0296 | Growing your Amazon FBA Business with Isaac Kuhlman

Hi, this is Isaac Coleman from real coaching@goteamreal.com and you're listening to EA Interviews.

EA Interviews, episode 296, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the Imperfect Action Round. Seven days a week, join Mario Ficini for today's expert Authority Effect interview. So business is fun and business changes and there's all these great things. You know, 30, 40, 50, 100 years ago, everything was done by catalogs or horse drawn carriage or just walking up to people saying, hey, you want to buy this? But now we got the Internet, we SEO all these different ways and there's this one little website you've probably heard of called Amazon and they sell a few things here and there and maybe you've thought about going, hey, we should have a store as an extension of our business on Amazon. Or maybe you just straight up were like, you know what? I'm tired of what I'm doing. Whether it's my business or whatever, I'm gonna sell directly on Amazon. But where do I start with that? Maybe you already are. But how would you like to learn from someone who's generated over 12 million in sales on Amaz Amazon and helped a thousand people plus do it? That's why I'm excited to have Isaac Coleman on the show today. And I'm going to bring him up right after we thank our sponsor.

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Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Isaac Coleman. Isaac, how are you feeling today?

Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Oh, it's my pleasure. I just. There's so many things I want to ask you, but I guess I'll start with this one. Why would someone want to start a business with Amazon?

Well, I think the main reason is just so they can get filthy rich and drive a Lamborghini. That's probably the main reason. Yeah.

Are you talking the Aventador, The Diablo Countach? Where are we going with this?

Choose your model. I guess the now the real reason and the reason why we work with real people is because a lot of people are actually looking to get out of a 9 to 5 job. Stop doing something for another company, for the corporation, for the quote unquote, man, having to sit in front of a desk and be stuck where they are. There's a lot of different things. We view it as what we call a Lifestyle business where you can get actual freedom and income, geographic freedom, time freedom, all that kind of stuff. And that's probably the biggest reasons that drew me into it. And then probably most of our members, and you know, my business partner, Kirsty Verity as well, is that we can do this business. And if you guys know anything about Warren Buffett, obviously a great investor, done a lot with the market, and he basically says if you don't find a way to make money, like when you sleep, you'll work until you die. So we wanted to find ways to make money while we slept. And Amazon does that because you don't need to be at a workstation to actually be making money on Amazon. It'll make money whether you're actually sitting there or not, because people are buying on the platform 24 hours a day. So you can actually go off, you know, spend time with your family, your kids, friends, take a vacation, and that thing will still keep churning. Obviously, you still need systems in place to kind of run the business, but the sales keep coming and you don't have to work, you know, you don't have to trade that time for that money. And that's a huge, big reason that we chose to do this business itself.

What's the top thing someone should consider if they're thinking about starting an Amazon business?

Yeah, I think it's. Look, there's tons of different things I could say here, but I always think it comes down to the number one thing is your budget. Because you can go on to YouTube and you'll find tons of people talking about how you can start Amazon with $500 and you can make thousands of dollars a month, but in reality, treat it like a real business. So your budget will actually determine how successful you are, how quickly you'll become successful at something. If you have a million dollars in your bank and you want to sell on Amazon, you'll have a much better chance of being successful faster than somebody who has $500. Now, I'm not saying there's a ton of people out there with a million dollars in the bank going out and setting up Amazon businesses. That's not necessarily the case. Most people are probably going to be looking between 5, 10, 15, $20,000, a modest investment, a decent sized investment, and they're going out there and creating a business on products, right? So you have to be able to purchase products, you have to be able to invest in the business and the marketing. And if you don't plan that properly, you'll burn through your budget and your cash Flow will be gone and you'll have the product sitting there live on Amazon, but you can't do anything with it. So you have to plan that stuff out. And your budget is a huge factor in that. So don't go into the Amazon business thinking that, you know, 500 or $1,000 is going to get you there. And definitely don't try to do it just by thinking that you can watch some YouTube videos and hope that you get rich and famous someday.

What would you say? How long would you say it takes if someone's willing to invest that 5 to, let's say, just $25,000 investment? What's the timeframe you should be expecting? Is this something 30 days, you turn it around and have net profit six months?

