388 : Sam Cohen – Delegate, Automate, Eliminate and outsource to grow your Amazon business
Fascinating to see how Sam’s business model and more importantly his clients business models are also changing in today’s ecommerce world. Think of all the retail stores in your market that have closed. Where are their buyers going? Are the retailers that remain busier? Are they carrying tons more stock and tons more sku’s? I am not seeing that. I seeing a trend of off brand stores liquidating fashion of major brand inventory like TJ Max or Marshalls and then Ollies in our market. So what can this mean for your growing business? Opportunity? Sam says yes!
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Here is transcript- It is automated so it is not perfect but it does seem to get better over time.
Sam: [00:00:00] This guy came in and screwed up their account more. If he tried. I mean he was, he was not even putting parent and child eight since together variations were each their own listing. It was a logistical nightmare. And I told them and let us show you what we could do. Let us do work for free for you for a month. And then you’ll decide if you want to work for us. And My,
Cool voice guy: [00:00:25] we focus on the people, the products and the process of ecommerce selling today is your host Stephen Peterson.
Stephen: [00:00:37] If you’re looking for cashflow or you’re looking for another revenue stream. And when I suggest is you have a staff member who shows some interest in this, uh, taking on this project and you look at it as a project and you measured their costs versus what your gain is. Um, then I have a group for you. I have a really strong group for you and it’s Gaye Lisby and Gary raise $1 million arbitrage lists. And what’s cool about this list is, um, those multiple lists. There’s limited number of people on the lists and I’m on one of them. And what you get is you get these daily lists Monday through Friday and they just have all these different things that you can buy. Now. You might go try to buy it and they might be sold out. However you were trying to buy the blue one and we, there’s a pink one next to a lie and then you’d start down that rabbit hole.
Stephen: [00:01:24] And these lists are phenomenal. They’ve consistent, they’ve been out there for a couple of years. And what I like is the people that have joined through my link, and again, I get paid for this, so I don’t want to hide that they stayed with them. And that’s very cool to me because that means something. That means they got value. And so I’ve got a 14 day free trial. The only way you’re going to get this offer is if you go through my link. So it’s a 14 day free trial and you’re going to get either Gaye or you’re going to get Gary, who’s going to onboard you. That’s a big deal because they can find out maybe how to tailor a little bit towards you. Um, and again, I suggest if you have somebody else that you can have handle this for you, that’s how you’re going to grow your business.
Stephen: [00:02:04] Um, they bring in inventory for you. They follow the procedures, you’ve got good receipts, they’re all receipts that should stand up and, and so again, consider joining. You’re going to get a 14 day free trial. So if it doesn’t work, pull out. I get it. Sometimes this doesn’t work. You thought you had a process, you thought you had the right person, you give them the opportunity and they fall short. It happens. But this is a great opportunity to try it, especially if you’ve got a spouse or significant other that wants to help them, the business, but doesn’t have a lot of time. This might be a perfect opportunity. Again, a 14 day free trial. So here’s how you get there. You come through my link in which you come into this episode. You’ll be a link there, but you go to amazing freedom.com, forward slash, momentum, the word momentum, hyphen arbitrage.
Stephen: [00:02:47] Yeah, that’s a lot of stuff to spell, but it’s momentum, hyphen arbitrage. And you’re going to get that link. It’s going to click through and they’ll know it came through us and they’re going to give you that 14 day free trial plus the onboarding and have a discussion with Gaye or Gary and talk about where you are in your business, where you’re going in your business, and let’s see if they can help you. And again, 14 day free trial, try it. And if it doesn’t work out, you move on. But get that team member producing revenue. Everybody, we are in the revenue business. Welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. This is episode 388 Sam Cohen. You know, I was thinking about why I’m the one who approached Sam to come on because he has this conference coming up and it’s an east coast conference and it costs us 199 bucks.
Stephen: [00:03:30] Yes, I’m leading with this and you save $50 if you use this code solstice, um, off of his website, Amazon consulting experts.com. And the only reason I pitch it is because it’s east coast and it’s very inexpensive. He puts a top shelf show on, um, definitely suggest you go down the night before, get a hotel. It’s very inexpensive on the Jersey shore and uh, enjoy yourself because the night before there’s, there’s cocktail parties or whatever that you can go to some meetups and you’re going to meet people. That’s the whole key. And this is drivable for me. That’s why I enjoy it. And for 199 bucks, it’s a heck of a deal. Um, I am speaking there, but I’m not getting any money for, for pitching his stuff. This is a chance if you want to meet people, you don’t have to fly to Vegas or go to Orlando. This is a great opportunity if you’re up in this, this part of the world to go to this conference and there’s a lot of speakers, but more importantly, you know, yes, I’ll be a terrific onstage.
Stephen: [00:04:25] Not the deal is you’re going to get to meet a whole bunch of other likeminded sellers. That’s the key, right? And so I just think it’s a great event, um, that they put on and they put on a really nice event. It’s really well done in a really nice places. New places, supposed to be even nicer. So I’m pretty excited about that since June 30th, 2019 so that’s the pitch fest. I do allow him to pitch it because again, we’re, can you meet two or 300 other sellers for 199 bucks? And matter of fact, you could save 50 bucks by using the code. Let’s get into the podcast. All right, welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. We’re excited about today’s guest. A repeat from a couple of times and the reason I haven’t back is because the dude knows what he’s talking about and he’s got a breadth of experience from running his own business, but then hundreds of clients that he’s had over the years. Sam Cohen, welcome back Sam. Thanks Dave. I appreciate you having, I appreciate you coming on because I know you’re busy. We were doing in the precall we were both like checking off our list of the 20 projects we’re working on today. Literally today, right?
Stephen: [00:05:30] Not enough hours. Um, I mean, remember I’m part time. I’m spending a lot of my time with my grandkids this week and it really affects my life and, and I, I couldn’t get in until late. I have to cut out early. Um, but as I said to my son, we were talking earlier, I said, this is the beauty of what we do is the freedom to decide when your kids need you. Your grandkids need you, that you can do that. That’s your experience too. Correct. Absolutely. My were just off
Sam: [00:05:57] for about 12 days for spring break for Easter and Passover and I took him to New York City. We took them to the car show, took them to American girl, you know, everything we wanted to do, we were able to do. And I was able to catch up on work by coming to work early this morning and five in the morning, you know, because I don’t have my kids in the morning. So it’s very easy to catch up on work and I get more work done between [5:00] AM and [9:00] AM than I do from [9:00] AM to [5:00] PM because there’s no interruptions.
Stephen: [00:06:31] Right. And there’s fires. All you’re doing is running around putting out fires, right?
Sam: [00:06:34] Yeah. You tend to be reactive rather than proactive and uh, yeah. So it’s an ongoing challenge. I’ve studied time management for years. I’ve studied energy management, which is just as important as time management. And I do my best work in the mornings, so that’s pretty cool.
