How To Advertise Your Amazon FBA Business (Maximize Your Profits)

We want to find the new heroes, the heroes of tomorrow. That is the key to selling on Amazon and to all business. Okay? Apple's not resting on their own stuff here. Your goal is to find your heroes of tomorrow, your hero products of tomorrow, your big wins of tomorrow are not what you did yesterday.

Welcome to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, a show where we interview high voltage entrepreneurs growing and scaling through e-commerce, real estate, and other wealth without Wall Street ventures, showing you the path to making your first or next million. Hey folks, welcome back to the High High Voltage Business Builders Podcast.

As always, like, share, comment, engage, help us beat big tech, get the message out there. I don't care if you say something hateful, just get the algorithm involved. So we are here speaking today about Amazon FBA, which you might hate too, but that's okay. Just keep listening. You might learn something today from our guest who has a long experience, deep experience, and very good knowledge in this marketplace of playing with things. We're gonna go over things like fees and what it means to you today if you're playing in the fee world of Amazon and how to get away from that, how to increase margins. If you're struggling, why friends don't let friends sell less than $20 products on Amazon, and probably a lot of things around that we'll cover in short order, including the acquisition and exiting of these companies, which is a most important thing you guys always hear me talk about, which is building with the end in mind. Aaron, welcome to the call, brother.

Awesome. Thank you so much, brother.

Good to have you here. So you, you're on the Amazon warpath. Tell us a little bit about that.

The warpath.

Wait, wait.

I'm on.

Yeah, it's a warpath, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean—

Or isn't it?

Yeah, so I, here's the way, like, so Andy Jassy, he came out with a statement just in this first quarter 2024, and he made this bold statement. He said, listen, no matter what Amazon's doing with their fees, no matter how much we increase it, we have 3 new types of fees or 4 new types of fees. We're increasing our rates. He's saying reducing our cost to serve. And he says, regardless of all that, sellers are selling more and doing better than if they would go off on their own and not be on Amazon. That was his big statement.

Yeah.

And I guess some people were like, what are you talking about? What do you mean this? But I go, listen, if that wasn't true, why are there so many millions of people going to Amazon to find revenue, to find the profit, to find business? Because they have hundreds of millions of customers and we have access to them. And so if you have any margin higher than zero, uh, you're making money on there. And, and potentially if you got into another business, you would've done it better. That is possibly true. At the same time, for me, I tried other businesses and many times, and when I found Amazon, it's like, wow, this is quite profitable. Yes. Our margins this year are shrunk by quite a bit. Compared to last year. That is true.

Yeah.

However, we also weren't, we weren't prepared. Other years we had a massive amount of new products coming out and serving in a way, in a widening sphere of influence of more new products, more new categories going crazy. And last year we kind of slowed down for one reason or another. Okay. Which I won't justify. That was a mistake on our part, but we learned from it. We go, okay, good. Now we're putting our investments heavy into making the end of this year and next year be huge. And we do think we can revert our margins just by having products, as you're saying, above the $20 mark, right? Even way higher than that. And things that are special. And you have to work for the customer. Realize your job is not to extract money from Amazon. Your job is to deliver a product that is better to the customer in a better way. And if you do that well, you will have margin, you will have profits. And it doesn't matter if your margin, listen, is low in percentage, if you still have a high dollar amount. Okay. Cisco, they're at 2 to 3% profit margin and it's multi-billion dollar company and they take home hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. It's like, okay, I'm okay with that. I'm happy to be at 50% margin.

Economies of scale.

Yeah.

But who's yelling about that? Typically it's those sellers who have really not played the business game. They played the side hustle and the hobby business. Am I wrong? They're really not in many ways understanding the fundamental business growth, omnichannel, CLTVs and LTVs, and actually pulling more out of existing customers from brands and secondary products. Is that a fair statement? I mean, to pick on anybody who's trying to verify Amazon.

