Ep. 71 How To Build, Grow And Sell Your Own Amazon Business For 7-Figures With Neil Twa

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to raise your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host Chris Larsen. You can get a free copy of our book@nextlevelincome.com just click on the book link. Also check out our Invest link. If you're an accredited investor, you can learn how to gain access to our new Self Storage fund as well as other institutional quality real estate opportunities. On today's show, you're not going to want to Ms. Neal TWA. Neal has figured out how to optimize, Automate and then even let you outsource building your own Amazon business and brand so you can make over six figures a year and ultimately sell it. On today's show we have Neil To. Since 2012, Neil to has been launching, operating and growing private label businesses on Amazon fba. He's a co founder of Voltage Digital Marketing and an Amazon growth consultancy and co founder of a software called Six Leaf that helps sellers launch brands. And since 2016, he and his partners have helped thousands of students launch and grow their own private label brands, many of whom have gone on to create amazing six, seven and even eight figure businesses. Together they sold over $100 million in physical products across the Amazon channel. Today he's focused on launching, operating and accessing you e commerce brands with a continued focus on Amazon FBA and multichannel marketing. Today's show is sponsored by Money Insights and their investment optimizer strategy. In my book, I share how I use the same strategy starting over a decade ago to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthiest for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth and increasing stability for their investments. And now you can do the same thing. In addition, you can build a plan to build an emergency fund, pay for college, fund a business plan for retirement and ultimately optimize your total financial picture. To find out more information, check us out at the banking link@nextlevelincome.com Neal, welcome to the show.

Hey, great to be here man. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely man. We've had some really great conversations over the past month. Neal, I've really enjoyed getting to know more about you, your business and I'm super excited to share your story and what you do with our audience. Before we really get into the nitty gritty, kind of share with us a little bit more about your background. I mean you have an amazing team you're working with now, so maybe you can kind of catch us up to where you are today?

Well, once upon a time. I like long walks on the beach. Let's get all that out of the way. I'll try not to say anything that my mother cares about. Let's get down to the stuff that's most interesting. Like a college dropout. People like to add. I think at times they think it's funny. I have a school of hard knocks education. Yeah, I wanted to learn about E commerce in college. I went to college on a full ride music scholarship and a work study and so I thought I was going to be a musician. Loved Miles Davis, jazz, went on classical. I thought I was going to do that for my life. By the time I got into the third year of that I realized I was going to be living in a van down by the river. And I'm like nah, this isn't going to fly. So I got into business management. The Internet kicked off. I'm like man, I want to learn how to make money. The Internet's going to be something else. We were doing green inbox on the computer screens at that point and so I went for the computer science and I was like they're going to teach you Fortran and mainframe programming. And I'm like oh dude, no way. I'm not living on the green paper thing. I'm not doing that right. So a guy comes in, he's an adjunct professor and he is teaching and he's a consultant and I'm like what are you doing? He's like I'm starting to learn this HTML thing and active server pages asp. And I'm like wow, what is that? And he's like well it's dynamic driven, it's going to be on the Internet and all this stuff. And I'm like teach me how to do that. So we can't do that here at college. So I'm like I'm out of here. So I went and got a little gig making like bucks an hour as a consultant near Kansas City. I had learned in the computer science lab how to set up and network these computers when they first came in. I taught myself, learned how to do it. Nobody knew how to do it at that point, right. So I gotten good enough that I got this little job and I was working inside of banks basically going around and helping them network their computers and their printers and the little, all that other we used to have to do once upon a time. So I got pretty good at that. I started teaching myself HTML, active server, dynamic pages, started teaching myself programming the web. Did get picked up as a consultant in Sprint Local where I helped them build a knowledge management platform and realized they had more of an aptitude for the business and the understanding of the technology, but the application of its business and it's more of the creativity of my background was flowing into business and the jazz. I love making this creation because nobody had done this before. And so I had this opportunity to create something and it was pretty successful. And because of that I went and applied for this company called PCs. Sprint had just opened its mobile division in Kansas City and I got hired like on the spot. I was like the 5000th employee because they were just sucking employees everywhere and trying to hire people as fast as they could. And I'm like, great, cool, let's do that. So I went into there, got a job. We were running the whole 50,000 webpage version of mobile division, internal customer support thing and it got like crazy. So they decided let's build this knowledge management platform. I'm like, what is that? Have no idea. Like knowledge management. So I learned about tacit and implicit and learning and knowledge and latent semantic search engines and natural NLP language and all this stuff that had to go as a part of that and very immersed into all of the business and the sciences behind all that and got really good at it. I launched that project, got to be a part of the success of that. The first knowledge management that helped support Sprint as It grew to 80,000 employees by the time I left and 25,000 customer service reps. So it became a mega organization and they needed more help and they needed to expand and stuff. So they hired IBM to come in and IBM, it was a cross project team. Long story short, the project was really great. One of the partners and I became friends. The cue here is networking is net worth at the end of the day.

