Working Smarter and Building Business Relationships with Kevin King - Amazon Thought Leader

Working Smarter and Building Business Relationships with Kevin King - Amazon Thought Leader 00:00:00 Today, I sat down with someone who needs no introduction in the Amazon space. Kevin King is his name, and he is truly the serial-born entrepreneur having started businesses from the ages as young as two or three; yes, he defines it which he talks about in the episode. But just incredible to learn as to how he builds his flywheel, as I sort of allude to plenty of times in the episode, and you know, from Billion Dollar Seller Summit all the way through to Product Savants and the number of Amazon Eight Seven Nine however many figures you want; he's got him. And uh, just truly a guy that believes in abundance from a mindset perspective. He's willing to share and understands the value of time investment. So had a great chat with him. 00:00:49 I hope you guys get as much out of it as I tend to in this episode and virtually every person that I'm so fortunate to sit down with. Hi. And welcome to Successful Scales, the show where I interview now successful professionals about their journey and try and garner insights onto any tips that can be applied to your business at home. Whether it's financial freedom or the exit of your company, wherever your journey may take you, the idea here is to simply learn from those who have done it before. I hope you enjoy and you get some value out of this. Buckle up and enjoy the episode. 00:01:29 Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me today and sharing some of the wisdom that you have gained over your career and everywhere you're heading. So welcome to an episode of Successful Scales. Hey, I'm glad to be here, man. Awesome to be here with you, John. Yeah, no, you know, we've spoken a little bit and I am very familiar with you and all of the value that you give to the entire e-commerce and Amazon community at large. Before I dive into giving you all the praises, I'd love it for anyone who might not know who you are, just to talk to me a little bit about who you are and what you've been up to, and then we can really dive into the meat of it all. 00:02:09 Sure, yeah. I've been an entrepreneur pretty much my entire life since I was two years old. I've never worked in a corporate environment, never worked for anybody, really. When I was a teenager, I worked at McDonald's in a deli and delivered some pizzas. And those are the only three jobs I've ever had where someone else was actually paying me a wage. So since then, I've always been an entrepreneur. I've been doing e-commerce since the 1990s, back before Google existed, back when Yahoo and Lycos and AltaVista and some of those guys started selling on Amazon in 2001. I run several of my own websites, e-commerce websites. Some membership-based sites, was involved in some television production for a while, and we had an e-commerce component to that. 00:02:58 Started selling FBA on Amazon in 2015 and have several different businesses that I'm either a part owner in or I own in that space and continue to sell seven, eight figures on Amazon through those businesses. Also, I've been doing 20-something years in the calendar space where we sell on Amazon, and also we have our own website. I do speak at probably about 60 events all over the world for e-commerce, primarily Amazon sellers. I host the Freedom Ticket course, which is a course for new sellers. It's part of Helium 10, and I have a partnership. Helium 10 is a big software company in the Amazon space. They and I made a partnership to offer that course for free to anybody who has their software tool. I also do their advanced training called Unions and Elites. 00:03:51 I run an event twice annually called the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, which is once in person and once virtual, which is seven, eight, and nine-figure sellers. It's a very small, exclusive, high-ticket event for really advanced Amazon sellers. We have partners in a company called Product Savants where we help experienced sellers discover new product opportunities. We'll find something that's got a great opportunity, we'll source it, and then we basically turn it over to them to brand it and run with it. Wow, my hand is sore. I've just been writing down all the things here. Mate, just can I say what an incredible experience to to start your career, I mean two years old! What were you selling or what were you doing at two years old as an entrepreneur? 00:04:43 Buying bubble gum, I think it might have been two or three... I go to the uh grocery store, uh buy the little one-cent bubble gum and I come back and then sell it to the neighborhood kids for for two cents or three cents or whatever I would take. And I think old oatmeal containers-they're like cardboard. And the top of them was kind of like a soft little cardboard and you could actually make it into a little drum. So I would make those and sell those as little drums to the neighborhood kids. So yeah, I've been, my father used to say that if there was a nickel around, I would smell it. That's brilliant. So, I mean, I can’t even ask you the questions about the decisions that you made to head down that entrepreneurial direction and choosing that life. 00:05:35 It’s like that life chose you from, you know, from before you even realized what was going on in life, which is pretty unique in and of itself. Yeah, I’ve always kind of marched to my own drummer. I don’t like to conform to what society says. I’ve always been a little bit of a rebel, I guess. I don’t like to conform to what society says. I mean, I went to college. I have a degree in marketing from Texas A&M University. I did those steps, but I didn’t go to my dad’s dismay. I think I didn't actually go and take a job in the corporate world after that with all the health benefits and the insurance and the 401ks and all that. 00:06:13 I've never been someone that likes that. I like to dictate my own life, and I like my freedom. And that's what this lifestyle gives me. Yeah, it's a lot of hard work sometimes. And it's not really freedom. You're having to bust your butt. But the rewards are there. You can bust your butt for a year or two. I busted my butt for 10 years or so in one of my companies. In 2007, I decided I wanted to travel. So from 2007 to 2014, so basically seven years, I traveled the world. Went to 92 countries, all seven continents. Uh, I was still running some of my companies, you know. As long as I had an internet connection and my laptop, I could dial in, so pretty much every month I was gone about two weeks, either by myself or with friends or family or whoever wanted to come along. 