Stephen: [00:06:57] Me Too. And you know, it’s funny, my son is working with us and so he does all our video and photography and listings and all that stuff. For today we are doing an Fba shipment for a client. And what’s he is a nighttime or so he wants to sleep in, right? I mean he’s 22 I guess he graduates college this week. I’m very proud of him. Um, my daughter too. Oh Wow. We’re getting old. Was her graduation? The university. Oh Wow. Congrats. I mean it’s a, it’s awesome. And then she’s getting married in September. Oh Wow. You got the double, the double win. Isn’t it? So cool. You know, and like I said to him this morning though, I said the beauty is this flexibility and for him to stay late at night or work nights or whatever or sometimes he’ll leave cause we do a lot of video editing or photo editing. He’ll leave and go to a coffee place and hang out. That’s the lifestyle he wants. I don’t care the work, as long as the work gets done, I don’t, I don’t as I tell him all the time, I don’t want to be a boss anymore. I was a boss for so many years. I don’t want to be a boss. The work management, you’ve got to self manage and teaching, teaching that that’s the life skill that I don’t, I know I wasn’t taught until Grad school. How about you?
Sam: [00:08:11] Yeah. Uh, I went to, you know, some of the top schools and they don’t really teach you what’s going to happen after school. They kind of teach you how to live in a box and how to get a job and had a, you know, do a four o one k and work for 40 50 years. And then, you know, when you’re 65 or 75 hopefully you’ll have enough money to retire. And at that point your life is pretty much a, you know, your health thoughts going and you can’t, you don’t really have the energy to travel or whatever you know you want to do. So I always go back to the Peter Thiel quote, he says, if you have a five year plan, ask yourself why you do. And in six months, you know, and I’m, I’m all about the vision boards and imagining my ideal lifestyle and documenting and journaling and you know, I just decided I want to go back to living on the ocean and I, and within a month I made it happen. You know where I’m going to be living on the ocean starting on Wednesday May 1st. I’m super psyched about that.
Stephen: [00:09:23] Well, let me ask you something, because you just talked about all the methods of planning, tracking and that kind of thing. Does that really work for you
Sam: [00:09:32] all? Yeah, that’s, that’s the, the foundation of my life is visualization. And you know, I’ve tried to learn from the smartest people in the world when it comes to business like Warren Buffet, he spends most of his day reading and thinking or Bill Gates. And then when you do, when you do those things for the majority of the day, when it comes time to make decisions, you have all this stuff that you’ve acquired, knowledge in your head, and then the decisions become easy because you’ve done all that preliminary research. I actually real quick on time management, I actually document every hour I spend in a week, 168 hours how I spend it. And then I review it the following week and I say, okay, what can I delegate? What can I outsource? What can I automate? What can I eliminate? You know, a lot of people are busy being busy and they’re not being productive. So
Stephen: [00:10:33] maybe get that again because that was a lot of Nate’s, I liked that. So automate, eliminate, delegate, delegate,
Sam: [00:10:41] automate, uh, outsource, eliminate. And then there’s, you know, software processing, logistics, infrastructure, technology, standard operating procedures. These are all the things that have allowed me to scale my business and, and really focus on, you know, my consulting business, which I enjoy a lot more than selling stuff on Amazon these days because I’m impacting people and I’m changing lives. And it’s really, uh, been my focus for four years now. The consulting business and they’re doing an Amazon for eight years. So four hours. That’s a long time. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when it was just a, uh, a crazy idea how to start one at a hundred sellers and, you know, I, you know, everybody told me I was crazy and uh, I stuck with it. And, uh, now we’re working with some of the biggest companies in the world, working with fortune 500 companies, working with a ton of people in the fashion of the street, foot wear industry as their Amazon, you know, strategic business partner.
Sam: [00:11:55] Um, yeah. So we’ve kind of moved away from the teaching people how to do retail and online arbitrage. We’re focusing now more on brand management, brand image, brand integrity, uh, protecting prices. You know, making sure that all your products are represented on Amazon, not just your top sellers. Um, you know, full product lines, controlling the price, controlling the inventory, controlling the brand image. Um, and we’re getting calls from manufacturers, you know, that that nine inch engines a year, we’re getting calls from retailers that are doing eight figures a year and everybody sees the writing on the wall, you know, they’re getting either cancel the orders from retailers or retailers going out of business or reduce orange from retailers, or the retailers are not credit worthy at this point. So the entire world is shifting, including, you know, on Amazon. And we really feel that third party selling on Amazon is going to be, uh, the bulk of Amazon’s business going forward.
Sam: [00:13:06] You and I have spoken about this in the past and for years Amazon was saying, you know, third party sellers sell about 40% of the products on Amazon. And for years I would say, no way. It’s much higher. It’s much higher, it’s much drier. And I took him a few years to actually say it was over 50%. And that was the tipping point. Um, you know, third party sellers are closer to 60% of all sales on Amazon. And we did a study, there’s about 500 million products in Amazon’s catalog and Amazon first party only sells about 15 million products. So that just gives you an idea of the percentage. What did you say? 15 out of 500? 15 million out of 500 million. Now obviously the 500 million is a fluid number. A lot of it is private label. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I know. So we’ve actually run software where we can figure out what are the items that are in the top 1% of a category that Amazon doesn’t sell. And we based our wholesale relationships on that, you know, model. So
Stephen: [00:14:22] it’s funny, I tell this story, I’ve told the story a couple times. Um, when you and I went to a shoe event and we just happened to run in each other. I think we both knew we were going to be there and it was in New York and I remember you going and you knew you were like, I don’t know anything about this. This was like probably four years ago and you’re like, I really don’t know much about this. I don’t know any of the sellers. And yet you walked in and half the people knew you because retailers or retailers and sellers or sellers. Um, but the other thing that struck me is how many of those shoe come had, I forget there were hundreds. I mean this was, this is, if it’s F, F, F, a, N, y if anybody’s looking for a trade show to go to F, F A, n, y Finn, I forget what it stands for. Something that I don’t fancy Fashion
Sam: [00:15:05] Association of New York.
Stephen: [00:15:06] No, there you go. That’s what it stands for. And there’s, there are a couple of them and they’re in different hotels and really interesting. You go up to suites and their shoe companies and they got shoes everywhere, yet it’s a sweet, but you know, a bedrooms and stuff like that and you could buy there. But I remember going there and I remembered the number of accounts. Now, this was four years ago, so I’m sure it’s different, but how many of them weren’t selling on Amazon? They were just an enormous amount. They were only selling in boutiques and you know, some of these shoes were unbelievably stunning and expensive. Those brands, they have no clue what it takes to sell online. Right? Because they, they, like you said, we’re selling to retailers and the retailer buckets are getting smaller and smaller, and you brought up a point that I didn’t think about.
Stephen: [00:15:52] Whole bunch of them are not credit worthy. There was always terms, you know, let’s face it. That’s how Kmart lived, or Boscov’s, that’s how they live. They get credit terms, they sell hopefully enough before the bill is due. Then they pay the bill and then they make a profit. Right. Right? There are a lot of companies that are still in business, but that nobody will give them those terms. So they’re not buying. Correct. Right. Correct. And so how do, how does the average seller, Steve, right part time seller Steve, how do I start working on those relationships? Is that where ace has moved to where you’re training somebody like me, how to negotiate, how to work with the brand or are you just training the brand or are you doing both?