I love that. That's gold right there.

Yeah, Networking with these guys and getting to know and going to lunch and finding out what they're about and making friends and learning. And literally at the end of the day I discovered one critical component and that is it's who you know that gets you there and it's what you know that keeps you there. So if I couldn't have figured that out, learned it or adapted to it, I would have been kicked out and fired. I would have been removed. Right. But I actually found that I could do it. And so IBM said, hey, come work for us. I'm like, great. The partner answered me. I went to Armon, count a handshake and suddenly I'M in IBM again, no degree. So I feel like the dumbest guy in the room, which is what everybody wants to do. Everybody says I'll be the dumb in the room. Well, I literally was the dumbest guy in the room. I went to double docs, the MIT's, the super guys, the Yale and the Harvard graduates and all these people. I'm sitting in the boardrooms of some of the large communications companies at that point. I'd been in Verizon, I'd been in CenturyLink, I'd gone into the Thompson family companies, I'd been in Wall street and setting on the boardroom. And so we got to all of that and realized there was nowhere else to go. But I had always been playing the little side hustle game. I had a little game server company running on the Internet. We had thousands of customers who were basically doing VoIP communications so they could multiplayer their games. So I'm dating myself again because you couldn't do the game and play and talk to each other unless you had cell phones. So we set up these little audio codecs on servers and people could connect in groups of 10, 20, 50, and we had little pay per package. And then they would talk and network and do their multiplayer gaming. Right. Long before games actually incorporated it into the actual game, which we all take for granted now. But it always gave me that entrepreneurial spirit I always knew I was going to eventually kick out on my own. IBM says, hey, we're going to Argentina, do you want to come? And I'm like, no, I don't want to go to Argentina. So they said, here's your early retirement. So in 2007 I left, started my own management consulting company, made IBM a client, got into the public sector as well and some security clearances. Got to go work at places like Boeing and do other things in the drone programs. And we got to work more in the knowledge management side and Cummins Manufacturing and got this really cool stuff when I was my own consultant. So they paid me a really handsome fee to do that. Way more than they were paying me when I was an employee.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

Funny how that works. So there you go, reinventing myself. I kept moving forward, right? And just kept filling holes where I could fill holes, literally. And always knew again to keep doing my own thing. And so I just kept expanding and adapting. Got into wire alignment communications at a startup company in Oklahoma. And oil and gas fields were basically got patents on digital wireline communications. Basically turning copper lines in the home or business into Communications that could accept like gigabit transfers.

I've heard about that.

