How To Take Your Products Global with Stephen Somers

For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone.

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Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

Welcome to Bacon Wrap Business. This is Brad Costanzo and I am always looking for ways to sharpen my skills in some areas that I don't know much about. And I'm letting you all listen in and hopefully eavesdrop your way into some really profitable strategies that either you can use directly in your business or give you some ideas for something new. And it is my great pleasure to do this because even if you weren't listening, I love my audience. But even if you weren't there, I, I would be finding a way to have these conversations no matter what. So I hope you appreciate them as much as I do appreciate you listening in as well. By the way, if at any time we come up with something in this episode that creates a question or an epiphany or anything like that that you ever want to get ahold of me, you can always shoot me an email to ask bradakenwrapped business.com or you can go over to baconrappedbusiness.com and there's a button on the page now where you can leave me a voice message with a cool little tool called Speak Pipe. And today's guest actually did that. His name, is it Steven or Stefan?

Stephen. Yep, Stephen Summers.

You heard Stephen there and he's going to introduce him. But he left me a great little voicemail on this Speak Pipe and he told me about some of the stuff he's doing and I wanted to share that with you. But let me first introduce who he is. So he's the founder of Marketplace Superheroes, which is an online education and service company, which he's going to explain how unique this is that really helps people across the world learn how to sell their products globally on Amazon, even if they're starting from complete scratch. And with his business partner, Robert Ricky, they've sold over $12 million worth of products on Amazon and have actually helped 4,000 people learn to do the same thing. And they've even built an eight figure coaching and service business in the process. Now, one of the things that you can get a lot of information on is how to just set up a product and start selling it on Amazon. However, one of the things that I found really interesting here was one of the areas that they focus on is helping people go global because it's one thing to figure out just the US Amazon market. And it's probably, I say probably because I haven't done it yet. Whole other thing to go globally and make this thing work and then tackle logistics and all of this other stuff that actually makes my head swim. That's the reason I hire other people or partner with them to do that work. But, Stephen Summers, welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business.

Thank you very much, Brad. It's such an honor to be here. I've listened to the show many times and yeah, whenever you came back to me after I left my little voicemail, I was really honored and really surprised that you wanted to have me on. So here we are, going to talk about stuff I love talking about. So I'm really excited.

Yeah, my pleasure. Well, and you did drop our buddy Brad Spencer's name. And Brad's a close friend of mine, lives in Orlando. Great guy. And, you know, it's actually a shame. Brad, if you're listening to this, I haven't even had Brad on the podcast, but I think it's because we talk like every week, several times.

But Brad will be a guest. Brad, I'm making a promise to you. So tell me more about Marketplace Superheroes, what you guys are doing, how it works, and then give us the overview because then I'm going to kind of forget that we got an audience and I'm going to start asking some questions that I want to know.

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. So Marketplace Superheroes at its core is a training business. And basically what we help people do, as you mentioned, is to teach them from complete scratch how to sell their own branded private label products globally on Amazon. And when I say globally, I mean North America, Canada plus Europe. There are other markets like Japan and Australia and India and places like that. So we are actually opening up in Australia pretty soon as well as other markets. So they're the kind of countries we're talking about. So that's kind of the first piece of it. We've helped over 4,000 people, as you mentioned, do this. It's a really successful, trained business, got a lot of different products and programs in there to help people at all different levels. When it comes to then the rest of the business. We really said to ourselves, it's great that we teach how to do this on a global scale. Not a lot of people are doing that, have the experience to do that, the partners to do that. And really what we said was, what other problems do our clients have? And the biggest one always is shipping stuff from the far east across to us, across to Europe and of course to places like Australia. The big problem there was people are shipping a small quantity of things. Typically if they're just starting or, or even if they're a bigger company, they might be doing a new product or they want to just ship more of the product that they're selling well to keep topping it up. And we saw this years ago, even with ourselves, we have to find a freight forwarder, we have to go to the freight forwarders, we have to get pricing, we have to almost teach them how to do what we're doing. Because even though it's a very big business now, it's still relatively new in the market. So again, we just came in and said, how can we solve this problem? It's taken us a few years to do it, but now we have a company called Superhero Freight and it's really for our members only at the moment. But that's actually pretty close to changing. What we did was we contracted a full time team whose software developed for us software in Ukraine actually and they built an entire software ecosystem which is really cool. And the real big thing we've been able to do is have a tool that enables our members to find the product through our tools, then bring it across to the freight app, get pricing from ourselves to ship it from the Far east across to US, Far east to Europe, etc. And we're basically able to slash people's freight costs because we put on our own containers from China. So that's kind of the second part of the business, the services. And we actually have a translations team, we have a listings team for Amazon. We have everything you could possibly need. We have people who can help our members achieve those goals. And yeah, so it's a really successful company. We've done eight figures now in revenue, as I mentioned. We've actually won five 2 comma club awards for ClickFunnels, which a lot of people talk about and we're pretty proud to say we've done that. And we're from Ireland, you know, a little town where nobody's heard of anything like ClickFunnels by the way, or really they know what Amazon is and that's about it. So it's kind of cool that we live in these places and we're able to do this because of the Internet and just honored that we have so many great clients and just delighted to be here to talk about whatever you want to talk about. I can reveal anything you want. I'm an open book brat. Awesome.