Well, yeah. So what we like to do is we like to set goals with our clients. And, and what we do is we say, okay, how much income do you need to kind of replace whatever you're looking for? What would you like to see as income, like in the next year? And we call this our smart goal. So our smart goal deadline might be 12 months. And say, you know, most people, they're just looking to get, you know, 3, 4, $5,000 in income that's good enough to pay a bunch of bills, offset maybe having to work entirely or, you know, take away some of their, you know, job. Maybe they'll have to work three days a week instead of five days a week or whatever. And we say, you know, generally speaking, you can get to that point in 12 months. You're not going to be hitting $5,000 a month in month one, month two, month three. But what we like to do is we say start with your goals, start with your budget, and then we kind of plan out, you know, based on how much time you have the ability to put into the business, how much money you have in. There's kind of like a factor of like if you say, just for an example, say you have three hours a day to work in the business and you have $20,000, you'll be able to get there probably to that $5,000 probably in 10 or 11 months. So you can do that pretty quickly as long as you have structure in place. Now, there is some things here, like just to even get online, like on Amazon and selling, there's some things to consider. You know, you have to do product development, just even finding products, understanding how to build out a brand and find products under that, that could take you two months. Then you find the product that you want and you order it. Well, it takes 20 to 30 days to manufacture most products. It takes another 30 days to ship it, and it takes Amazon about a week to actually check it into their warehouses. So we're talking about another two months essentially that you're going to have to wait on top of the first two months. So the investment is not all coming out in that first month anyway. So you're not like putting $20,000 in, waiting four months to get started. You're putting some money in to get started, some money in as you go, and then obviously paying for the cost of goods once you place that order. But essentially speaking in about six months, you should start seeing profitability within the process of the business. Right. So money should be coming back into your bank account and you should start seeing a momentum of sales growing. Now, again, you can't just do it however you think you should do it. You have to know how to do it. But six months time, you should start seeing money come back to you. And then that's actually the first sign of like, hey, I'm doing something that's working now. How do I really make it profitable? How do I scale it? How do I grow it even further? And that's when you can start to launch more products doing the same processes.

So it sounds like you could start with a lot less, but just realize, hey, it's going to be 15, 20, 25 grand over 4, 5, 6 months. But you don't need it all up front because some businesses, you do need that and much more upfront just to get started on top of the ongoing monthly.

Yeah, I mean, if you try to get into real estate and buy and flip houses, it's not going to be 5, 10, 15, $20,000. They're gonna have to buy houses. Right? So you either have to get a big old loan from a bank to help you do that, or you're going to need to fund some of that upfront with a big cash deposit. So there are things that are out.

There and you need to know what to do to fix them up.

Exactly. Right.

Or pay someone.

It's not like anybody can just go out and fix a house. Right. I mean, and most people were doing it either themselves or they have a very close construction crew or whatever. But yeah, I mean, there's, there's lots of different business models that will cost 10 or 15 or 20 times what an Amazon business can. You go set up a retail shop. The exact same products that you want to sell on Amazon, you do it in a brick and mortar store. It's going to cost you 20 times the amount that it cost you on Amazon.

So speaking of the products, what would you suggest for someone to start with, with an Amazon company, Amazon business.

Yeah. So the products that you select should actually be tied to an interest that you have. So I won't say that there's 10 awesome products you should go out and sell right now. Because if I said that, then everybody listening to this would go out and try to sell those 10 products, and you guys would flood the market with bad selling. Like, you guys don't know what you're doing. So you just all compete against each other and be like, well, that guy's full of crap, because he gave me one product idea and I did it, and so did 5,000 other people or whatever. And so that's why we don't do what we do do. Well, we do tell people to do is essentially find a niche or an interest that you're interested in that you're passionate about. Like, you can see behind me I have some musical accessories, some drums, some guitars and all that stuff. I actually built a brand around musical instrument accessories. So I'm passionate about that. So I built a brand around that. So I know exactly what works. How to make those products, or like, you know, how to make them better, how to use them, how to tell people how to use them, how to describe that. In my marketing, I know the problems that people like me have. So that way I can explain that through my listing and my images. So that's a really good way to get started, is think of things that you're interested in. And then we actually have a process where we show people this spreadsheet, we call it our Product Analyzer Bible, that breaks down all the costs, including, like, advertising costs, marketing costs, launch costs, before you even place the order up front. So you get this spreadsheet and it basically breaks down. You know, how much is it going to cost? What's your competition look like? How much do you need to actually sell in order to be on page one? All that stuff. And what can you expect in income, profit, revenue, return on investment, all that stuff. And then you can actually prioritize that. So based on what area of expertise you want to be in and what products you kind of pick under that line, you can actually do the analysis way before you actually place the order. So that way you don't just go in and think, oh, yeah, I can easily. I got $5,000. I can easily launch any product under fitness. So you go out thinking you can do a jump rope and Fitness. But what our Product Analyzer Bible actually tells you is it's going to cost you $130,000 to be successful on that product. Then you go, okay, $5,000 isn't really going to cut it anymore. And that's what we want to stop people from doing is. That's why I said, first up, your budget will determine how successful you are, how quickly you can be successful. If you had $130,000, you might be willing to launch that jump rope because you might make $30,000 in income. Once you get to page one, there's. And that's a great return on investment, but you won't be able to do that with a $5,000 budget. So you have to find products that actually fit your budget.

