Selling Supplements on Amazon, Goals, and Who to Hire | FFLTV Ep 8

It's episode eight.

Hey everybody. Welcome to Freedom Fast 9 TV. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Today we're gonna talk about the role of government. We'll talk about New Year's resolutions and goals, the order of which entrepreneurs should hire. And we'll talk about selling supplements on Amazon. Let's.

So it's a new year, new president, new optimism for some, new pessimism for others. And this is the time of the year where everybody is planning their life to be completely different a year from now, right? We know them as New Year's resolutions. Look, we all know New Year's resolutions don't stick, they don't work. Let's talk about New Year's goals instead of New Year's resolutions. Because I believe that it takes a year for you to really commit and get results out of anything. I committed to doing the Freedom Fast Lane podcast for a year before I would ever even analyze the result. I've committed to doing Freedom Fastlane TV for a year before I determine if it's a success or a failure. My training about 12 months to 1 million, I very publicly say when we're selling that training, the Brand Builder Bootcamp, we say if you're not willing to work at this for a year before you have a million dollar business, we don't want you. Now I have plenty of students who have hit the million dollar mark in month three or month six, but they got there because they had a long term focus. They did not get there playing the short game, they, they got there faster having the long game. There are plenty of people who lose weight and then gain it back, all within a six month period. They lose it and then they gain it back. The question is, who do you want to be? Where do you want to be? What do you want your life to look like one year from today? And then you can plan out the habit that will get you there. I have a podcast episode with Todd Herman. You can listen to it over@freedomfastlane.com or you can subscribe on itunes and just scroll to the episode with Todd Herman. He is a sports psychologist. I think that was your title, Todd. Sorry if I just botched it, but basically he works with high performers to get the most out of their performance. So one of the things he talks about is chunking your goals into 90 day sprints so you can have a year time horizon. But, but having it done in 90 day sprints and when you have that type of a deadline, you get way more done and you often get a year's worth of results in 90 days. So I like to say, what do you want your life to look like a year from now? And then let's break that into 90 day sprints. That is gonna be how you actually achieve the things that you want to achieve. So if you wanna have a business in 2017, what do you want it to look like a year from now? Not six weeks from now, not six months from now. What do you want it to look like a year from now? And then plan out the daily habit in 90 day sprints of how you're going to build that business. Same thing with your body, same thing with your family. I believe you can radically change your life in a year. I don't subscribe to the idea that we overestimate what we can get done in a year. I think we tend to sell ourselves short. It's really people aren't willing to do something for a year and that's why they don't get the result. So one quick thing that you can do right now to ensure your success, get into a group of people who have already done what you want to do, whether that is fitness. Going to a crossfit gym with people who take off their shirts and make you feel like a fatty fat fat because they're already doing what you want to do, right? So that type of accountability, being around that people is actually how you hack success because your brain normalizes whatever it perceives. So if you're in a room of millionaires like a lot of people were at Freedom fast lane live, there's a natural up level because your brain has to reset, it has to recalibrate, it has to align with whatever is going around. Your brain is a normalizing machine. So whoever you surround yourself with, you will normalize whether it is body, fitness, money, whatever. So if you're building a business, join the tribe, join the back room. Depending on what level you're at, if you are a millionaire and you want to be a deca millionaire, get into the back room. If you are a six figure earner and you're ready to be a seven figure earner, join our tribe. If you're just starting a business, don't just buy a training, get into a group that has done it before and can come back and pull you alongside them. That's what we do in our brand builder bootcamp. So what do you want your life to look like a year from now? Put it into 90 day sprints and then join a group that has done it before. And that is how you will ensure that this Year is actually the year that you do the things that you've always said you want to do.

I believe that the best way to financial freedom is to build a business and invest the profits. And today I get to be the student because they're going to recap some of the best questions that were answered at Freedom Fastlane Live. One of the most popular presentations at Freedom Fast Lane Live in December of 2016 was with Cameron Herold. And Cameron basically laid out the model for going from 1 million to 100 million. Something that he has done several times and that he walks his clients through, including Amazon, E Commerce owners, people who have tech companies. He has a bunch of different clients and we were going through his process and he laid it out of growing, having that type of a rapid growth. And he talked about his vivid vision, which he explains in depth in his book Double Double. But there was one specific question that I wanted to know from Cameron because he laid out the plan, but I wanted to know what about the team that will need to rally behind you? So I asked him the order in which entrepreneurs should hire and here's what he had to say.

The biggest transition that I have seen, like the biggest challenge has been for those individuals to get the first hire right or to start learning how to build the team. Last year there's several of our backroom members who were one and two man shows and now they have. There's the first one that was really, really difficult. But after that the team started to blossom. So what have you seen be that process for hiring the right person or who are the first hires that you think need to be in place in order to get that moving.