00:07:03 And I wasn't backpacking um, but it wasn't like let's take off for a year and uh wander around like a nomad. It was literally, I would let's go to Egypt for 10 days, I'd go to Egypt and maybe stop in uh, Turkey or something on the way back, and then come back work in the office for two weeks, and then all right, next trip we're going to uh, Peru! Next trip, we're going to Antarctica! Next trip, going to whatever it was. And so that I just i did that for uh, seven years. You can't do That uh, if you were working a normal job, I spent quite a bit of money doing that uh, and you know I wouldn't stay in the Four Seasons or the Ritz-Carlton all the time. 00:07:39 But I wasn't backpacking, standing cheap hostels either. I hired local guides everywhere I went to take me around, which a lot of these people end up becoming friends, um, just because you're spending 10 weeks with somebody or 10 days with somebody, I'm sorry, and they're taking you everywhere around the country at the end of the trip, you're eating a meal at their house, meeting their kids, and their wife, and whatever. So that that was really cool; you get to see a different Side it's not just taking some sort of package tour type of thing, uh, and, uh, it really changed and I spent a lot of money doing that. And people were like, 'Kevin, that was silly. 00:08:12 You know, you were in your uh 40s when you're doing that.' Um, what you should have just invested that money and put it in your retirement house, half a million bucks or whatever you spent. Just imagine what that could be now. Um, I'm like, 'Yeah, but just imagine if I didn't have all those experiences either,' or, 'Imagine if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and I can't walk up the Great Wall of China, you know.' No, I'm gonna live my life now. I don't live in the present. In the past, you know, a lot of people are always remember when we did that. I don't live in the past. I live in the now. And the past is the past. And I want to do those things when I can. 00:08:50 And it changes me. You know, you hear stuff like on the news recently, the riots and stuff, or the war, little mini-war that happened in Israel in May. You know, I have a different perspective on that than most people in the West that have never been to Israel or only know what they see on TV or what the TV wants to tell them. I have a different perspective. By seeing it firsthand, I've been into the West Bank. I've been into Jerusalem. I haven't been to Gaza, but I've been there. I have a different perspective on it. I can see how things get twisted. It just changes your view of the world. It makes you a much better person. I'd rather do that when I'm 40 than when I'm retired at 75, which is the normal way society says you're supposed to do things. 00:09:35 That's just me. I do the same thing in business. I don't do things the traditional way. I mean, firstly, I mean, you know, living through that war that just was here in Tel Aviv and experiencing it firsthand, for sure. I mean, You know, we're not going to have a whole episode about geopolitical situations, that's for sure. But definitely, You know, I can deeply appreciate that, You know, things are definitely not as they seem and how the media spins aspects of it. But I think that that's also one of the, you know, the decision you made to spend seven years traveling, you know, the reality is that, you know, as someone who has spent the last seven or eight years living outside of Australia and, you know, immersing myself in US culture and now in Israeli culture, you know, through the Middle East, the best decisions I ever made in my life, because the perspective that you have on culture, on the bubble that you grew up in, on those sort of very 00:10:38 insular experiences – you know, you're forever changed. And so I would even argue that you wouldn't be as successful as you are today without having that level of perspective and understanding different cultures and having those experiences. I'm sure without even getting into it just yet, but I'm sure that helps shape some of the business decisions you likely have made since. Yeah, it has um it has, and it's opened up opportunities too by traveling. I mean, I have partners in some of our businesses that I would have never met if I wouldn't have been in China or Hong Kong or something. My wife is Colombian. I wouldn't be married to her if I hadn't traveled to Colombia during this. Let me just clarify that seven years wasn't supposed to be. 00:11:21 It wasn't a planned seven years. It's supposed to be one year. When I turned 40, instead of going out and buying a nice Corvette or a new car or whatever, when you're 40, you're over the hill crisis or whatever, I decided to travel for a year. But that one year, I got so addicted to it, it turned into seven. And to me, life is about the experiences you have and the people you meet. It's not about how much money you have or how hard you're working, which is a lot of people get caught up in that. They get caught up in the, I need to make more money. I mean, it becomes almost like a game and they want to outshine their neighbor or they want to look good to their friends or whatever, or look like they're successful. 00:12:00 They need to feel that way. And that's success. For different people is defined in different ways. And it's not always about money. You need a certain amount of money to live the life that you want. But, you know, I see this in e-commerce all the time. People are bragging about, you know, I've got a seven-figure business or an eight-figure business or we're hitting 10 million bucks. I'm like, good for you. But, you know, some guy over here that's got a little $600,000 business, he actually might be happier than you because you've got, yeah, you've got a $10 million business, but you've got 100 employees. You've got to deal with all this. Crap. How much money are you really making? Are you robbing Peter to pay Paul to keep this thing alive? 00:12:40 What's really going on versus this guy that's got his little $600,000 business and he's taking off $150,000 a year or $100,000 a year out of it, whatever the number is. He's happy. He doesn't have to stress over the problems that you have. So it's not always about being bigger. It's not always better. And a lot of people, they lose sight of that. Yeah, I think you touch on some very classic almost entrepreneurial myths that exist where people wear the number of hours that they invest in their business as a badge of honor. And I did 80, 90, 100 hours a week. Look how hard I'm working in the hustle life. But when you sort of break it down, what idiot starts a business to work 100 hours and have absolutely no free time? 00:13:26 I absolutely loathe the days that I'm stuck in the office for 10, 12 hours, realizing that, you know, there's moments in time when you're growing a business where, yeah, you've got to push and you don't have the infrastructure and you don't have the freedom that you might have 18 months, 24 months, 36 months down the track, depending on how quickly you can build that structure. Or, you know, it looks to me, and we'll get into it in a second, but you're building a very intelligent flywheel of how each of the different businesses that you create helps, you know, give it that extra push from product savants to; is it the Billion Dollar Seller Summit? Billion Dollar Seller Summit. 