate. You like the spatula, you might also like this set of serving spoons or whatever. And see how many people actually go for that through an affiliate link. And then you could launch a product in the future. There's all kinds of things you can do. And do you still focus on, like, back on the Amazon products, like consumable products? Because obviously you talk about going back to the well, you know, with subscribe and save and stuff. That's also a good advantage that, you know, you sell it once the same customer and getting repeat customers. I know it's normally a smaller percentage. That's always an advantage as well. Yeah, consumables are the best type of product you can have because of that repeat business. But yeah, so like in this new business I'm doing with recycles, we're doing a lot of consumable stuff. I mean, it's not all consumables, but quite a bit of it is because for that exact reason, you can spill a little bit more or take a hit on the first sale and PPC cost or whatever, knowing that there's a certain percentage of them. I'm going to keep coming back over and over and you'll make your money on order number two or number three down, down the road. You're calculating a long-term value of a customer is sometimes, you know, LTV. It can be a, it's something a lot of people don't even know how to calculate. And so those, those are important things too, but that means it takes money. That means it's a real business. It's not a start with 500 bucks and you're going to be sitting on the beach, you know, two weeks, two months from now. that so many people paint this. And even, you know, there's one of the biggest software companies out there, not Helium 10, but it's one of the big three. And they recently released a tool, a brand new tool. And they had, I missed the little webinar announcing this tool. And one of the top people in the company was actually on YouTube. I went to YouTube to see if I could find a replay of it. And I didn't find the replay, but I found some other supporting videos that they had made. Only had 50 or 100 views yet. But on that video, they're talking about how to calculate your A cost. And this is someone pretty high up in the company talking about how to calculate your A cost, and it's completely wrong. And this is one of the big software companies. I'm like, you're leaving out a major expense here in your profit margins. And so I messaged the person, and I said, hey, I wanted to point this out to you. And they're like, oh, my God, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. These are people that don't sell on Amazon that are doing that. So, you've got to be careful. There's so much misinformation, so much wrong stuff, and it's frustrating to me that so many people get misled. And you're messing with people's livelihoods and their money. But back on the Chinese problem, that's not going to go away. It's always going to be there. So, there are certain products you should start considering that are outside of what most of those guys go, and that's where you should really go. As Amazon closes loopholes, another one's going to pop open. It's a cultural thing; it's not going to shift. So, I think, is the biggest obstacle going to be for a lot of sellers to get caught up in that web. They're going to launch something that gets caught up in that web where they're just going to get knocked out really quick. So, that's where it's truly important to differentiate patents, licenses; make sure you're copywriting your packaging. I mean, that's one of the best ways right now, actually, that you could actually get someone off your listing is if you don't have a trademark and you're waiting for brand registry, or you don't have a patent copyright, create unique packaging, not some plastic bag with a label on, but you know, I create unique boxes, four color boxes on all my, all my products. And then I copyright that and it's 40 bucks and you get to get it back really quick. It's no nine month wait, send it in and copyright that. And then when someone actually jumps on my listing as a counterfeiter or as a hijacker or whatever, if they're knocking off my product, I can actually file what's called a DMCA, digital digital 1998 using that copyright. And by law, Amazon has to take them down. And so if you come in and you do that, you know, that's, that's good ammunition to fight against that. I mean, all these little things that most people don't talk about or don't teach or don't know is what I try to help people out with like in the Freedom Ticket. Yeah, makes sense. Is there anything, as we wrap here, is there anything you'd like to add before we go? I just want to say that you're doing a great job. I mean, you're out there hustling, doing three or four of these every single week, putting out really good value. It's straight to the point. You know, there's a lot of people that have podcasts and it's just a bunch of fluff. But I know that every time I listen to a Seller Sessions podcast, there's going to be some value. You get good people that know, for the most part, there's people that actually know. What they're freaking talking about and they're actually, they're actually doing it and you don't let them get away with anything. You know, you, you push them and if they say something and you're like, wait a second, how does that exactly work? Or you dive a little deeper, like the example we gave earlier. And I think that's really good and really needed out there. There's not a lot of the other podcasters are doing that. They're talking about, here's a great book you should