Sure. So, and even, even before the first hire, I think a lot of it is our stop doing list or I call it my fuck it list. You gotta look at a lot of the stuff that's on your list of stuff that you do day to day and decide what things you're not gonna do anymore. Cause some of it is just pointless. So the next hire that I would get into is actually start outsourcing using Odesk or Elance and looking for fractional people that I can hire who can do little bits of work instead of full time employees. The first full time employee I'm probably gonna get to is either gonna be a sales or marketing person, probably salesperson, anyone who can drive revenue. So in my world, revenue solves problems. There's not a single problem that exists that can't be solved by a check. So the more gross margin you have coming in the More people you can hire. So I'd be looking for revenue producing roles versus overhead and then hiring fractional people as much as I can.

Do you think that you should hire people that will grow into a role or people that should have already done it?

Yeah, I ideally like to hire ahead of the curve. So I hire people that I know I'm going to need in two years. I try to hire them early and tell them to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. It's like, I know this role is a little bit beneath, but look where we're going. So you use the vivid vision as a way to attract them. I'm hiring people who have done it before as much as possible, which is why I like outsourcing because I can really get people that have done it more often than not. We don't need full time employees. We need some stuff done, but we don't really need an employee. We just need the stuff done. So if you can get somebody who can do it in three hours, three hours once a week. I'd rather have some fractional people, some part time people than a full time.

What would you consider the difference? Meaning for what role would you hire a full time person? Because there's a lot of people in the room who are saying like, I have a lot of things that need to get done. How do I identify which ones need to get outsourced and which ones need to be full time people?

You start grouping all your tasks together or all your projects together into buckets and you'll start seeing that some of the buckets have a lot of stuff. And as soon as you have enough stuff that is going to be getting done for a number of hours, you can say, okay, now it's really a full time role. But if you see that it's stuff and it's only a few hours a week, then you can outsource it. As soon as your stuff gets to maybe 30 or 40 hours, then you're going to start hiring full time people.

I bring this up to you today because this actually had an impact on me. I had never heard him answer the question in this way before. Usually I've heard Cameron say the first hire you need to make is an executive assistant. The second hire you need to make is a project manager. And he talks about sales later in the process. So I never heard him say sales is the first hire that you need to make. And it made me realize there's no one in the company except for me that's been in charge of sales in any of My companies, I've always been the salesman. I have never had to think about.

I've always had to think about putting money in the bank account rather than saying who else is putting money in the bank account? I've never had that off my shoulders. I had never even thought about taking that off my shoulders. So we immediately started hiring for a full time salesperson and as of today, we haven't filled that position yet. So if you love to sell and you love what we're up to at freedomfastland and capitaldom.com, i wanna hire you. So this had an impact on me just seeing that, oh, the leader of the company doesn't necessarily have to be the one who is always cashing checks. So that's why this was probably my biggest takeaway from Freedom Fastlane Live. And I also thought it was interesting that Cameron brought that up as one of the pivotal things that, that you need to hire for when you are starting to scale the business bigger than yourself. Tom Bilyeu had a similar answer when I asked him about the key hires that they made at Quest. And he said that their cmo, which was basically a sales position because he went on to explain that it was a social media role and that person was out drumming up attention and making a lot of sales through social media. So since that was an E commerce company, the cmo, the social media person was driving all of the sales. So in both cases they said someone who takes sales off of the attention or the task list of the entrepreneur would be a key pivotal piece to the team once you started to scale. I had never done that before, so it was a big takeaway for me. At Freedom Fast Lane Live, we did an entire podcast on this. You can head over to freedomfastlane.com or subscribe on iTunes@freedomfastlane.com iTunes and you can hear the entire episode of me recapping what we learned about hiring and team building over the last 12 months. And that is ready for you right now on itunes or@freedomfastlane.com I believe that entrepreneurship and capitalism is the best way to solve just about every problem in the world. I get plenty of pushback against this point from people who disagree. I wish that those who disagreed could have a healthy and respectful debate about the conversation. I truly believe that we all agree that we want to solve world problems, right? We want people to be healthy, we want people to be wealthy. We don't want people to be discriminated against. I wish we could just start the conversation there. There's problems in this world that we need to solve, what's the best way to solve them? I believe that in almost 100% of cases it is through the profit motive that we can best solve those challenges that face us. That's why I think we need more entrepreneurship. That's why we need less government. That's why we need freer markets. So I asked John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods and the author of Conscious Capitalism, what he said was what he thought was the role of government, especially in today's world. And here's what he had to say.