So let's talk about some of the stuff that is. I'll get to the global stuff in a minute. Amazon marketing changes a decent amount with new regulations and new restrictions and new hurdles and et cetera. And I know that in the past, like, if you got into this business five, six years ago, it was a lot easier than it is now. Especially you get really smart competition out there and you get people who are well funded and know exactly what they're doing and trying to steamroll a lot of other people. I mean, I've heard a lot of horror stories, but what's working now, especially for somebody who, let's say they've got a product they're selling on Amazon. Let's say they are thinking about doing this and they're kind of like standing at the base of the mountain looking up and going like, man, there's a lot of stuff to learn, et cetera. Let's talk about what's really working. What are some of the fundamentals that's making things work?

Yeah, it's a really great question. There's a lot in it, actually, so I'll break it down as best I possibly can. So the first thing to say is I see Amazon selling on Amazon as having two distinct business approaches. So we've got what we call the marketplace approach and then we've got what we call the brand approach. So basically what the marketplace approach is, it's what we typically teach our members to begin with, which is, you know, I don't know what product I'm going to sell, I don't know what business I want to be in, but I want to look at Amazon almost like a stock market, and I want to identify what's a product that's in demand, that's obviously got proven demand. It's selling. It's actually got low competition. So it's not something that's really trendy, it's not selling hundreds of units a day. And it's something that I can come in and easily improve the offer in the market, improve the marketing behind the product with Amazon listing, as well as in running some simple but very effective Amazon paid traffic. So in other words, we take something that's low on competition, it's not very trendy, makes a small number of sales per day, and we put it into the market. And I'm going to explain something called the rule of five to bring that home in just a second. So that's kind of step one. Then we've got the brand approach, which is kind of what you were mentioning. Somebody is utilizing Amazon more So as a method of distribution in their overall supply chain, rather than it being the business, it's just a part of the business. And I've got a good buddy, Ryan, he actually sell hair replacement products and you know, they actually private label for their companies as well. And they're doing millions and millions of millions as a vendor on Amazon. So it's been cool. I get to see all the different things that are happening. So let me just start with the marketplace approach, then I'll break down the brand approach. What's working? So basically we've got something called a rule of five on the marketplace approach. And it's really appealing to people starting out because they're intimidated by having a brand new business, having a physical product business and all that. What we say is look at a base level. If you can have five products, you can just be making five sales per day of each of those products, but you can make them in five markets. So you got five sales per day. Five, five markets, five different products, making those five sales each day in each country and you're making an average net profit of $5 per day per product. Sorry, if you do that every day for 30 days, let's just say that model will bring you to $18,750 in net profit. So obviously someone beginning, they're like, wow, I'm making almost 20 grand a month, which is five products. And of course the big thing that helps us do that is the fact that we have what we call the multiplied market approach. We're selling not just on Amazon.com, we're selling in multiple markets. So the long and short of it is when you look at that approach, you don't have to be the greatest marketer in the world. You can actually do some very simple optimizations within Amazon and really it becomes a game of becoming good at product research and choosing those non trendy, boring markets as we call them. And we like that approach because on the other side, yeah, there are people selling thousands of units of products every single day, you know, supplements and things like that. But the reality is that's where all the competition is. That's where you have to be a world class business and you have to be well funded, as you mentioned quite rightly, because you've got to drive a lot of traffic to stay on top all the time in those categories. And so honestly we just don't get involved in them for our members. We're like, if you've got lots of products making a small number of sales in a number of Countries, it's lovely because it compounds and it grows. So that's kind of like our business approach and what we take. But yeah, on the brand side, I would say Amazon is a phenomenal distribution channel. And if you have a brand and of course, even though you're selling this small number of units today with these small number of products, like I mentioned, we still brand those products, we still trademark, we do all of those things in order to protect ourselves on Amazon. That said, though, let's say you're a bigger brand. What's working there really is using your other channels to also send people to Amazon in order to boost your sales on the platform. It's kind of like with YouTube, we're building our YouTube channel right now. And yeah, you can drive traffic to your existing YouTube videos, which increases your watch time on the channel, on the platform rather, which then it shows YouTube that these are videos that people actually like. So you're kind of, you're not manipulating it, but what you're doing is you're showing YouTube that when the right people watch my videos, they like it and it's the right audience. So please give me more of those people. And then on the Amazon side, it's kind of the same thing. You're utilizing your external traffic to show Amazon these are products people really want. And when it's on your platform with all your trusted branding, the conversion rates are going to be high. So I would say that the key to making the brand approach work on Amazon is utilizing your other channels in order to push on sales, certainly when you're starting out and ongoing. So with that said, we take that more simple approach because our buyer base or audience base, typically a little bit older, they're not online marketer extraordinaires. They just want to get a simple business up and running. And down the line they might move into the brand approach. Many do, but many stages adding more products to their Amazon business. They understand they're selling on a platform. They're cool with that because Amazon bring in customers every single day in multiple countries and it works for them. So that's a big explanation. But I just wanted to break down those two approaches for you.