I, I do think that there are people who are, I would say, defeated, that they've kind of given up and say, the second you say there's no way anyone's making money on Amazon, I quit. I'm not gonna play that game. When you say that to yourself, no matter what size you're at, if you're at $10 million, $100 million, or $2 million or $500,000, whatever, it means you're on the way out because you've lost, you've lost the battle to somebody who's taking your margin. And they're not, it is very unlikely for someone to do an entire business and they have no plan to be profitable and they probably are profitable already and you may just not know it. But people, they just make assumptions like that and then they say, well, no one's making money. I'm done. Amazon's terrible. I'm going to go start a lemonade stand down the street.

I mean, like, better options in other areas with smaller amounts of traffic and less customers. I look at it as opportunity cost. And so we have played, and I think, you know, this in the $50 to $200 plus in retail price point for the last 3 or 5 years, we've shifted all of our brands, all of our margins, all of our effort has been to move into a new affinity, the tier 2 we call it. And out of that Amazon mosh pit where everybody's fighting over similar products and spatulas and all the other nonsense that are playing in there and giving people an opportunity to really make a profitable venture, even if it's $20 or $12. We have a net profit $12 margin that says all after costs, load of goods, line of goods cost, et cetera, et cetera. You gotta have more than $12 or something. Don't launch the product. What do you say about that?

I think it's a great strategy. That's a good niche. Whatever way you go forward, you need to have something that works for you. So recently I was thinking of launching a product that was over $1,000 in price point. And I thought like, this is blue ocean. There's almost, there's like 2 competitors that do anything decent. It's going to be great. Built it out this. And in the end I said, you know what? I'm not dedicating the right amount of resources on it. While it's a good theory, I have my entire team going in one direction. And that's working. And I'm not going to, I don't want to divide my attention. So what's a good strategy if you do very well? So on my podcast, I had Irshad Ganji from Mr. Pen. His average price point is like something like $7 or $8, right? That's his average. The guy is taking, the guy is making a boatload of money, great profits at the end of the year, great sales. He's in the top 20 on seller ratings right now. And that's his price point. Why would he like that? If you're there, why would you have any interest to go to $50 products, $100 products? It just doesn't make sense. So I think you've got to go into Find the strength. And if your decision is, hey, I'm gonna go heavy into this category for $100, $200, well, make a brand around something that has a lot of products in that category and, and get strong and develop in it.

Prosper in it.

Prosper in your niche. Yeah. Open a secondary brand. I would only argue that if I had a $7 or $8 product and I was driving a bunch of value, mm-hmm, it could easily offer a bundled solution of that product.

Mm-hmm.

For $14 instead of $16 and double my profit margin for the same amount of effort.

Mm-hmm.

The thing about it is, is that, and, and I completely appreciate what you're saying, if you're in your niche, stay in your niche. Don't get unfocused from things. that are opportunities that may be more costly than anything else. And I've done that too. And one of the amateur moves in many ways in business, other than to hedgehog down into, as Jim Collins says in Good to Great, just hedgehog down into those areas and stay extremely focused on what you do really well and just keep digging and digging and digging. And I think when people get going, some of the negative feedback I hear and this complaint and this, and the fees and stuff, and you look at their business or look at what they're doing and they're very disjointed.

Yes.

They've got a product in outdoor gear, a product in sports. They got a product over here in health. And it's like, okay, which one are you? Like what brand, what, Product baits. Well, I'm still figuring that out. Well, it's like, which ones make any the most money?

And yeah, and go from there. That's not a bad idea. Like, that is not a bad idea at all. But I think it's, it is a failure to develop a category of products that go well together and that serve one customer. Because you develop knowledge as you sell, right? If you've sold 10,000 units, 100,000 units, millions of units, you're learning about what this customer needs, what the complaints are, how to service them. And you can find, oh, like, like us, we asked our, our audience like, well, what's the product that you want? And happened to be this basically a cast iron thing that goes inside the oven.

Mm-hmm.

To cook food. And we're like, okay, we're making it. We're, we're paying for that right now. We're in that going, 'cause that's what they want from us. But they know that they trust us on certain products. And now if we're adding categories and things that they want, they already don't have to be like, oh, is this a good brand?