Well, that's a great insight there, because whether you're talking refrigerators, couches, lamps, or charcuterie boards, they all have different, you know, expenses, they have different profit margins, they have different demand. So it's. It's awesome that you're offering that, because I think people just sometimes jump in and go, I want to do this because I like it. But they. And they go, I want to make a million dollars a year, a month from it, but don't realize it's eaten up 90% of the profit just because of the thing it is.

Yeah, I mean, there's. You can. You can lose money on pretty much anything if you're not paying attention to what the fees are. And if you don't plan it out ahead of time and you don't know exactly what profitability you'll get after, you know, Amazon takes their commissions, Amazon takes their shipping fees. You know, your freight forwarder or your freight shipping from wherever you're getting it sourced and sending to Amazon. You know, any of that other stuff, all that supply chain stuff has to be factored into the cost. Otherwise you're going to just think that you can sell it on Amazon for whatever price you think that you can do it for, and then you'll find out nobody wants to buy it. So a lot of people when we first started this business, you know, I think it's been eight years now, actually, almost exactly to the day, eight years. Basically, a lot of people were just like, I'll just put a product on there and I'll charge $10 more than my top competitor. And they think that they can do that. Well, do you think that people on Amazon who are shopping there are dumb? Like, they have a whole list of great competitors that have ton of social reviews, you know, social Proof right there. Ratings, reviews, price right there. They can read their listings and they can price compare with, you know, the top sellers in the world or in this category on Amazon. And why would they pick you with fewer reviews, not maybe as great a marketing copy or whatever and then 10 more dollars? Why would they do that? Like Amazon, buyers are looking for great value products that speak to them. Right. The brand speaks to them, the messaging speaks to them, the images speak to them. That's what they should be thinking when they're buying. They're not just going to go out and buy from some arbitrary seller that's selling it for a higher price.

The only thing that comes to mind in that scenario is you'd have some killer photos or video that someone else doesn't. Because I've seen some where they have one or two photo, there's no details but they're selling the heck out of it. I mean, but yeah, at the end of the thing it's, it's unlikely.

Yeah. Well, think about being that seller, right? So that seller probably has been around for a while. They got their ranking, they established their reviews and they now command that price point. You as a brand new seller aren't going to command that price point. Likely you're not going to be able to sell for $10 more than that person, for example, because they'll just crush you on sales. Because if you put 50, 50, you know, compare them apples to apples, they're just going to look at yours and go, unless you got some really, really compelling reason for me to buy it for $10 more, I'm going to go buy it from that tried and true number one seller over there.

Yeah, and there's also the browser plugins that automatically check something out even if it's not on Amazon. It pulls up Amazon's listing to show you the shopping comparison. There's all these things out there now and you have to remember the positioning. You're not going into a Saks Fifth Avenue where it's a high end exclusive and you're not necessarily price shopping. You, you're, you're literally on Amazon, like you said, where you can just click a button and it even tells you the competitors, you might like this. Also a lot of people who bought this, they show that the little slider bar of here's what else they bought.