Sam: [00:16:33] So we’re actually doing both. We’re working with a lot of private label sellers. We’re working with a lot of brand manufacturers, a lot of inventors, a lot of people will have patents on products. A lot of people who you know want to do CBD oil or they want to do, you know, something that they saw, you know, like they were on shark tank and now they want to do Amazon. Things like that keep coming our way. Uh, and we’re also presenting to the brands, you know, we have one big fashion brand that we just landed and the CEO of the company reach out to me on Linkedin and I fell in love with linkedin after this. Um, and they had, they were selling to Amazon through vendor central and they were getting destroyed. Amazon was tanking prices and changing things and you know, ordering stuff and then deleting say was it was just a logistical nightmare.
Sam: [00:17:36] And so they went ahead and they tried to do seller central and they hired a guy who claims he used to work for Amazon as a consultant. And anybody who’s ever worked in seller central knows that there’s certain ways to do things to be profitable and this guy couldn’t have screwed up their account more if he tried. I mean he was, he was not even putting parent and child eight sons together. Variations were each their own listing. It was a logistical nightmare. And I told them and let us show you what we could do. Let us do work for free for you for a month. And then you’ll decide if you want to work for us. And my staff went crazy. They’re like, what are you doing? We can’t work for free. I said, this account has the ability to open up every single door in the fashion industry for us.
Sam: [00:18:28] If we do right by them. And we did work for free for them for a month, probably cost us a few thousand dollars, but we just saw in the account we’re getting 10% of their gross sales. And they just emailed us a list of like $2 million worth of old inventory that they have. And when I say old, it could be six months ago in the fashion business and they want to sell it through Amazon. So now we have an opportunity that made, you know, 10% of $2 million worth of inventory. Um, and those are the kinds of things we’re focusing on.
Stephen: [00:19:05] What, what is their option outside of that? So that’s the stuff that ends up at like a Tj Maxx or Holly’s
Sam: [00:19:14] well, there’s a higher end brand, but you probably know the brand. It’s called Badgley. Mischka. Okay. Um, so they’ll, they won’t be in Tj Maxx or Marshall’s, but there’ll be a Nordstrom rack Saks off fifth.
Stephen: [00:19:27] And do they take more than 10%? I assume they, yeah, they discount heavily to those guys, you know? Yeah. So that’s a double edge sword. So I think this is a big point for people to understand. What you’re saying is they would have to discount it a lot for Nordstrom, even take it. So they’re taking a big hit on the chin and then Nordstrom still was going to take a percentage of that. Correct. Absolutely.
Sam: [00:19:51] And the beauty of Amazon is you’re selling to people all over the world. You’re not just selling to people in New York and Los Angeles or Milan where they’re very fashion forward. You know, there’s plenty of people in Middle America or in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or wherever you are that will buy a nice dress, even if it’s from last season. You know, they have a fall season and the spring season, but there’s plenty of people that are buying an $800 dress for $400. Uh, you know, because it’s last season. They don’t care. It’s still looks good. It’s still, you know what I’m saying? It’s still fashionable. It’s just not the latest style or design. So there’s a lot of opportunity for end of life goods. This continued goods. Um, you know, even with the shoe companies, we buy discontinued models from three crocks and they do phenomenal on Amazon, you know, and, and to crops, they don’t have a lot of value, uh, because the retailers don’t want them.
Sam: [00:20:58] So there is another opportunity. We got a list of 200,000 pairs or crocs and they were willing to sell them to us for $8 a piece. And the retail on him was like 30 bucks, then we didn’t take all of it cause it would have been, you know, one point $6 million. But some of our clients bought, we bought, and I was talking to Mike, Better bench one of my clients and I said, how’d you do with those crops? He said, well, I sold over 50% of them in the first month and it had over a hundred percent Roi. So yeah.
Stephen: [00:21:36] So He’s actually was a game.
Sam: [00:21:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean,
Stephen: [00:21:41] yeah, it’s thinking about this too. I remember that same shoe show we were talking about. I remember the Chukka boots. Do you remember the guy who is down to $6 delivered from la? He goes, yeah, and I don’t remember the brand. It was an obscure brand. That’s why we’d none, neither one of us bought it because it was obscure. But those opportunities, you know, where could you buy a shoe delivered to your warehouse for $6? And these are, you know, probably $80 $90 shoes back when they sold. And these are the ones that didn’t sell. So to be fair, these didn’t sell. Right. Whatever. They pulled it from retail. A lot of them were case packs, he said never opened. So that was a whole port. Um, but in today’s day and age, how hard is it to put that chuck a boot up on Amazon and get it found?
Stephen: [00:22:23] Cause I think that’s one of the things that it’s easy to buy stuff. And I, this is my experience, I have a warehouse full of that stuff. So to you, you, at least you used to, maybe you clean. But it’s the truth though. I mean I, I bought things because they were cheap naively sometimes thinking, oh, I could just put that up because back then everything is sold on Amazon right now, as you mentioned, there’s 499 million for, you know, 999,000 other products that they have to fish through to get to my pair of chuck chuckle boots. So how do you deal with that? You know, or let me make sure I’m correct and I say this is the price. So good you can afford to do the PPC. Is that the smart move there? Is that the the thing?
Sam: [00:23:04] Yeah, so basically what, what you’re doing when you were at our level or our client’s level is you’re managing large data. You’re looking at metrics just like Amazon does. It doesn’t really matter what you’re selling. We actually reverse engineer where we have a proprietary software where we can see what the bid prices are on the top keywords before we buy a product. So we know if we’re going to be able to be competitive, get on the first page before we even make or buy a product. So to give me an example, if you’re buying a $6 boot that you can sell for $80, you know, we’re going to take unbelievable pictures and you know, we use, uh, and the service a lot, um, in magic image, uh, I forgot what it’s called. Um, and you know, we optimize the heck out of the list thing and then we run PPC campaigns both automatic and manual.
Sam: [00:24:04] And we also do targeting of our competitor a Sims, which, you know, gives us a lot of sales and there’s enough knowing when there, you know, to, to drive traffic. One of my clients, he made shoes and China that look like, you know, converse all stars and he crushes it on Amazon because he knows how to, you know, advertise and market and you know, he’s doing Facebook ads now to is Amazon listings. And it’s really, you know, a few can market on Amazon and off Amazon. You know, you have a grand slam there with, with the private label
Stephen: [00:24:45] it is, you’re thinking about this, right? Cause I want to make sure that people are listening or getting value. Is that where a lot of the advice goes is that, is that where people should be putting their time? Cause most people know how to source or know how to buy and know how to do the math to say, yeah, it’s $50 and I can buy it for, you know, even the old third, third, third, Chris Green’s third, third, third math. Right. So assuming that, that, that all that piece has already learned or there’s enough people teaching that, is this where the education has to occur now is managing, uh, managing that marketing? I mean it’s, it’s, it’s like, you know, the whole complete business at that point. Kinda. Does that make sense?
Sam: [00:25:26] Yeah. When it comes to brand ownership or even private label, there’s typically three components. There’s product research, which I would argue is the most important part. You know, doing your due diligence. Seeing what the competition is like, seeing what the estimated sales velocity is like. Either way, since we last spoke, we’ve developed a contact at Amazon that gives us actual Amazon data. So we’re not guessing, uh, with the jungle scout or the viral launches or the, you know, tactical arbitragers are the helium tens of the world. We’re getting actual sales velocity data from Amazon and that’s one of our strongest advantages. You know, we can give them a list of a sins and they could tell us, you know, what the keywords are, how well they perform, how many they sell, how many get returned. Obviously we can export the reviews and see what’s going on there.