Not a good brand?

No, they know that we're doing good and we are working to service that person and we're building things out for that. And if you look at any of the great companies, right? They focus on single things, single customers, right?

Selling more of the same thing in different packaging. I've talked about borrowing this from retail many times. If you got the iPad, you got the iPhone, you got the iWatch, you got basically the same product in all these different packages.

That is true.

Yeah.

And once you go into that, just package it all up differently. Even the packaging can differentiate a product you're already selling to a higher valuation. Some of these little simple things, and Amazon's really looking at variations very closely right now and looking and saying, hey, if you just image variation difference your product, we're going to hammer you, right? You actually have to innovate create a differentiation in the product. For the strategy that we're talking about, there's a little asterisk behind what I just said. So people are like, oh, all you have to do is just create variations. No, you actually have to create separate products. But it just gets easier to follow the market as you do that. Because as you said very astutely, and you have a lot of experience on this, the market will tell you what additional products they're willing to accept from you. And sometimes you got to be okay offering them, hey, I like this. And they're like, no, nope, don't like it.

Okay, great. Pull it back.

If they want the $1,000 product and you sell 1 unit a day and you're making $600 in profit, yay. Like there's no one argues with that, right? Or maybe $500 in profit off of $1,000.

Even $200, I'd be happy all day.

Well, just one a day, right? I mean, it just opens a revenue stream of profitability. No one's going to argue with that. Go find 10 more of those, right? It's really about growth and it's brand. Ultimately what you and I are talking about, just to differentiate what someone might be thinking about products, because when I hear a lot of these complaints and maybe too, you too hear this with the fees and other issues, everyone's still at that product argument level. They're not actually just talking about the brand, are they?

Yeah. I mean, these fees, it is inevitable, right? We are in an inflationary time period and it's gonna go up. And if you're the people that get hurt the most, I think are where you're somewhere in the middle, right? Because the lowest price person.

Yep. Yep.

A lot of times they don't get hit as hard if they're making a profit on the lowest. They went up, they're still the lowest because everyone else has to raise their prices too. So there's some—

Well, those fees changed by $17 under or $20 under now, so they actually make more. On the sub products, it got a little bit back, right? Because the fee structure changed, it went below that mark, to your point.

Yeah.

More.

Yeah. Although they— I mean, that was a— it really saddened me when they took it out because although they gave people a lot of reductions, they took out the Smaller Light program, which was so fantastic in the last like 6 to 9 months that it was up. I mean, we were printing money in the Small Light program and they nixed it and they basically Because what happened is people who knew about it were printing and everyone else was getting hurt. So they said, okay, guess what? Everybody's kind of in it on a default. So the people who were taking advantage of it got hurt and the people who weren't actually got improved. So the, whatever. But at the end of the day, each product, there is a price point, right? There are not companies that continually go for years on end losing money on a product and keep reordering. It's extremely uncommon. So. If you are the lowest price, that is a strategy. And then if you are in the middle or in the middle, you could get hurt cuz a lot of fees cuz you're losing it and you can't raise your price. And if you're the highest, that's also probably pretty good too. If you have the best product, you have the best quality, you have branding, you have something special nobody has, that's also a good position.

In other words, you're saying there are a lot of different ways to do this right. And there's of course a lot of different ways to do it wrong.

Yeah.

Which just gets down to individual preference and strategy of kind of where you want, in this instance, to deploy capital and time and energy. It's gonna cost more to deploy a $1,000 product than a $20 one.

Yes.

And so a lot of people want to get into the $20 products, but they missed, and there's opportunity cost and barriers of entry. above certain price points, $50, $60, $99. But we typically find there's a longevity and a price point and ability to acquire a customer, which kind of leads me to PPC and the ability to acquire customers on 50% of searches now that are all no longer just organic. They've got to be PPC driven. So there's a huge change. And of course, COSMO is coming, which I was talking about a little bit this morning on Twitter because the effect of COSMO we've been tracking since the white paper came out and before the white paper came out. Let's go to PPC real quick, if you don't mind, because that's one of those things that inflation is happening in terms of their inflation. of cost per click and changes and knowing that in 2026 they're, you know, going to be moving into the most profitable division they've ever had beyond AWS, which is advertising and marketing as an engine. How do you see and are you adapting and what would you share about all that?