Exactly. I mean there's, there's so many ways people can shop on Amazon. Amazon's there to essentially capitalize on making money from people who are in a hyper buying position. Right. They don't go to Amazon to browse. Most of the time they're going there to actually purchase something. They type in something into that search bar looking for that exact product. So then all they have to do is then look at who comes up on, on the page, compare them and say this is the one that fits exactly what I'm looking for. Whether it be through the pictures or the price or the reviews or whatever, all that determination. Most people especially like under a $20 price point, they don't spend ton of time comparing stuff. They'll look around at a couple things. But you know, for $20, you know that you can return stuff too. So they're in a hyper buying position. They'll go ahead and just buy the best or most.

Highly reviewed one. So then they can actually try it out and if they don't like it, they'll just return and say it wasn't good or whatever and then they got a return issue. But that's what Amazon shoppers are used to. And that's as a person who buys on Amazon all the time. That's exactly how I buy and I sell on Amazon. So you have to understand buyer habits. You can't just make up your own rules. You have to go by what's actually happening out there.

It's a great expert authority insight and I'm glad you're sharing it because again, a lot of people just think there's no rules to any of this. I'll just do what I want. I have a passion, I have a dream, it's going to work. I love that you have a passion and a dream. Absolutely, 100% unequivocally go for it. But there are structures to all the same thing with the marketing of it. There are things that work. Success leaves clues and you can't just make stuff up. So don't run uphill if you don't need to. You bring up a great point about the searching. How important is SEO for selling an Amazon business?

Yeah. So obviously with the phrase SEO, we a lot of times associate that with, you know, kind of query based engines like Google or Bing and getting, you know, page one search results for that. Amazon is actually one of the largest search engines in the world, but theirs is a little different. And it's based on buying, so it's based on how much you get bought for any keyword. So whatever's typed in, you know, musical accessory or I sell an ice scraper, so someone types in ice creeper. You kind of need to be in one of the top pages or you know, one of the top positions to get most of the sales. If you're on page like three or four, you'll get much fewer sales than if you're on page one or you know, position one on page one. So it's quite important to be competitive with your ranking for, you know, high level main keywords. So a lot of people get this kind of confused, like, well, what's the main keyword? Is it the thing that most people buy on or is it the thing that most people search for? Most of the time they're the same. But I will tell it a very simple way to understand what a main keyword is. People don't believe that this is true because it's too simple. Common sense. If you call that thing something, it's most likely what that thing is called and that's what people are searching on Amazon. Most people are like, well, what is the Amazon algorithm or the bots and all the crawlers call it, they call it what the customer searching because that's who drives the algorithm is the customer. So if a majority of customers call it that thing, then that's where the searches are going to go and that's where the sales are going to go most of the time.

I love that you're talking about that because.

You'Re absolutely right. So many people just think, and especially with YouTube also, it's like, well, what do I do here? What should I do for my video? Or this, that the other thing. And it's like the people are driving all of this. The machine didn't just magically come up with the algorithm. That's why they're always constantly changing it, because they realize people's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and even the abbreviations when they search for stuff and typing, you know, I remember back in the day when it was like you had a keyword optimized for the wrong spelling of stuff because everyone was learning how to type for the first time and you know, there was more searches on certain things. They were spelled wrong. Same thing when you buy a domain name. So thank you for bringing that up.

And Apple didn't have as good of autocorrect back then, I think.

Yeah.

We'Re the ones driving all of this. So if our habits change, they're going to change because like you said earlier, they're in the business of selling more stuff. If we want to call it zebras and kangaroos, hey, if it's 10 times search and people are buying it nine times as much, they'll probably adapt it.

Yep, exactly right. And that's sometimes you'll see a completely random product on some of those listings. Because I shouldn't say completely random. But for example, you might see, you might search umbrella stands. Cause you want to put a little rack by your front door somewhere, umbrella rack. And in the top 10 search results on that page, you'll see a listing for an umbrella because it's so like so highly sold on umbrella relevant keywords that it also is bought on that keyword as well. So it's not actually an umbrella rack, it's an umbrella. Because it's such a popular umbrella, it actually gets kind of leakage onto some of these other keywords as well.

So when you take all of this into account, is there a certain type of person that should be going for this more than another? Is there certain behaviors and personalities that just tend to be more successful on Amazon? Or is it if you have the money and the patience, you're good?