00:14:07 When I'm sitting and talking to you as someone who's also trying to grow businesses and have impact, and understand how I can work smarter, not harder, I'm also trying to connect the dots saying, right, here's Kevin. He's living a life where he spent seven years off and on traveling, living his absolute best life. For me, that's the aspiration. That's the goal-is how do I create the life that I want to live and work backward? Not how do I waste my, you know, my now mid-thirties and early forties away to eventually have a big pile of money in a Corvette and a Ferrari. I mean, who gives a shit if you're not going to enjoy the ride? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I've got, I mean, I have, I've created, I've got every guy's probably dream life. 00:14:53 You know, I live in a penthouse in Austin. I have a. Really nice Porsche. I can travel wherever I want. I have a wife that's beautiful and 20 years younger than me. But all those things have come with, you know, there was 10 or 15 years of hard work doing that. And then it's like my wife, my mom says, all the past businesses I had when I was in my teens and my 20s and 30s was just preparing me for what I've been doing in my 40s and now early 50s. She's like, that was your training for all that. You know, what some people say, the 20s and 30s are for learning and the 40s and 50s are for earning. And there's probably some truth to that. 00:15:34 And I work differently now than I used to. I work smarter, not harder, like you said. And sometimes, you know, when you start a new company, like I started one last year during the pandemic. And yeah, there's some long days, a lot of 12, 14 hour days for a couple of months getting that thing going. But once it got rocking. I could cut that way back. So you've got to work. But a lot of the things that I did, I traveled and spoke at different events all over the world. I was invited to speak at different Amazon seller events. And you're meeting different people. You're laying the foundation for now what are business partnerships I have and other things that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't done that. 00:16:15 So you've got to work some, but you've got to work smart. So I deliberately for a year. spent a lot of time on the road traveling, flying to London, flying to different events in the UK. Speaking for free, a lot of these and some of them by the end of it, I was like, 'All right, you gotta pay me now because I know um I'm putting some bucks in the seat so we gotta figure out a way where you're at least covering my cost but I did that uh and it it laid the foundation for everything I'm doing now with Parts Of Ons with doing dollar seller summit uh with uh the training that I'm doing Um, so if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't be where I'm at now and able to leverage all these relationships. 00:16:54 And that's where a lot of businesses, a lot of businesses, it's who, you know, um, that, and the partnerships and the relationships that you build that can really determine your success, not how many employees you have or how much money you have. And that's really how I'm able to do what I do now. You know, it sounds like a lot, but like my billion dollar seller summit, it's a hundred people max that can come to that. It's a $5,000 ticket. So it's an expensive event. And we do it nice. But because I have all these relationships in the space, I can send out a few emails. I can line up. I know who the good speakers are, who the bad ones are, who I don't want, who I do want. 00:17:32 Most of them I know personally. So if I invite them and say, hey, I'll cover your way, it's a 9% success rate of people saying, yes, yes, I'll be there. So that's the extent of my work. Two or three days of making, you know, coordinating that. And then I have an event planner that I've worked with for years that I turn everything else over to him and let him do it. I'm not involved in all the micro details. If there's some major detail, he'll come to me, but he takes care of it and I trust it. The same thing, you know, like with products of odds, I met Steve Simonson, a partner in that, you know, through all my travels and speaking and attending events. 00:18:10 And he's been bringing stuff in from China for 30 something years. He's got a whole team in China. So why not leverage that? So my skill is finding new product opportunities. And so I spend my time doing that. And then I turn the product opportunity over to him and his team. They source it. And then he and I go through it and determine whether it's a go or a no-go. And that's it. So it's working smarter. The same thing with Helium 10. I have a course that I created called the Freedom Ticket. I created it in 2017. And the reason I did it is because there's so much misinformation out there on Facebook. So many guys trying to sell people on selling on Amazon, showing their Lamborghinis and showing screenshots. 00:18:49 And most of those people I was just looking at them. I was like, these are just pure bullshitters. Uh, most of these people haven't ever sold on Amazon. They did, they did for a couple of months. There's a couple of good people out there that are legit. Uh, but most, the vast majority are not. And I just got frustrated and I'd see people posting on Facebook. Oh, you should do this. And they'd just be parroting each other and something that was a total falsehood will become a truth or people would be like, yeah, never send traffic to Amazon without a landing page. I'm like, you're an idiot for doing that. But it just became, I got frustrated with that. So I was like, I'm going to create a course. 00:19:24 And when I was creating, I was like, you know, this is going to create a course is a lot of work, but it's a one-time thing. And so I look for things where I can duplicate it, create it once and sell it many times. That's what a course is if you do it right. And I created it, but then you've got to market it. And you've got to get affiliates and you've got to do all this stuff. It's like, why not? That's a lot of work. Helium 10, already the biggest, well, at that point, they're the second biggest, but now they're the biggest in the space, in the entire space. Got a million people plus or whatever to download with their Chrome extension. Why not just go partner with them? 00:19:56 I knew the owners of the company and said, hey, why don't we just do this? We'll work out a deal that makes sense for both of us. And they said, sure. So now all I've got to do is create it. I don't have to deal with any of the traffic, any of the audience, any of the customer service, any of the setting up the GoToWebinar links or pages or anything. They take care of all that. And it was a 50-50 deal back in 2017. So I would have to give 50% away to an affiliate anyway to drive traffic in. It was a win-win for both of us. So it works smart. And so that takes all that load off of me. 00:20:31 I don't have to go out and hire a bunch of people to do all this and set up an office and have people in the Philippines and whatever and try to completely control it. Just partner with smart people and focus on what you do best and maximize that rather than trying to own the whole shooting caboodle. That evolved from we were charging $9. 97 I think at the time to now it's free if you have a Helium 10 membership. You know, they pay me a fee for keeping it up-to-date and for shooting new versions every year or so. And it's a win-win deal. Could I make more money if I went out there and hustled it myself? Maybe. 