So here's the price of ads are going up by a lot typically, and everyone has a certain budget. And as all the margins squeeze, the advertising goes up, You can't stay what I would call on the average. If you have an average product, you are going to get crushed and beat out of the market. You have to make something special. And in advertising, we're playing now, we're advertising more off of Amazon than we ever have in our history because we know Amazon is now where so many dollars are being placed. And I believe it's gonna continue to grow. They've been growing exponentially.

It, mm-hmm.

I, I think they're gonna pass Google in advertising revenue in the next, I believe it's over 5 to 7 years.

I believe that one of that, maybe by 2028 after they make that full shift.

It's gonna happen. And so typically Amazon was so profitable to advertisers in say 2015 to 2018 or something like that. Like any ads, it was just like, it would be free because people didn't know about it. It's up. I mean, like this little secret trick that we have. To advertise, it's revealed bigger brands know about this now. There are categories where all the clicks are $49 a click for a product that might be $50.

Yes.

Okay. Because they want that recurring revenue. So it's getting to be a bloodshed. So what can we do? Like what other places can we go to? So we're seeing how much you can advertise on TikTok, on the Facebooks, on all these different things. I know some people that have gone back to like, they're like direct mail, like crazy things like that where—

Direct mail has been big in the millennial group.

Yeah. Because you think—

18 to 35 is buying things on direct mail.

I just read this the other day, not to, not to cut you off. Well, no, but that's the thing.

Buyer group, big buyer group in the dark.

Where people are not looking typically is where the best opportunity is. And so, let's say whatever, 5 years ago, 7 years ago, it could have been Amazon, but now all the big advertisers are going to Amazon, right? L'Oréal just started selling on Amazon. I believe Nike started selling on Amazon after they had stopped for such a long time. The big brands are going there. They're spending money. You no longer can just take these ad spots for free. And so We're looking to see where can we spend off of Amazon. And I, I met with a seller who's doing tens of millions of dollars and he only advertises off Amazon. He advertises on the Facebooks and everything else, and then the Amazon lifts because of that, but he doesn't play the Amazon ads game. And that's a margin.

Yeah.

We're right now rebuilding our entire site. Okay. We're a shout out to, well, I'm gonna shout them out right now, even though I'm not sure it's gonna work out, but we use a company called Van who made Simple Modern's website and also Hexclad's. Okay. Led by Xavier.

That part. Yep.

And that site's being built and we're planning to go and spend a lot of money to send people to our site. And then from there, some people will go to Amazon. Absolutely. Some people will go to TikTok, some people go wherever, but we're gonna drive awareness for who we are.

Yeah.

And then they'll find us on Amazon, even if we're not advertising, if they saw a good ad and they wanna buy the product, we don't need to take those top spots on Amazon. And so it's something that we're trying. We haven't done it yet, but I, I do believe, as you, as you mentioned, Omnichannel is everything. If you're on all the places and then you find out where it's going to be your best type, your best way to reach your customer and bring that product that you've worked so hard to bring out.

We call it the halo effect. You probably heard it. And it's just that ring of channel opportunity that flows over. And we're seeing DTC flows to Amazon. We're seeing up to 30% of any e-commerce commercials related to products that don't even say go to Amazon, up to 30% are going to Amazon. And we're seeing their TikTok shop traffic. Paid traffic and organic, even if it's not your product, is ending up with brand searches over on Amazon up to 25%. Well, we've had at least one person's brand who blew up on TikTok for her products and then watched her 10x her products on Amazon. The lift was just insane. And so now she went up 2 tiers of sales every day on Amazon. It stayed there while she's continuing to stock up TikTok shops as fast as she can, because that really fast halo effect, we're actually watching it happen more between those 2 channels. Then we're watching them go back to like to the DCC or searching for the websites. They're becoming in a technology, they're becoming platform buyers.