I will say there's quite a few things. So you have to be able to adapt and accept that change will happen. And don't think that what you know today is going to be the way that you're going to run this business forever. That is never going to be the case in any business. But Amazon changes much faster because it's literally online. There's not like physical storefronts that have to be adapted or changed. It's literally all they have to do is change certain things about their platform and then you have to understand how to fix that stuff or work around it or whatever. But I would say, you know, for most people there's, there's two types of people or two traits of people that will probably be more successful than others. People who can find solutions to problems and not get frustrated and quit when they run into a hurdle. That's, that's number one probably characteristic trait. If you can find solutions to problems, you will persevere in most things in life and you'll be more successful than most. The other thing is essentially have a passion. Because no matter how good of a problem solver you are, if you don't have a passion behind this, you'll just get bored and quit. Like, if you're like, hey, you know what, it's not that appealing because really you're not doing a fun job or fun work. It's essentially the work that allows you to live the life that you want, but that, that then the lifestyle becomes much more fun than the business. And then a lot of people get bored and just say, you know what Whatever. I'll just kind of get. I'll just kind of let it kind of run itself. And then if what happens is they kind of maintain it at the same level. But as I will say, anytime you're trying to maintain something and just maintain it, you'll see that over time, you're actually killing it, because you actually have to actively be growing a business or trying to grow it in order to make it run successfully. If you're just trying to maintain, that's actually a slow death in business. And it might take a year or two to figure that out. But all of your business will. If you're just kind of at a maintained level, your business will probably start to die in about a year or two.

Wow. Definitely don't want that to happen.

Yep.

So appreciate everything you're sharing, but I want to ask you, how did you get into this? What's your background, and why did you choose selling on Amazon?

Well, I actually created the Amazon algorithm, so I know everything about it now. I'm just kidding.

You said that pretty convincingly. I was like, wow, really? I didn't remember seeing that on the one sheet.

No, actually, literally. It was sort of by passion, by chance, and by keeping an open mind, I'd say that's probably the number one thing. I tie this back to having watched that movie yes man with Jim Carrey. So back in, like, maybe 2007 or so, there was a movie called yes Man. And in that movie, Jim Carrey is told he has to say yes to everything that comes along because he's kind of a negative Nancy. He doesn't want to do anything, doesn't want to go hang out with his friends. And then he starts doing it just as a kind of a trial, just to see what happens. He's like, well, what have I got to lose, basically? So he starts saying yes to way too many things, ends up partying too hard, doing way too many things that he shouldn't be doing, constantly over, you know, overextending himself. And he basically finds out that, you know, a lot of great things happen, but also he's burning himself out. So I kind of trialed this at some point and just said, I'm going to say yes more often. Not all the time, but way more often. And eventually it got me to a point where I started. I was friends with a guy who actually sold some products, some cell phone accessories on Amazon, and I was working as an operations manager of an indoor go kart facility here in Las Vegas. So not applicable in any sense to Amazon. But I did have some business.

Sounds fun, though.

Yeah, it is. It's a lot of fun to raise go karts when you want, but yeah. So, like, I kind of understood how to run that business. I got that business profitable from a sense that it never actually was profitable because it was a location that was kind of just kind of recently opened and they lost money every single month. I found a way to get higher conversion rates on some of the upsold stuff. Much, much higher. And essentially from never having profit to then 6,000 profit, 20,000 profit, 30,000 profit. And then basically at that exact same time, I'd met a guy who had started selling on Amazon. We became friends, we started talking. He said, you know what, you should try this out. You should come work with me, or, you know, we can kind of coordinate and partner up on this or whatever. And I said, well, I don't really know that much about Amazon. I've bought a couple of things, but I haven't really sold anything and don't know much about it. He's like, no, I can show you all that stuff. So I was like, all right, I'll keep an open mind. Let's go see what this looks like. So he kind of showed me the basics, the ins and outs of, like, how it's performed. You gotta have some customer service, gotta do this kind of stuff. Didn't show me anything about, like marketing or sales tactics or anything like that. But at that time I was, I kind of understood basic business marketing, all that stuff. So ads and all that good stuff. And then I just said, okay, look, you know what, here's what I make at my current job. I will need at least a base element of money to come work with you. Otherwise it's not going to work because I have bills to pay. Like, you know, you have a decent amount of saved up income. I didn't at the time. So we did, we partnered up, essentially. I then the day before I was supposed to start working with him, his account got shut down. He was doing $330,000 or more, something like that, on that account in a month, per month. And it got shut down. And I was like, oh, crap, I just quit my job. I've literally come work with you and now I've got no job. Long story short, we decided to get it going again. We had to open another account. We had to do things. You know, he was actually, they were, they were doing some nefarious review stuff that was kind of the wild west back then. So, like asking people to give you A five star review for a free product kind of thing. Amazon quickly found that out, said you can't do that, shut the account down. And so we had to start a whole new thing. So we went basically From April in 2013 at $0 and then by Christmas we were at $500,000 a month over 30 days and getting disbursements over $100,000 every two weeks. So congratulations. A very fast learning lesson of now I've got to figure out how to do everything from scratch because it would have been really nice to just jump on a floating sailing ship and just steer it a little bit. But we actually had to like rebuild the ship, pull it off the bottom of the ocean, put it back on water and start to figure out how to actually move it forward. So it was very quick learning.