00:21:15 But it'd be a lot of hustle and a lot of work versus that time that I get paid enough for what I do from them for the partnership, why not take that same time instead of trying to hustle that and make a mix of a hundred grand or 200 grand or whatever in my pocket, put that same time and energy into a product sponsor into something or a billion-dollar seller or something to make even more money. So that's people sometimes ask me, Kevin, why don't you, can I pay you to consult? You know, and I was like, no, I don't really have time. You know, I've got my own business that I'm running. I've got my own stuff. I'm not really interested in consulting. I got so many people asking me to do it. 00:21:51 I said, okay, a thousand bucks an hour. And people were paying $1,000 an hour to get on the phone on a Zoom call like this and talk to me about whatever they had, whatever their questions were about Amazon. And I did that for a little while, and I was like, this is actually not the best use of my time. Yeah, $1,000 an hour is a lot of money. And for some people, that becomes their business, and that's what they do. But for me, I had to look at it like, okay, if I take that same hour, which usually doesn't turn into an hour, it's an hour and a half, because we've talked about it longer, and then they get some follow-up questions. So it usually involves a little bit more time. 00:22:23 Than on the surface, but if I took that same hour or two hours and I would devote it to doing something that I can multiply, you know, creating a course or or or creating a product in my bit one of my businesses that I'm going to be able to sell. You know, that same investment of time could multiply so that same two hours I'm giving up a thousand bucks an hour right now to do something for zero dollars an hour in one of my Amazon businesses, but that zero dollars, that same hour is going to come back and pay me five or ten thousand dollars two years from now when we sell that company. Um, so you have to, I have to look at things like that and that's what a lot of people, I think, have trouble actually doing is looking at the big long-term picture. 00:23:10 I think there's a lot to unpack from that for people who are sort of approaching it. So, you know, to me, you're someone that has the mindset of abundance, right? If it's not about a situation where money in my pocket is better than money in your pocket, it's that I'm happy to concede that I'm not going to make all the money, but if I invest my time wisely and I find the right. Where it's in our mutual benefit, then as a result, I'm able to achieve a whole lot more. Like just sitting here and sort of unpacking that in and of itself, you know, it's the great equalizer time. We've all got 160 odd hours in the week. I mean, yeah, okay, you want to work 250 hours a week. 00:23:46 That's your decision, right? But the reality is there's only so much time. So it's how can you create that leverage? And I'm doing the math as well. I'm sitting here and I'm saying, right, well, Helium 10, I know you mentioned it, but just to reiterate, we're talking about over a million downloads as a Chrome extension. It's the most used tool in the space. So that, in terms of what that does for your credibility, working with the elite sellers, and then from there, parlaying that into the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, and then from that into the. Funnel around product savants, you know you start to build this incredible flywheel, and I feel like it's the word I use all the time right now, but I would say that for the smartest entrepreneurs, they're the ones who are really thinking laterally and saying, 'How can I? 00:24:30 How can I?' It's not about how can I make more money; it's how can I make more, how can I add more value to the existing relationships that I have, so that you know if you if you want to talk e-commerce, talk, you know, how can I increase my cart size or my LTV of my existing audience and how can I start to actually have bigger impact, so that I'm not working harder or growing bigger teams; I'm simply getting more bang for my buck effectively. Yeah, exactly. Um, and that's that's my approach is I want to enjoy life-you only have one life to live, and so I don't want to spend it all, all working all the time; I want to have some fun. Hopefully, we'll have a bit of fun. 00:25:10 I'm assuming you're going to be at Prosper in about a month. Yeah, I will be there. I will be there. So yeah, so we'll definitely have to have a few beers over there. But before we get there, I got to ask you the question because my business partner, Lippy, who you haven't met yet, I managed to convince him after he spent, well, convince, you know, he's a big boy, he made his decision, but he spent five years in the military. Here in Israel, he's Australian. And before he went to college over here, he was going to study entrepreneurship. I said, listen, I'm growing this Amazon business. You know, I was doing 2 million at the time. We took it to 5 million, 12 months from when he joined. 00:25:47 And, you know, as a subsequent output from that, I pitched him on the businesses that we've created today. Now, you know, I took him away from education. What value did your formal education, because you said you did go and study in the end? How would you say that's had impact in my career as someone who is a serial entrepreneur from birth? Very little. And I had a couple of classes. I had an entrepreneurship class and a class with a lawyer that taught a class. And I got some value from those. But there's a lot of classes. At Texas A&M is a good university. I'm a huge fan of the university. I'm a huge football, American football fan of them. But the actual value of going to college, probably, I mean, I did it because that's what you're supposed to do. 00:26:38 And my father insisted that I do that. He had been saving as a child for, you know, to pay for it and all that stuff. But I don't think it's necessary for most people, especially today. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or some very highly skilled, you're going to need some education. But for someone that really wants to run a business, there's nothing better than experience. There's nothing better than getting out there and just doing it, failing. I've had a bankruptcy. In 1998, I declared bankruptcy. I've had the ups and downs. It hasn't been a straight-up curve. I've had to get very creative at times, writing a check, hoping the bank didn't cash it for three days to ride that little float. I've done all that stuff. 00:27:21 I've dealt with having to get loans from basically the New York mafia. Just crazy, crazy, I mean, crazy stuff that I've gone through to get to where I'm at. It's not an overnight success or anything like that. But I wouldn't trade any of that for anything because those all shape you and form you and make you just that much better at business. Yeah, and, mate, you've got connections now with the New York mafia. I mean, you just want those, right? Yeah. Do you know what? We'll save that. We'll save that for those beers at Prosper. I'd love to hear that story. But yeah, I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs when they're going through this journey, there is a lot of pressure that exists. And it's not just the self-imposed like, I want to succeed. 