How To Pass $1m In Sales On Amazon #BrandBuilderPodcast

It's easier to make money when you're thinking about people, because when you think about people, when you think about audience, it becomes a lot easier for you to make decisions about what they would want to buy. So the way that you grow through that plateau, through that constraint, when you're stuck at around a million dollars, is by going back and partnering or advertising to a specific person.

Welcome to the Brand Builder podcast presented by capitalism.com I'm Max Kerwick and I advise physical product brands to find their story.

I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and I invest in physical products brands. A physical products brand is arguably the most predictable path to a seven figure business. And we advise them, build them, buy them and sell them.

The show goes behind them, tracks their success and hands you the keys to what's working.

Let's dive in.

Hey, real quick, I'm doing a test in my business right now that I think you'll be interested in. We have a training called Million Dollar Brands and it helps business owners and entrepreneurs get clear on those first three to five products that they're going to build that will get to 25 sales a day at 25 to $30 and thus be a million dollar business. And we sell that for $297. And I recently had the idea of what if at the end of that training when somebody completed it and they filled out a form saying they know what their three products are going to be, they know how they're going to launch the products, let's refund them the cost of the training, let's incentivize the action of actually making some decisions in your business and getting clear on your business. And I did this because someone challenged me with the thought of what would I change in my business if I only cared about my customers results and I didn't care about profitability. And I immediately said, let's incentivize action. And then I said, well, would I really spend however many thousands of dollars a month I spent on Facebook ads or would I take some of that money and put it into a scholarship fund and then fund some of the cool ideas that came from my training? And it was like this whole world of creativity opened up for me. So this is a test right now that we're running. If you are starting a new business or you are still under that million dollar threshold or even that 25 sales a day threshold, then we have this training called Million dollar brands. That's $297 and it's refunded to you when you complete the training.

And I figure if you walk out.

Of that training, you're gonna leave with such a clear business plan that you're gonna want to work with us on ongoing. So you can find this@capitalism.com brands. And depending on when you sign up, we're also opening up strategic windows where you can qualify for a scholarship and.

Have your business funded.

So this is all an experiment. If I lose my rear end on it, we'll probably shut it down. But for now, you can find it at capitalism.com brands.

Hey, what's up everybody? Ryan here. And today what I wanted to go through was some challenges that I've noticed that brand builders run into, especially when they are starting to scale or starting to grow. And I work with a lot of Amazon sellers and physical product sellers who have got momentum, they've got something working, they've got something in the marketplace, they have sales, they have.

They have a product that is working and then they get stuck. And at the same time, I have some amazing entrepreneurs who just go on to build and sell eight figure companies or what's the difference? And I invited a group of people into my home. I have been testing some new curriculum at the lake house that I'm calling eight figure exits. It's basically kind of my strategy and my formula. And I work with people who have audiences or who have products or who have money to invest into this type of a model. I work with them over at, you know, two to two and a half day period. If you want to attend that, by the way, just go to capitalism.com8 and you can get details there. But I noticed similar challenges to the individuals who were showing up and.

I.

Wanted to share some of those insights with you. So the Fast Lane to $1 million is having that suite of products, those three to five products that are selling 25 to 35 sales per day and you have price points around $30. That's how you get a million dollar business. And the challenge with that is that most people go and pursue that and get it up as soon as possible, which is great, by the way. And then they hit the million, which is about as much capacity as they can handle on their own. But building a real business out of that is a challenge. That's the plat. So we work with these business owners in order to free up.

That energy so they can build a real company. Now I said something when I was going through this model with some of the entrepreneurs that created a real braingasm for people who are in the room. And this is What I said when starting a new company, I always am going after the audience as step one, like who is my target market and where are they hanging out. Second, I go to the way that I'm going, you know, what am I going to sell them and how am I going to sell to them? So the sales channel piece and then it's about systems and scale from there. The challenge that a lot of physical product sellers have, brand builders have is that they skip step one and they go right to step two. What am I selling and how am I selling it? Which is great by the way. You know, it's a fast way to getting revenue and sales when you are bootstrapping a company. But if you do that, the way that you ultimately scale is by going back to step one, going back to the first piece and identifying who is it that I'm selling or selling to or serving and where are they hanging out. And then we drop our product into that pool. Right. So that takes work. And it's a different skill set than just putting up a product and hoping it sells.

