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Do you dream of selling physical products and creating a successful e-commerce business? Does it feel like an impossible undertaking, even after hours of research? You’re not alone! The complexities of choosing the right product, managing inventory, and navigating sales channels like Fulfillment by Amazon (Amazon FBA) often deter potential entrepreneurs. However, Neil Twa, CEO of Voltage Holdings and a seasoned e-commerce expert, outlines a clear, actionable four-step framework to help you thrive!
Neil’s expertise is backed by an impressive track record: as an eight-figure Amazon seller, he has successfully launched multiple brands and assisted thousands of entrepreneurs in building their businesses. With over 17 years of experience in the e-commerce space, Neil has developed proven systems for scaling and sustaining profitability. Let’s dive into these steps and some of Neil’s most impactful insights!
Step 1: Understand What to Sell
Finding the right product is often the most overwhelming part of starting an e-commerce business. Neil stresses that the key isn’t just about finding something popular but about identifying products that resonate with your target audience and meet specific profitability criteria. He uses what he calls the “Green Light Process” to evaluate products based on profit margins, cost structure, and market potential.
“Products are just a transactional mechanism by which the brand occurs. The emotional connectivity, the outcome, the solution, and the benefit are driven by the brand.”
To start, focus on:
Profitability: Ensure your product has at least a $12 net profit. This means after deducting all costs — including production, shipping, Amazon fees, and advertising — you should still make $12 per unit. Tools like Amazon’s Fee Calculator can help estimate these costs.
Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): Keep your COGS below 35% of the retail price. For example, if your product sells for $50, aim for production costs, including packaging, to be under $17.50.
Scalability: Choose products that allow for differentiation and innovation. Avoid overly saturated markets where competition drives down prices, and instead, look for niches where you can add unique value.
Step 2: Focus on Data, Not Emotion
One of the biggest mistakes new sellers make is falling in love with a product. Instead, Neil advises adopting a data-driven approach to decision-making. Use tools and algorithms to assess market trends, customer behavior, and competitor performance. This allows you to adjust strategies quickly and focus on the most profitable opportunities.
“Never marry your product. Marry the brand, marry the business, marry the avatar, but don’t marry the product.”
Key actions include:
Competitor Analysis: Use tools like Helium 10 or Jungle Scout to evaluate competitors. Look at their pricing, customer reviews, and best-selling products to identify gaps or opportunities.
Test Small: Before committing to a large inventory order, test multiple products by purchasing smaller batches (e.g., 100 units per product). This helps you gauge market interest without overcommitting resources.
Pivoting: If a product underperforms, analyze the data to understand why. Adjust your approach — whether it’s improving your listing, changing pricing, or exploring a new niche.
Step 3: Build a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy
Amazon is more than a marketplace; it’s a sophisticated search engine. Success depends on your ability to leverage its algorithms to drive visibility and sales. Neil explains that understanding customer psychology and crafting compelling listings are critical to standing out.
“You are not convincing an Amazon buyer to buy your product. You are answering the three questions they have in their mind because they are predetermined to buy when they show up.”
Steps to optimize your digital marketing:
High-Quality Listings: Use professional photos and create a detailed description highlighting the product’s benefits. For example, if you’re selling a water bottle, emphasize its durability, leak-proof design, and eco-friendly materials.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns: Start with Amazon’s Sponsored Products ads to drive traffic to your listings. Set a budget, identify relevant keywords, and track which campaigns deliver the best return on investment (ROI).
Keyword Optimization: Research popular search terms using tools like MerchantWords or Amazon’s Keyword Tool. Incorporate these keywords naturally into your title, bullet points, and product description to improve search visibility.
Step 4: Prepare to Scale and Sustain
Scaling your business requires not just success in sales but also careful management of inventory and cash flow. Neil points out that many sellers fail because they cannot capitalize on their success by reinvesting in inventory and marketing.
“Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash flow is king.”
To build a sustainable business:
Inventory Management: Use inventory planning tools like Forecastly or SoStocked to avoid running out of stock or overordering. Running out of inventory can hurt your Amazon rankings, while excess stock ties up capital.
Multi-Channel Strategy: Expand beyond Amazon to platforms like Shopify, eBay, or Walmart. Diversifying reduces dependency on a single channel and opens new revenue streams.
Brand Development: Invest in creating a recognizable brand. This includes developing a logo, consistent packaging, and building a presence on social media platforms to connect with your audience directly.
Final Thoughts: Align With Purpose and Value
“ If you focus on that purpose and value…then you will be a byproduct of that. You will gain more than just financial profit.”
Neil’s final piece of advice underscores the importance of aligning your business with purpose and value. Whether you’re a first-time seller or scaling an existing brand, focusing on purpose-driven value creation ensures lasting impact for both your customers and your life.
…Class Dismissed!
By following these four steps, you’ll set yourself up for not only financial success but also the freedom and fulfillment that come with running a sustainable e-commerce business!
Want to hear the full interview with Neil? Click here!
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Transcript
Neil: [00:00:00] Products are just a transactional mechanism by which the brand occurs. The emotional connectivity, the outcome, the solution, and the benefit is driven by the brand. But the product itself just completes that transaction.
Brien: Welcome to the Millionaire University podcast. I'm your host, Brian Guerin with you today. And on this edition of the MU pod, I'm joined by Neil Twat. He's the CEO and co founder of Voltage Holdings, a company specializing in launching, consulting, selling, and acquiring brands with a focus on e commerce channels, such as Amazon FBA, as well as Omni channel.
And since 2012, he's launched five plus personal brands. He's generated tens of millions of revenues as an eight figure seller, and that's incredible. He's also assisted in the growth of thousand plus others through consulting, coaching, mentoring, alongside his business partner in the voltage team and guys to round it out.
He is also the author of almost automated income with FBA. Neil, I'm just guess I could keep rattling for 10 minutes on there, but I'm going to just go ahead and welcome you to [00:01:00] the show.
Neil: Yeah, that's kind of boring. Everybody else. Let's
Brien: I love it.
Neil: You're still listening,
Brien: after all. I think somebody's still here, there's maybe one or two people still here.
Well, let's hope so. We'll find out, right? We'll check those download numbers afterward. All right. Well, Neil, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today, man. I'm really excited because the topic of Amazon FBA, we get a lot of questions on this from our MU listeners. So we're happy to have an expert on board to, to unpack this a little bit for us.
But what we're going to talk about today is a little bit more specific. We're going to talk about the four steps to building a real profitable and a sustainable e commerce business, starting with private label on Amazon FBA. Before we hop into that, let's get a little bit of your origin story. How did you find yourself where you are today?
Neil: Well, I got to go back into the Wayback Machine cause I'm an old goat. And let's do it. I knew life before the internet. There's going to be a generation here soon who has no idea what life was before the internet. We're aging out. I'm not that old, but at 48, the life before the internet was quite a different time than it is [00:02:00] now.
Brien: I miss it.
Neil: But yeah, I grew up in the mountains of Oregon in a little place called Medford. It was great to grow up there and it was a fun place to go out and be outdoors and just play around. And just absolutely fell in love with the culture and the people in the environment and whatnot. But as I got a little older and found the internet through my friend who had a computer and we were too poor to have one, but I'd go to his house and we'd dial up on the interwebs there and through dial up and get on the boards and message boards.