I think that nowadays the website a lot of times has to have an offer and you send them to the website first because that's the most brand loyal people that you can get. They're buying from you directly.

Get them connected to the brand.

And so it's like, good, offer your best deals there. Give your best offers on your own website. Try to get them there. A large percentage of them are going to go instead to the Amazons, possibly the TikToks of the world, right?

Lead capture. Yes, they are.

But if you create them and you get them to want your brand and they talk with your brand, well, they still may want same-day shipping and you're not gonna give that on your website.

You're winning.

So fine, they'll go to Amazon.

Yeah.

But at the same time, they had that experience with you. And then on Amazon, you don't have to fight that bloodbath 'cause they're pretty much gonna go buy your thing.

Omnichannel in 2024 and beyond. We've been yelling at this for years. I know you've known this for years, and I hope anybody who's listening to this will take it away again and say, create the additional channels. Not if, but when, because you can't do it all up front. So focus on one channel until you get enough product brand revenue searches and momentum and take your brand and then quickly start moving it into other channels. SEM search engine stuff in Google is changing dramatically with recent content updates, which is dramatically impacting people's listing abilities or cross-listing abilities with Amazon. But you're seeing things like the YouTube channels and SEM starting to take over that click-to-sale ratio. And it's actually with like the PMax campaigns and stuff we're running, it's stupid cheap to just throw—

So you're running, you're running a lot of PMax right now or what?

Yes. All PMax assets go in and then you just optimize by what is good, high, or best in terms of what the PMax campaign tells you by creative, and you just start eliminating the ones that are not good and leaving the ones that are, and it's dialing in like crazy. And it doesn't take a lot to do it. You can start at $5 a day and just let the data come in and they're gonna fall over to Amazon. It is a demand capture platform now. When I discovered it and you did, it was a discovery platform.

Mm-hmm.

It's where people went to discover products. That shifted somewhere around 5 years ago. I'm gonna say roughly when the DTC world sort of blew up in the Shopify space and Meta, and so many people hammered ads everywhere. The demand capture audience conversation thing we've been discussing in the social media universe started to really cause more demand exposure, demand discovery, right? And brand discovery. And TikTok's kind of revitalized that with their social commerce. So now we're just seeing Amazon has become, as I was discussing with my last guest, a demand capture platform where you can embed your logistics and your done-for-you shipping options through FBA and then port that out And spoke it out to all these other channels. Easy to do, right?

Yeah.

And connect them in the shop.

The shipping on Amazon for items that are very small is unbeatable anywhere else by far.

It really is to this day.

If you have an item less than 3/4 of an inch, right? Like we might have like, say some cutting mats or something to ship that in the post office. It might be like $5 on Amazon. It's like $2.80. Right.

I mean, and they're about to reshift the universe again. I've heard rumors and scuttlebutt that they're going to one-day shipping as a goal here shortly. Yeah.

Oh yeah, I was in, I was in, I had a, I literally met with a couple of news stations at their facility. They built a facility here in Tampa solely for the purpose of creating same-day shipping, right? So like all of the, every single item they're going through and they're doing 25,000 packages a day or something like that. Every single item at their facility is same day. And they created that hub for that purpose only. And it was on the news and this and talked and whatever, but that's absolutely what they're doing.

That's what I'm gearing up for.

Just gearing up.

Cosmo's coming and that's one of the reasons they're going to be able to do that faster. Livestream stuff incentives are going through the roof right now everywhere, more so than just videos. Livestreaming stuff is just going like crazy. Some lady set a record the other day for like $300,000 on a livestream. If I'm not her on TikTok drops every day. So this is incredible. Like you just put the camera up and say stuff.

Crazy.

It's like, how much can you say on this if you don't try?

Right.

The opportunities are just crazy endless.

What, where do you like, okay, I can kind of get an impression.

Maybe people listening are getting this. What are you bullish on? in this year and where do you feel like you're going to be putting your time, energy, and attention and money towards? And what are you kind of hesitating or maybe pulling away from that maybe the year or two you kind of step away from and you just see what's happening and you're kind of making shifts?