00:28:13 I have that hunger. I want to achieve. But you mentioned as well, your father wanted you to go down that traditional route and go to college, get a job. Stuck that 401k and have a nice pension, and whatever that looks like. How, how, how did you sort of combat that knowing that your, you know, your family and assuming you know your family, you're potentially close with, yeah my father and I did not speak for a while, I mean it was I was rebel, rebelling against everything that's um he thought should his his child should do. I mean i was a I was an 8-plus student in college, in high school, you know. I was I think my high school class was 800-something people, it's a big you know big high school and I was like eighth or something in the class. 00:29:03 Well the last semester of my senior year, I just I got frustrated, I just got I don't know burned out or rebellious, and so I just quit going to some classes or I would take the take the test, uh, you know, calculus test, and I would just not feel like studying for it. So, I just chose B for every answer on the form or whatever. And, you know, I ended up almost failing something. It knocked me down from like eighth to 23rd and upset my dad so much. But I was just rebelling against him and against the norms. And it caused issues. And so I was kind of like on my own for a while. And my dad wasn't really happy about some of the things that I was doing and refused to support them. 00:29:46 Or, you know, he couldn't go brag at the end around coffee with his friends. Oh, what's your kid doing? What's your kid doing? You know, so it created some uncomfortable stuff for him, but I mean, now everything's fine. But yeah, he's, but he still, still has concerns, you know, about, I don't think he quite, he's not entrepreneurial-minded. He's very much, you know, some people have that entrepreneurial mind and risk takers. They're willing to take the ups and the downs. Other people need that steady paycheck and that steady thing. And he's one of those. And you need both of those kinds of people. Yeah, you probably need more of those kinds of people than you need the people who are willing to take those ups and downs. 00:30:30 And I think that's also, I mean, you really draw on a really interesting point here. I feel like, you know, let's put the hustle life aside here for a second. And let's also talk about the fact that there is just almost like. Glorification of being an entrepreneur and having a startup, and all this sort of like, you know, sexiness about it, and I don't know, for me, it's not that at all, like, it is so far away from what people sort of glorify it to be. And I think, that you know, one of those decisions when you're going down that journey is that you have to be very okay to say, 'I am not, I'm not going to have this steady paycheck that's going to come in every two weeks or every month or whatever the pay cycle is.' I'm not, you know, there is no 100%. 00:31:17 I mean, there's not 100% security in that, as we all know, but it's more secure than this journey. So, I mean, what are your, I mean, you're pretty much born into it, right? So, you've always lived it, but what are your sort of feelings or sentiments towards anyone who's going to go down that journey? What are the caution signs or what are the things that you should be looking for? Yeah, it is hard work. I mean, and a lot of people, they think, oh, I want to quit my job so I can work for myself. And a lot of times all they're doing is creating another job and actually a harder job. And so a lot of people don't realize that. Then a lot of people, like you said, they think it's glorious. 00:31:51 And I see a lot of 20-somethings that want to start some company and they think, oh, I'm just going to start it. And a lot of these companies have no purpose. I mean, they say they have a purpose and a mission, but it's like, who's going to buy this? Nobody's going to buy this. I mean, you're going to get 10 people to buy this. And they go out and they get some funding from somewhere. And it's because some of these funding guys, they're rolling the dice. I've got a friend that invests in startups and he puts a couple thousand dollars into different startups and he's got 600 of them or something right now that he's got like $2,000 or $2,000 in each one. 00:32:24 And he gets down to the ground floor and he's like, look, out of these 600, probably 595 of them aren't going to make it. I'm going to lose all my money. And that's OK. But maybe I'll have the next Uber or Lyft or, you know, whatever. Next Facebook will be one. So I'm just rolling the dice. And so that's how some investors look at it. But these the entrepreneurs are starting this. They don't see it that way. They think they have some badge of honor that it's a glorious thing. Yeah, I'm living up. I've created this cool new startup and this new technology. And they don't realize what it really takes to make something work and to make it run. And so I think that's where a lot of people get caught up in the glory of it. 00:33:07 It's nice to be the boss, nice to do what you want, but there's a downside to that too. You're working holidays and weekends and nights a lot of times. But at the same time, if you want to take, you can organize your schedule. Next month, I'm taking three weeks and just basically taking off. But I'm not truly taking off. I'm still going to have to check in, check the bank accounts, check to see if there's any disasters. But I'm not going to be doing day-to-day work. But I can plan my schedule. That's what I'm going to do and organize everything towards that. When I travel for seven years, that's what I did. I organized my schedule to fit my lifestyle. 00:33:46 What entrepreneurship can do for you is it can, once you get over that hump and that initial hustle, is it can help you. You can craft your own lifestyle. Which is much more difficult to do if you're working for somebody. And whatever that lifestyle is, it makes it easier to do that once you get to a certain point. And the Amazon business is probably one of the best opportunities of that in the last hundred years to where you can actually do that because Amazon does a lot of heavy lifting for you. You know, you don't have to have warehouses and staff and all this. You can, one guy in his pajamas with an internet connection anywhere in the world, sitting in his pajamas with an internet connection anywhere in the world can run an Amazon business. 