I love it. There's a lot there. I mean, I've taken a whole bunch of notes here and it's.

Whenever you asked me the question, I was like, oh, get ready.

This is great. Because it drums up a lot of good questions. Okay, so you said something interesting with on the kind of. Maybe it was the marketplace approach, which is what's in Demand, but low competition, obviously you said in something easy to kind of improve and add your own. So in demand and low competition, I would think would be a little like. Takes a little bit more finesse to find. Because if it's in demand, anything in sufficient enough demand is going to get more competition. Right? So how hard is that to find? And is it really like finding a needle in a haystack?

Yeah, it's again, a great question. When you start out and you go through this for the first time, it can definitely feel that way. But then I think the key to it is understanding that when you go to Amazon, you go say, shop, all departments, and then you pop in to say like the kitchen and home department or something like that. A lot of people start with, you know, the best sellers, right, the top 100 in a category and they're trying to find opportunities in the top 100 bestsellers. And we always tell people, like, you're not going to find these kinds of products there, because the reality is that on Amazon, that's where all the competition is. So when you look at Amazon as a market, then you've got this bestseller rank bsr. And what we look is like a lot of people are looking for a product that's got a 5,000 or less BSR, right? Which again, if something is at 5,000 in say the kitchen and home market, and again the names change all the time, that could be selling 20, 30 a day, as much as that, because there's just so much volume in the Amazon market right now. So we say, well, look, as long as it's 20,000 or less, it's still in range for us. So I suppose the long and short of it is what we do is we start out with the top 100, we click through and then we start looking at what are other products people are buying that are associated with this seed product, if you want to call it that. And then we start finding things that are 12,000 BSR in kitchen and home. And what we do is then we take the generic keywords. Let's say that the keyword was wooden cedar hangers, for example. We take that, we plug it back into Amazon and then what we do is we say, well, how many search results are in Amazon right now for that particular keyword? And if the search results are 2000 or less, then that's something that's interesting. It's something that has got sufficient volume, but at the same time it's not got an outrageous volume. And obviously the less of those, the better. I actually just Did a video today for our YouTube channel, which we'll release in a while, and we're showing five examples. So I found one, and it was called a carboy carrier. Do you know what that means, Brad? As a matter of interest?

I actually do now.

I'd never heard of it before. I think it's very much a us thing, right? So I saw this thing, I was like, what the hell is a cowboy carrier? So, of course it's to carry those kind of, I suppose, plastic big. What would you call them, big containers where you put liquid in them. Right. Yeah. So I saw these. I'm like, that's super interesting.

The reason I know that is I own a website called Homebrew Academy.

There you go.

And carboys are oftentimes used in beer, in home brewing and beer. So I'm not a home brewer. I know very little about the art of home brewing.

Very good. You know what that is, though? So you know more than I did. Anyway, when I found it and then I found a carboy, like, it was like a car boy stand. You can put it on the stand, it can sit there, right? And these things here, like, the listings were awful. They literally had tiny titles. No bullet points, no nothing. So the point entirely is when you start going through these markets and you start looking at products that are Nowhere near the 5000 or less BSR, if you. You start to see so much opportunity for. Well, I can improve that listing massively. I can improve the offer. The Caraboy carrier. I could do a twin pack rather than the single pack. There's many strategies that we teach. So I suppose the point is that you feel when you start out like it's a needle in a haystack, because you're still trying to find what we call the home run product, right? The one that's going to sell 100, 200 a day. Whereas when you really lean into. I'm just going to sell stuff that has some search volume. It's not very competitive. And I'm not trying to make tons of sales every day. You start to realize there's actually so much opportunity in that end of the market, but you've got to be prepared to sell things that are super weird and are just not your average product, you know, okay.

At least with your methodology and with your students, to what degree do you focus on just finding the products and filling the demand there with a versus building out, doing all of the real brand building things that make something really stand out? Because there's a couple different sides to this, which is Just get a good product and tap into the demand and don't overthink it versus go out and try to build an actual damn brand.

Yeah, totally hear you. And honestly, whenever it's the approach we're talking about, we're building a brand, but we're not doing the brand in the way that you and I would define it in terms of like, we're not building a website, we're not building a sales funnel, we're not building the Shopify store. We are very much fulfilling the demand with a better version of what's out there. And we are creating a brand for sure, because there's a lot of people in this market and they are teaching. Yes, you build a big brand, that's what you're focusing on. We really don't do that to begin with. Now here's the thing. When you validate that, let's just say your cowboy carriers are going really well. Your simple branding is working for you. You're making sales on the Amazon platform. Now you've validated like, well, yeah, I can sell it on Amazon. It's doing well for me. It's making me the money I want to make. Now I can actually take it up a notch and I can improve the branding. I've already got my own barcode, I've already put it on the product. I've already trademarked brand name. So I've done that part of things on the technical end. Now I can improve the overall piece and then I can put it onto my own site and all of that. So we very much use Amazon as like a validation tool really to begin with. And then we can scale it up. You know, like a good example, got a guy called Peter, he's an Irish guy actually, and he started there last year. And one of the products he is selling that took off from are dog whistles, you know, and so they took off at his simple branding and he's now able to take those and he's going to start building a much more robust brand around dog whistles. They'll probably take it off of Amazon eventually and then he can build, you know, complementary products and stuff like that into that brand. Well, very much, yeah. We're fulfilling the demand on Amazon, we're validating the product and then if we want to, we can take it on to that next level down the line.