Yeah, right now our big focus, and it's pretty much, we lost sight of this. I mean, we were going this big in 2019, 2020 in terms of adding products. But the truth is, if your percentage for each sale is going to go down, okay, it will. This is not a, Unless you invent something that's way more expensive. But if you are selling stuff that is not like literally an invention of like from zero, like a Scrub Daddy kind of thing where no one has anything and they can't do it 'cause it's patented, your margins are gonna go down. So knowing your margins are gonna go down, okay, you must be in new markets. You have to be in new markets, in new categories. You have to, because if you're in the same category, if you're relying on the products that you had before, you are going to lose. I am bullish on finding the new hero products, right? Our hero product has been our milk frother for many years now. I think maybe 5 years or so.

Yeah.

I don't want that to be a hero product anymore. I want to find the new hero products that— the idea is we cannot be resting on the victories of yesterday. So I have 3 products, huge. We're talking about products that First orders are half a million dollars.

Okay.

Multiple of them. And we're gonna go in extremely hard in categories and we want to find the new heroes, the heroes of tomorrow. That is the key to selling on Amazon and to all business. Okay. Apple's not resting on their own stuff.

All businesses.

Your goal is to find your heroes of tomorrow, your hero products of tomorrow, your big wins of tomorrow, because they are not what you did yesterday. Okay. If you look at any single company, period, if they go to a new level, it is because they hit a new gold. They struck oil in a new place because things change and markets change. And the guys that do not change, they get left behind. So I am bullish in finding new categories where you can be at the top. Because yes, e-commerce is growing. The percentage of growth is slower than it's been in the history of time. So it's growing like maybe 2, 3, 4% in a year, which is the slowest growth. Before, you just stayed in the same place. E-commerce grew 10, 15%, and you were up just because e-commerce was growing and there weren't that many people coming in. Yeah. Now there's more people coming than ever. The market is growing slower than ever. So if you keep your same spot, your growth is either zero or negative or hardly almost anything. This is something that is new. So the idea is find your new Heroes, finding the heroes of tomorrow. And that is the only mantra that I am operating in our own companies. What is the next score?

Find your new heroes.

I love it.

Always have a process of innovating and conditioning a pipeline of products. Something I will always agree with and continually talk about finding those additional products and developing. It's 2, 3, 4, 5. It's an investment strategy. You don't know that they're all going to take off, but you know that one of them is going to take off. And when it does, it's going to do more than all the other ones combined. And you'll have found that new gold mine and then you'll expand it out. into variations and types and go wide on it as we've discussed. And that will create a great new platform for you guys. If you're listening to that, you also have to understand there's a barrier of entry. This is why I would never say that this is for a brand new person who has no capital to do it. I've always told people this repeatedly. You're going to have to capitalize this business, and that's a barrier to entry for a lot of people. But realistically, doing it the right way, that is also your opportunity cost versus doing other things that cannot grow or reach hundreds of millions of people who want to buy your products. And there's so much upside potential. We haven't talked about your past and what that means for upside potential. Maybe you want to talk about that for a few minutes here with people just so they can get a scope of what I'm saying in terms of growth and opportunity when this market is done right.

Yeah. So, I mean, we started Amazon and I want to say the initial capital we paid for a course, okay, Amazing Selling Machine. We lost, you know, lost, but we actually, it was the best investment, but it was $4,000. Boom. That's gone. It was actually $5,000, but I got a buddy of mine to rebate me $1,000 because he got affiliate commissions.

Okay.

Don't tell Matt Clark that.