Would you say that you learned a lot more than you would have had it been easier to maintain?

Absolutely. And the other thing was, is that that happening kind of threw off his passion and drive to want to continue doing the day to day grind. So essentially he just said, I'm throwing you at you. And then I had a couple of support people with me, customer service representatives and stuff, and he said, I'm throwing you guys out there, you guys are going to figure out how to get this all back. He gave us some, some guidance on some things, but we actually literally had to figure out how to do it all because he was like, I built it up and I don't really want to spend the time to do it again. So that's why I got you guys with this team to do that for me. Didn't really give me a whole lot of instruction or guidance. There were some training videos that we watched that kind of helped with the product part, but not nothing to do with the business, nothing to do with the overall elements that we needed to learn. So yeah, it was, it was basically a crash course. And you know, he kind of was like, I just want you guys to make me money so that way I can not have to do this and grind in it. So he was very entrepreneurial spirit, entrepreneurial, spirited. And so that's what we did. We said, you know, in spite of that we're going to make this work. And we did.

Would you say the foundation is also stronger now because of it?

Yeah. So the idea here is that we stopped working together about two and a half years after we started working together. Essentially I had outsourced everything that I was doing, even to the point of managing the business and managing the team to an outsourced team in the Philippines. And I just said, you know what? I'm only working probably five productive hours a week, if that, so you could probably take over those five hours again. So I basically created that whole business back to the point and now he's able to take that back over. And he was. And this was actually in 2015. And I haven't worked with him since then. But I also haven't worked for any employer since August of 2015. And because of that, finding all those ways to actually build a solid foundation and, and grow a business the right way and not do some tricks like that to get accounts suspended is exactly how I built my two new brands after I stopped working with him. And then how we've helped thousands of people actually grow their businesses as well.

That's fantastic. And I can relate. I haven't done. I've been intrigued by the Amazon selling, but I've never done it in the way that you're speaking of. But there's been many times in business where I'm like, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks. And then some, six 12 months later, I'm like, this is awesome. You have all that insight that no one goes through unless you've been through.

Kind of like a diamond, it gets crushed. You know, all that pressure, all that pressure. It's like if you can come out the other side and not break.

Yep. You.

You're at a new level. And for the people who can relate to that, cool. For the ones who can't, I've actually changed in the last couple years when I say, I hope you don't go through this and that I've actually been like, I hope you go through it. It's not as horrible as it was for me. But go through it sooner and faster because you'll be a better person for it long term. And you can. No one can ever take that from you.

And I agree. I think the best school or learning that you can get is by making mistakes. Yeah.

Experience.

If you're afraid to make mistakes, you're probably not going to be successful in any business.

And the wisdom, what was it? The knowledge is learning from your own mistakes. Wisdom is learning from others. And I agree with that. However, if you never try anything on your own, you never build up your risk tolerance or your confidence because you're always.

I don't know, I don't know. I don't want to do anything wrong. It's like sometimes I'm like, this is probably going to blow up, but I'm willing to take the Hit let's. I'm tired of thinking about it. We got to do something.

I haven't found a business yet that has zero risk.

So if you have. If you're risk adverse, don't start your own business. Go get a paycheck, go get a job, and that's totally fine. Just understand that everything that you do in a business will have some level of risk in it. It's not going to be huge if you do things right, but it will be. Not everything is going to work out the way you want, perfectly from day one.