Okay, cool. Traffic. So to what degree do you rely on internal traffic media buying inside Amazon? You touched on this about using some of your other channels to send that traffic over there. What ends up doing the heavy lifting, like how effective are Amazon sponsored listings versus let's just say Facebook ads or Google Ads to your listing, et cetera. But what are some of the effective traffic strategies?

You're going to be kind of disappointed with my answer. And the answer is yes. Initially we optimize heavily the listing on Amazon. So obviously we spend lot of time choosing the right keywords. Amazon obviously give us as well the opportunity to put in some back end keywords which would be keywords that are very much associated with the product but they're not as important as the key. They're like YouTube tags is the best way I can describe it. Right, so you're tagging up your product, if you want to call it that, so that the search engine and the algorithm can learn. Oh yeah, that's what people are looking for on Amazon. And really because of the types of products that we're choosing, the Amazon PPC plus those optimizations are actually most of the traffic that people are utilizing. And then it's time as well getting into the internal system ranking and I mean any search engine, YouTube being the same by the way, because I'm building the YouTube channel out at the moment, I see the parallels and it's the same idea even in that channel. The difference that we've been able to do is drive some additional traffic to our videos. So yeah, like I mean with our members, a lot of them, they typically build out a simple social media kind of campaign and most people don't actually do any Facebook ads or anything like that to these products. Now would it be more effective, would it push more leads and more traffic to their business if they did? Yeah, most likely. But typically with the types of products that our audience are selling, sometimes, like I'm going to give you an example, one of our members, he sells like the covers of the feet of your washing machine to make sure that it doesn't scratch the ground. Right. Now I don't know about you, but not a lot of people are going to get excited about an ad campaign about something like that. So they're kind of, in some ways I would say these products are kind of commoditized in some ways. Right? People were not trying to build an expert yoga mat or something like that. And some people can get really disappointed by that because they're looking to build some kind of like earth shattering brand. As I always tell people. The kind of people that do the business, the way we describe it, they're looking for a simple business model, they're looking for something that works, they're looking for something that can make sales and then they're looking for something that down the line they can get more advanced, they can add in these strategies that we all understand and we know. And even for me, we've never run Facebook ads to our Amazon listings and they've grown and we've got products that have been selling on Amazon now for 10, 12 years. And yes, I hear your earlier comment about things have changed and all of that, but the truth is that the products that we sell, they just keep selling and nobody really wants to come in and sell them because they're all chasing the hundred, five hundred unit sale per day. Because I think there's. In business in general, by the way, there's almost like a certain snobbery towards like, oh, well, it only does a small number of sales per day. Like if you had a web, let's say your homebrew website, let's say that made. I'm just going to throw a random figure. Let's say it made like $2,000 for you per month. People out there would be like, well, do you not want to scale that up? Do you want to make it like the number one home brewing site in the world? And for some people, they'll say, well, no, I've got a couple of other businesses going. It's a nice little business. I don't have to touch it, I don't have to think about it. And it's kind of the same thing with these products.

Nice. That makes absolutely perfect sense. Let me ask you a question that as a marketer, as somebody who sells this stuff, you may not love to answer, but I know my audience and I will love it if you do. Because this is one of the things that I think is this kind of transparency I think is missing in the market. When a lot of people talk about gross revenues and I tell everybody, don't be jealous of somebody's gross. Look at the nets.

Absolutely.

I know that a lot of E commerce businesses, because the margins on that. What kind of margins? And I'm not talking about runaway success. I'm talking about kind of average. What kind of net margins are you. Are people really looking at. And I preface this especially for my audience because I see this frustration a lot and I even face it as well. I've had an E Comm business and I kind of face this as well. But it wasn't a runaway success, which is like, oh man, yeah, we're doing really good with $10 million in sales and I'm making $100,000.

Yeah, I know. I see it all the time.

What can people really expect at the end of the day as far as a net profit margin goes?