Yeah, that's one. Plugs for Sony, where you basically plug a television in and all your Internet data and everything or wherever you plug it in. It was really cool. And demand grids. So if you had a brownout happening in California, all the homes and businesses in a certain area would be demand elastic. So they would literally come down, things would shut off automatically. Business shut off. It would avoid brownouts and blackouts. Super cool technology. No one's ever going to hear of it because that bombed and failed. And then, yeah, bombed and failed. I put too much money. I found out my partners were cooking the books. One day I discovered, you know, why are we having so much trouble? Where's the money going? Et cetera. And then I discovered where it went. So then led into the reinvention of myself as I started to learn how to do mobile paid ads and mobile traffic ads. I got to be pretty successful at that, which kind of saved my bacon because I had to go bankrupt in that business. Had to indemnify myself, cancel out the business, clear out everything and get absolved of all that because of the investor money to it. So I got out of all that trouble because I wasn't involved in it, but what a mess. So I had to reinvent myself and start over again. And I did in affiliate marketing. Got into lead generation and traffic generation and mobile. And we were uploading mobile spreadsheets of products into servers and just watching it go across the networks and seeing what came back. And I. I struck a little bit of gold on a mobile dating app out of South Africa. Never believed that South Africans would ever have so much fun dating, but apparently they were hot and dating in the mid-2000s.

When my coach says, if you can sell sex, health or how to get rich, you're going to make money.

Well, dating is kind of a combination of all those, is it not?

Yeah.

So yeah, that was kind of the great hybrid market. But I got into it well enough to have some companies be very successful, learn about Series A funding and how to fund companies and stuff. And so we had done that and did that some more and helped them do that and realizing that while I was generating their traffic and leads, I should be generating my own product leads too. And it kind of dawned on me and I need to be running my own products. Like I need to switch gears here and stop running other people's products or apps and I need to start running all this traffic to my own. And thus began the brand era, really, of my E Comm evolution. As we got going on that and learning about what people wanted the right avatar and what the numbers to really look like in order to make that profitable, especially on volume. My friend of mine one day posted on Facebook, hey, I sold something on Amazon fba. And I'm like, what the heck is on fba? Never heard of this, right? So I call him up and he's like, yeah, there's this thing called Fulfilled by Amazon. They literally ship the products, handle the customer support. You use their warehousing. It's really cool thing. Nobody's doing it right now. You can jump right in and such and such and such. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I got to try this. So I signed up to their seller account and got going and just started looking for product arbitrage. This is how I originally started. Just kind of like a little hustle, right?

Product arbitrage, product throwing out a lot of cool terms here today.

Buy low, sell high. We were looking for deals where it was a dollar a unit and we could turn around and flip it for seven, we got it for five, we flipped it for 25. When we were using other people's brands to do that, who had already had established some traffic. A lot of corporations at this point, not individual sellers, were really involved in the early stages when it launched. And actually it's another company that Amazon purchased in order to allow that infrastructure occur. So FBA is actually a separate company from Amazon. So we learned basically that this filing system of Amazon is a giant search engine. At that point, Google was becoming big. They were taking over market share like crazy. But it was all information ranking and SEO to get somebody to digest some information and then maybe go to one of your products or something or purchase something from. Once you reach a certain consumer level, Amazon kind of blew all that out of the water because their big filing system, this little engine, was all about producing products and purchases in 30 seconds or less. That's the model that Beso said, buy all things to all people in 30 seconds or less. And I'm like, well, that's where the buyers are going to be. So let's just stay focused on that, right? So it turns out it's a big search engine. It runs just like the engines we were building that I started my career on. The latent semantic knowledge base. Learning engines is this engine, this filing system that runs all those products. When you click in and you're looking at your reviews and you're at the surface level of Your phone. There's a lot of technical happening behind all that, but at the end it was just a big search engine. If you give it what it wants and you dance with it, it will reward you. You don't even necessarily have to have the best product, have to have the best product. But if you don't have the best product and you rank your product, customers will eventually find you and suck you and you'll suck it down and you'll die. So there's a combination of course of ranking and providing a great brand and then obviously longevity, profitability will follow. So we started to build brands about two years into that process, realizing that other people's brands spending all that time and energy was really going to be building somebody else, another car, not us. So we got into brand building and that's when things took off and got to be fun because we launched a product and another product and we developed a system, a game plan we call the five by five game plan. And we started to deploying those into the brands, repeating that process weekly, quarterly and looking at 90 day cash flow plans and turning it into a business because we're business builders. And my partner I found right around that time, his name's Reed, he was also high up in a company he co founded, he was the VP over a hundred million dollar firm and he had left that about the time I did and he discovered Amazon around the same time and I said hey you business, the knowledge, aptitude, logistics and detail oriented brain. Why don't I come in with my neuro ADHD brain and what kind of marketing and stuff I can put together and you help me systematize this and let's see what we can do. Eight years later, we're still together, we're two halves of the same coin. So he does things I don't and I do things he does. And then we stay in our lane and we actually do really well at it, which is cool. That's awesome. So we just kept launching those man. Just kept launch.