Sam: [00:26:25] That data is so valuable. I would easily pay six figures a year for it because it, it gives you a blueprint of what to do. Then you have to source the product. Obviously, you know, China, India, wherever you’re going to make the products. And then the third part is branding and marketing. And that’s really, you know, where we do our best work because we have an inner circle program where we charge anywhere from 25 to 120,000 a year to manage people’s Amazon accounts. And with that comes along an entire brand awareness campaign on all the different social media platforms on Google, you know, SEO and Google ad words and Facebook ads and eighth, you know, Pinterest and Instagram and even youtube on some of our accounts. And it really elevates the brand. We build them a Shopify website that integrates with Amazon Fba. If anybody’s looking to build a standalone website, uh, sharp high plays very nicely with Amazon Fba, so he could pretty much have orders, make sales on your Shopify site and there’s a plugin where you can have Amazon Fba fulfill those orders for you. So it’s pretty cool.
Stephen: [00:27:50] Yeah. And it’s not as complicated as it was in the old days. Right? I mean it, and like you’re saying, it’s automated. So brands get the value of utilizing Amazon’s, especially now as we all know, that coming up as one day delivery, which is crazy. Crazy, right? I mean, just think about that.
Sam: [00:28:07] Prime now is insane. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten time now.
Stephen: [00:28:12] I think we were in Vegas, I think we were in Vegas and we needed water for a party. Andy ordered water because he’s like, I’m not carrying it up. Uh, you know, or I’m not hearing it from the street. And so he ordered prime now and they brought us cases of water, I mean within like an hour
Sam: [00:28:26] then the rest of us, that’s for sure.
Stephen: [00:28:28] Yeah, it’s crazy though. Yeah. So I did see it at that point. That was the only time I’ve seen it.
Sam: [00:28:33] I was in a meeting in Manhattan and they went out of batteries for a digital camera during the meeting and they did it on prime now and be pulled the meeting and they had a fresh set of batteries. So it was pretty cool.
Stephen: [00:28:45] What you know, and that’s, it brings up an interesting point because I think a whole bunch of people listening, even though we’re all sellers are saying, I haven’t seen that or I haven’t utilized it cause we’re all probably too cheap. But realistically for that group in that business meeting, how like mind blowing is that? I mean, does that become a topic of conversation then? Because everybody’s sitting there saying, are you kidding me?
Sam: [00:29:07] Yeah, it’s insanity. I mean, the world is changing at warp speed. I mean, if you look at the things that Uber is doing with Uber eats and door dash and grub hub and all these different platforms, and then you see a guy like Elon Musk who says, oh yeah, by next year we’re going to have a million autonomous robot taxis on the road. And to me, they don’t have to share the money with an Uber driver. So it’s going to be substantially cheaper. And you know, I looked into buying a Lyft and Uber Ipo. I said I, I’d have to be crazy to do it because autonomous vehicles are, are, are the, you know, the present and the future, you know, so Uber’s losing $3 billion or whatever that losing. And a big part of it is because they have to pay the drivers so much. Right. You know,
Stephen: [00:30:04] so the world is evolving. You know, I love the autonomous car because I think about where literally I get off out of how many times you go to an airport for stuff. I was just, what airport we said just in, it lasts a couple of weeks ago. Atlanta, right? They make you walk 70 miles to get to the pickup, but you still have to walk 70 miles to get to the Uber pickup place. Right. But here’s the deal. So imagine that that car is dropping Sam off and it knows that I’m right there getting ready to be picked up and it literally drops him off at pulls three feet forward and goes to me doesn’t interfere with traffic because it’s just in and out because they’re communicating with each other, each car. Um, my, my other Uber story’s a good one for Friday. We’re, we’re in Philadelphia. My son graduate from college.
Stephen: [00:30:48] I think I mentioned that. And so we’re going and it’s a whole family and you know, I’m going to have an adult beverage and I will never drink and drive, not even one. Right? So the plan was I sent to my wife, I said, hey, you’re going to drive. She goes, I’m not driving in that city at night. No Way. Right? So it’s like I could just order an Uber XL because there’s a big group and it, it just shows up and it’s just like, how life changing is that where we don’t have to worry about parking, we don’t have to worry about, uh, you know, um, uh, oh, I’m drawing a blank on them. Taking your parking, your car for you. You know, that whole ballet. I don’t have to worry about any of those things. And it’s a bigger group and all I have to do is order a larger car. They’ve made it so convenient.
Sam: [00:31:30] That’s equivalent to when we were kids. And our biggest dream was to rent a limousine for the night. Taking care of, you can go from bar to bar, you can go to parties, you can pull up and style. I took an Uber XL down to Atlantic City Airport. I had my four kids and my two grandkids and maybe about a hundred pieces of luggage. You know, we took an Uber XL and it was, it was worth every penny. It was under 160 bucks or whatever. And we had so much stuff it wouldn’t even fit in my escalated. So we had to get like one of those sprinter vans and we had the best trip of our lives. We went down to the fountain blue, you know, we had a bad experience with an Airbnb, but other than that,
Stephen: [00:32:21] but you didn’t have any responsibility. Right. I mean you were able to then give your attention. Gary Vee used to see this. Tell me if this is true cause then I want to bring it back to Amazon. Sure. He used to say that, that like Uber doesn’t sell travel. They sell time because you know the car shows up when you needed to it hand, it gets you where you’re supposed to be at the best time that it can. It allows you to do all these other things. Is that still, is that your perception too?
Sam: [00:32:47] Oh, absolutely. I have a brother in law. Uh, I won’t mention any names, but he has the license for Duracell, for a cell phone accessories. And he entered into an agreement with Duracell to license their name to make cell phone accessories in China. And he got it into every big box retailer in the world. He did over a hundred million dollars in sales in one year. And this guy hasn’t driven a car in 15 years because he’s too busy focusing on work and he might run someone over. It’s not the best use of his time to be driving in a car. And it’s pretty amazing. Quick story, Procter and Gamble’s sold dorsal to Berkshire Hathaway and Berkshire Hathaway and tried to get out of the licensing agreement and he actually just sued Berkshire Hathaway and won the lawsuit, uh, because they were trying to restrict how many Sku is he can make and what colors he can make. And that wasn’t part of the agreement. So here’s a guy, he actually sued Berkshire Hathaway and won the right to continue to produce products under the Duracell Maine. Uh, which I thought was pretty cool.
Stephen: [00:34:11] No, let’s apply this logic to Amazon. So tell me what Amazon and their one day delivery, I mean, everyone’s going to be like dust Steve. Of course it’s the same thing. But that competitive advantage and no, but now I guess Walmart has done a decent job of competing at the way that they can compete. They’ve got lockers now at our Walmart, I don’t know how yours are, but they have these little gates now you can’t get in without when they’re watching everybody and they’ll bring it to your car. We have a friend who gets their groceries from Walmart and she said, because she’s got a bunch of kids and she said it’s the best thing in the world. She actually knows the people by name. They bring it out to her car. She said it’s the best thing in the world. Now obviously Amazon can’t do that unless it’s a whole food scenario today. But so what do you think they buy it? Go ahead.