Anything that you can make a profit doing belongs in the private sector, because you're going to have entrepreneurs who are going to create innovative solutions and you're going to make progress. Things that business can't make money doing, they're social problems. Let's say I'm on the board of the Humane Society of the United States, for example. They can't make money doing what they're doing. They're helping dogs and seals and cats and livestock, animals. They can't make money doing that. So things that you can't make a profit at belong in the private sector. But in the nonprofit world, however, there are certain things that the nonprofit world can't deal with either. There are global environmental issues. There are things you need rules in the society, you need laws, you need police, you need defense. There are things that, that neither the private sector, nor the capitalistic sector, nor the nonprofit sector are equipped to deal with. That's government's job. It's a huge job. If they would just stick to that and do it well and let business do what it does well and let the nonprofit sector do what it does well, we will be living in a virtual utopia.

So I thought it was interesting that John broke it into basically three groups. If something can be solved profitably, it should be done from government. If something can't be done profitably, it should be done through a non profit. And if it's too big for either of those, that it should be addressed by government. I mostly agree with this. One thing that we didn't have time to go into is that that changes new technology and new opportunities make it possible for the profit motive to solve certain problems or for a nonprofit to take over what a government could only previously do to now, it can be taken out of government and put into the nonprofit sector. So we didn't talk about that. But if we assume that's true, which I think we all agree, technology makes things easier and faster, right? And it opens up more opportunities. Well, if that is true, then we should be seeing less government and progressively less nonprofits and then more into the for profit sector, the private sector. But we tend to see the opposite because most people don't think that way. The tendency tends to be for more government, for people to say, why do we need the profit motive in this? Why can't we have a non profit do this? Why can't we have the government do this so it's more fair and equitable? Well, the reason for that is because things are sustainable when they're done via the profit motive. So the best way that we can progressively make the world a better place is to, if the government needs to be involved in something, have them solve the challenge to the best they can. Which isn't gonna be very good until a non profit can take that over. Until the profit motive is there to solve that problem. That in my opinion, is how we can progressively make changes that better our world and sustainably do that through the profit motive. Cause that is how we ultimately will solve all of the world's problems.

This is the part of the show where we look at one of our students business look at their best opportunities and where they could make more money. So we're gonna hear from one of our tribe members right now.

Hi there.

This is John Tarr, new member to the tribe. Not very experienced on Amazon, but very experienced in digital marketing in general. Been around. I've been a media buyer for a really long time and in addition to that email writing and offer creation, I've been around a digital marketing game but never on Amazon. One of the reasons that I recently joined the tribe is I saw an ad on Facebook and I knew Ryan and it said one of my students just sold their company for I think it was $15 million. And I thought, you know, with my skill set that sounds like a pretty good idea. I would love to start a company and build something that I could sell so that I could leave a legacy for my son. And Ryan, my quick question is, and appreciate you in advance answering my quick question is I have some experience in the supplement space, but it seems like a very, very competitive market on Amazon. How is a new person supposed to break through the noise on Amazon and be competitive? Appreciate it.

Bye.

Bye.