00:34:25 And so it's created a lot of opportunities that didn't exist before because you're basically doing what I was saying earlier, giving you the hidden 10 example and the product semantics example, and so forth. You're just spinning off part of that load and partnering with somebody else that's doing it all for you. Yeah, I mean, you know, we talked about this, I think last time we sat down, I said, you know, if someone had no idea what they were doing and they wanted to make a buck and they had a bit of money to invest, obviously, you know, you could very easily come to you, product savants, and Steve Simonson, and effectively say, right, hook me up with the right product, you know, through the deal structure that you guys have. 00:35:07 Go to an incredible Amazon brand management agency. Make sure that those products get to, you know, a fulfillment center and you're away there effectively if you've got the money to invest, right? It's unbelievable what the Amazon ecosystem has enabled people to achieve with, you know, I don't want to say little to no skill because I think that it breeds a little bit of misconception as to like how easy it is to sell on Amazon. I think that a lot of people, you know, I see the funniest posts on Facebook. You see that the question that comes up, I would say like once a week is, I've got $10,000. Do I invest in crypto or do I invest in Amazon? And I just, I don't understand. 00:35:50 Like, if you're writing that question, there is absolutely no way that you should be putting even one cent of your money into an Amazon operation because they couldn't be further away from each other. Yeah, there's a lot. Most people that try to sell on Amazon fail. I mean, I don't know the exact number, but you hear statistics about, you know, Amazon, 6 million people worldwide open to Amazon or 6 million seller accounts on Amazon or whatever the number is. There's a million open last year. But most of those are not selling much. And the vast majority of people that take a course or they try to sell on Amazon, most of them don't succeed. The vast majority don't succeed. It's because they're either not taught right or they don't have the right mindset. 00:36:28 And it does take a skill set. It either takes a team, or experience, or you got to wear a lot of hats. You got to know a lot about a lot of things. And a lot of these people that are pitching people on courses and selling on Amazon leave a lot of that out. They just show the cool little. Look, I bought this for $2 on Alibaba. I'm selling it for $20. And, you know, they don't even tell you the right numbers. You know, I made an $18 profit. I know you didn't. Leave their house out in the middle. And they make it look good because that's what they're doing-to sell you a course or just take all these done-for-you services that are out there. 00:37:04 Your guy who has $10,000 could end up in that. Most of those are a waste of money too. The real money in Amazon, selling on Amazon right now, at least for the next few years, and it has been for the last couple of years, is not actually running the business because it's a cash-intensive business. And that's what a lot of people don't realize is how cash-intensive it is. You may have a $500,000 profit on paper, but I can guarantee you didn't put 500 grand in your pocket because you're having to constantly reinvest that to keep the flywheel, as you said, going and the new inventory coming or adding new inventory. But where you can make money is this aggregated culture that's popped up around. 00:37:42 The Amazon business especially, it's been around for five years, but in the last year, it's really gotten a lot of press. And there's 60, 70 some odd companies now that have raised, I think, collectively into the close to $3 billion collectively to actually invest in Amazon businesses. And so that's where the opportunity is, is someone like yourself or me or the audience build something up where you can make a little bit of money as you're doing it. But build it in such a way that in two to four years from your start, you can actually flip this for hopefully millions. And that's where you can get the best leverage. And so if you come to it from that mindset versus I need to quit my corporate job and replace my $100,000 a year income. 00:38:23 And in the next three months, it's like, no, keep your corporate job. If that's what's covering your bills, do this on the side at night. So it reaches a point where you can actually pay your rent. Then maybe consider leaving your corporate job or maybe not. But grow it to a point where it's throwing off that half a million dollars and in today's world you could sell that for a million and a half to two million dollars, probably with the competition that's out there in the aggregator space right now to one of these aggregators that will take it over from you, you've proven that it works and they'll blow it up; sometimes they'll give you a piece on the back side so you can take a lot of chips off the table right then and then reinvest that and do it again or take it and do something else or whatever you want. 00:39:05 And that's where the true opportunity is. And a lot of people that are getting into it, they don't think about that. They don't think about that long-term play to where, look, selling on Amazon is not necessarily make money now business. You can make money in two to four years from now business. And they come in undercapitalized or they don't understand how to analyze competition and analyze risk. and analyze where your true costs are selling, not just the basic three or four things that are always going to add into a spreadsheet, but there's 25 other things that you've got to consider too that can really cut into your profits. That's where a lot of people drop the ball. And then it becomes, like you said, it's a lot of work. 00:39:48 You've got to wear a lot of hats or you've got to have people that you're partnered with that can do that for you or that you've hired. So, you team me up here perfectly, Kevin. I got two areas that I'd love to talk to you about. So the first is the last thing you said is about having the right partners. Now you have, I honestly lost count of how many businesses you have currently and also how many you've had over the years. In your case, then I want to step back into the aggregated chat because I'm particularly interested in it. It's something that we've been chatting about and I've got some some questions and I feel like you're the man who'll have some of the answers I'm looking for, but on the partner's perspective when you're starting a lot of these businesses how many of them do you go into when when you have a partner and how are you also making those assessments? 00:40:37 Is it from a perspective of 'I service this need like I'm very operationally savvy they're great on the sell side or like, how are you how are you making those decisions well yeah it's exactly that way I mean I'm very good at sorting at finding product opportunities and analyzing the keywords and the data and using the tools and just uh it's like a sixth sense you know all right like uh you know if you do This and this I can see that I can see the uh the big picture around something or how you, the creativity that might be needed to like, well, if we change this and change that, this will make it really good. But then I, on the sourcing side, contacting the factories and stuff, yeah, I can do that, but that's not my cup of tea. 00:41:18 So I'm part savant, so I'm part with Steve, who has a whole team that does that. And then Steve has a lot of experience bringing stuff in. He knows a lot of the regulations and rules of different things. You know, if it's got wood, oh, we've got to meet section 13. 