Agree 100%. And the way I always thought about it was at least if it's my business, I can control and learn and grow and we can do things and put it in place to minim it down the road, even though it still sucks now. But if it's someone else, they might, you know, if the company's. The bottom's falling out and the in. The owner who's the leader isn't being the leader and doesn't care, there's nothing you can really do except watch it, maybe take some pictures. It's like being on the Titanic and it's like, do we get a lifeboat or not? Well, maybe, maybe not, depending on the company. That's a horrible situation.

Exactly.

I think so. Thank you for sharing this. I have one more question before we thank our sponsor, but it is the thing I was saying earlier. The wheel of whatever. Oh, you'd like to. You'd be happy to know I got this from Amazon.

I was gonna say, do you know what it is? It's like a Zoetrope type thing for, like, making cartoons or whatever. Right.

Oh, I'm gonna need to get another one so I can do that. I love animation. That's my background. It's actually hamster wheel.

Oh, okay.

It's. Oh, you get yellow. So my question for you is, what band would you love to play with?

Oh, actually, this is funny because I've always said that if I could ever play with one band, it would be. It would be this particular one. But if I could play with any individual musician. So I'm going to give you two answers. So any individual musician would be Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters. I don't care what instrument he plays. I don't care what instrument I play. Playing with that guy would be awesome because he's got so much energy. He's an awesome dude. If I could play with any band, I've always said this, and it's probably a band. You've maybe Never heard of, but it's actually the Toadies who are from Texas. And they had that one song that you probably remember, Possum Kingdom from back in the 90s, which is something like.

Actually, I don't know, it's appropriate because it's not. It's not like explicit, but it's like, do you want to die? Do you want to die? Make up your mind. Anyway, so that was their like big hit single back in like 95, 96. And I've been a fan since that album, which was their first album. And just the way that they play music is very high level, like, like very tight knit, very, very fat. Like not necessarily fast paced, but up tempo tight, very, very measured. And the band just. It's a rocking band. So if you haven't heard of them, check them out for sure.

Nice. Well, I appreciate that and I appreciate the two part because I use that to just basically have carte blanche and ask whatever the heck I feel like asking. But I appreciate that you expanded on it because I'm gonna have to remember that because there is a difference between playing with the band and playing with a music because they may have been in multiple bands or on their own.

Nirvana and Foo Fighters. And he's been successfully touring as an incredibly famous rock and roll musician for 30 years now.

Yeah, the other one I'm thinking of is Slash.

Oh yeah.

It'd be an interesting after party with Slash. Let's put it that way.

All right, well, we're going to thank our sponsor and come back for the.

Imperfect action round titles, cover designs and promotion. Oh my. You are all excited to achieve your goal, maybe even dream of becoming an author to serve more people with your business. But it's turning out to be a lot more than you expected, huh? I get it. I've done it numerous times personally. Visit getmybusinessbookpublished.com today to take the first step on making this process enjoyable, dare I even say fun, and most definitely profitable. Your business and audience depend on it. But you know what, don't take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors like Lori.

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Back with the imperfect action round. Isaac, are you ready to take imperfect action?

I am.

I got three questions for you. 60 second or less answers. The first one is, what is the fastest path to the profits?

What was the fastest path to profits?

Yes.

Man. Planning. Before you ever make any investment, do your research and then make sure you have the budget before you even start. And then follow the plan and execute actions as you should. I mean, don't stray from the plan too much before you actually start to test stuff out.

And what I'm hearing there is you're not just speaking about Amazon right there at all.

Yep. There's a lot of businesses that don't plan anything out, and then in six months to a year, they fail.

Oh, great. Thank you for that. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

Picking products that they can't afford to be successful, which means that they're picking products that are out of their budget range to compete on. And then essentially maybe they're. They're only ordering like a hundred or two hundred products or units of the product. Then they sell out, and then they can't afford to reorder because they haven't got the money back from Amazon fast enough. So now I have to do the whole process again. So it really is improper planning. And that's the thing that causes people to fail more often than not, because they keep repeating that cycle over and over and over.

So they should be picking products profitably. Say that three times fast.

Exactly. Pick profitable products and plan for their profit before you actually even invest in.

Them and have a process.

Yep.