I have been waiting to answer a question like this. Thanks John for your submission. Look, the story, the narrative around the bane of my existence, Amazon businesses. I hate that phrase. There's no such thing as an Amazon business. There's only a business that collects the order on Amazon. I've said this a thousand times, but it's a huge distinction. And the reason I bring that up now is because the narrative around most businesses that take their order on Amazon is that the way to make money is to rank for keywords, show up in front of people who are already shopping, collect the order and that's where the business starts. Look, I popularized that idea. My 12 months to 1 million plan is pretty much predicated on that idea. And it works. It's totally viable. Most people get stuck there. John, you are in a very rare position, a very powerful position that most Amazon marketers don't have access to. This is where they struggle. You know, media buying and you know, email marketing. If that is the case, let's double down on that. A, because you will not be dependent on Amazon and B you will beat everyone on Amazon by doing so. Here's what I mean. Most people who are trying to sell physical products are just trying to rank for keywords and close the order. That sales cycle is very short, which is why a lot of good cash flow businesses have been built on that model. You have the benefit of, of having a longer sales cycle if you use email marketing. What I mean by that is you have the ability to drive hundreds of opt ins per day and then warm them up and give them content through an email marketing sequence and then hit them with the order button which just happens to be on Amazon.com you can drive so much traffic and attention doing this because you basically get a twofer. The first fur is that you have the warm up sequence through the email. So you can do it like a product launch, like a rolling launch. You'll buy traffic from Facebook or from Instagram to a squeeze page to an email follow up series and then have a rolling launch for the product, whether it be a supplement or a widget or whatever it is. And then the second fur is that that customer is comfortable buying on Amazon.com so your close percentage will be much higher by sending them to Amazon than it would have to be if you're sending them to a sales page or through an affiliate link or however you're monetizing that person. There's a bonus fur. The third fur, the three fur is that you now have the lead. And the lead can be monetized through affiliate offers, can be monetized through information. Products can be monetized through all the things that you know how to do. So you are not tied, you're not handcuffed to the model that most people feel enslaven to, which is that Amazon has control over their business. When most people build a business that's completely dependent on Amazon, they can't sleep at night. Now they're making all this money, but they're all afraid it's gonna go away. So when I'm advising one of those clients, I say the first move they need to make is by collecting their customer data, getting those email addresses so that they have a pool of buyers that they can go to no matter what happens, and they've got a bigger base of customers that they can launch products to. You are going the opposite direction. You need to build up the opt ins and the eyeballs so you can launch products on Amazon to them. So we've already talked about how that could be profitable and how that can give you the ability to launch products. Now let's talk about how it will help you beat everyone else who's trying to do this. Because you already control the eyeballs. You basically have your own launch list. You have the ability to drum up demand whenever you want, which means when you go to rank for keywords, when you go to ask for reviews, when you go to set the price that you want to set, all of these things are going to be in your favor. You can command higher prices, higher conversion rates, and higher orders at once, which are all things that drive Amazon's algorithm. So by you doubling down on where you're good, driving traffic and writing email copy, you will actually have the side benefit of ranking for keywords, having higher profit margins, and that will beat everybody else on Amazon. So you're in a very unique position to go into any market and crush it, whether it is supplements or anything else. So I don't think you're at a disadvantage. I don't think you are too late to the game. I think you're in a perfect position to absolutely kill it with your skillset and combining it with a powerhouse like Amazon.com so I'll wrap this up by telling you some of my goals for 2017 and where my focuses are. First, I believe that at some level, everything that we do comes back to community and connection. I said on the podcast where I predicted trends for 2017, that I think intentional communities or new ways of connection are gonna be big in 2017, mostly because we're absolutely starved for it. We all live behind computer screens and phone screens, and the idea of actually genuinely connecting with someone is. We're starved for that. But at the same time, that's what drives all human behavior. Why do we work out and spend times in gyms because at some level we think we'll be more accepted by the opposite sex if we look good and we're fit and healthy. That is baked into us. Why do we worry about money? Because at some level we feel like we need to survive. And that often comes because we don't feel connected, we feel safer. We feel more risk tolerant when we have deep connections with friends. You can Google that one. That is just primal instincts. When we feel disconnected from people, we have more worry, more stress, because it's a part of our brain saying we need to survive. We're not plugged into the community. So I think everything that we do at some level comes back to our need to connect, our need for community. I think it is just as baked into us as our need to survive. And yet we don't know what to do there because we've lost the ability to connect. We didn't evolve to be in families of four. We didn't evolve to be living in high rises. We evolved to be in packs of 12 to 30 people, very, very intimate relationships where we had each other's backs. So part of one of my big focuses is, you know, who's my really close, intimate group of friends? You know, what's my in person tribe, who are my lifelong friends that I nurture because that makes you feel safer, it makes you feel more risk tolerant, it makes you happier. My happiest moments were in college when my best friends lived on either side of me and I was building a business and had to eat cafeteria food all the time and was working really hard. But I was surrounded by my best friends. So that is a focus of mine going into 2017. Also this year, I am very focused on building my audience for the long term. It's why we do Freedom Fast Lane tv. It's why we have the podcast. My audience is what opens me up to networking opportunities. It opens me up to investing opportunities. I buy my students businesses sometimes. So those are the spillover effects of my audience. And I'm committing the entire year to putting all of my energy into building up the audience around capitalism.com and freedom fast Lane. And I am continually trying to stretch my risk tolerance. When I feel stuck, I ask myself the question, what's the biggest risk that I can take right now that will, if it pays off, take us to the next level, closer to where we want to be. So I'm continually trying to get uncomfortable by taking calculated risks in hiring, in spreading our message in, in launching products and the things that make me uncomfortable, but will take us closer to where, who we want to be@capitalism.com so I'd encourage you to ask yourself the same questions. Who are you connected to? What are you committed to over the next year that will set up your business and your life for success going forward? And what's the biggest, boldest risk that you could take, that you can tolerate right now that, if it pans out, will set you up for who you want to be and where you want to be a year from now? Thanks so much for watching Freedom Fast Lane tv. Please, if you found value in this, send it to somebody who you know needs to see this message. Subscribe on itunes and subscribe on YouTube. Share your comments over on Facebook and we'll see you throughout 2017.

Sam.