Let's take a quick break and then we're going to dive into like what you're doing today because man that is. I'm just thinking and if you're listening and you're thinking the same as me, if Neil's the dumbest guy in the room then there's some really smart people.

And I work with, there's a really smart people out there because I work.

With neurosurgeons most of my career. Spine surgeons, neurosurgeons, ortho. I always thought I Had this complex. I'm like, I'm not a very smart guy. People are like, oh, you're a pretty smart guy. And I'm like, I'm working with geniuses every day. It is a treat when you get to work with people like that. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple things before we jump in. You're talking about, like, building knowledge management systems. I just started to implement a system called Notion. Have you heard of this? Have you heard of it? The course I'm doing is built by a guy called August Bradley. He's basically talking about how to blend these knowledge management systems with you as a human so that ultimately you can access those. So we'll have to chat about that at some point in the future.

Well, I mean, knowledge is so much component of how we learn, how we adapt, when we buy, when we choose certain things, whether drawn into the emotional component, whether we're using our right or left brain at the time we decide to purchase or buy or do anything, frankly. And so there's a lot of components of building in that. What's that implicit knowledge. That knowledge you ultimately understand, without doubt, tacit knowledge. It's the training of knowledge and learning of knowledge in your brain. And of course, there's different ways to adapt learning and audio and visual and other things to people's ability not just to learn, but to actually purchase if you apply it over to the side of E Comm. We developed a process to basically know exactly what people want from the product we're giving them so that we get 30 to 50% conversion rates on our listings inside of Amazon every time we put a listing out there, formula that we went through and learned how to adapt for every person who wants to buy in that system. So it's systematized. It's a formula. It doesn't change. It's math. Right. And so what we do is by the numbers. It is not guessing. It's not emotional. It's not maybe this is going to work. It will work. When you follow these steps, it literally just kind of by numbers.

Well, that's what's so cool about you and Reid. You guys are, like you said, you're two halves of the same coin and you've been able to blend human behavior with spreadsheet algorithms. All this information that now we have access to. And the company that you do this with now is called, as we mentioned in the intro, voltage. Right. So you're talking about your five by five game plan. I think that really kind of epitomizes this whole process, Neil. So Maybe we can talk a little bit about what that is, how that blends all this technology and psychology together.

Well, it gets down to one simple question, right? What the hell do I sell? It's the same one everybody has.

What do you do? Yeah, what do you do? Now you've done a lot.

What the hell do I sell? Yeah. Well, everybody has that when they get started. Even people who are ex to some degree or people who are already selling in the marketplace. It's the same question I deal with whether they're in the market and selling or they're brand new and got a golf course management degree or whatever and never sold anything online whatsoever. So at the end of the day, again, it's about process, it's about people, it's about the buying signals and the emotional aspects. So when you find a certain demographic, you just tie into that demographic and then you go deeper into that. Right. A lot of people think you go lateral. So if I need to move to more markets, more channels, what I'm saying is you don't. And that's where a lot of people fail. When you find a particular avatar you lock into, there are numbers that are going to flow and you're just going to keep piling into that. You're going to keep going deeper and deeper, deeper into that vertical. And so what I see so many times is people making mistakes of going too wide. Okay. What they think is, if I don't do that, I'm losing opportunity. And what I'm actually saying is you're losing time, money, and energy if you do that. If you apply aspects directly into answering that question, staying focused on who that avatar is and that person, and doubling your understanding of them, you will double the revenue. So when you answer that question, it literally has a number of components that tie together with answering that question. It can't just be, well, hey, go see an umbrella. Well, that doesn't really add up at the end of the day because is it working? The numbers, all emotions aside, can I make it profitable? Can I pay for rising logistics and shipping costs? Can I have people come in and help me automate components of it? Getting my freight charges in, my storage fees, ensuring I have capital to market, you know, obviously purchasing the product, I got to consider all of these numbers in the business and of course, paying taxes while also being profitable and making some money. So in answering that question, there's certain criteria that we go after at a high level right now, because I don't want to take a huge amount of your time today talking about It. But there are segments of this and I'll give you a pro tip. It's usually women, 27 plus. So if you're going to sell to the majority of that's a good avatar. It's been 27 plus.