It's a different skill set and the challenge that most people run into when they hit, when they're going after the sales first is that they become really highly paid Amazon channel managers or they become really good funnel builders, but they don't really become business people.

Your job as an entrepreneur is to, when you hit that wall, go out and now make the pivot to building a real team or a real company or a real brand. And that's how you grow from 1 million to 10 million. And that requires you to build upon a foundation rather than you building up an Amazon sales machine.

If you look at trends of any marketplace, there's always a commoditization of, of, of knowledge after a wide open west period. So if you, if you were to go back circa 2013 and you were to launch a series ofproducts on Amazon.com you did really well. It almost didn't matter what you sold, you did really well and you had a nice short term advantage in the marketplace. And now that that information is fairly commoditized and the mistake that entrepreneurs make is thinking that that's still exclusive knowledge and you can't hire for it. At this point there are agencies that can take over Amazon and they can take it off your plate and do a better job than you at building out that presence. So you stay in the CEO or entrepreneur seat and you organize the pieces. That's the pivot that you make. Once you hit that plateau of really it's like when you're under 2 or 3 million bucks as a one person show. If you are selling products in the marketplace and you are operating it mostly by yourself and you're addicted to one sales channel, you tend to have 60 to 80 hour work weeks. You are addicted to one channel and constantly afraid that it's gonna make a change or go away. You are looking for the little incremental things that you can pull rather than the big things that you can move in a company. And you don't have something that's really sellable. The hard work at this point is maintaining that sales channel and freeing it up so that you can go spearhead something else. So I made this pivot about a year and a half into.

My first big physical products brand. And that pivot happened when my partner and I were like, we're spending all of our time doing this. What we need is to bring on somebody who can obsessively learn the platform better than us and, and grow it better than we could so that we can go run a real company. What that did is it freed me up to think bigger picture and it freed my partner up to basically be president of the company and release more products and to oversee infrastructure. And if you don't do that, then you're always going to run into kind of this rabbit hole or this rat race of maintaining you go on defense rather than offense. So a lot of times I will be working with a physical product seller. And I'll say the way that you will grow this business is not to release another product or not to come up with another ranking strategy, but to go build an audience. And that's not the news that they want to hear. Mostly because that requires you to ask a lot deeper, harder questions about what your business exists to do rather than just how do I sell more of the same stuff that I'm selling right now? So I want to share with you a conversation that I had with someone on this topic. And.

The person brought to me their business and they were really struggling because.

They sold a commodity and they were selling about a million dollars worth of that commodity. And the question was, how do I scale to 10 million? And the answer was not what this person wanted to hear, but it was the fact that they had to go back to step one and identify who the, who was behind the purchase. And the answer came up, well, I don't know, and I'm not sure how, how to even find that. I mean, I've got 10 people who would buy this commodity. So what do I do. Now here's the answer that I gave this person.

They had one product doing about a million dollars a year.

What you're going to sell next, if you don't have a person, you can decide what it is that you're selling first and just put it out into the marketplace and sell a lot. Sometimes you can roll out a second follow up product that complements the first. But you don't build a brand, you don't build a three to five product suite unless you've got a person in mind. It's not possible unless you are selling something really broad like you're going into the general market of beauty or, or supplements and you're selling one of everything. But then you have no repeat customers. And so that becomes really difficult to scale and you're running into challenges with competitors and you will never grow unless you're coming with a bunch of funding. So the fast lane to growing through that plateau is just to pick anyone, pick a person who uses your product, pick more of that person and then identify what else do they buy and you start rolling out products to that person. It's not like you have to have some sort of a magical avatar. You don't have to have some sort of mission behind the business. You just have to have a person in mind because that frees up your mental capacity to be able to align your marketing, align your product suite behind serving that person. A lot of times I fear that when I talk about audience building or marketing to a person, that people think that I'm doing it in some sort of a selfless way. The truth is it's easier to make money when you're thinking about people. Because when you think about people, when you think about audience, it becomes a lot easier for you to make decisions about what they would want to buy.