And I'm like, wow, there's this whole other world. And it wasn't mainstream yet. So I had kind of an affinity for it. I just didn't realize how much I developed that desire to be a part of it. So when I got through college, high school. High school wasn't terribly complicated for me. It was actually relatively easy.
But at the end of it, I didn't want to go to college, so I wasn't prepping for everybody's normal college thing. Even though that's kind of what my parents wanted to do. They were not college graduates. My dad was a high school dropout who went to the Navy. Learned how to become a boiler man mechanic, and he was a really hard working good guy.
Tough to live under at that age, but he was a good guy. And it taught me the suck it up buttercup strategy for life. So that built the character [00:03:00] that I needed to be tenacious and just a mean young man. But I wanted to go to the air force. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. And as I went through the training and got started into it, they basically rejected me because I couldn't fit in the cockpit.
I was too tall. I have too much height from my waist up, so I couldn't set in the cockpit with the helmet on or I'd hit the canopy. And so they're like, you can't fly the plane like this, dude. I'm like, well, then now what? So the second, like when everybody else had already been prepared to go to college or whatever, I'm like backpedaling scholarships and applications in the last semester before I graduated.
And so I did get some scholarship stuff and actually music, played music since I was, uh, in trumpet specifically since I was in the fourth grade. And so I was like, well, I guess I'll go for music and I'll play band and I'll figure out what to do next. And so I went off to a little liberal arts college in Iowa and started playing, you know, music and trumpet and jazz and classical, which is what I was doing.
And I had a scholarship to go there. So that's what I did, but I didn't really want to be there. So within the first like year, I was failing out. I went from, you know, an A plus 4. 0 student in high school to like failing out at a 2. 7 GPA in [00:04:00] college. I didn't really know how to do college. It was a very different way to study and learn and act, and I just didn't want to go there anyways.
So I applied to get back in because I didn't know what else to do. So by my year two and three, I'd kind of figured out a little bit about where I sort of wanted to go as the internet was coming online, as they were shipping computers into the university and we were clearing out the basement of the library to make a computer room where they were going to host it.
I was helping to set up the computers and dip switches and networking and nobody knew how to do anything. And we were reading manuals and like doing this on the fly because nobody knew how to do it. And so I got pretty good at it and had fun and realized it was part of the aptitude, but then when the internet really hit.
And about 98, you know, or
Brien: so,
Neil: I had actually decided to go be a computer science major and move to Missouri to do that and spend about a semester there. I met a guy who is actually a consultant who was programming at a sprint in Kansas city and he was an adjunct professor and he would go there and do that.
And then he'd go back and do his job. And so he was teaching us, you know, C plus computer programming. And I'm like, man, this really sucks. I don't want to be a programmer. And he's like, well, you know, if you want to get in like business and [00:05:00] consulting and programming and stuff, you could do what I do. And he told me how much he made an hour and stuff.
And I'm like, Oh, I could do that. You know, I was young, I was like 60 bucks an hour. I could do that. He's like, yeah. So I jumped out of college and went and got a little consulting gig and started to teach myself how to do programming and then started into HTML. And then that became ASP active server pages.
And then I started building a little web apps and things. And I applied to get a programming job at sprint and I got on. And so I started programming at 19, 20. In 25 bucks an hour back in 99, 20, that was not bad money at all. And I was learning how to basically program web apps on the fly. So I'd stay up to like one or two in the morning doing the work to learn how to do it and apply it and then come back the next day.
So I wouldn't get fired. So my entire first career was just trying not to get fired from a job that I didn't know how to do. And I was figuring out how to do it on the fly and I got pretty good at it. It's a life skill to be able to just tread water and float like that. And so I was doing it. But they developed this little division called sprint PCS.
They were like, Hey, we're going to go into the mobile phone industry. And so they had a cattle call for everybody [00:06:00] internally that they were going to start this division and start launching mobile phones. And I'm like, heck yeah, I want to do this. What's a mobile phone. And so we're like, get into this. And I got hired on as a full time employee, 5, 000 something badged employee.
Go launch this, you know, mobile division and start launching mobile phone. So I started on the cusp of that. By the time we got into that, we were programming larger systems and knowledge management systems and implementing systems that have New structure and incorporate structure and whatever number four, long story, boring, short, I got pretty good at it.
And where the time is sprint and, uh, my career had changed paths and we had about 80, 000 people inside the company. So I watched it go into five years from 5, 000 employees to 80, 000 employees. So that was quite fascinating to see a company that that size and magnitude go that fast. It was literally hand over fist.
People were, they were throwing warm bodies. When I, by the time I was 21, I'm managing a team of five people who were like three times my age, they put me in front of these people. And I'm like, that's a grandpa. And they're like, do something with this team. And I'm [00:07:00] like, really, I have no idea how to manage people.
I'm starting to learn how to do this. And I'm like, so I was just in sink or swim mode again. So we launched and we took over the web page. 50, 000 of them started building up this little thing in the PCS division was launching and got my first mobile phone in 2000 and I was hooked on the technology. I was hooked on the whole thing.
I was hooked on the internet and I still knew that there's something I wanted to do. I was just in the corporate world at that point. Cause that's where the money was being spent clearly. And there wasn't no academia, there was no marketing degrees, there was no higher education to teach you what to do on the internet or how to do digital marketing or do any of that stuff.
Right,
Brien: right.
Neil: Everybody was figured it out on the fly and it was happening so fast. Hence the dot com bubble. Everybody was throwing money at trying to figure this out. And IBM came in to help do part of the project. And over a course of a year, I made friends with quite a bit of crew of IBM people, which was new to me because they were a different caliber of person.
They were from different locations, they were different degrees, and they were from Harvard and Yale and Stanford and all these big universities and [00:08:00] stuff. And I was like, wow, that's kind of cool. And. I figured out really quickly to, you know, they get you there and it's what you know that keeps you there.
Brien: Yeah.
Neil: And the relationship driven aspect of that, I was learning very quickly. That's how business was done. And to that point in degree, it had always been in my mind that it was, you know, backbreaking hard work and you do this and that's what gets you forward. And you know, you've got to work hard, work hard, work hard.
And the idea of being smart and working smarter than harder wasn't even in my brain yet. And, but it was starting to develop that seed. It was planted. It was going, I was like, Hey, wait a second. You can make this much more money if you're just this much smarter or this much better at figuring it out. And so that's where I fit.
I just kind of fit into the middle of that. And I was like, that's where I landed. That was my place. And so I stuck there and made friends with one of the partners at IBM. And after we saw the project and did the work and helped them out and just got in the middle of it, he says, Hey, there's a job at IBM.
You want to come check it out? Little did I know he'd already set up the interview. He'd already set up the, staged it up. And I, it took me longer to fly out to Armonk, New York to do the interview. It took 20 minutes and then fly back. [00:09:00] Then it took the whole process to be done. And so I was an IBM, no degree, just experience.
And now I'm working for IBM. Which was quite fascinating. So now I had a laptop and a cell phone and a corporate credit card and it was like, go, which was a new experience too, because now I was on the road and traveling different locations and business and developing projects and working again in the development of knowledge and management of knowledge inside these corporations.
That's what I was doing and led me into some really cool projects that I get to sit on board rooms. And so some of the largest companies in the world, I got to go down to wall street and go into the Thompson financial company that not many people know about where it's the backbone of the exchange. And systems and technology and server farms that stack up 10, 20 stories high.