Sam: [00:34:53] So the funny thing about Amazon is, you know, Jeff Bezos is, is playing a different game than everyone else. Elon Musk is playing a different game than everyone else. What Jeff Bezos does is he says, people always gonna want things faster. People are always gonna want things cheaper and people are always going to want a bigger selection, right? Those are universal, whether it’s retail or Etl or whatever you want to call commerce these days. So he’s doubling down on his strength, which is the two day delivery, which as we all know, you know, Amazon collects maybe $10 billion a year in prime membership fees and they still lose money on, on postage. Um, but it’s part of their, you know, one of their pillars of success. So he’s spending $800 million to switch from to data one day because he’s doubling down on what he’s great at. And once you put that kind of pressure, Walmart already said that they’re going to have one day delivery without the prime membership fee.
Sam: [00:36:02] So it’s just, it’s just advancing business and it’s, it’s each guy is one upping each other. And for the last eight years, I’ve always been asked the same question, who’s the biggest threat to Amazon? And people were saying Rakuten and Ebay and new way. Again, you know, Alibaba, I said that the only one company that compete with Amazon is Walmart because they’re so advanced with their logistics and their distribution network and they have 5,000 stores and I think the status is, you know, 90% of the u s lives within 10 miles of a Walmart or something crazy like that. And they’re really the only ones that can compete with Amazon, but they still have a ton and catching up to do. I know I bought stuff on walmart.com totally different experience than buying on amazon.com I bought stuff on Ebay dark. I’m totally different experience than mine on Amazon.
Sam: [00:36:59] Amazon customers are not priced centric. They’re more focused on convenience, saving time, knowing if there’s a problem. The the, you know, the marketplace has their back. It’s kind of like if you walk into Nordstrom or Macy’s and you buy a suit, you’re not getting the best price, but you know, if there’s a problem you can return it. You know, it’s quality, you know, it’s been curated and that’s kind of what Amazon has become. You know, like I know the women in my life, they shop on Amazon 24, seven. I mean it’s, it’s crazy and they’ve never once bought anything on ebay.com or that they’ve never once bought anything, you know, on walmart.com because they don’t have that trust factor. Hmm. Um, so it’s pretty, it’s pretty cool what Amazon has built and, and Amazon’s, I’m gonna Chore Company now. They’ve been around for, you know, 2122 years, whatever the number is.
Sam: [00:38:02] Um, and so they have a tremendous head start on Walmart and anyone else. Uh, the best thing Walmart did was they brought in a new CEO, Doug Mcmillon, who I had a chance to meet at a conference. Pretty Smart Guy. Um, they, they bought out jet.com for 3.3 billion because they wanted access to Marc Lore. He was the CEO of jet who used to work for Amazon. So it’s kind of like a cat and mouse game. They also bought out smaller companies like barnacles and Moose jaw and some other brands in the 75 to $150 million range. Just to add to their repertoire, you know, and, and they really, Walmart’s going after Amazon’s customers and Amazon’s go, you have to Walmart’s customers. So it’s pretty fascinating to watch.
Stephen: [00:38:55] Well, uh, let’s apply this to a small seller then. So I mean, does that mean that all the small sellers need to, you know, pick up their marbles and go home? I mean, is that what you’re saying? Because you know, third party sales are gone, right? Or it actually, you didn’t say that. I’m putting words, you said third party selling is going to take off. It’s going to be the number one place. Yeah, you said that. I mean to be fair, I didn’t mean it that way, but basically that it’s brand management now because like you said, you’re not really teaching anymore how to do retail arb and online arm. And the value of learning that is you learn all the, the interest and as complicated as is now, you really learn how to do all that stuff, all that basic background stuff. So what is a third party seller to do? I mean, what is, you know, you’re going to have a conference soon. What are we talking about?
Sam: [00:39:44] So the main focuses of ace right now are establishing wholesale relationships, established wholesale accounts, figuring out how to add value, uh, either getting exclusive cause sell on Amazon or actually managing the account for the manufacturer. Um, we’re also working with retailers who needed to transition, manufactured, so knit, everyone knows they need to be in the Amazon game. They just don’t know how. Okay. So 99% and people are better off setting up as a third party seller with Fba then they are selling directly to Amazon. Right? We had a scenario with a fortune 500 company that owns five hour energy and they used to sell directly to Amazon and guess what? Amazon tank, the price in order to get market share, surprise, surprise. And they didn’t care because they were doing volume until they got a phone call from their biggest retailer, which is seven 11.
Sam: [00:40:54] And they said, hey, what’s going on here? Amazon selling it cheaper than we’re buying an oh sale, you know, and seven 11 is the biggest retailer in the world, so you don’t want to piss them off. So the shuttle off vendor central, then they’d try to do seller central. They tried to do it on their own and they had no clue what they were doing. They were, they were using the same UPC for one bat as a 144 path. Things were getting stripped incorrectly. It was a nightmare. They didn’t know how to do multi bats, they didn’t know how to do flavor variations. They didn’t know how to do anything. And they were calling me for about two years and I was helping them for free. Every time they called, I would help them to the best of my ability on that phone call. And after about two years they finally said, you know what? You’ve helped us more than anyone we’ve ever paid. So you’re our guy and we’re going forward with you and we want you to manage our Amazon account and you know, a to z soup to nuts. And they’re paying us like 10 grand a month to manage their Amazon account. And they’re doing about 2 million a month in sales right now on Amazon. So that’s, that’s pretty incredible.
Stephen: [00:42:13] So then is this small seller, I mean, how do you know, again, I want to bring this down to scale for people who listened to my heart because we’re not, no, no, I get it. I get the perspective that’s a breath where you could get to, but it starts, it started with one small account, Sam, right? I mean, let’s, let’s be fair. You didn’t start at this place. No. Nobody sees the million, you know, steps that were right and wrong, right? I’m sure lots of them are wrong. And so let’s bring it back to some third party seller who’s probably doing ra in Oaa and working on wholesale. Might’ve had an account or two, but are, are sharing the buy box with 20 other people in their prices up and down. And same nonsense that we’ve all gone through. How does that first account start for somebody who’s listening, who’s saying, hmm, I love the sound of that. I’d love to have the 500 hour energy deal, but again, you got to start somewhere, so let’s, let’s make it attainable for somebody. Do you know what I mean?
Sam: [00:43:08] Yeah. So when I started my business, I was selling DVDs out of a one bedroom apartment. And you know those stories.
Stephen: [00:43:16] Yeah. Episode 50. Go back and listen to episode 50. Blow your mind. Basically
Sam: [00:43:22] what happened was I couldn’t buy stuff fast enough. I mean, I was buying stuff from one or $2 and sell them for 10 or $20. And you know, that was when DVDs were in the hay day. Obviously we saw the writing on the wall with streaming and Voodoo and Hulu and Netflix and prime and all the other streaming services. And so we pivoted to fashion and footwear. Um, after a chance meeting I had with someone in the children’s apparel business and you know, we will, we were trying to get them to sell to us and he goes, well, I sell to Amazon and I sell the guys who sell on Amazon. I don’t really need you. And I was like, listen, we’re going to do 10 million this year on Amazon. You know, you should probably work with us. And he said, my son does 10 million a year just in shoes, just on Amazon.