Oh yeah, I'll give you two metrics. No problem at all. So we have what we call a poi. It's kind of like roi. It's the game minus the cost, over the cost. And then we have what we call por. So basically it's the same figure, it's just expressed slightly differently. What a POI basically is, it's return on investment. So we look for 100% or more on the poi, meaning we whatever we put into the product in the first place, the cost price, we want to double that. Whenever all is said and done, we want to get double our investment back. Right. And then the POR then is going to tell us, well, whatever my profit was, what is that as a percentage of the sales price? So what we look for there is we look for it to be 30% or more. So let's say we sell something for $20. We're looking to make $6 in our pocket net profit after all costs and expenses. Expenses are paid. Now sometimes it can be 25%, sometimes it can be a little more. But if something was say 20% or less, we would keep away from it. And the reason for that basically is if you're private labeling something, you're shipping it from China, let's say you're shipping it via sea. Again, just to be completely honest, it's going to take you 112 days, maybe a little more, to get that into stock from the likes of the Far east. To make it worth your while, you got to be doubling your money, the poi front and you got to be looking at that 25, 30% or more as that expressed over the sales price. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about profitability. So you could take any of our members or our sales figures, we do about and have done about $1.8 million per year in revenue. Ish. In our business. And many of our members got some people doing four or five hundred thousand plus a year. So whatever that figure is, look at that and just go, what's 30% of that? And you could say that's the net profit pretty much that's in the business now. Again, to go a step further, when you start a business like this, are you going to put, if you did 10, let's say you did $30,000 revenue in a month and that's going to be roughly $9,000 back in net profit. Are you going to pocket all of that? My answer is no. Because if you do pocket all that money, what you're basically saying is like, I don't want the business to grow any further. I just want to take the money, put it in my pocket and run. And like in any business, yourself, Brad, if that's your approach, you're never going to grow the business. So what we always tell our members is no matter where your business is for the first year to 18 months, you're not going to take any money out of the business. It's as simple as that. Now, when you do get to profitability, we always recommend what we call the 33 rule, which basically means if you take 33% for yourself, 33% back into the company, 33% other, you're in a good position then because you're not stripping the company of all its money. And again, I think this is the problem in general, right? We live in a world where online, a lot of people make these massive promises and they don't break down the real numbers in a business. And unfortunately, then I see it all the time. There's people we all know, they're driving Lamborghinis and whatever. And I know these guys and I know their numbers. And I know many times it's BS like what they're talking about because there's this idea in the Internet now where like, entrepreneurship is kind of sold as some. Like you're a celebrity or something. Yeah, it's kind of weird, you know, Whereas, like, being a business owner is great. And what we sell more so is we're going to teach you skills. Like, we're going to teach you how to figure out the profitability, we're going to teach you product research strategies, and we're going to help you get a business up and running that's going to make you money. And then long term, yeah, like, you can take this stuff and you can get a lot more advanced. You can build that big brand that we've talked about and all of that. But at least you've got experience in the business. I think, honestly, in E commerce and in business in general. By the way, I think the worst thing you could do to get into business is like, have no experience whatsoever, go into something and like, try and come up with the biggest innovation the world has ever seen. And I just think that's why the percentages of business failures are so high. Because people, at the end of the day, they don't know what the hell they're doing. Whereas at least if you take a pre designed approach and you just spend your time executing on that and become really good at that, you learn so much more. You learn everything there is to learn, as a matter of fact about how business works. So that's what we typically sell with our audience. And it's good because when people come in, then they got the right expectations rather than people come in and they're looking to be millionaires in 30 days, you know.

Yeah. Well, number one, thank you for that transparency. I know hopefully my audience appreciates it because there's so much BS out there and I even find myself occasionally falling for it and then going, wait, wait a minute, I've kind of seen some of these numbers. There's a couple things you kind of sparked for me. So like you said, first year to 18 months. Don't plan on taking money out of the business. Do not do this if you need this money to, if you need this money to pay the bills and to, to spend, et cetera. When I first started my first ever online business 12 years ago and it was a digital product, I mean you have, the margins are a lot higher and I didn't take any money out. I took my first fifteen hundred dollar checkout after about eighteen months. And the other side of this really is. Or it made me think of strategy. Have you ever heard of a book called Profit first by Mike Michalowicz?

Yes. Oh yeah, that's it. And that's a huge deal now. I mean they're certifying everybody and I see a lot of accountants now. CBA's.

I love it. I love it. And I had Mike on the show twice actually. And I'll put a link in the podcast episode show Notes for this. But the bottom line on that, just for my. You already know it, but for my listeners edification, he was like, look, it's very easy to just take all your profits and then just shove them back into the company. And for you to just live on peanuts for a long time that creates this entrepreneurial poverty. And he's like, just as an employee, they tell you to pay yourself first, go out and if $100,000 comes in, create your own little profit account first so that 100,000 comes in. Maybe you want to engineer yourself a minimum of a 10% profit margin. So pull that off first and then pull the rest of the tax account, pull the rest of operations and then spend the rest. You still get to grow, but take a little bit off the top. Just don't expect to keep it all that's great, man, because you really help dispel some of those concepts that, yeah, I'm going to start this thing up and I'm going to live off this thing like a rock star. And that really just does not happen. I also like how you mentioned the concept here of like, it's almost like training wheels, which I like because for a lot of people, especially brand new Amazon E commerce sellers, it can be really overwhelming to think about. I'm going to start this big brand and it's going to be this big thing where realistically, if I can get in there and hit a bunch of singles and figure it out and figure out the ins and the outs of selling on Amazon and then selling globally and then working my logistics and cash flow management because there's a lot of skill sets that go into this.