read and what we got from it. Or, here's a, you know, they're interviewing someone and it's, there's no substance to it or no, really, hardcore and you're straight to the point. honest so you i mean when i talk to you it's like you're a slight different version of me in terms of like we i think i think the reason why people possibly like the show is i'm like you we're impatient and we don't have time to waste and i i respect the audience so when we're doing i know this one's probably clocked in an hour and a half but i believe there's this jam-packed of like i believe jam-packed with good information but generally is the it's about just getting to the point because people got to go off and run their businesses and so hopefully you know i do this so i can have people look over my shoulder if i ask the right questions they get the benefits i get the benefits because i sit here for 90 minutes and get to speak to you and learn about you and learn how you do things do you see what means that i can apply that to my business as well yeah no so i mean that's I mean, so congratulations on a good job and for putting out, what are you at? Episode 300 or you're up there. I forgot, you know, cause normally when we hit the century, I know we bring you in, but I completely just went past it. And I thought we'd just gone past it. So I'm about, I don't count anymore. I just like, for me, just, I enjoy it. You know, it's in my fabric. We just got the content out there. It costs me; I worked out the other day, it cost me about £10,000 a year to put out 150 podcasts a year. But I enjoy it, you know, like you-you have like this is my hobby as well, does that make sense? It's like some people into cars and that, and I like talking to people, so like, I'm having fun now sitting there chatting to you at 7: 25 UK in the evening; I've been going since half four, five, six o'clock or whatever it is this morning, but um, yeah, I enjoy it, and people get benefit from it, so everyone wins. Yeah, so keep it up. Keep doing that. You're doing a great job, and I really appreciate it. I listen to almost every one of them because you never know what you're going to learn and what you're going to hear. Cool. And so, parting gifts from you, what we've got coming up-you speaking work, the courses, 2. 0-you mentioned. Do you want to give us a rundown? Yeah, sure. There's a brand new version of the Freedom Ticket coming out in October. I mean, I update it regularly. So, you know, it first came out two years ago. So if there's a big change and we go in there and we update the module, but, you know, it doesn't always cohesively fit-you know, it's a different. And if it's a really small change, we might not fix it, but we've completely redone it from scratch. It was 20, I think it was 60 modules and 22 hours originally. Now it's 85 modules and like 38 hours of actual content. So it's a full-on, like a college MBA-type course. And we're doing some things with that that I think everybody's going to appreciate. I can't talk about that right now, but just check in October. And I think it could be a disruptor and a really change the whole course of a lot of people's lives and what's happening in the industry. I also have a billion-dollar seller summits. The next one's coming November 13th to the 17th. It's in Austin, Texas. That's an event I do twice a year. Last one was in May. It's for high-level sellers. It's not for new people. So if you're not at the high six figures or in the seven or eight figures, it's not for you. I do bring in some of the Chinese guys. You need to know what's happening or what they're doing. I'm not saying you should do those techniques or those tactics, but that's your choice if you do that or not. But you need to know at least. You know, I've never done a rebate. I've never even given a rebate. I've never had a friend or family review something. I've never done any, any of that stuff. I have used launch service in the past and then the Facebook stuff. But I haven’t done any of those gray area things or what some people don't even talk about in the new Freedom Ticket. We don’t even talk about rebates. I think rebates are going to be, uh, in the current way that they’re being done are going to be short-lived. I think that always exists because there’s a way, it’s a way to beat the system and it works, but them being so publicly acceptable, uh, I think, uh, is not going to be around too much longer. So we don’t, we don’t talk about that. Uh, the Freedom Ticket is not about hacks. You know, we do do some of that in the Helium 10 Elite because people want that. But, uh, the, the freedom ticket is core business stuff, but at Billion Dollar Seller Summit, um, you know, it's limited to 50 people. It's a $5,000 ticket. So you need to be an advanced seller. But you can go to BillionDollarSellerSummit. com and see if there's any tickets left. For this one, there will be another one in July next year. SellerCon, I believe, is doing their event in Austin, July 16th to the 18th of next year. And so from the 19th to the 23rd, I'll have another Billion Dollar Seller Summit right after that so people can make one trip of it. Also here in Austin. Or you can go to FreedomTicket.com. Those are probably the two best things. Or if you just want to follow me, you just look up AMZ Marketer on Facebook and there's ways to follow me there. Sounds good. Kevin, thanks for joining us. Guys, thank you for joining us. If this is your first time, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and I'll see you again in the next few days. Take care.