And they're just these glass walled in digital computers running the stock exchange, mind blown, you know, and just these environments that I got to go into. I'd never would have got into personally. And I, here I am floating in and out of these large corporations all over the world, and it was quite fascinating for a young guy in my early [00:10:00] twenties to be doing all that and realizing so much about business so fast.
And just getting a deep ingrained understanding of how business is done at certain levels. And then I realized there were certain levels within those companies to get to that certain level. You had to compromise certain beliefs or structures or family or other things. And that's when I started to realize this wasn't for me.
I was reaching the ceiling because I wasn't willing to do those things. I wasn't willing to take the corporate credit card and do an entertainment Friday with clients or other people because I didn't want to go to those places. And so when it started to compromise values and beliefs, I was like, well, this may not be for me anymore.
And I don't think I want to keep climbing this corporate ladder if that's the way this has to get done. And thankfully, that crossed paths in 2007, and I fired the man and burned the boats and got out when they said, Your division's going to Argentina. You're welcome to go there. If not, you gotta find a new job inside of IBM somewhere.
Good luck. Or take an early severance, early retirement. You can leave. Those are your options. And I had just asked my wife to marry me in 2007. We were gonna get married in March. And by June I [00:11:00] was out of a job and we were newly married
Brien: and we
Neil: were like, okay, sink or swim. She has a good degree of BSN is an RN.
And so she was working and out of school and you know, employment and doing that stuff. So we had her income. We just didn't have my income anymore. And then we found out we were pregnant in September of that year too. So it was a new business, new marriage, and we're pregnant all in one year. And then discovered in December of that year that the pregnancy had taken quite a toll on her and she had to go on bed rest.
So then she wasn't working anymore either. Okay. And was running off her PTO hours. And so we were down to no income with a new business and a new family. So not recommended, but I was into challenges.
Brien: Yeah. But scenarios like that sure light a fire under your butt.
Neil: Well, that was it. It was again, sink or swim.
It was like, figure it out, get it done. It's been the story of my life to that point. So I'm like, okay, well, this is just, this is the way it is. We figured it out.
Brien: Yeah.
Neil: Got into that business and just figured it out. I became a different kind of management consultant. I started a management consulting company and I started trading time for money in a [00:12:00] different way.
And it was a little bit nicer, but still it was the same thing. I just ended up back on some IBM projects and subcontracting to other projects where I was a billable consultant. So, but at this point I was at the 250 an hour, not the W 2 wages. So that was cool. But again, still trading time for money.
Still self employed to some degree and still only making money when I build for hours, which was cool because I needed the money and it was great, but it was still that reconciliation that I got into a job, but I was now in a job and myself of my own creation. I think a lot of new entrepreneurial people struggle with when they realize the way to make money in business is to learn how to create force multipliers.
Out of not just yourself, but the business and its brand and what you're doing and not just multiply yourself out of force. I had not understood that and made it very difficult on myself for the first three or four or five years till I hired a mentor. And basically the mentor was kind of like my life raft was kind of like.
I think the phrase that comes to mind was when the student is ready, the mentor will appear [00:13:00] and you just have to know that that's what you got to grasp onto. And I'm like, I'm willing to spend time with you. I'm going to go with you. I'll pay you money. It's like, whatever. I need your input. I need your guidance.
I need your help. Like you have to help me with this. He was kind and gracious enough to do that and taught me some really valuable life lessons in the development of business. Specifically, the sales fixes everything. Don't be a used car salesman, but sales fixes everything. You have to learn to sell. You have to be tenacious with your selling.
You have to be tenacious with your followup. You have to find and qualify the right people, not just every person. And you have to really learn to give them what's in it for them while not taking what's in it for you out of the equation. And then you have to deliver the results. Whatever you do, you must deliver the results.
If you can create that engine, it will become a perpetual machine. And so he really beat that into my head because I've never truly understood that yet. Right. I realized the engine required to run a business as an entrepreneur or as a person is very different than any kind of corporate or structure you put yourself in that feels.
You know, somewhat safe until they call your number,
Brien: but
Neil: [00:14:00] it also has all these other mechanisms you don't have to be like, I don't have to be the accountant, I don't have to be the bookkeeper. I don't have to be the person that deals with the credit card. They pay them off. I don't have to be the person that does certain aspects of the finances.
Right. And the management and the oversight of all that and the business development and the lead page guy and the window washer and the guy that does the dishes and the one with the lawn, it's like,
Brien: yeah, go change the diapers while you're at it,
Neil: changing diapers. Cause then by that point we had our second child and then our third child.
And in four and a half years, we had four children. So in that four and a half years after I started my business, I had four young kids under the age of five as well, and a wife struggling with some very significant medical issues on top of that. So I was both a primary caregiver and dad, and in some cases, mom, and we had some very significant issues with her health at one point, and she had to go have a full hysterectomy after the fourth child, and unfortunately, the car rising machine failed, and she ended up having some major complications in the hospital.
They ended up overdosing her on morphine and she coded out in front of us and I watched her die once and then they brought her back and then they took her in for emergency [00:15:00] surgery. She had three of them in 36 hours. She died once again on the table when they resuscitated her during that process. And so there I was with a guy and barely any business, wife who was dying in the hospital and four kids having a three day period there where I thought, well, I'm going to be a single dad with four young kids now, what, or young daughters too, which makes it in my mind, it made it even more difficult to reconcile.
Thank God she is safe and she recovered and it didn't end up fully killing her. They didn't die twice. I can laugh about it now. It wasn't funny then. Like it was, uh, it was not. Yeah. At that point, but I can laugh about it because it was a long time ago, but it was a definite change in the mindset and mentality of me as a person who was in business like these life events didn't define me out of fear and going backwards and trying to desperately pull for the world to save me.
It was more like purpose driven value had changed. My family had changed now the dynamic and this health issue and crisis that we were dealing with. And these young daughters had changed my perspective on what value was. The value now [00:16:00] was my family. It was no longer the business, you know what I'm saying?
Like it had inverted in that process. And when it inverted the purpose of everything that I was doing changed. And while it wasn't fully recognized in that moment, it still took years later in a couple of major challenges in business for me to fully understand what that actually meant. In what I was trying to do with this whole business and it actually defined it into, I know a lot of people say lifestyle businesses, but they don't always live it all the way through their children and down.
And that's not something I wanted to be as a person. That's not, I didn't want the hypocrisy of, you know, I do one thing and my family does something different. I want this whole thing to be one unified and glorious purpose, if you will. That was my goal. That was my objective. That was what I wanted out of business.
And I got it. It took me 17 years to do it, but I homeschool my girls with my wife. We live on our 50 acre country homestead out here. We run a multi divisional business. We've got a lot of business that we're doing now and I run it as a lifestyle and my kids [00:17:00] get to be a part of it. And as they've gotten older, they're doing their own entrepreneurial things.
And my 16 year old is learning how to do business at levels that most college people will never understand. And this is my opportunity now to pour that back into others and be able to show them how to create a lifestyle driven business. In which the business goes ahead of you and makes money 24, 7, 365, even when you're sleeping.
And you can have purpose and value over profits while also getting the profits. And this change that I learned is something that I really want people to understand. Because they get in business and they think it's all profit driven. Like if I just make that profit, you know, if I have that big opportunity, then my Lambo and my jets and my kids, and they think about where it is going to be when those things occur.