I fully agree. And I mean, it's great. You're so quick at getting this. It's great. It's like you've done this before, Brad. But yeah, and on the other side, I don't want to paint a super negative picture either. Right. Because the other side of this whole thing is. And I think this is the big point, we've all read like rich dad, poor dad and stuff like that. A lot of people here have. And whatever you think about the book or whatever, for me, this concept of being an asset creator and being an asset owner, I just think that's the most powerful concept from that book in particular. And so what I always tell our members is with that profit first analogy you were talking about there, et cetera, at the end of the day, you're building an asset that you're looking to asset to pay you over and over again for years. And so you're not looking for something that's going to make you money for a little while and then it's gone. You're looking to front load your effort in your business so that you get paid for the longest time off the effort that you put into your business.

Well, and the skill sets, the skill sets are assets and the skill sets are maybe the most valuable assets because you know, if something happens to one of your product listings, it's like, all right, cool, I'll find another one.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And there that's. And I guess all I was going to say was on that is like, that's the, as you say, that is the real thing. That's the real beauty. So you can get excited about it as you're building that because yeah, I'm not making a ton of money today. But I know that down the line when this accumulates, because it's going to compound and accumulate with time and my product is going to rank better in the system over time, et cetera, I know down the line I'm going to see the benefit. And as a matter of fact, I just wanted to mention another interesting point, which is my goal in business, right, A lot of times, because I came from a very not wealthy background. I wasn't eating ramen noodles or anything for my whole life, but I wasn't exactly super wealthy or anything. And so for me, I had this bad belief system of like, I need the business to pay me as much as I possibly can get out of it, you know, so Robert and I'm a business partner, like with Marketplace Superheroes. Even as that business started to become successful as well, we took a lot of money out of the business. One year it was awful because it was personal income and we paid half that back to the tax man. So equally like, if your goal in life is just take like multiple six figures, personally, a bad news for you, it's a terrible financial strategy because you're going to give most of it to the tax man anyway. So the advice I always tell people is, look, get yourself to an income level of 75,000 or more per year because scientifically proven beyond 75 grand a year, most of your needs are met anyway. And then after that, it becomes a different game. A game of throwing something that's maybe down the line you liquidate or sell or whatever the case may be.

Absolutely one of the things I'll let you in on. And my audience, I don't think I've really talked about this. It's one of the potential Amazon or E Commerce. This is kind of more of a product and brand strategy that I'm working on with a client here. And this ties into one of the things you and I talked about offline prior to this. We're both big Jay Abraham fans and leveraging as much as possible. One of the things Jay talks about is leveraging other people's assets as much as possible and creating synergies like that. So one of my longtime clients has a really cool company that is an app in the, I'll say in the health and fitness space, right? So he's got hundreds of thousands of users, almost like 25,000 new people every month download his app, you know, track and fitness, et cetera. And it's ad supported. So all of the revenue literally comes from these really nice ads that he does. So they're not like cheesy mobile ads, they're like these big beautiful banner ads. And he can drive like half a million impressions or 80,000 clicks and all of this stuff.

So.

And as we've been working together, one of the challenging parts for me has been the fact that like he doesn't, with a few exceptions, he actually doesn't sell much. So it's really getting everything else going. And as I started to realize that this guy has got a lot of brand affinity with his users and everything else and this is one of those things, we already know that they're at least somewhat interested in health, fitness, walking, running activities, et cetera. And it started to make me think there's probably a good opportunity here to utilize his audience affinity and knowing what they want to create a product or products that serves that market. And he's already got the ad space to basically just funnel tons, thousands of free clicks and to this every single month.

Right.

You know where I'm going. So we're in the process right now of starting to research, do a little bit of R and D and figure out what to kind of try from a validate. Let's try to validate something, let's try to create a product. And this would be, if we do this, this is where the kind of the Jay Abraham esque strategy comes in. This would not be me doing this as a consultant for fee. This would be me leveraging his create a new business together whereby he's responsible for traffic, I'm responsible for getting the rest of it up. So that's one of the reasons. Also this is all very fascinating to me because I haven't been as much of a physical product E Com guy in the past. I've worked with some, I've had one, I've work with some and that's some degree of success. I will say that in the actual operational aspect of it, that won't be me. So I'll be partnering or hiring people to kind of run with this. But this is all very interesting to me and I kind of like because part of me was going down this angle of how can we just do utilize this audience to build a real solid brand of products that can then eventually sold and exited. But I also like the idea of tapping into other products out there that just end up creating a really nice income stream as well without having to over complicate the brand aspect.

Yeah. And again, you know, there's so many things out there, like there's so many models with that, you know, I mean I know you had, I think in the past you Drew Canole on the show, right? I'm pretty sure I write in San.

Oh yeah, Drew was my very first ever consulting client. Started working with him seven years ago when he had almost. He had less than 100,000 Facebook followers and all this other stuff.