All right.

They run a lot of the purse strings, a lot of the money. It's the largest buying demographic on Amazon. It makes up the majority of purchases online.

I can attest to that. I got one of those in my household.

Absolutely. I got one too. And I'm raising four more. We call it subscribe and spend in my house. So yeah, because Joel, we gotta save money. It's by not spending it. It's this whole concept. So at the end of that, you have to realize that there are people just like you who are buying things. And one of the simplest things I ask people to do is most of us are all Amazon consumers of some level. Right. Go to your. Who is not at these days about 125 million Americans.

Right.

So go to your last 90 days of order history. What you need to understand is 6 out of 10 of those or 60% of the FBA sellers are third party, just like us. So if you look at those packages and you look at what you've purchased, you're going to find many of those are from third party sellers.

I buy a box of protein bars and this is interesting because I started to figure this out. They're not coming from Amazon.

They're not coming from Amazon. No. We're leveraging a simple little equation. Similarity plus familiarity equals trust. Take a brand into the market. I'm going to get product into the market. I'm looking for similar products that are already selling in the market. I don't need to invent. I am an inventor and I have patents. But realized was innovation is literally where the money is made the fastest and can be the most scalable. Okay. In the least amount of time. Because typically an inventor has to do a whole lot of things, patent stuff, and then get people to validate and go this direction. But innovators see ideas and see opportunity and similarity already in the market. And then just innovate little changes to that, creating a familiarity of that product. I'll give you an example. Okay. So we're going a little by the numbers in terms of the equations a minute ago. We'll come back to that. But we call this don't marry your product, buy somebody else's girlfriend instead. So there are plenty of products in the market that you can steal. Joke. So we're not Talking about cheating or cheating on products, not people. Just be very clear. So these products that are in there, right, they're already sell. There are already brands there. You don't have to guess, you have to pull the data together. Once you pull the data together, it's a data driven decision. At the end of the day, if I know that I'm going to make profitable, if I know where my competitors are and I know what their profit estimations are and the amount of sales they're making, then I'm going to come in and say really simply can I beat them on profit? Can I buy up their customers and how long take me to do it?

I like the sound of that.

Well yeah, because people go in with a shotgun approach thinking well if I just throw everything at the wall, something will stick, right? And there's an analogy just popped in my head, my dad gave me, I'm not going to tell you, had this thing sticking to the wall side tangent. So yeah. So really what we're looking at is a concept of a specific number. We're looking at products that make us more than $12 profit per unit, preferably more than 20 to 30. My business builders and we average more than $35 in profit per unit. That is after land cost, marketing, logistics, shipping, freight, taxes, all of the business, we actually put that much in our pocket for every unit sold. Cause that's all that really matters at the end of the day. Sure, I can tell you seven and eight figures and that's real sexy. But I know guys who were doing seven figures who are spending just under seven figures a year to make it work. That's not profitable. It makes sense when your net margins are above 15%. Much better when they're above 18 to 20. And when done correctly, our builders are always shooting for 18 to 20% net margin across their entire business. So in very simple terms, a profitable product makes a profitable brand profitable business. But we don't have to guess. Remember the equation again. The similarity plus familiarity equals trust. Amazon's your trust products are already selling that are in. Find similar products that are familiar to you or in your purchased history already from the last 90 days and then start to ask questions about simple first level analysis questions. Okay, could this product be profitable? If it's more than 50 to $300, it's probably profitable. Okay, if it's $25 or less, it's not very profitable for the seller. After they add their cost and fees and everything else, they might be making two to three dollars max. And in many cases, they're making a dollar, right?