And they actually don't start the process of it here in their walk first to gain that they got it inverted. So those are some of the things that focus on the topics that we brought up in terms of the steps. Because people tend to get the steps about building an e commerce business wrong, the same way they get the steps backwards about the purpose driven value of what they're doing and who they're serving.
And then the [00:18:00] profits come from that. So in this same stepping stone of what we do with the business in terms of an e commerce startup. What the heck do you sell is the first thing that everybody has a question about, right? And I remember it was one of the first things that came up with a guy I was consulting back when I started the Consulting side of our business and got on an hour long call and did the whole thing and you know, okay great You're gonna get this awesome product or whatever and I remember him looking at me on the phone He's like, but what the blank do I sell like you didn't get it?
And this is goes back to that sales fixes everything mantra that I was ingrained in me So I'm like, well, I didn't explain that very well, Tim. So we need to come up with a process that defines that. So we came up with metrics and process we call a green light process. And it literally gets down to whatever you want to sell.
You should be able to sell to anybody in a box. It just gets down to understanding who they are, what they're doing, what's in it for them, what they're willing to pay for it and making sure that you do it profitably. And so that means that you could literally sell anything. And with that, I discovered in the 2000 era, Amazon through a process of determining how to create my own physical product [00:19:00] brand, like I had gone through the marketing and the digital marketing and all that stuff.
And then realized for me personally, maybe it was age thing. Maybe it was just understanding or aptitude towards the business. I actually want to see a physical product, not just a purely digital product. So like there was online, there was digital in the thing with Amazon or even selling your own website and selling your own product was cool, but pure digital play seemed hollow.
It didn't quite fit the purpose and value outcome for me. So I wanted to see tangible products as a part of that. And I didn't have that yet. So I went on the process of trying to figure out how to do that. Like manufacturing didn't know about it, warehousing and retail and all this, didn't know about that either, but I knew about digital marketing.
I knew about avatars. I knew about building businesses and selling people. And I was like, okay, well, I can figure this out. And I landed on Amazon. And one of the reasons why I really landed on it is a friend of mine invited me to take a look at what he was doing. And I had no idea there was this thing called fulfilled by Amazon.
What is known today as FBA. Which it turns out was just a company that Amazon bought a logistics and freight management company. Then they rebranded it as FBA and they did that so they could take over [00:20:00] control of their logistics and supply chain to the customer when they were flipping books. And Jeff Bezos decided, well, I want to sell all the things to all people in 30 seconds or less, but they needed the infrastructure.
So he convinced all the shareholders would put in 15 billion and they went to building this large infrastructure and they bought a company to help them get it off the ground. And so I was right in the early cusp of that change. Yeah. And Amazon, and I saw the way the physical products and stuff would move and realize, well, I can move all the product through their system.
It's sort of automated. I don't have to manage the products. I don't ship it from my garage. Like it's not eBay, right?
Brien: Yeah.
Neil: It's not like garage sales and crap. It's like, Hey, they ship real physical products. Brand new to the customer. This is so cool. I can see them. I can see how this is going. And I kind of got into that moment of opportunity that all of us do when we're in a place long enough to see opportunity, it will happen a little bit of luck.
Right. And I happened to be there right in the early days of when that was exploding. And we got to our first seven figure brand in 2014.
Brien: Wow.
Neil: My physical product branded products through Amazon, and I was really hooked on the system. [00:21:00] Because we were focusing on the person, the purpose, and the value of the product and the solution that it provided.
And Amazon was delivering the products to the customer. So we got to really focus on that. And, of course, it was making money 24 7. So no longer was I trading time for money. I was going to sleep at night and waking up with thousands of dollars in sales every morning. And man, I was hooked. I like, I wanted more.
That was the dime bag of business. And I'm like, I want more. I want more. So we started launching as many brands as we could capitalize as fast as we can launch products. And we got very good at it. And what happened was, what the heck do I sell? And it actually came out of one night, I'm up late with one of my children.
We had the four under four. So they were all in diapers. They were all young, they were on bottles. It was just like, man, I'm in defense 24 7 in my house. Mm-hmm . And there. Yeah. Am there. Yeah. Somebody was never sleeping, somebody was always awake. Somebody was always either throwing up or having a dirty diaper or some problem was always occurring.
Like just a normal process of life. Yep. Don't sleep for 10 years basically. And so she's up, my wife is so tired and she's sleeping and I have the third daughter with me. So I'm up feeding her and taking care of the [00:22:00] crazy neurotic cat that's puking at three in the morning. Cause she's crying and making him totally nervous.
So he's throwing up in the kitchen and she's screaming cause she wants a bottle and it's three in the morning.
Brien: Yeah.
Neil: So you get all that nonsense chaos settled down and sat down in the chair and I'm holding her and feeding her. And I flip on the television and what's on at three and four in the morning.
At that point, he's like infomercials, right? Like that's all it's on. So I'm flipping through infomercials and up pops this one for this. The product it's called a seat pet and it's this doll thing and it attaches to the seat belt and the kids can put their little crowns or whatever they want in the pocket.
And it's this cute little animal. And it's got this little kid. Like their head won't fall over and they can snuggle it when they're in the car and they take this pet with them or whatever. I'm like, that's a really cool product. And here I am thinking I'm going to order one, right? Cause I still hadn't transitioned my mind.
Hadn't conditioned myself away from consumerism yet, even though I was really trying to do that as I was building these businesses. And it turns out I was like, it snapped in that moment. I was like, Hey, I could sell one of those. Like I saw it on television. They're obviously, they're making money. They have to be, they're putting all this infomercial out and maybe it's for people like me with insomniac kids up at four in the [00:23:00] morning.
Feeding bottles. And I'm like, that's perfect. So I called my partner the next mid morning after I woke up and I said, Hey, yo, could we sell one of these? Could we figure this out? And so he's like, yeah, yeah, let's go do some brainstorming. And then his younger son at that point was into anime. And so he said, what if the little innovation, the little tweak.
What the heck do I sell is that we just change up the faces to look a little bit more anime and a little less straight animal characters. And so we developed three or four of those that just had a bit of an anime look to them instead of a regular cat or regular dog or whatever. They had big eyeballs and bigger faces and wider faces and they had a little bit of anime appeal to them.
And so we played on that innovation. We played on that spin and it's not terribly complicated. And we took a Hail Mary pass. Cause we were super cocky and I don't recommend this and ordered a couple of thousand units after we had had them send us a prototype they had made and stuffed, and we asked for stronger stitching because the stitching wasn't strong enough for the sides and.
We asked him to make the head a little bigger than the ones that the other company had made. And we asked him to put the pockets a little bit [00:24:00] bigger because the pockets were a little small. We'd ordered theirs and we were playing with their product. And we're like, here, change these things on the product.
So the manufacturer sent us a prototype and I'm like, Hey, let's run with that. Let's get those three. And we ordered 2000 units. I put my half of it on a credit card. So like, here we go. We're in the bills are coming due. We got to make this thing roll. Right. And so we launched that product and we both. Got the product off the ground and learned something very critical in this entire process that kind of pivoted the way we started doing business after that.
We called it trend jacking at that point because literally there was a trend of somebody buying the products and there was this thing called a spillover halo effect that was occurring where people were seeing it on the television but then going over to Amazon and buying it. And so what we discovered when that occurred, we called it the as seen on TV at that point because that was like how those commercials worked as seen on TV.
