How To Build A Real Brand Beyond Amazon

Oh, hey, what's up, everybody? Ryan. Here I am literally leaving my house after just holding a workshop with some. This group was all Amazon sellers. And because of that, I wanted to talk to those of you, specifically those of you who sell on Amazon.com because that was this group, that was everybody who was here that was building something that was making them money, but it wasn't making them as much as they'd like. And you know, they know that they can't sell it and they know it's not really scalable. And that's most Amazon sellers. That is most people who are selling products on Amazon. And this might be bold to say, but I would be. I might. This is tough, but I'd say most, maybe 80% of Amazon sellers are not entrepreneurs. They're sellers. They're hustlers. Now, I love you hustlers who just want money, who just want to make enough money to be able to live the life that you want. Cause I know that's why you sell on Amazon in the first place. But you are not building a business. You are not building something that someone else wants you to. You are not building an asset. And everything changes in your business when you start looking at it from the perspective of am I building an asset versus am I building something that is going to make me money? And it changes everything about how you operate. You see, some people think that a sellable business just means how much cash flow my business makes times that by four. And that's what my sellable business is. It does not work like that, especially right now because a bunch of Amazon sellers are just trying to sell their problems. I'm the only person in my business. I work 60 hours a week. I should sell this thing. Nobody wants your business that you're working 60 hours a weekend to make 100 grand a year. They don't. And I, I was given this advice by a mentor of mine when I was like 21 or 22, I paid a lot of money, 25 grand, which was like all the money in the world to me at the time to join a mastermind group and.

Leader. Basically said to me, ryan, what I was doing was I was an affiliate marketer. I was making like 100 grand a year, maybe more, maybe 200 grand. And he's like, ryan.

You have an income stream. You don't have a business and you need to go get one. I did not want to hear it. I did not want to hear that. I wanted to know how to sell more stuff and make more money. Did not want to Hear that? I had to learn how to run a real business. And that is most people who are selling physical products, especially Amazon sellers. If you have ever said.

How do I build a funnel to sell more stuff? If you have ever said, I'm doing well on Amazon, but my Shopify store sucks. If you have ever said, my market is 25 to 35 year olds. You don't really know your business, you do not really know the drivers behind your business and you can't sell it. And so what we just did over the last two and a half days was work with these hustlers and we turned them into entrepreneurs. And the first day was a really long one. It was a really long.

It was a really long grind to get them to get it. And then about 10am, 11am on day two, they all got it. And the cool thing was, was the universal feedback was people saying, I came in here thinking that my business had this ceiling. And now I realize that I have this ceiling. I thought I was building a business with the intention of selling, but now I really have a business that can be sold. And even if I don't sell it, I have a better business. They got the bigger picture and the bigger picture is a lot bigger than Amazon.com now here's the big takeaway that I want you Amazon sellers to get. If you sell on Amazon right now, you have figured out how to bring a market up market, how to bring a product to market that is big, that is really big. And because of that you have a superpower and you're wasting it by looking at what the internal Amazon data tells you. Tells you. If you are listening to the people who are like, just sell 10 products that make $10 in profit and make 10 a day.

You are toast.

That might be profitable for like the next year, but you are going to get eaten up by the people who come in who have real businesses that serve that market. You know, the market has only continued to consolidate. I've been warning you about this for years, that if you didn't build a real brand with real people and a real audience, you were gonna have a hard time. And that's what we have seen happen. So one of the big shifts that the attendees got at this workshop, which is all about building with the intention of having an eight figure exit, what they saw was that if you look at your business from the perspective of an investor.

Rather than you doing all of the work, if you look at it from the perspective of an investor, you get a different viewpoint of your business. You look at what assets the business has versus just what the cash flow is. And there's a couple things that we work on in order to make it more sellable and more attractive. And number one is the profit margin. So we talk a lot about how to justify higher price points. We talk about how you can raise your prices when you target the right person. And we look at other ways to raise that profit margin by doing some little things within the inner workings of the business in order to raise cash flows that don't necessarily require you to sell more product. Number two, you have to have multiple places that the product can be sold, your products can be sold. And that doesn't mean that you are on Amazon and Shopify. It means that you are have one primary sales channel, but you've got the control of your buyers. And there's a lot of ways to do that and we went through them. It's different for every business, but it requires you to know exactly who you are serving in order to get in front of that person. And then number three, you have to be able to walk away from the business. It's if you cannot go away from the business, it's not a real business, it's an income stream. And that requires you to develop a new skill set like leading and hiring.