Yeah.

Because once they get their marketing and high competition and you get the bestseller badge, there's a big race to the bottom pricing problem that people face. We don't play in that. We play with the people. And let me give you the simple analogy to kind of wrap that up. When I go and have an abscess tooth and I want to go to the doctor and I'm looking for the dentist who's going to fix my problem, okay? There are people who will go and say, hey, can I get in? And he's going to say, yeah, sure, and I'll get you in an hour. It'll be 300 bucks. They're going to say, okay, is that what you can do? He's going to say, well, I could do it in 10 minutes for $500. Oh, no, I can't pay that much. Can't pay. So the people who are at 300 in one hour are typically people who are selling 10, 20 to $30 products on Amazon. What I want is the 10 minute solution to pay 500 bucks. And many people do, too. In fact, millions of people will pay that. Okay? Because they want that solution. They want it solved. They don't want the pain anymore. They don't want the headaches. They want it done. Okay? So we're at a different level of selling in the marketplace, which has given us a different level of profitability, longevity, sustainability, and actual business building with profits. And that's very, very important. Right.

So how have you systematized that? So you figure out what these products are? They're not even your own products. Nope. Figure out who the customers are. How do you systematize that whole process after that?

So literally, it's a process that we call our green light spreadsheet. So as we go through and we look at those numbers, we're going to.

Fill out a Matthew McConaughey.

Yeah. No, not that spreadsheet.

That Green Lights.

No, not that one. It's literally a sheet that goes in and looks at three components of the business. For that unit is profit, percentage profit, ROI and profit per unit. When those go literally green, you should sell that product. Once you validate with your sourcing agents and manufacturing that you can hold price point, you should sell that product. It's really not more complicated than that. Finding those products is a little bit of a process. Virtual assistants can be taught to go in data tools, data mining tools. Some of you may have heard of these, maybe not. There's things like Helium 10. There's Jungle Scout. There's Phoenix from Sixleaf. And they go, they data mine that and show you that data that you're looking for for your competition so you can gain, you know, an 80% understanding of that product and estimated sales and profitability and how you're going to compete with them in the marketplace. Right. Remember again, revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash flow is king. So we're going to make sure that we look at profit line so that we have great cash flow. It's all that matters. If I can get better profit and cash flow, then my competitors, I'll go to market against them. Because now I know it's just a matter of time for me to up all their customers. If they have $10 in profit and I can come in with 20, I'll spend $19 of that buying of all their customers until my average costs come down. Me 30, 60, 90 days to do it and I dominate the market and become the lead player. Why? Because my average order value, which is referred to the amount a person buy of my product in a certain amount of time, will go through the roof. They'll buy that first product, but then they'll also buy a second and third product at full profit. We can track those metrics. Right, interesting. So I can go in and just.

Start tying the products in together.

Start tying the products together. So the goal then is that five by five you mentioned with that game plan is win and systematize the product research component, the sourcing agent component, which we have all these sourcing agents working for us now to validate those sheets and then literally just produce number of project launch costs that we either say yay or nay or reorder and launch that one literally because the process is just going through that plan. The goal of putting five products in the market inside of your brand for a couple of different reasons. One, you need more than that to lower your risk. Five should just be the beginning amount of SKU you have in the marketplace. It lowers your risk as you you put more in the marketplace. It's also more products making more money at the end of the day. And Amazon actually rewards brands and they're rewarding a lot more. In fact, they just killed 15.4 billion in revenue. You can go look this up online from over 50,000 sellers in the Chinese side that they moved out of the system to get rid of fraud and other things. And then they moved out about another 200,000 who were doing buyer networks, fake reviews, they had secondary accounts. They were just jacking and messing with system it took down about 15 billion in revenue to clear that out. So there are huge opportunities now that were not there just months ago.

How about that?