Method of trying to figure out a product you're using television commercials. That's basically a way of finding products and we're hacking the urban mindset. We called it and going through and seeing these products. And so we developed belt buddies. All right. And belt buddies, we [00:25:00] put them on Amazon. We threw up a compelling listing really at the end of the day.
Cause it was just like, Hey, if you want this one, then this one's better. And we shot the photos with the iPhone and we had some really great compelling copy because we were pretty good at that. And it turns out we were selling 10 times more than they were capturing all the traffic that was coming on Amazon and demand for that product.
We simply got ours ranked higher, more visible. It was like five or 6 more per unit than they were selling there for. And the 2000 units sold out in eight weeks.
Brien: Wow.
Neil: Organically without any marketing. What we discovered was there was not only that halo effect, but there was this thing going on inside of the engine.
Where it was visibly displaying products and changing the way the organic visibility of that product was occurring in the system. When we watched that happen and something clicked in my brain. And I said, you know, I've seen that before. I couldn't figure out where I'd seen it before. And why was this doing this?
And, and they had developed this engine on Amazon to make these products go. And I'm like, where was this at? It wasn't really published. Nobody understood it. This was all brand new. [00:26:00] And it turns out part of the algorithmic system. Okay. Cause it's all technology driven at that point. It's very technology driven now was all about relevancy, the relevancy of the person, the product, where it was placed in Amazon system and where that traffic was flowing inside of the ecosystem of individuals looking for that product.
So from the top down the commercial down, there was a specific channel of literal data flowing like a river, but Amazon, we call Amazon a river, right? But it's also this big tree of data. And in this big tree of data, they've categorized and created what's called a taxonomy of that data. So boring technical stuff, but in essence, that's where that product lived in the system that created certain relevancy to somebody who's looking at it, a mom or a dad who wanted their kid to be safe, who didn't want their head to be cocked to the side, who wanted to give them a cute doll that they could ride in the car with.
And it was also make a great gift if grandma or grandpa wanted to get them one or somebody else. And that was kind of the driving mechanism of that customer avatar. So we [00:27:00] really dialed into it. We ordered another 2000 units and another 2000 units. And all of a sudden these things were just flying off the shelf.
And here we were with a seven figure toy brand selling stuffed animals. Wow. And it just took off and so many things clicked. And the thing that I realized was I had developed some of that stuff at IBM. When I was on a particular project for over a year, I worked at our month. In New York, which is their patent headquarters center.
And they do like 18, 000 patents a year out of that division. And I got to work alongside of a group of guys and gals who were working on the super computer, super crane machine, deep blue Watson. And we got to be a part of doing some of that. And what we were developing was technology, artificial intelligence, latent semantics, search engines.
Human machine language and learning algorithms to determine and analyze data from a large language models. As I understand it now very differently than what we were doing then, but that's what actually we were doing was kind of some of the frontier of that work. Being done back in the day, like 2003, four.
And what you're seeing now is so tip of the iceberg, right? Well, [00:28:00] AI for me is fascinating because it's very beyond where it is now. And I'm seeing the introduce AI chips. Now Willow just came out this week, but that is just now telling you things they've had for like 20 years, just so we're clear. So this machine and all this stuff that we were doing, I realized that part of the programming and the knowledge and the learning and the aspects of that Amazon had either borrowed or took in part of that code or developed their own.
And that's exactly what they were doing with it. And as soon as it dawned on me that I'd seen that response before in the engine, I was like, well, that's because we've been working on it in the past. I know what this thing's doing. Like I have a certain degree. I need to go figure out what the rest of it is doing, like how they changed the programming.
And so I spent the better part of 18 months just technically geeking out on Amazon's A9 system to figure out how it was ranking keywords, organic, algorithmic, paid traffic, what it was doing, when it was doing it, and then mapped out a whole launch process. Every 30 days of how the algorithm would work.
And I called it priming the engine. And when priming the engine would occur, the outcome [00:29:00] is you could get significant organic traffic in the world of online, that'd be like understanding SEO for Google and being able to rank a website that generates a ton of traffic. And when it does generate a ton of traffic, it stays there for a long time.
Brien: It's like Amazon specific SEO,
Neil: Amazon specific SEO. And so what came out of that was our ability to rank products very high and fast in the organic world. In fast forward, Amazon's changed a lot of that now in terms of the way that the engine sort of works and they're rolling out what's called Cosmo and other technologies to make these large language models become a huge part of it.
Uh, the way that ranks and organically ranks in Rufus, but still the core of that engine is still sitting under that platform and we still utilize it today for ranking and maneuverability of products. But the conditional learning of the product led us to understand, okay, how do we make that profitable?
If we can get that much organic traffic, what kind of profit metrics do we want? What are our numbers? And so also how do we run the business? Not by gut feel. How do we make it profitable, make it growable, make it sustainable. Cause as we were business development people, we weren't treating this like a side hustle.
We weren't treating [00:30:00] it as a hobby business. We weren't just flipping products for profit. We were trying to build brands, very big difference. And so you're listening to this. You really need to think about what is brand building look like. And products are just a transactional mechanism by which the brand occurs.
The emotional connectivity, the outcome, the solution, and the benefit is driven by the brand. But the product itself just completes that transaction. So what does that mean for our world? It means we actually focus on products second and we focus on the data first. We invert the relationship. And so many people hear e commerce and physical products and Amazon FBA and stuff, and they immediately jump to the product.
And that's where so many sellers get it wrong. That's why so many people fail in Amazon or any e commerce venture is they've got it wrong. They got it backwards. They've been taught to look at the wrong metrics. So what are the right metrics? Well, in my world, you can't launch a product that doesn't have less than 12 in net profit, which is going to automatically exclude most 20, 30, 40 products on Amazon after fees and marketing and cost and PPC.
You simply won't make that profit out of that [00:31:00] metric. So those, uh, Billions, there's billions of products, by the way, there's over a billion skews on Amazon. So what it does is as I go in and we called it our green light process, we started eliminating all the products that didn't meet certain criteria, certain cost of good metrics, like nothing more than 35 percent cost of goods, nothing more than 30 percent a cost, nothing more than 12 and nothing less than 12 in net profit.
And so we started to build an algorithmic Engine and spreadsheets in our process that helped us define which products. And we got down to about 6 percent of those are the ones that we should target. And that doesn't sound like a lot, but do 6 percent of a billion. And it's actually a lot of products.
It's more than you can do in a lifetime.
Brien: Yeah. But
Neil: with that criteria, we then leveled up our understanding and our launch process, we got out of the lower end products and started elevating products in the 50 to 500 in retail price point. And we started doing that about six years ago. And in that process.
We then developed some systems in the last couple of years. We've developed a whole algorithmic driven data system. We call our green lights process and [00:32:00] spreadsheet. It's all software driven. I have a development team. It's all internal to voltage and behind an NDA, and we don't sell it publicly. It's just our internal information system and technology we've developed to run these businesses.
And I get my client's access to it. That's it. Nobody else gets access, but with that, we understand how to develop the product pipeline and rank and get this engine into organic sales. And then Amazon goes and switches everything. So organic is harder to get to, and you have to buy your way in through PPC now to some degree, but the organic is still there and we still prime the engine and we still do some of those things, which is how you get eyeballs on the offer, but one of those major things in getting to that data first and always creating a great product, very important.
Hopefully anybody's listening to this. Isn't thinking I'm creating some crappy product. It's a 50 to 500 product. It has to have great value in it. It has to be a great product. Can't break in the first five minutes. Has to have some innovation changes to it, not inventions, but slight changes to make its value proposition unique, a unique selling position.