The job of a CEO is to set the vision of the company to bring on talent and to make sure the company doesn't run out of money. That's your job as an entrepreneur. And if you're not doing those things, then you are a hustler, you are not an entrepreneur. So for those of you who sell on Amazon, if you are behind the scenes figuring out the next way to rank, figuring out the next product that you're going to sell based on Amazon metrics, you are not building your business, you're building your profit stream. So here's what you have to do. You have to start making the transition of, okay, I've got this profitable thing. How am I going to get this to grow without me? How am I going to make the pivot from Amazon seller to owner? If you look at your own business like you're the investor. Cause you are. If you start looking at it from that perspective and you go from operator to owner, what would you have to do? You would have to replace yourself from those Amazon operations. You would have to be thinking about strategy and handing it off to somebody who's going to implement it. You have to start thinking about how your brand is positioned in the marketplace. You have to set an overall vision. Vision for your company. These are the things that we worked on for the last two and a half days with these, with these sellers and with these business owners at my home in Austin. It was so cool watching like there was, there's, there's a couple there that, man, they just really got it. They said they were up till 4am last night with all kinds of ideas of how their business was going to grow. They had hit a ceiling and, and what they thought, thought was that they could get a few tips to grow a little bit, like grow incrementally. And what they saw was that they really did have a eight and eight figure business that could be sold. And they just did this little shift and this whole world opened up for them. And it was so great seeing their transformation. There was one guy who came in from Slovenia that's such an honor to me when somebody comes in in and pays me money to fly from Slovenia to work on his business for a few days. And he could not figure out how to make the pivot from, I'm just selling this commodity on Amazon. I'm selling thousands of these commodities. But like if somebody sells the same product and undercuts me, I'm out, I'm toast. And, and we get, we. He completely turned around his viewpoint of the business to the point where he now sees who it is that he is, is selling to and how he is to help that person and how he's going to make way more money than he ever knew that he could possibly make. So there's, there's one individual there, oh man, who was selling.

You know, the most commodity product, just this wide open series of like random products. And he found a thread to tie them together that will allow him to triple his, his price points, triple his profit margins and attract raving fans and sell way more product than he would ever have done had we not gone through this hard work. And when you are listening to the Amazon guru who is telling you how to use Jungle Scout to find the next product and get it ranked, like those tools are great and you give them to your Amazon sales channel manager.

Those are tools in your tool belt in order to implement the vision and the direction of the business. They are not the things that you should use to determine the direction of the business. If you are determining the direction of the business by internal data at the marketplace, then you are, you are not building something, you are extracting something and that's very different. So if you want to sell more product, if you want to sell your business someday.

This is the hard work you have to do. You've built something that has sales. You've built something that can take a product to the marketplace. Do not squander that. Do not squander the opportunity that you have built. You've built some really great sales systems. You have a skill set that you can apply to a real business that can be scaled and, or sold. And you are wasting your time if you are. Whoa. You are wasting your time if you are only.

Looking at it as. I'm just going to get as many sales on Amazon as possible. All of the action, all, like, 90% of where all the meat is happens outside of that. Not necessarily taking sales off of Amazon, but going after the people and building a brand of people who want to be fans of yours, repeat customers of yours, who will buy more often, who will pay higher prices, who will tell their friends, who will come back and buy from you through Shopify, who will buy from your funnel, who will follow you on Instagram, who will introduce you to influencers. And that's where it starts popping, and that's where your, your business really takes off. Rather than being this stuck Amazon store that sells even a few hundred thousand dollars a month, but can't really be scaled or sold, that pivot changes everything. Do not waste the skill set and the opportunity that you have built. Whether you just listen to my podcast or you join the back room or you come to one of our events, or you come to my workshop, which you can find out more about@capitalism.com 8. Just so you know, here's my end game. Like, I don't. Like, I don't make my money selling workshops. I make my money doing, like, I don't know if people get. I made all my money doing this stuff. And the reason why I even teach this stuff is because it opens up opportunities for me to invest in exciting companies. And exciting companies are not stuck on Amazon. You know, I don't consider myself an Amazon seller and I never did. I'm an entrepreneur and I use Amazon as part of my business.

If you think like that, you will be very successful. If you don't, you will be an Amazon seller who is following all the Amazon gurus, doing what they tell you to do, what they say is working for them, and most of them are pulling your leg.

So build your business, man.

Don't. Don't just sell stuff. You're wasting your time. There's lots of stuff to. There's plenty of stuff to sell. Build something real. And if you've got sales going on right now, it is time to apply that skill set to building something bigger. I can help if you want it. Or you subscribe to the podcast. Follow it. Follow us on YouTube. Follow us on Instagram because we recorded a lot of stuff these last three days and we'll share some of those stories coming soon, and I hope you find it valuable on your journey. I'm rooting for you, really am. I want to give you money one day. I want to invest in your exciting company one day. But you got to build something exciting first. All right, thanks for listening. Share this with an Amazon seller. Talk to you soon.

Sam.