Yeah, huge opportunities, things opening up. Just incredible to put those products into brands because Amazon is wanting you to be brand driven and it's starting to kick everybody out who is not playing by brand rules, who is not brand trademarked, who isn't brand registered in the system.

Nice to hear.

Yep. But when you're doing this, they give you things like sponsored brand advertising. These sponsored brands, they could even tie you into the marketing. You could get in their prime email blasts. They can even advertise you on espn. We've had our products show up there. You can do very shortly email blasts to your customer couldn't do before retargeting options and targeting options, brands that weren't there before. So they're becoming very brand centric, which is cool. And it's finally a great way to see that evolve. So again, you asked about the five. It literally just is a component of ensuring that you have a systematized amount of products that are going in. The other five in that five by five is that each of those are just averaging five sales a day across all of them. Why? Because with the profit margins we're talking about, you could have $100,000 in profit a year. When you extrapolate those numbers.

Okay, so just five products equals $100,000 in profit a year. Just five products and then you just. To the business owner.

Wow. Profit to the business owner. Right. So that's how you make 100,000 a year in this business. So in the process of extrapolating that and systematizing it and going quarter by quarter product launches continu adapt your brand. The example here would be I sell a higher end bike seat. I don't do the cheap Chinese 29 hurt your butt seat. I'm doing the gel padded, the hole in the middle don't crunch and munch your goodies seat, that cost you 69 bucks. And it's the stuff I'm going to ride up the back of my with. Right. But then once I get you to buy that, I'm going to sell you the high end panniers and maybe the $250 version of those. Right. For protecting.

You're talking to the right guy. I've ridden a lot of miles in my life.

Yeah. He said the right calipers, the right brakes, you got other better lights, you want the right hand grips, you're going to get the right gloves, you're Going to get the right gear. All of a sudden, your value is going through the roof for me. And my brand is continuing to put products in front of you that you like. Right. And you're coming back and buying more of those products you like, and you're getting all the other components that go with it. So that's that vertical I talked about a minute ago. Right. Lock into that vertical and just keep feeding that vertical. More and more of your brand, people will come back, come back in a quarter or come back in less than 90 days and buy again. You can even have them on subscribe and Save, so they'll be purchasing regularly from you. And that continuity into the business with that profit and that cash flow, which is really king. So there's a lot to unpack and all that. There's a lot of things I didn't say, which some people are like, didn't he say this? I know there's other things in there, including how to even get people to see your products in the system. We'll maybe have to unpack that later, but Amazon's a river. But it's also a tree. And that kind of goes back to that knowledge management component, that search engine, that filing system they're running, how some products are more relevant and why they show frequently bought, and how do I actually get customers to see them and rank them correctly. And that's all kind of tied into the technical component of that. But it's all keyword driven, so you're aware it's all keyword driven, which means people are very specific about what they're looking for. Remember all things to all people in 30 seconds or less. And when you lock into some of those great keywords, there's a lot of profit behind them.

So everything you said, people are listening. I'm sure people's heads are spinning like, well, this sounds great, but what does that mean for me? And the day we spoke, I was in the middle of reading a book. It's called Idea to Execution. And in that book they talk about optimize, Automate and outsource. And I'm a big systems guy. I always try to figure out. My son even said, he's like, dad, you're always trying to figure out how to make things more efficient. I was like, well, optimize, son. And then I'm always looking for systems. And, Neil, your company has actually put together this really Optimize, Automate and outsource to help people build these businesses.