But when it gets down to it, I can't marry any product. This [00:33:00] is a mistake most sellers make. They marry their products. We say, don't marry your product, steal someone else's girlfriend. There are plenty of products. That's the third thing you got to understand. If the first thing is conditionally understanding what the heck to sell.
And the second thing is going by the numbers to make sure you understand it's profitable and the right metrics are in place. Then you also understand you never marry a product. Never marry your product. Marry the brand, marry the business, marry the avatar. But do not marry the product. And that could be a digital product or a physical product or a product you're delivering as a solution within your business.
Never marry those three change, adapt, overcome, and innovate, create irresistible product offerings. And this is a business that can work in perpetuity.
Brien: When you say never marry the product, do you mean specifically, like, I guess, having never sold a physical product, I'm not adjacent to it, but. I could see where maybe is this like you get obsessed with the product and you try to do X, Y, and Z with it, or you change it, we got to do this to make it better, whereas now you're married to it, like you're ingrained in it when really [00:34:00] maybe you need to kill off that product line.
Neil: You're ingrained in it like a marriage that now you realize he's beating you or she's abusive and you're stuck in the marriage and you can't get out and you just keep taking the beatings. Because you're invested in it. You spent time in it. You might have kids with that product and you're like,
Brien: the beatings will continue until you sell this piece of crap.
Neil: The beatings will continue until morale increases. It's like, Oh, and I just expect I'm going to pull every bit of ounce of success out of this product. And I just can't let go of it. I'm so a leverage into it. And usually what it means is they've got time, energy, attention, money, very leveraged into that to the point that they can't get out of it.
They put too much hope and Lambo hope dreams into that product. And instead didn't look at it like a data set. They looked at it in the, in an adverse relationship. They looked at it in what's in it for me, which is the opposite of purpose and value equal profits. So if purpose and value are to supply something to the market that someone wants and can't do without meets that objective, that solution that they're looking for could be jump higher, run faster, lose weight, gain weight, build more muscle, be healthy, do [00:35:00] physical activity, don't do physical activities.
It's some output that they're looking for. If you focus on that purpose and value, Then you will in major metric numbers profitable, then you will be a byproduct of that you will gain profit more than just financial profit, physical, mental, spiritual, home profit, personal profit, confidence in your brain and by the product of monetary becomes an output of that, which means it can't be the first thing, cannot be the first thing, or you will die in business, you will quit, you will bury your product, you will give up before your success occurs.
So we will go in and we call it the five by five product launch playbook, meaning that anybody that works or we work, we launch five products into our brands. Those five products tell us which data is over the mark with 80 percent confidence. We know the product, the market, the amount of potential opportunity, the number of players in that market, the volume of that market, potential profitability, and we have an 80 percent confidence it's going to sell well.
We just need to get it into the market. And test that data, get that 20 percent back. So we can take a look at the data and say, do we invest more [00:36:00] time, energy, attention, and money into that product? And what will happen as a law of averages is that when you invest in five of those products, and I'm only talking about a hundred units per product, a hundred units per product data set, and what it literally gets down to guys is an Amazon listing.
It's just a webpage. It's graphics. It's copy. It's a conversion metric. It's like a lead page for your product, but most people get this part run. Pay attention to me when I say this. You are not convincing an Amazon buyer to buy your product. You are answering the three questions they have in their mind because they are predetermined to buy that product when they show up to Amazon.
We call it the psychology of the buyer. We don't need to be there to convince them to buy our product. We need to answer the three questions they have in their mind before they show up. If you answer those three questions, they will buy our product in 30 seconds or less. Even if I only have five reviews on a new product, I've got three product launches that came out of the last three months heading into this holiday season right now in December, 2024, and they're both doing between three and 7, 000 a day.
And I have each of them have less than 10 reviews per product right now. [00:37:00] So when you dial in the organic, when you dial in the copy, when you dial in the value proposition of the seller. The reviews do not matter as much as people think, and it doesn't apply as much to the algorithm anymore as it used to.
Brien: Really?
Neil: So what they're looking at is the trending data, the conversion metrics, the sessions and percentage of conversion against other sellers in your, what's called a node, all right, technical terminology for a second in this big filing system of data and engine. It's on Amazon and literally it's in Facebook and it's in YouTube and it's in tech talk, it's in all of these algorithmic driven platforms, right?
And if you have a website and you want to drive traffic from Google, guess what? It's in there too. So what I'm about to say is cross platform understanding. These algorithms are looking for certain trending metrics to determine whether or not your data set is better than another data set. Not that your product is better than another product.
You understand what I'm saying? People get this so wrong. They, they focus too much R and D and time on the product and not enough on the data. Cause this is all data driven. It [00:38:00] always has been. And that's one of the myths of these companies. Hopium course guru, YouTube Lambo mindset goofballs is to get you all focused on the product when in actuality, they don't know about the data.
They somehow hit a product and then sold you a course, but haven't really repeated it on scale and done it for 17 years and had any experience doing it at the scale. And so they sell you a course, what I'm going to just give you a course right now, you take it for free and skip it. When you find that data and find that product, there's a thing called a node on Amazon, and in that node is where brand play and in that brand play node.
All right. Which is just a technical term in this big filing system. If you think about the filing system, like a tree, all right. Categories and departments are the big. Branches in the big bottom of the tree, the truck, the categories and departments are above that subcategories. And then as you get out to the leaves, those are the nodes, there's a lot of nodes, but in those notes are where brands play, not where all the regular sellers plays were brand to brand competition occurs.
And so when we target a particular product in a note on Amazon, believe it or [00:39:00] not, we are only competing with five to 10 sellers and that's it. Billion product skews. 8, 600 units a minute, all of these sellers, two and a half million of them. And we are actually only competing with six to 10 of them, roughly five to 10 of them in that node for our product.
For a total search volume of that product, that individual product every year. And the search volumes on Amazon are ridiculous. So if you go in and get some of these keywords for say, uh, air mattress, it's like 37 million searches a year, somewhere around that line. If I'm not mistaken. So in that there's 37 million people looking for just air mattresses, just one product, 37 million people a year are searching for that product.
I only need 1 percent of that market share by my product to become. I was multi seven figure business in this marketplace. And the numbers are astronomical. People overthink them and overcomplicate them. And they think, well, I need all of this effort in actuality. You just need all of this focus. So if you focus on that note and find out who are those five to 10 or so players that I need to attack, and I want to go after their [00:40:00] value propositions, and I want to create three differentiating statements that are different than them.
It isn't even about the product yet. Like what happens when you buy a product, Brian? Are you holding it in your hand? Are you holding it in the value that in two days or less, or when drones kick off here soon when I buy it in 15 minutes, it's gonna be droned to your house. Yeah. Not those drones. There's different drones.
Brien: Yeah. No, not the bad. I don't think that's Amazon
Neil: testing all of their delivery drones .
Brien: Not to our knowledge. . I'm sure
Neil: it's not, but yeah, it's basically they're gonna deliver that product, but it's the belief that that product is gonna meet and exceed your expectations. You bought it and are waiting for two days or less for it to show up.
So you didn't actually buy the product, did you?
Brien: Not exactly. No, it's not there yet.
Neil: Not even there yet. You bought the belief in that product. So what is the product doing? It's actually completing the transactional expectation that I was set to give you when you exchange that product for money with me.