Yeah, yeah, no, he's all good with it. He didn't get anything changed, so. He's all good with it. Actually, he's coming on the podcast tomorrow.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, and then the product, our initial product was somewhere around $3,000. Okay. And then plus I think we paid like $300 to design packaging, paid another like $300 for photography, somewhere in that range. So all in, we're under 10 grand to start. Okay. That. Multiplied very quickly. But when that grew, when we sold out of our first 300 units, whatever, and I was like, oh, okay, we need to order more. Okay, I need to order 1,000. Oh wow, I need to order 2,000. And in fact, for the entire year after we started selling, because it was going well, it didn't mean I had more money. I mean, I had less money. I had to put more money into the business. I want to say we probably put in $35,000 into the business more Before we took any money out of it, possibly more. I mean, at that point, my, I didn't even have an LLC set up. It was all my personal account. And it was like, okay, what's what? Where's the cash flow? What's— I was just, I just knew I had to put money in that account because I'm like, oh, wire is due. We have no money. We just have inventory. Okay, cool. Flip it. And so tens of thousands of dollars more after you find success. So now that's, that number has gone up probably. Like if I did that same product now, it would never succeed. I mean, I don't think it would. Even if I put all the time I put into it. I was working, I was probably putting in 2 to 3 hours on ads every single day when I had one product. I was putting out blog posts all the time. I would promote and play, I would do everything I could to make that product go because at that time I had no money, but I had time. So when you have time, you have an ability to go and post on all the social medias and go to Twitter and go to this and go reach out to an influencer directly and fight. Like you have the sweat equity. And so right now I don't do that for every single product that I have.

Yeah.

So when you're starting a company, if you're going to start it from zero, what do you have? You have the time. And what you can do is you ask customers what they actually want. And you've seen products go viral when it's a person's first time ever selling a product because they actually researched, oh, you do, you have some cleaning solution. Well, oh, you don't want this one. You don't want this chemical in there. Okay. I'll do without chemical. They researched something and they go to some community that they asked and said, here's my product, check it out. And their stuff sells out because they did the sweat equity. That got them to find out what the customer wanted, because the big businesses a lot of times cannot do it. So that's the easiest and fastest way to open. Find out what people want and make them something that doesn't exist that they want. And then there, you don't need marketing dollars. What you need is sweat equity. Time.

Yeah, we literally just had a conversation with one of my clients about this because of the type of, uh, product that he has, and he is also a firefighter. And the whole concept was, look, man, you got time and you got some equity in here. Literally in the same conversational framework, go out and run an event, go to the fire stations, get them together, build this event together, get your product there. Get it sponsored, make the t-shirts, show up, organize this thing, put your brand all over it, give 'em a QR code to go buy the product, and you're gonna crush it. Just get the entry fees to make the thing break even, and you're gonna make it all on retail, plus get all the brand value, all the formatted videos, and everything is gonna be a gold mine for you, and everybody's gonna love you. Like, that's something he can do in sweat equity for the business, and it's gonna reward him greatly 'cause he's gonna get all these fire station guys working with his products.

And the key thing is, dude, the product Should be improved as a result, right? It's not so much get all the local marketing, but find out what they need. 'Cause they're gonna need the same thing that people need all across the country, right? As opposed to getting your name out locally, learn from individuals and change that product. And that would be an easier home run for him.

Yeah.

Is he, I mean, he has, he's just a firefighter and he's going to use for the, what we call the circle of confidence that he has around him to do exactly what Aaron's talking about, which is research, discover, And then test market. I'll, I'll finish that statement in my words. You can use your own. Test the market. So many people don't get— I got a guy coming the other day. He's like, someone told me to order like 8,000 units of this product. And I looked at the problem like, dude, don't even like order 8,000 of this product. You have no idea like that's gonna sell. Well, all the numbers are right. All the tools tell me the number's right. No, man.

Like, I agree.

Don't order 8,000. Go order 100, go order 500 and test the market. See what they like. Find out, innovate, customize one or two things and then see if you're worth— if it's worth ordering. Hey guys, never make that mistake. People sell that crap all the time. That's great advice, dude. Is there a question I didn't ask you yet or something you want to bring up I didn't get to yet in our call?

I mean, if you want to talk about— so a couple of things we're doing, listing optimizations now. We're doing like listing teardowns, not live. I just record it. But if someone has some listing they want to have a teardown, find me on LinkedIn, send me, hey, I want this listing to be teared down. And then I'll make a point, see how many I can put in. On one of these next episodes to tear down those listings. That's the—

Love it. Great offer, guys. We'll put the notes in here or look up Aaron on LinkedIn and certainly take him up on that offer to see what insights him and himself and his team can get for you all.