Sam: [00:44:13] I went, whoa. And this guy was not humble. Sad would exaggerate. You were humbled very quick. Yeah. I was like, ah, sorry. Yeah. Came off like a big shot. Ended up with my tail between my legs. So, but I, but I took that information. I came back to office, I went out to Zappos website, I did shop by brand. I threw every single brand into a spreadsheet. I curated every, uh, I had my vas do it after I realized how long it was going to take. And I curated every website for every shoe brand I could find. And if you asked 99.9% of the people, how many brands of shoes can you name? I would venture to say that 99.9% can name less than 20. We found out there’s over a thousand shoe brands that have cult followings that have people that will only buy those shoes for whatever reason, whether it be running shoes or whether it be, uh, you know, she for old people or shoes for people who flat feet or shoes for kids or crops or whatever.
Sam: [00:45:20] And we really dove in and we went and we opened a retail store and we opened wholesale accounts with as many companies as we could. I took a team of six people to magic, which is the trade show in Vegas for fashion and footwear. Obviously. We went to the family show in New York and we had mapped out a plan of which brands we want them to pursue. We had done tons and tons of preliminary research on Amazon to see which brands were well represented, which brands were not represented, which brands were being sold by Amazon, which brands had, uh, you know, bulk of their Sku and an acceptable sales rank range. Uh, and then we did something even cooler. We used, um, uh, some exporting tools. [inaudible] was taco arbitrage or storefront, the Stalker and we exported entire shoe lines from Amazon. So if you typed in Nike, you would export every Nike on Amazon and you would compare the selling price to the MSRP and you would know if that’s a heavily discounted brand or if it was something that sold at or close to less price.
Sam: [00:46:39] And those obviously moved up to the, uh, you know, top of the list to the priority because they were selling at full price whether there was a minimum advertised price, but yeah, to and here are two or there just wasn’t that many sellers or it was just, you know, we found a brand, I think you know, it called Hoka, h o k Monica Busby turned me on to those. And those shoes sell like crazy. Her full price, you know, she didn’t even have to discount and be competitive with other sellers and it was just a, it was just a numbers game. It was just a metrics game. Getting back to the small seller, let’s do this cause I don’t want to lose it. Anyone in erupted cause somebody accuse me of interrupting somebody and I’m like all right, I’m sorry. But I think you gave a ton of great advice. The things that I heard and I
Stephen: [00:47:29] want you to break it down a little bit more. The thing that I heard was you kind of put a line in the sand saying, okay, this is the category. This is where I’m going to start. I like shoes or I want to start with shoes. So you did, that’s where you put in the time and the energy and you talked about it earlier saying that this is really where the work is, is that research, right? So a small seller, how far down should they niche to become the expert? Because that’s what it sounded like you became as an expert.
Sam: [00:47:56] So it’s Connie, because I’ve said two things often, you know, one, one is when people ask me, what do you sell on Amazon? My typical answer is anything we can make money on, right? So we sold everything from wards grooming kids to enter rated stuff to children’s stuff too. You know, pet home, baby DVDs, toys, you name it, we’ve sold it on Amazon, sold the racing bike, um, crazy stuff. The flip side to that is if you get involved in a specific niche, whether it be shoes or any other category, and you really do a deep dive analysis of what the sales ranks mean, what the sales velocity is, what the popular colors are, what the popular sizes are, what the popular brands are. Then when you go sourcing, whether it be retail, online arbitrage, wholesale, or even private label for that matter, um, you will have an instinctive knowledge of how that item is going to perform because you’re so immersed in that category or that subcategory.
Sam: [00:49:08] And you’ll get to be able to know intuitively how the item is going to perform based on all the data that you have. So it does make sense to go deep into a particular category. I would caution, you know, going into just one specific category, because on Amazon, things can change on a dime and we always tell people to buy wide before you buy deep. And we tell people, you know, never allocate more than 5% of your sourcing budget to anyone Asen or Sku because the price could drop, the demand could slow down Amazon come on the ledge thing. I’ve been seller could buy a thousand pieces and just burn the price. So there’s, there’s so many moving parts and so many variables and so many dynamics at play that you have to do an asset allocation. Um, you know, similar to what they do on Wall Street.
Sam: [00:50:03] You know, you don’t want to be overexposed in any one security or anyone Sku in this example. And just getting back to for the smaller seller, the most important thing I did and my clients or laugh at me to this day. Uh, I have a client, David Cohen, who I upset at them so many times and he repeats it back to me and he says he hears my voice saying it to him and Jason, give me an example. If you go and buy a toy for $5 and you sell it for $15 and Amazon takes a $5 three and you made $5, that’s great, but is that the best use of your time? Meaning if you could buy a shoe for $50 and sell for 150 and Amazon and 30 and you made 70 on a $50 investment, you’re making over 100% it’s a lot less labor intensive on the sourcing side and the prepping, packing and shipping side.
Sam: [00:51:00] It’s a lot less inventory management. And we brought our average selling price, which I didn’t realize how valuable that was it. That’s the one thing I would change about it. Start over is focused on my average selling price because we were selling toys and DVDs and an average selling price was $15 and maybe we’d make three to $7 on a sale, but you had to make thousands of sales to really make some serious money. And so when we switched to business model are passionate and footwear, our average selling price went up to $60. So that’s four times. Um, you know, the average selling price that we had, which means it’s a lot less sourcing and it’s a lot less prepping, packing, shipping. It’s a lot less inventory management, it’s a lot less price management. And it became a much smoother, more enjoyable business, uh, because there was a whole lot less than it had to go ride for us to be successful.
Sam: [00:51:59] So the most important thing I could tell a small seller is made sure whatever you’re doing is the best use of your time. There is something called opportunity costs. And if you’re doing something that’s making you a little bit of money but it’s precluding you from making a lot of money, you’re actually losing money. So I go back to the example of prepping and packing and shipping boxes. I was obsessed about shipping everything perfectly into to Amazon and free. For the first couple of years, I was the only one that was allowed to create FBA shipments because we were selling DVDs. And let’s say it was a Harry Potter DVD. Well, there were seven different movies. It was widescreen, there was full screen, there was Blueray, there was collector’s edition, there was limited edition. And then there were some Canadian goods mixed in there. So I had to make sure that the right UPC went to the rite aid sin.
Sam: [00:52:56] Otherwise we’d have a big mess on our hands when people bought them on Amazon and got the wrong one. So I literally had DVDs piled up to the ceiling in my office on my desk and my entire staff was waiting for me to create FBA check notes. And then I realized I’m the bottleneck in my own business. And so I trained Iyke who you know well, uh, on how to do things very carefully, very methodically and not screw up. And 95%, you know, if he got it 95% right, his 95% was better than my 100% because we couldn’t scale if I was doing all the work. So time management and energy management or the two most important things, uh, again, I document every, if you do this for a week, you’ll be successful. Take down a journal, be disappointed on how much time you waste. Right?