Excellent. What is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Well, what we would say is create a brand that resonates with your consumers. So we always talk about be your ideal client. Understand all their ins and outs, their problems, their joys, their frustrations, what they like about the products that you sell, how they use them, and what they identify with as the person within that niche or that interest. So if you're selling bicycle equipment, you should probably understand what it is to be a bicycler, right? Like you should probably be bicycling. You shouldn't just sell that stuff just because you think it's a great market to sell in. Understand your ideal client and that'll actually generally help you prosper a lot faster.

Excellent. Do you have any activities, cheat sheets, checklists? Do you have any.

Training material for picking the right client and narrowing down the avatar?

We do actually on our site goteamreal.com so go team real. So three words combined into one dot com. Go there. There's free training. It talks about how to understand your ideal client. It's kind of like a, it's I think maybe a 45 minute free training overall, like the total amount, you can obviously speed it up if you want, but it goes into a lot of the stuff, planning, you know, the ideal client, all that stuff, and then honestly like it gives you the best overview I've seen out there of how the actual business works. Not just how to pick a random product, not just how to sell something on Amazon. We're not talking about, you know, going out and buying some Tide detergent and putting an Amazon listing up or whatever and selling it there. We're talking about creating your own brand with your own private label products that you can then resell as you know, the only company that has that exact product.

Excellent. Excellent. What books would you recommend to Expert Authority World?

I'm sure you've probably got a lot of these recommendations. I'll give three the Slight Edge by Jeff Olson Basically, it's a lot like the one thing where it's like just focus on the next thing you need to do to get to where your goal is. You have to plan the goal first. 4 hour workweek by Tim Ferriss I will say that that's probably a very, very recommended book, but the one thing especially about that is it's E commerce related and it tells you exactly how you can live the lifestyle of working only four hours a week by doing an E commerce lifestyle or an E commerce business. And then literally one of my favorite authors, as far as business goes, it's not even necessarily business related, but it's John C. Maxwell, he talks a lot about leadership, understanding how to be a good person and how that translates to good business practices. He's kind of off the Napoleon Hill, think and grow rich kind of offshoot of that. But he does a great job at, you know, anytime I read one of his books, I'm like, literally underlining, like, every other sentence. Like, man, I got to remember that. That's a great quote. That's great. That's great. And I'm like, everything he puts into a book is like, literally gold for your brain. So if you can read anything by John C. Maxwell, that's. That's well worth your time.

All great recommendations, and I agree, especially with John Maxwell, excellent author. Thank you for those. And where would you like people to go again?

Yeah, so just go to goteamreal.com you can check out the free information that we have for you there. If you are interested, you can, you know, reach out to us and let us know how you're interested. We don't, you know, we don't do these, you know, business, you know, podcasts and jump on with Mario to let you guys, you know, see and know about us. We just want you guys to be informed and educated about these things so you don't make a bunch of mistakes. We'd rather you guys save that money if, like, if you're like, hey, I've got a thousand dollars. I'm going to go out. But listen, $1,000 is not going to make you successful on Amazon. It's a good start to growing, to that. But don't just think that's all you're going to need to invest. So we want to stop people from making these mistakes, getting burned, and then having a lot of these people that are, you know, driving these rented Lamborghinis, telling them exactly how to live that lifestyle, they're not living that lifestyle. That's just a promotional video. Don't fall for the traps. I drive a Toyota Corolla. I'm not going to tell you to go out and rent a Lamborghini ever. It's pointless. So listen to people who are really doing the business, who actually wants you not to fail, not to make those mistakes. And if you, if you enjoy that, you know, there's free training there. You can actually use that and implement that yourself.

Well, thank you so much for being real and just sharing the truth. It's been a lot of fun. I appreciate your wisdom and sharing it with Expert Authority World.

Been an honor. Thank you, Mario.

All right, Expert Authority World. We have another great episode here today. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless.

You're already the expert, but have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you 24? 7 and if so, how well are you promoting it? With the Expert Authority Effect publishing method, it's easier and more profitable than ever. Visit getmybusinessbookpublished.com today and take the first step to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book. In eight weeks, visit getmybusinessbookpublished.com and take the first step knowing it will be your very best and you're leaving it.

All on the field.

Oh yeah, and it's also free. Once again, that's getmybusinessbookpublished.com hey, thanks for listening to today's episode.

I hope you got a lot out of it.

I know I sure did. If you haven't done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show and also be sure to check out eainterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview, video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you tomorrow.