Well, yeah, there you go. I mean, I didn't actually know that. That's really interesting. But again, I just knew he was on the show. And I suppose my point is like, if you look at Organifi, that product, that's like a really good example, I think case study or something like that where they didn't have a fitness app or anything, but as you know, they had a huge audience from social media and stuff like that. And obviously then they really utilized that build a funnel around Organifi, etc. I suppose if you look at Organifi, it's not like they make a big deal of the funnel, but I mean, I don't know if they probably get angry with me for saying this, but in my opinion they don't have a big funnel or anything. They just have a great product and they have a great. Everything is great. I actually bring it in from the States myself to Ireland because I like it so much. I kind of look at something like that and that's a good example of a product that would instantly work in this example, simply down to the fact that obviously it's consumable, which is beautiful. And I think with that, with physical products, I think a lot of times people, they say, well, I'm going to sell the obvious stuff, I'm going to sell gym gear, I'm going to sell clothing, I'm going to sell X and Y. And that's great and that's going to work well for people. But at the end of the day, I think the holy grail of physical products, when you have an existing audience like that, is consumability.

I was actually thinking about doing an electrolyte supplement or something of that nature.

Oh yeah, man. And again, tying that into the app as well. And part of the methodology behind what that person does. I mean, it's as close as to guaranteed success as you can get, really. Because you already know. It's like Netflix. I love the Netflix model in that they know what their audience love, they know what they're watching, they know why they're watching it. So when they make their own shows, it's almost like they're able to Frankenstein a show together based upon real time data, which is why they get pretty much Most of their shows 100% correct. And you've got the same opportunity, which I think is just phenomenally exciting. So I can't wait to see more about that because, I mean, that's something that I think it's guaranteed to win, you know.

Thanks. Yeah, yeah. Fleshing it out now, it's a matter of implementation plan and making sure that nobody's bandwidth gets stretched. But there'll be probably some good strategic partnerships and whatnot there as well. This is awesome. When it comes to global, is there much of a difference when it comes down to the global aspect of selling internationally?

Yeah. I mean, when we talk about Europe specifically being, you know, a lot of our clients are US based and a lot of people listen to the show. I know there's people from all over the world, but a lot of people here are the U.S. canada based. And I suppose the issue for a lot of people is there's this fear around the unknown. Right. And again, I'm not going to be nasty to our friends in the U.S. i love the U.S. it's a country I travel to all the time. But I think a lot of people from the US would probably accept and agree with me that in some ways the US can be a little bit insular to the rest of the world.

Oh, 100%, yeah.

And that's normal, by the way, if I was in the US But I'd be the same, by the way, if I lived in the US because it's an amazing country, you have everything there. So I get it, it's completely understandable. But at the same time, it's that unknown factor that stops a lot of people then from looking at, say, markets like Europe. But the reality is that it's basically a very simple playground. All you've got to do is set yourself up in the right way. So I'll give some ideas here to your listeners. Just in general, because I think we're moving into a globalized world anyway. Even with digital products now with the European Union, they've added in basically VAT global. It doesn't matter where you're from. Which I can explain as well. I will explain because it's not relevant to Amazon, but it doesn't matter. It's relevant to your audience. So just to say then that that's the big fear, vat Value Added Tax, it's just sales tax like you have in the US and in the US as a matter of fact, sales tax is very much a gray area in the US too. I don't think anybody really knows how sales tax works in the us, Every CPA I ever speak to has a different opinion because it's not tied up. Whereas in Europe we're in a situation where it's very black and white, what the situation is, and it has changed a little bit. But essentially, if you're, let's say US llc, for example, or a Canadian limited company, or any other country outside Europe, and you come into Europe with that business structure and you sell your products into Europe, what happens is because you're a non European entity, you instantly have to register for this vat, this value added tax scheme. And then what happens is whenever you sell a product, it's just like sales tax. So it's about 20% that changes per country, but it's about 20% ish. Sales tax is lower, as we know, it's about 7 to 13%. So you allow for that. But essentially the mistake people make is they come in with a non European business entity. And so why it's a mistake is that let's say you bring your products to the uk, they land in the uk, you register for UK VAT as a US llc, that's fine, you haven't made any mistakes so far. You make a sale to somebody in the uk, you're collecting the VAT on behalf of the government and you're paying them every quarter. You can do it yearly as well, what they call a flat rate scheme, which I won't get into, but you can do it different ways is the point. Now, the issue is this. When you're selling on Amazon in Europe, right, there's something that's beautiful called the efn, which is the European Fulfillment Network. It's an amazing idea Amazon brought in years and years ago. Basically what it means is you can hold your stock in the uk, for example, and then you can get your products translated into multiple languages, so German, French, Italian, Spanish, and then put them on, make those listings active. Basically, somebody from Germany can come onto Amazon.de they see your product, they see it, they like it, they see it's fulfilled by Amazon, they're utilizing their fulfillment and they buy from you, it's shipped from the UK to that person. And what happens is because you're a US LLC and a German person has bought from you, it's landed in Germany, you technically have to register for a new German vat. And if somebody in Austria buys from you, because you're a non European entity, you have to register there and there and there and there and there. So it's a compounding issue Which a lot of people, by the way, Brad, make this mistake. And anybody who's an E Commerce seller doing this, I'm saving you thousands of dollars right now by explaining a mistake you're making because we see it all the time. So the simple fix, anyway, for anybody listening that what we teach is if you set up a European entity. Now, a lot of people can't tell people what to set up. It's just I can't advise them at cpa. But what a lot of people do is they set up a UK entity, a UK limited company, and we can help people do that. And basically what happens then is because you've got a UK Limited company now, you can avail of a lot of the inter EU rules of tax. In very simple English, all that means is when we take that example we had a second ago, now you're a UK limited company. Yes, you're a US resident, but you own a UK limited company. You will register for VAT straight away in the uk but now if a German person buys from you, you'll simply charge them. The uk you would charge the UK VAT on that? Basically. And I'm paid to the UK or up until you hit a certain sales threshold in that country. And in very simple terms. So it's a little bit like if you held your stock in Texas and you sold to somebody lived in Florida. Well, let's say Florida, say, well, if you make more than $50,000 in revenue in a year, you now have to register for sales tax in Florida. It's the same idea. You pay the VAT to the UK and if you hit €100,000 in revenue in Germany now you got to register only for German VAT at that point. So again, I'm not going to get too much more into that because it could get very complex.