Sam: [00:53:51] When you, when you put it in writing like that [inaudible] 68 hours. Yeah, exactly. So there’s people who are on diets who, who take pictures of everything they eat and they extended to the nutritionist. Those people are far more successful in losing weight than the people that eat ice cream in, in the middle of the night. You know, without anyone saying. Yeah. So, um, so it was 168 hours in a week. I document how long I sleep, how long they exercise, how long they spend with my kids, my grandkids, how long they work, how long a moms Facebook. God knows. That’s my biggest challenge. Um, and you know, I say, what can I automate? Well, can I outsource? What can I delegate? What can I eliminate? What piece of software can I pay 50 bucks a month for that will save me hours and hours of manual labor. So you take a software like inventory lab where you take a software like tactical arbitrage or any software that we use as Amazon sellers is that 50 or a hundred or 150 bucks or Api Ego.
Sam: [00:54:57] If that saves you six hours or 10 hours a month, it more than pays for itself because there’s, you want to earn $300,000 a year in profit. Your time has to be worth $1,000 a day, which means your time has to be worth $100 an hour if you’re working an hour. So if you’re doing $10 an hour work, like prepping and packing and shipping, you’re not actually saving $10 an hour. You’re losing $90 an hour. And I try to tell people this, and thankfully most of my clients get it, but some of them can be a little stubborn. So they realize that it’s right, but they say, why would I pay someone $10 when I could do it myself for free? And I’m like, you’re not doing it free because you’re costing yourself, you know, time to be sourcing. We all have a finite amount of time. We all have a finite amount of energy and we all have a finite amount of money.
Sam: [00:55:54] So by working smarter and not harder, and I hate that business coach Sherry, but the crew, um, you will allow yourself to grow and scale and you know, so I have 10 things that I write down for all my clients. Delegate, outsource, automate, eliminate. Then you go to software processing, logistics, infrastructure, technology and standard operating procedures. If you could nail those 10 things down, you could five x your business in a year. And we’ve done it, you know, people that we’ve done it with. You know, we had a guy, uh, that we know and love I’ll do is per won’to. He came to me, he’s like, boss, I plateaued. It didn’t use the word plateaued. It’s like I, I hit the wall. I’m only, I’m suck at 20 to 30 grand a month or, and can’t figure out how to get any higher. I said, listen, you know me, you liked me, you trust me, stick with me for a year and do exactly what I say and I promise you you’ll, you’ll change your business.
Sam: [00:56:53] And at the end of the year, he was doing two to 300,000 a month. So we tend to head to his business and anything I told him, and, and not to say that, that I’m great, but he listened to everything I told him. And if I told them to do something, he would get back to me. 12 hours later, he’s like, you know that checklist that you gave me yesterday? Yeah, it’s all done. What, what do I have to dance? You know? And it just took massive action. And I have a lot of people that came to me through Tony Robbins and Russell Bronson, and they’re the same way I’m on. Okay, here’s a new seller to do list. Set up an LLC, open up an Amazon account, make sure it’s a professional cal, you know, enabled, sponsored ads, enable Fba, do this, do this, do this, get yourself approved categories, brands, this, that, these people do it within one day. You know,
Stephen: [00:57:42] so the learning and what you’re describing is gone, right? Because you basically your jumpstarting them and that’s, well, let’s do this because I’m going to run at a time. I want to make sure we get to this. You have a conference coming up and uh, it is, uh, the solstice conference and it’s in, so let’s get the dates right, because if somebody is connecting with this at this, they want to learn more about this, I assume, is it going to be a pitch fest at your conference that they’re going to, you’re going to know to know death on this stuff.
Sam: [00:58:10] Nobody sells from the stage. Okay. Over the last three years, uh, we don’t pay anything. I don’t sell anything. I just sound like my clients after they see the, the family and the community that we built and cultivated. And I got news for you at this point. It’s not about our success as sellers. It’s about our clients’ success. You know, we’re, we’re in the legacy stage, we’re not in the making money stage. We’re trying to impact as many people as possible. And we’ve seen, we’ve literally changed not only people, businesses, but people’s lives. I mean, we have clients that were real cures in New York City. They moved down to Boca Raton, Florida. I love that guy. You know, Paul and I love that Paul’s referred 50 people. I can
Stephen: [00:58:58] hang out with that dude every day. I don’t want to miss this because he’s going to be there. Cause I, I loved that guy. Do you ardsm speaking? Oh yeah. Awesome. June the 30th, 2019. It’s a Sunday. I think this is the only east coast conference. I mean I was thinking about that cause lots of them are west coast or in, in Vegas. It seems to be, or even Orlando, right? Because that’s a big place to go. But what I like about it, I could drive. Um, although I’m flying in, it’s June 30th, 2019. It’s in freehold, New Jersey. Um, and it’s the one that’s south. Kate made it, but it’s only 199 bucks. That’s the thing that I think people got to realize is that, you know, I mean, you know, and, and I get it, having been involved in some of these conferences, there’s enormous costs.
Stephen: [00:59:40] Like James Thompson tells me, he’s like, Steve, I have to spend a, what was it, like a salad is $60 in Vegas or some crazy number. He was telling me, I’m like, oh my God. He’s like, that’s the unfortunate thing. What’s nice about where you’re doing this? I mean, it’s a head. Yeah, well this is very nice for 199 bucks and you give him an a $50 coupon and in which I’m going to give you guys, um, and Steve doesn’t get paid for this. So it’s, I don’t think I benefit, um, but him up speaking. So, uh, and I have a pretty good topic. I’m talking about this year with bookkeeping and accounting and stuff. And so,
Sam: [01:00:15] you know, the night before June 29, right, we usually have a, a, a meetup. Uh, I’ll make the announcement of where that is as soon as suites secure the location, but just the one through what the day looks like on Sunday. Real quick. Uh, breakfast and registrations at [8:00] AM I speak at [9:00] AM Steve speaks some time shortly thereafter. And we’re going to have Andrew and deliver on hurts calling Jeff Cohen, Stephen Peterson, uh, possibly John Lawson. Um, rea shine, mine speaking. Uh, we’re going to have Kathy Terrell, who’s a Ebay experts speaking. We’re going to have representatives there from Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, jet. Um, we’re going to have people there that are software developers, will to have people there that are logistics experts. Um, we had a sponsor last year, first toys shipping, who, if anyone wants to do international, they have a direct pipeline into setting everything up without all the aggravation of selling internationally.
Sam: [01:01:17] Um, we have a girl, Rachel Michael, who I’ve sent hundreds of clients too, and she actually knows how to do accounting for Amazon sellers. Uh, you know, so it’s pretty amazing, you know, make sure you set up an LLC. He makes sure he set up as an s Corp. I know Steve, you have a background in accounting. She does bookkeeping, payroll taxes, uh, you know, any legal notices from the IRS and she only charges a few hundred bucks a month. It’s like having a virtual CFO, um, and she saved people tens of thousands of dollars in taxes. Um, so, you know, we have different, uh, companies coming to sponsor with different viewpoints coming to speak. And it’s really going to be more about all about ecommerce and the future of business rather than just Amazon. We’re going to add a Shopify expert there and it’s really going to be, we, we consolidate everything into one day because I, no matter, no matter how much I love going to conferences, whether it’s Tony Robbins or Russell Brunson, it’s very hard for me to leave my family and my businesses for three, four, five days and spend thousands of dollars on flights and hotels and this and that. So we consolidate everything into one day. And we’ve had a lot of the military people as clients and they say the fact that you can fit that many speakers in a one day period is a godson.