It's a faith based move, right? So I have to provide a good product that won't break, but that's, and it's closed the circle, hopefully by you leaving a positive review, which closes that economic engine. But in [00:41:00] actuality, what I need to do is outmaneuver my competition by convincing them that my product is better than yours.
So we're in the digital marketing space at the end of the day. That happened to let a physical product be delivered by an engine. Okay. A 15, 20 billion ecosystem delivers the product. That's what it does. So what am I actually focused on? And what you should you be focused on? If you get in the e commerce world, I need to be a really great digital marketer.
I really need to take the time to understand who they are. What's in it for them and then present the best value statement for work. And then you can sell anything to anyone in a box and 30 seconds or less. When you grab ahold of that, the whole world of e commerce opens up to you. And then the benefits of it too, because as a physical product inventory based business model, we can write it off.
We can depreciate the assets. We take transitory Fiat currency into a physical asset. And that physical asset could be worth 10 times what we bought it for. So instead of just holding it in the bank, we're translating into a physical asset. Yeah. That's worth, and by the way, the second oldest profession in the world,
Brien: right?
Neil: His product, you know what the first one is, right?
Brien: It starts
Neil: with [00:42:00] a P. We're doing it for product, but it's the second, I mean, all product movement has ever been a trading, bartering and selling of goods. It's the second oldest profession. E commerce is just a mechanism by which is delivered. And with the systems of infrastructure, warehousing, people, technology that I don't own, hire, or manage.
I simply leverage that system, pay to get access to it. And then it does the rest of it. So with that, I'm just focused on what product and brand is trending or available, or I can develop profitably into a market space, not marry the one until I find exactly which one the customer wants to buy the most from me, and then deliver that product to them in volume as fast as I can, and let the algorithmic engines push me through like an avalanche, it becomes like a snowball rolling downhill, and it will become an avalanche of opportunity when you do that.
And all of that rolls into what we call our platinum principle, which is building in this mechanism, like I just explained. These products and businesses are worth more in the end than at any time during the business building phase. As you build them up and cash flow them, remember, revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, [00:43:00] and cash flow is king.
And that is the value statement of an e commerce driven business model, but make no mistake for anybody who's listening to this. You can't capitalize an e commerce physical product business for a few thousand dollars. You can test products for a few thousand dollars. But when the business says go, when the organic takes off, when you do it right and meet the answers to that questions, you have to capitalize the physical inventory and that's where most people miss this boat and go out and maybe hit a product and get things going six and eight months and can't do the necessary capitalization of that inventory.
And their business dies off. They can't get the 10, a hundred, 50, 000, a hundred thousand dollars or whatever is required by the business to reach the next level of inventory capitalization. And for those who can, they will win in the end, just so we're very clear. And that business is a saleable asset as you grow that business three, five years out.
We actually look to acquire that company. So anybody who works with me can help start the business or grow an existing one. And then three to five years working with us, they become the exit and we become the [00:44:00] exeter. So at that point, I have a first right of refusal to buy my client's businesses from them.
So as I help them build, they build under our structure, they become profitable. Then we do an off market deal to look at acquiring that company from them. If not, I will help them find the right person to acquire that company. So in the beginning and the end, so voltage has developed the entire model of incubating brands all the way through to exit.
We call it the platinum principle. And that's when you exit, when you want you exit on your terms with your profitability. It will be multiple sales channels. It will need to be more than a million in EBITDA for you to create life changing generational time and wealth freedom opportunity, which is doable in the e commerce world in three to five years.
And you will have an asset that could even be inherited or transferred. You can bring your kids into it. You can create multiple brands. And once you figure that out, you can create product after product and brand after brand. And you can keep doing this for a long time. And it's a lot of fun. I've enjoyed it.
It's been fun watching these brands. It's been fun watching my clients go like crazy in their brands and seeing their lives changed. And the purpose, the last part of our platinum is the purpose of the acquisition is that we're actually [00:45:00] kind of a business as a mission. We've partnered in a joint venture with a private equity company that was developed.
Out of my relationship through networking. With a gentleman in his group who are veterans, and they formed the country specifically to go out and help veterans in the world. They're veteran operated, funded, backed, and grown, and we have become the e commerce operational wing of their P. E. operators. So as we are acquiring companies, we are employing veterans.
We're operating the company in a management format. And taking a percentage and ownership in the company to see that through. And then we are basically after five years of operating that company, selling it to the operators and their families for life changing opportunities. So a veteran that comes in, gets trained by us, grows up, becomes the CEO operator, their family gets an opportunity to acquire that business in five years.
And it becomes a life changing opportunity for them, the full circuit.
Brien: Wow. That's incredible, man. Oh my goodness. Okay. So that's where it all comes back around to, uh, doing something with incredible purpose with this awesome. I mean, you've got a heck of a flywheel of a business operation here.
Neil: It's moving along.
It's [00:46:00] 17 years to an overnight success.
Brien: Yeah, woke up one morning and 17 years later, here you are.
Neil: Well, I haven't slept much of that. So, you know, with all these young kids, it went pretty fast, but now we empower others to get involved in the veteran aspect of it. We're under LOI with two companies. The third one's about to go LOI.
We've taken the better part of a year to get to this place where we're ready to acquire these companies. We've got four on deck three, as I mentioned, are moving. And we've gotten and kissed about 200 plus frogs that did not meet our criteria and upside and their numbers weren't correct or whatever, but we're down to the ones that we're ready to acquire those roll ups are right now are going to tune to about 30 million a year in sales for those three roll ups.
And then we'll be moving from there. The goal that they have their big, hairy, audacious goal for their P is that we have 50 businesses under our control.
Brien: Wow. Okay. And then those were veteran owned businesses. They will be veteran
Neil: owned and operated businesses. Voltage will be the management company, oversight and accountability, financial and fiduciary responsibilities over the [00:47:00] business ultimately, but we will bring in the operator.
We will train them through our normal mechanisms of becoming an operator like we do with those who want to get started on their own. We train operators over 12 months. So we don't train employees. We train individual people who want to become individual lawyers in business, and we build them into their own business, and they learn how to become a CEO operator.
And then with that, they are then eligible to qualify for these businesses and become operators in the business. And then in five years, if they're still great, if they're building, if they're growing, if they took the full opportunity to heart and actually got in. They can then acquire that business away.
Brien: Wow. What a cool opportunity. We've had a small handful of veterans on the show, veteran entrepreneurs, and what a cool opportunity where a lot of their mission is helping veterans that are coming back from battle and from deployment and re assimilating into society, and part of that is. I need a career.
Neil: I need a purpose. I need a mission
Brien: purpose. I need a mission and
Neil: get it right. And so that's why we've aligned here to give them that purpose and mission for themselves and their families in that capacity and do our [00:48:00] best to chip away at the rate or anything else from PTSD or issues with that, to help them along the way.
So pay your growth capital is a. Full organization of support around the families and the people that are involved in that. And out of that growth metric, what they're doing, their events, everything they're doing already. We're raising up warrior operators, if you will, out of there to come run these companies with us.
Brien: Yeah, I love it. Well, and this, I mean, just the, the FBA with Amazon is such a crazy, awesome opportunity. I loved how you broke it down using the tree analogy where. At the end of the day, I think it's so easy. Maybe this is probably one of the first things I think you mentioned earlier, where someone who's trying to get into this line of business or start this up as their own entrepreneurial endeavor.