Yeah, we have a thing called Amazon Account Management Services. Vams as we refer to it and it's the ability to gain operational independence from your business before you exit it. We refer to it as the Platinum Principle. You may have heard of the Golden Parish, the corporate world, and that is you do all your years and you bail out, get your jet, your house and go off.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're gone. And great. But not everybody can do that with the principle. It gives everybody the opportunity to create a business that is worth more in the end when you sell it than at any time during the business building phase. So when we build, we build great foundations of business and then we put great brands on top of them that are profitable and it creates a whole profitable business that can actually be exited. It's an exit play. It's a very good monetary play for capital, time and money you're putting into a business, it's actually worth something. So we have the ability to automate those. For individuals who come and be business builders with us, we give them the capability of creating operational independence before they exit, which is our takes over the full account management, making it a completely done for you solution. Once that brand is up and running, we know the upside potential of that business. We know the exit potential. We know that in 18 to 24 months that business could be worth 3x to 4x. Its revenues is profits. So we know that that market is really taking this by the horn. In fact, in the last 18 months, 6 billion in capital has been deployed to buying Amazon FBA channel. So one of the greatest amounts of money I've seen in the last 20 years being deployed into one area this fast.

And you've seen some pretty big areas.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Internet, it's going like crazy. Yeah, it's going like. This is like a little bit of the tech bubble, right. The difference is it's a commodity based business because you're actually leveraging into inventory as a physical asset. But you're using Amazon's platform and infrastructure, which is a bit virtual because it's virtual real estate and their platform that you're gaining control of physical inventory. So it's a cool little bit of hybrid going on there, right. Unlike a traditional brick and mortar retail store. So it gives you that opportunity to create that. And as a buyer of these companies, as we set this up to bring in home offices and other brokerages and people who are interested in buying these companies, we help our business leverage those relationships to exit so they have a smooth transitional path from start to exit. Literally we can help them.

So you help business builders figure out the Products, build the business behind it, develop the strategy to exit and then.

Actually provide, actually provide the pre exit, which is a little bit of the reverse of the way most people would see an exit. You typically would build it up, you would have some components of automation and operational independence and then you go to the exit at which point you're going to try to reverse yourself out of the company. I got 70% now, 30% in the next five years kind of thing. What we're doing of inverting that, we're innovating against it, meaning that we are exiting the people from the business, creating all of that operational component and literally handing it to an investor and saying here it's independent, here's its profits, you want to take it on, here's who's going to manage it. Do you want to buy this company? And it literally is for them to just purchase.

So Neil, what's the best way for people to find out about your business if they want to get involved? What's it called? How does this work? How do they get ahold of you?

Yeah, in simple terms you can go to voltagedm.com that's V O L T A G e D M. Voltagedigitalmedia.com you could link it if you want. Go check out my LinkedIn if you want to determine if I'm serious or not. You'll see my partners are. I didn't mention Reid is one of my long term partners. Good friend of mine and who has come into the business in the last year, Kevin Harrington, you might know him from the Shark Tank and as seen on tv he's a partner in our company as well and helping to coach and mentor people. So we got a really strong team of support. He's brought his son in who is very good and handles a lot of his operations. So have Brandon who is a two time Emmy award winning videographer for a Success in the City series that he's doing right now where he goes around and interviews people in the cities. Very cool team, very good group of people, Very, very smart. Again, dumbest guy in the whole room of super smart people is cool. So I'm enjoying that because these guys are really good. But if you're interested you can check out a free video. It goes a little more in depth. It's almost like a training video. It's just 90 minutes where I go in and kind of break this all down a lot more and that's free to watch. You can sign up on the site and then when people are interested in talking to Me, they just text me. Literally. I make it really simple. I'm only looking for a few people. This is not for everybody. It's for those who are really wanting to build businesses first and they're interested in e comm and they're thinking, hey, how deploy cash in a different way. Maybe I'm into infinite banking or I'm doing multi tenant real estate or I own franchises in other ways and I'm looking to open up different deploy capital that at some point I don't have to run every component of the business. Right. And that's kind of how we've structured this. You guys can go check that out. Yeah, look, my last name is twa. If you Google me, you're going to find me and the former TWA Airlines.

That's what I remember.

That got one of the social networks.

And we will link all this in the show notes and then Neil, we're going to figure out a way to bring you back here and look at getting some more information out there to the audience. So thank you so much for everything you provided today. We appreciate everything you share with the audience. Bringing a different business idea than anybody else that's been on the show so far. Neal, twa, thank you so much.

Thanks, Chris. Appreciate you having me on, man.

Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to give to you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.

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