No, but that's great.

Yeah, but again, it's very simple when you know how is what I'm saying.

That's fantastic. So we're at the time now where you get to tell people who are very intrigued by all of this, by the idea that this is a real business, you've been super transparent that it is very possible to start from scratch and get out there and figure this stuff out. Especially if you're not looking to get rich quick, but you're looking to build these income streams and assets that can last a long time with Marketplace superheroes. But plug away, let's talk about some of the resources that you have for people. Where do they go?

Sure. Yeah. Thanks very much. So, yeah, Marketplacesuperheroes.com is our site. We're actually updating it at the moment. But regardless, whatever you land on the site, there's always an option for free training. We have a seven day free training series that we have on there that people can check out. And basically what we do is for the seven days, we just kind of walk people through the foundational important things you need to know for you to know whether or not it's something you want to do. It's a business you want to run. So we teach a lot of people way up front because. And even when you watch our YouTube channel, by the way, and I'd highly recommend people subscribe, we launch three videos a week there now and we go into very, very much a lot of detail. Because what I've learned, Brad, is that people really respect it when you teach them and you show them how things work, why they work, and all of the different things you need to know before you actually get into the business. Because again, to be completely honest with you, we used to not do this. We used to say, well, we'll tell you about the business, we'll tell you how it works and sure, look, come and join us and then you can learn how to do it all. And sure, like we still do that and everything and our programs are awesome, but, but we've just learned over time. I spoke to a lady recently and she was going to join one of our coaching programs and she had all these really relevant questions that I know that are webinars and stuff like that. They don't cover because they're very specific. But she needed to know the answers to know whether to move forward. So the long and short of it is if you go to our YouTube channel, you'll get all those answers in great detail. So marketplacesuperheroes.com, grab the free training, check out the YouTube channel, and also I'll invite any of your listeners. I have a very small Instagram following. Just so if you want to DM me and ask me anything. Stephen with a P H J. Summers S O M E R S Steven J. Summers. Come and add me on Instagram, ask me a question and I'll send you back a voicemail. And I'd be delighted to give you any more information that you might need.

Perfect. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for sharing so liberally and openly and honestly with our audience. I think that this has been super cool because you're also bringing a unique aspect that I haven't heard a lot of people who teach Amazon marketing to the show. That's why I invited you on. I get requests all the time of people who say they're Amazon experts, but you definitely had a unique twist to this and something that you taught me, some things that I didn't know and that are very useful as well. I suggest everybody go check out Marketplace Heroes. There will be links in the show notes here. There will be links absolutely everywhere for you to click on this and go follow Stephen and reward him with your attention for the information he's given. And if this is something that you think a friend of yours, family member, or somebody else who's either thinking about starting on Amazon or has started and wants some more resources, please share this episizzle. Because other podcasts have episodes, we have epic sizzles with them. And man, Steven, I just really appreciate your time today.

Well, I appreciate yours. You know, you've cultivated an amazing platform. I know you put your heart and soul into it, so thanks for having me on. I know how hard it is and how much work it is to build an audience, so I appreciate it. And anything I can do for your listeners, I'd be more than happy to do.

My pleasure. Okay, this episode is almost done, but our time together doesn't have to end. At least not yet. Subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next episode and head on over to baconrapbusiness.com where you can find more bonus material and you can leave me a voice message with your question. If it's good, I'll read it on the the air. And if you have a business problem you'd like my brain on, send me an email to ask Brad at baconwrappedbusiness. Com. Tell me more and I might be able to give you a second opinion on what's keeping you stuck. See you on the next episode.