They're like, how on earth do I, what do I sell and how do I sell it? Well, when you break it down simply into the fact that if you're starting a brand, you're really only competing with six to 10 other people.
Neil: At the end of the day, it's literally anything you've bought in 180 days, you should realize by Amazon's own metrics and admission, 60 percent of those [00:49:00] products are sold by third party people like us.
So you can just go and start mining all the products you purchased and realize that 60 percent of those, someone else sold. So why not you? There are people making millions a year on Amazon. Why not you? It literally comes down to the conditioning and understanding of those products, developing them, and then realizing who you're competing with.
It could be five to 10 major people, and then that's your mission. Go build a brand that knocks them off, but be willing to spend the team efforts to do it. That's where the time, energy, attention, and money kicks in. Those are four major factors for anybody who's listening to this. So what does that mean?
In our 5x5 process, the base case metric of launching one of these businesses in year one is a 50, 000 to 100, 000 venture. Just so we're very clear. The reason I say that again is a physical product business. It's number one failure point in our world. When we get through the process is not what the heck to sell, whether or not it's profitable, whether or not there's not a market for it, an opportunity.
Those things will be defined in the process. They are repeatable. I've done this a thousand times in 10 years. The end is you have to capitalize it. [00:50:00] The final component is the ability to capitalize what is working. And I make no amends to that. If you want to make a few thousand dollars a month side hustle, it's totally doable, right?
You want to treat it like a side hustle or a hobby business? You can do that But if you want to build a real business I don't recommend that if you want life changing time and generational wealth for yourself and your family You cannot treat it that way which means you have to be willing however possible legal and ethically Capitalize that business when it says go, that is your opportunity.
It is a snowball. You do it like Daniel SB did in four and a half years. And he's at 14 million a year in sales, but you have to be willing to do what he did, which was deploy over 850, 000. In that four years from both sales and additional capitalization of sales. So we drive revenue, we get a sale for every product we sell.
We have, we can buy another product, but then you've got to capitalize the next level of inventory to reach that kind of goal. And that is where so many sellers fall into that trap and why there's a lot of good people who get started on Amazon, but simply can't mature the product when the business says go and it dies.[00:51:00]
And I see them coming in six, seven, eight months into that process being like, help, help my baby. And the answer is you need more marketing and more inventory and they can't capitalize it. And that's the failure point in the business. They got a great product, they got a good opportunity, they just can't capitalize on it.
And so I want people who are listening to this to really understand that.
Brien: Yeah. And perhaps those who are listening who might find this to be an attractive option for entrepreneurship, it sounds like perhaps reaching out to Neil is going to be one heck of a way to get started.
Neil: Could be. Like I said, when the student is ready, the mentor will appear, but make no mistake.
We are coaching and mentoring for a purpose. We're coaching from mentoring to an exit. So my goal, my big hairy audacious goal, my purpose and value is when they grow up and build a business and become someone who is a authority, a CEO, an ability to run that company. I'm going to acquire it from them. So I've got some skin in the game when this happens to making sure I even put some money on the table for my fees.
To go after certain metrics of success in the business, profitability metrics, that if we don't accomplish that, I keep working with them until we do. And I put up 10 K of my [00:52:00] 35 K fee on the line to do it. And I put some skin in the game. So I'm only looking for my unicorns at the end of the day. Usually it's five people a month.
If I find them, I don't always take five people a month because I don't find everybody I'm looking for. And I would rather say no to you and have it not end up being a failure point when it's not the right timing, then get you just to involve purposes. I don't do courses and programs and all that BS.
I'm too busy for that. We do business building at its truest form.
Brien: I love it. I love it. Well, Neil, I think we could probably go for another two hours today, but I'm going to get in trouble if we do that. So
Neil: you've let me go and riff for an, how long have we been doing this now?
Brien: No, there's been so much golden knowledge that you've been spewing here.
I absolutely love it. But. We'll probably have to land the plane here, and I promise this is a fighter jet you could fit in, you and your giant torso, so.
Neil: You know, I tried to go back and get my pilot's license, and I, it was too slow. Isn't that funny? I'm like, I knew I had to get a little older and get a little more mature, and my wife and I made an agreement that I would stop the pilot training until my youngest daughter [00:53:00] turns 18, and so when she does, I'll go back.
But life has slowed down a little bit, my mind has slowed down, so it'll probably be just as fast as I need it to be when I start my training here in another few years.
Brien: There you go. Good, good. Well, make sure you get one of those jumbo jets, no F 16s that they won't let
Neil: you in.
Brien: So much fun, dude. That would be pretty wild.
So, well, Neil, man, this has been such a pleasure. I want to make sure our listeners, if they want to absorb a little bit more Neil in their life or grab your book, what's the best place to do all this?
Neil: If they're Amazon peeps who want to buy books, go over there and almost automated income with FBA is on Amazon.
You can drop that. Paperback in your house in a couple of days, if you want to go over to voltage, dm. com, that's voltage, digital marketing, dm. com. We've got a book there. It's five bucks there for the digital copy and it's 27 for the paperback. We deliver it to you and you get all the knowledge and strategy and guide with case studies.
15 chapters taken from my podcast called the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Top 3 percent listen globally on listen though, it's a very fun podcast I get to do with [00:54:00] people like you and you're going to come on my podcast, by the way.
Brien: Heck yeah.
Neil: Yep, and so you get that strategy and guide and then I've got free trainings, I've got live virtual events there, I've got presentations with my partner in crime, Kevin Harrington, and my partner Reed Larson, who also wrote the book, and he has a, Kevin has the foreword, and we talk about our As Seen on TV strategy, because that's how life works, so I developed that strategy, went along the line, and eventually met Kevin Harrington.
Who became a mentor and a friend of mine in 2016, and he's now wrote the forward to my book and we helped develop the strategy and we got a presentation that we talk about how's life weird like that, right?
Brien: Yeah.
Neil: And talk about our I've seen on TV strategy for building these brands and growing them into omni multichannels beyond Amazon, that's QVC, retail shops, Costco, wherever we can put that product, physical brand, we're going to put it to grow these things into a multichannel and podcast and other things.
There's a ton of resources for you to learn those four and five steps. And there's a lot of free information, templates, free software and stuff to help you really get into the process of executing it and finding out if it's a business model that you might think you're good at or want to try.
Brien: All right, man, that's fantastic.
I love it. I think the listeners are walking away with some serious actionable [00:55:00] advice and definitely some inspiration based on your story. So Neil, thank you so much for coming in. This was a ton of fun today.
Neil: Thank you, sir. You've been a wonderful host and very patient and I appreciate it.
Brien: And that's a wrap on this episode of the Millionaire University podcast.
Holy smokes, did Neil bring the noise when it comes to selling on Amazon FBA, starting a business and your entrepreneurial journey in e commerce. He had way too many notes of importance for me to mention here in our little closing, but I hope you really enjoyed this episode and you gained a lot of inspiration and actionable advice And thank you neil for coming on.
This was Fantastic. All right, folks. I have one favor to ask before signing off If you would and you enjoyed this episode go ahead and hit the share link in your pod player And send a text message to one of your friends family co workers colleagues Whoever it might be who you think would also enjoy This episode.
All right. That's it for me. Brian Guerin signing off. I cannot wait [00:56:00] to see you on the next episode of the Millionaire University podcast. Why don't you go out there and crush it today, my friends.
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