So the way that you grow through that plateau, through that constraint, when you're stuck at around a million dollars, is by going back and partnering or advertising to a specific person. So a great example of this would be Bulletproof Coffee. Bulletproof coffee started by Dave Asprey.

His first skew.

Was coffee. And that was the first way that he started selling physical products to that audience, to his audience. And if Dave wanted to be a coffee company, his follow up product would have been a dark roast. But it wasn't. It was MCT oil and then it was supplements and then it was food bars and then he did a dark roast. The reason for that was because if you are selling more of the same thing, then you are a product based company. And those companies don't grow very often until you've got a foothold and a moat in the marketplace. And what I'm thinking of is like, of course Charmin sells only toilet paper, right? But they've had 50 years of a moat built around them. For entrepreneurs, you don't have that luxury. So you have to pick a person and roll out multiple products to that person. Dave Asprey did not do coffee, then dark roast, then light roast, then decaf, because then he would have been a coffee company and that would have had diminishing returns. It would have been hard to grow if that was the focus. He was a performance company because he's a performance company. He says coffee, MCT Oil, and all his other biohacking stuff. By doing that, the same person comes back and buys multiple products rather than just seeing you as the coffee company. That is how you start to make the pivot into building a real brand. And for those of you who reject the idea of audience building because you don't want to do it, you don't want to learn it, you can just go find out where that audience is and partner with them. A very simple example would be something like.

What four Sigmatic did. Another coffee company, they just started sponsoring podcasts because they knew that the person who would buy their product listened to podcasts. They were cutting edge and that put their company on the map. That's how they grew. So if you are only thinking about, how do I sell more of what I've got, you can hit the million dollar point, but you don't go through that. You don't grow through that and get to 10 million. It just doesn't happen. You got nothing to scale because you don't control the marketplace. You can never control the size of a marketplace. You can't make more people go to Amazon, you can't make more people go to Walmart. You can't make more people buy at a specific place. You can't. You can only go to where there are more people and give them what they want and let them decide where it is that they are going to sell. So there was one person who came in who really wanted the step by step plan to get to 10 million to go from 1 million to 10 million. And so I reiterated the way you scale from 1 million to 10 million is by going back to the first stage. It's not the one million that matters, it's the do you have three to five products that connect with the same person.

Then go out and get more of those people?

And that was the next step to grow past $1 million. So for those of you who are selling lots of product but you don't have a real business.

The way you fix that is by identifying those three to five products of the same person and once they're up and selling and you can say just on Amazon.com if you want, once those are predictably selling, what you do then is you go back and say, how do I get more people? How do I get in front of more people so I can find out what they want so I can find out what they want to buy more of? Rather than just releasing additional skew after additional sku, you go back to the people because that is really the starting point of any business. That's how you're going to be able to cruise through all levels of growth. So I just wanted to share that insight with you because I know it's a roadblock that a lot of online entrepreneurs run into because it all becomes about algorithms and numbers and we forget about there being a person behind the purchase. So I hope you find that helpful. If you want help going through this model on your business, then you can apply to work with me at my home. Just go to capitalism.com eight. That's the number eight. Thanks for listening. Share this with an Amazon seller or a physical product seller that you know who's sitting around $1 million. Talk to you soon.

Hey brand builders. We hope you enjoyed this podcast by capitalism.com check out our website for upcoming events and additional content about building businesses, building brands and investing. My name is Max Kerwick and my mission in life is to transform businesses into brands. If you have any feedback about the show, any guests you want to see, case studies covered, topics explored, or frankly just any questions about branding in general, just shoot me an email@maxmaxrandbuilderstrategy.com again that's maxrandbuilderstrategy.com and I'd love to hear from you. One quick note, if you could subscribe to the podcast or even leave us a review on itunes. These things really do make a big difference in helping us book amazing guests and then also helping people just like you find the podcast. So thanks and we'll see you next time.

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