2, you know, import code or whatever. He knows all that stuff. So that's a good partnership where I can focus on what I do best. It's like if you're on an American football team, you know, you're the quarterback. It's not also the wide receiver. It's not also the running back. You've got to focus on what you do best and get a team around you. So sometimes that team is you can hire that team. You can get VAs. 00:41:58 You can get other people. You need to train them up or hire people that already have those skills. But for me, that's the harder way. And yeah, you may have more control, I guess, to a degree. And maybe you can take, you have more percentage of the company or something like that. You know, you have a higher, but to me, if I have 80% of the company, I have a bunch of VAs and employees doing it. Am I better off having 80% of the company and letting them do something or partnering with someone like Steve or he's got, we're 50-50? And instead of having a $1 million business, we have a $5 million business. And so 50% of a $5 million business is a lot more than 80% of a $1 million business. 00:42:41 So you see this on, I don't know if you ever watched Shark Tank or Lion's Gate, right? Yep, yep. Lions come on there all the time. I'll give 10%, I'll give, I'm looking to give, looking for half a million bucks for 10% of my company. And the Sharks like what they're doing, they negotiate. Well, I'll do it for 35%. You know, I'll give you half a million. And they're like, no, no, we can't give up that much. It's good to negotiate, of course, but then they negotiate it back and forth and it's at 30% at the end. And I'm like, no, I just can't give up. This is my baby. I can't give up 30%. I'm like, you're a fool. You're a freaking fool. 00:43:15 And a lot of people, they get too close to their business or their baby or they don't quite understand where key relationships can make all the difference and be worth a lot more at the end of the day. And so, that's the same thing like I gave the example of helium-10 and others. That's how I look at it, and how it's critical. And a lot of people just don't get that. Yeah. And that makes a whole lot of sense to me. The sum greater than the parts, and looking at how you can strategically align with the right people who have the same mindset and complementary skill sets really enables you to achieve a whole lot more. Yeah. I mean, yeah. For example, that's one of my companies. Well, I have two. 00:44:02 One of them is about to, we started it last year and got funded last year, but the pandemic, we decided to wait to launch the products until this year. So we're about to launch them here in the next month. But these are somebody that I met through my speaking. So the way the trail works is I was in Hong Kong speaking at an event. They saw me speak. They came up to me and said, 'Hey, we would like to talk to you about maybe a partnership with something.' I'm like, 'Yeah, I don't know.' A few days later, we're having lunch. And they're like, 'Hey, this is what we do. We're experts at sourcing.' We have this company and you know, we'd like to help find products and you know maybe we have some guys that have a little bit of money that might be able to put into it. 00:44:41 We'd like to start an Amazon business and I just wasn't totally comfortable at that point, you know, going with these guys. But then so, we kept the relationship going about a year later, they said hey, we have this opportunity for these products made out of recycled ocean waste, uh, we have this exclusive factory, they do stuff for Adidas and Nike, and they do this and this. I'm like, okay, now we have something rather than just me going and and finding something on Alibaba and putting our logo on it, and you get some guy that's got a little bit of money. Now we have a true moat and a true differentiator. Let's talk. So we start talking. These guys know how to source it. They've got the good connections. They also are ex-bank. 00:45:18 They used to work for JPMorgan Chase, so they invest in banking. So, they know a lot of people that have money. It's like, well, if we're going to do this, we're going to need a million bucks to launch this company, plus a line of credit. Like, oh, we've got the guys. So, you know, they're coming to the table with, with the people that have the money, they have those relationships, those money people trust them, then we form a company together. I'm good at the marketing side, the Amazon side, the creating the brand side. They're good at the sourcing side and bringing the money. So it's a good synergy all the way around. And then we hire out what we need. 00:45:52 If we need logo design or we need a website, rather than having a staff sitting here doing all that, we just go into Upwork or one of the places and hire. Uh, Vas or someone you know, some cases we've used people in the past, we know who to use and we just get those things done on a little on a case-by-case basis rather than having full-time regular employees. And then as far as you know, we have one VA on that that just helps you know some of the social media and some of the customer service, but if you do things right, you don't have a lot of customer service. And I personally like to be involved in the customer service when I first launched because I want to see firsthand what people are saying and and, you know, to be able to fix it. 00:46:32 And then I'll back off of that and pass that on. It's not the best use of my time, but in the beginning, it's a good use of my time. Jeff would love that. So that's, yeah, that's how we do it. And then, you know, this one company, when we came into it, we're like, it's a great opportunity, but let's build it to sell. So we contact like a group, like Northbound Group, who helps a lot of Amazon sellers sell. They come in usually after the fact. After you've been selling for a few years, and take a look at your books, and make some strategic plans, and some forecasts, and help you kind of get 00:47:05 all your ducks in a row to actually sell to one of these aggregators or whoever; but I'm like, 'We're like why don't we start with them from the beginning?' So we brought them in from the very beginning, they've got a small little piece uh, and they did a lot of work up front, you know, forecasting, and setting up the operating agreements, and everything correctly; so that when because our goal on this is not to to build this company, and manage it for the next 10 years, it's to build it for two to four years, and sell. It uh and then go on to the next one and so that that's uh so we've done it from the ground up uh organized from the ground up which is not necessarily what most people would do. 00:47:39 Yeah, you've reversed engineered the aggregated model. And when I do stop recording, we're going to have a bit of a chat in a few minutes between because I've got something cooking up on the sidelines here as well that's aligned with that strategy. So yeah, very, very smart. So before I let you go, the other question I