Stephen: [01:02:48] Because I think so. I think it, it helps him because I can learn, I can give x amount of energy and I don’t mind taking it on the Chin for one day, but when he gets dragged into two and three, that’s when I started to lose interest. I sleep in, then I missed the first lunch or I never, and so you’re not paying attention and you know, the night before. So I’m with you on it. I think it,
Sam: [01:03:08] it’s nice and easy. We actually had the Tony Robbins right hand man has come and speak again this year. Uh, he was there last year. He travels the world promoting Tony Robbins, uh, and he’s, he’s a brilliant guy himself. Uh, and sadly we lost my friend Dj this hear stage four pancreatic cancer, but we’re going to do a tribute to him. Awesome. And hopefully his wife and three daughters or be there to celebrate his life. And, uh, you know, we’re probably going to bring it in a charity or to just to, you know, get things going. Last year we had operation underground railroad, which rescues children, uh, out of sex trafficking. And human trafficking. And we raised a lot of money for that. And it’s just a, it’s just a phenomenal experience. It’s not all business. A lot of it is mindset. A lot of it is gratitude. A lot of it is charity. A lot of it is paying it forward. You know, that’s what I believe
Stephen: [01:04:12] at. The other thing is relationships. The people that you’re going to be there, you know, I mean, again, that’s why I like going to conferences because I get to meet people. I love the talk and I love to talk with people. And so for me it’s a value. All right, so how does somebody find out more information? So, uh, again, I’m just going to put this out there. It’s June 30th. It’s in New Jersey. It’s in freehold, New Jersey. It’s 199 bucks and he’s given you a $50 off coupon if you use the code code solstice. So l, s, t, I, C e S. O. L. S. T. I. C, he saved the 50 bucks. That’s awesome. Um, so you can find me a, not a beer. I don’t drink beer anymore. But you can buy me
Sam: [01:04:49] waterway. Yes. It’s going to be three gourmet meals. This is like a wedding hall that we’re doing it in. Three unbelievable gourmet meal. Married. Again, there’s going to be an open bar for a couple hours after all the speakers and there’s going to be a live rock band. Well, can I drink the indoor outdoor space so anyone during scotch or smokes the Gars, we’ll usually do that. At the end of the day. It’s pretty, it’s a pretty fun day. All right. Just hanging out with a bunch of likeminded people. Find out more information to tell me the secret. You’re still not giving it to our website. Amazon consulting experts thought Tom, it’s on the home page. Just put it in that code solstice for $50 off. Um, we have an amazing group of speakers and sponsors and we have an amazing group of clients and potential clients coming. And you know, we’ve had people travel from as far away as Australia for this. We’ve sold out three years in a row and it’s still an intimate setting. We limited it to two, 300 people. So it’s not overwhelming like those giant shows in Vegas that have 50,000 people.
Stephen: [01:06:01] And this other thing to think about, this is a three hour drive for me from Pennsylvania. So what is it where you’re located? It’s pretty much like me. It’s within one day’s drive of 80% of the u s population. So you know, think about, you know, you don’t, you can drive. I mean that’s what I like about it. So
Sam: [01:06:16] I want to greet him. Come down from Canada, uh, Jacob Toppin down last year, but his whole family,
Stephen: [01:06:23] right? They made it a pretty cool and I, and I think, you know, you buy the Jersey shore, it’s definitely something to see. You’re not far from New York City, so it’s really worthwhile and you can make it a longer trip. All right, so I’m gonna end. Normally I ask a question, but I think you’ve said it two times or three times and it’s going to stick with me because I can see it’s a title already. Automate, eliminate, delegate and outsource. Automate, eliminate, delegate and outsource. Every time you touch something, I call it a touch point. See if you could reduce it by automating it, eliminating it, delegating or outsourcing. It is phenomenal advice. Uh, Sam, if somebody has a followup question, is the best way to get you in on Allen, Amazon consulting experts.
Sam: [01:07:05] Yeah. Just go on the website. You can schedule a free consultation with free. Uh, yeah, and I sent a bunch of it
Stephen: [01:07:12] people your way, and I will close with this because I know I’m a little long, but I will close with this. I’ve sent a bunch of people who, you know, they’re stuck in. I, you know, they needed more than what I could offer him cause I’m limited in my knowledge and experience and I’ve sent people to you and they got in free advice from you and you’ve never, I don’t know that you’ve ever charged them. They never come back to me and said, Sam charged me or he wanted a bunch of money from me. Every single one of them I’ve heard from has said thank you and uh, appreciate it.
Sam: [01:07:37] Wait, so we don’t do a hard sell. Well I appreciate that. I mean, again, I like, I like it,
Stephen: [01:07:44] the honest part and I like people, you know, hey, you’re not everybody’s cup of tea. Your business style is not everybody’s cup of tea. Okay.
Sam: [01:07:53] Yeah. Well guess what? That’s the way the world works. Yeah. I don’t want to break your, I don’t want to blow your mind, but no, that’s okay. That’s what I’m from Brooklyn, New York. I ain’t changing who I am.
Stephen: [01:08:05] So for you. All right, well thank you very much. I can’t wait to see you again. It is June 29 June 20 June 30th Sunday in freehold jersey. Go to Amazon consulting experts.com save the 50 bucks you use the code solstice. And again, I do not benefit in any way 109
Sam: [01:08:25] so you know, there’s a list of airports and hotels, all that stuff. Okay. Where to stay and there’s this counts on the hotels and it’s all good.
Stephen: [01:08:34] All right. Well man, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. I wish you nothing.
Sam: [01:08:39] Anyone needs any help? Feel free to give me a call.
Stephen: [01:08:42] Fascinating to see the changes going on in his business. And the way he described it, you know, it used to be like you said, they teach everybody Ra and online arm now it’s how do you get that wholesale relationship and how do you add value to that brand? It’s stuff we’ve been talking about. You listen to all the outliers that are kind of my show. This absolutely, uh, one of the hardest things to do when you do it and you do it. I mean like really do it. You’re going to have a customer for life because you’re going to give them, you’re taking away their hassle factor, I like to call it. And so if you do a good job, so how do you learn that you gotta put in the time? So again, conference for 199, 149 bucks, take the 50 bucks off and you get to meet other people that are going to help you move forward in your business. That’s what you go to these conferences for. Not to listen to guys like me. Go and meet other people who are going to help you move your business forward. Come and hang out with me. I’d love to love to talk with you. I’d love to help you in any way I can, but really go meet the other 299 people, um, because they have the same challenges, the same issues. And again, I think Sam and his team do a great job for that price. Amazing ECOMMERCE, momentum.com ECOMMERCE, momentum.com take care.
Cool voice guy: [01:09:49] Thanks for listening to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. All the links mentioned today can be found that in commerce, momentum.com under this episode number, please remember to subscribe and the lake us on iTunes.