had for you is on the aggregated space, how long do you think this bubble is going to last? So we know that it's been around for five years and you know, you know what you tell me, how long, what's your prediction? Yeah. I mean, one of the first guys was that was doing this happened to be here in Austin and he sent, it didn't work out. 00:48:24 So they sent it on under because they didn't realize how much, you know, they bit off a little bit more than they could chew and they didn't realize how hard this actually is. So some of these guys, like your Thrasios, haven't figured out. They've got 600, 800 people, whatever the number is, working for them. They've kind of got a well-oiled machine, and they'll probably survive. But a lot of these other smaller ones are not going to survive. I think you're going to see some consolidation. I think you'll see some of these go out, just flat out go out of business. I always remember a story of a friend of mine. This was before the big aggregator rush. Three years, four years ago, he had a supplements business. And he sold it. 00:49:02 It was doing like $30 million a year on Amazon. And he sold it for a lot of money. And after he sold it, six months later, the buyers were coming back to him saying, 'Hey, can you help us out? Sales have tanked. We don't know what the hell we're doing.' And they actually paid him to come back in and try to reverse it back up and to help them. And so a lot of these aggregators don't have experience. They're coming from a different world, a corporate world. They got a lot of money, but they don't have experience. And they think, well, it's no big deal. We'll just hire it. will just hire the experience and good luck. Because most of the people that are running these Amazon businesses successfully, they don't want to come work for you. 00:49:40 I think Thrashty has been able to convince two people, I think they told me, of the companies that they bought. They make the offer to everybody, but only two of them have actually said, 'Yeah, we'll come work for you,' of the companies that they bought. Most of them, they don't want that. That's not why they're doing this. They're entrepreneurs. Like we talked about earlier, it's a different mindset. They don't want that corporate job. So finding good people that have experience in this is difficult. And so that's part of the challenge that I think a lot of these smaller ones are going to have. And then people that are selling to these aggregators, and if there's a big payout on the backside, if they're giving you, say, 60%, 70% up front, and the rest of it's on earnouts, like, well, we're going to double your sales, and you're going to get X percentage of the profits for the next three years, I'd be careful on those. 00:50:24 If you do that kind of deal, that's great if it works out, but you need to make sure that whatever that money is you get up front, that first payment when you close, you need to be happy with that and consider that's the only money you're ever going to see. If you're satisfied with that, then okay, take the deal. If you're not satisfied with that, be very careful. I think a lot of them are going to go under. I think the market also for the companies that they can buy, I've asked the guys to ratio this and they say, oh no, there's plenty of them. But I think it’s actually more limited what most think. Or they’re going to have to change their business model. 00:50:59 Because if you look at Amazon statistics, I don’t know what the ones were for 2020. I know for 2019, it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 businesses on Amazon worldwide are doing a million dollars or more in sales. Now, that’s 20,000 worldwide. Some of those, probably half, I don’t know the exact number, but a third to half of those are big companies. That’s Nike and Adidas and Procter & Gamble and whoever. Those people are the aggregators that I’m going to buy. I think immediately you can cut that market in half. There's 10,000 of these potential businesses. How many of those people are willing to sell or how many of those people are actually profitable? A lot of them are actually generating cash flow, but they're not very profitable. 00:51:45 They're not very well managed. They may not be so attractive to buy. High-risk categories or they're constantly having to evolve new products. So I think you're going to have a point in a few years where there's less and less of these qualified companies to buy. And you can see the aggregators that like the Thrasios that have bought up enough of them, they're going to start owning some spaces and it's going to be even harder. You know, we all talk about now in the space, it's the Chinese sellers that have the advantage and come in and do black hat and whatever crazy stuff. I think you're going to see in a couple of years, it's going to be the aggregators. They're not doing black hat, but the aggregators are the ones that are controlling the aspects of this. 00:52:24 And it's going to be harder for an individual seller. So I think, I think the time right now is probably about two years, two to three years of some pretty good times, unless, you know, something happens in the market or there's a world war or some craziness, you know, another pandemic or something. You just don't know these days, right? Without, without any of those kind of world-shattering events um yeah I think it's about a two to three year good run, it's always going to be here you know there's always going to be 10 years from now you're going to sell your Amazon business if you want to somebody but the good run right now where the the values are inflated and there's a lot of dumb money um that has to be deployed is probably the next two to three years, top yeah yeah that's uh sort of where my head's at too so nice to hear that validation Kevin, I'll let you go. 00:53:12 I know you got to run. Well, I mean, I at least definitely do as well. So I'm putting words in your mouth there, but I've got to say it's been such pleasure. You know, I know we hit record and I said, 'well, we'll try and get 30, 40 minutes out.' And before I look up, we've got two minutes until the hour's up and here we are. And I could go for another 10 hours. So mate, thank you so much for taking the time. It's been a real pleasure. If anyone does want to... you know, a $10 billion seller summit, if they're qualified, it's product savants and anything in between. What's the best way for them to find out about all the many businesses and ways in which you might be able to support them? 00:53:52 Yeah, probably the best way is just to follow me on Facebook. I'm not on LinkedIn or any of those, but if you just look up Kevin King on Facebook, I think it's, yeah, I mean, look at my ugly picture and you'll know who I am. That's probably the best way. Now he's lying to you if you're not watching our video. That's probably the best way to actually get a hold of him or to see what the latest I'll usually post in there. Awesome. Well, get him on Facebook, guys. Again, Kevin, thank you so much for sitting down. It's been an absolute pleasure and an honor having you. No problem. Glad to be here, man. Take care of you. Thanks.