And then, and then if you were looking to sell your brand and you want an offer from us, we have really fantastic offers for great brands. So we're typically looking for things that's doing over $1 million in profit. And if you're in that range, also find me on LinkedIn, send me a message. We are buying brands. We've probably bought 6, 7 brands so far.

For brand growth, acquisition of brand growth, or are you mini aggregating?

We're basically just buying and then putting under one roof. So you can call it aggregating, right? I would say we operate very, very differently.

But yeah, I didn't want to define you with other things.

I mean, we're looking to buy some assets now off people who are failing.

Very cool.

You know, well, so are we.

So we're going to have more conversations about that because we're going to be able to share some of that aspect. We're looking for very similar types of business as well. So we'll continue that conversation.

All right.

So if there's someone I could introduce you to in our network or not in our network, both live, historical, or whatever, it was in my power, who would that person be? Sit down, have lunch, pick their brains, take a few minutes with them. I've had answers from Elon Musk to Andre 3000 to, uh, who, what was the guy this morning? Oh, P.T. Barnum. That was one from this morning. P.T.

Barnum. Didn't anybody ask already? How are you gonna, are you gonna talk to them from the dead?

Well, I gotta say, we, we, in all time and space, there's a caveat. If they're alive, we're gonna do the 6 degrees of separation, which means somebody in here might know and can tag them. But if they're dead, Then it's just a hypothetical.

Yeah, I don't know if I have a great question for that, right? So typically, I guess in business, I mean, honestly, I would probably want to go and talk to, I guess, Jeff Bezos. I mean, let's see if there's anything like— what's interesting, I think a play that they have that they're missing potentially is their own brands. I mean, honestly, people say like how AmazonBasics and all these guys are really going so hard, but I disagree. Apparently, like, Target—

I disagree.

Target— I totally disagree. Has 25% of the sales that are one of their brands. Amazon has between like 2 and 3%. So—

They're also the worst rated brands on their platform.

It's crazy. It's crazy. So I think honestly, I could do a, like, if you imagine you take like the Thrasios, these aggregator people, and instead you have Amazon do that play and make it all Amazon brands, I think they would go huge. And hey, if I could be a part of doing that, I would, that would be cool. That would be cool. Like, I tagged Jeff in here. Let's make that happen.

Who knows what can, what can go down? I'm gonna toss in my idea too, just in case Jeff is listening. And, and if you don't mind, I'm gonna throw mine in real quick, which is if you don't buy TikTok Shop, guys, 'cause that may be an option, Amazon, 'cause that's your social commerce leverage, the lever to pull, then just enable it in the Amazon Prime app. Let my wife, okay, make videos on all the products she's already buying in which she can get money off of those to respend in the stuff she buys or maybe make some cash. You turn 150, 200 million people into social commerce and instantly within your Amazon app. And it's not that hard to do. Just track them, let your buyers review the products and make money on it. And you will actually crush that. Social commerce is sitting on your app. You just haven't done it. It's right in front of you. So there's my idea for Jeff, if he's listening.

Let's tag him in the comments, guys.

Degrees of separation, someone in our network might hear this and put us in touch with him. Never say never, right? Aaron, appreciate you coming on and sharing some insights, brother.

Absolutely, brother. Appreciate it.

Let me ask you this. If you're serious about building an e-commerce business starting on Amazon FBA, what if myself and my team worked with you one-on-one to execute the steps outlined in the podcast while helping you discover what the heck to sell, how to make sure it's profitable, and how to successfully launch a brand? Plus, how to do it under a consulting plus performance-driven model where I put a $10,000 skin-in-the-game guarantee for those that show up and are serious about building a real business done with us? If yes, text keyword profit to +1-417-413-4242.

That's right.

That's 1-417-413-4209, and I will personally respond with a few simple questions. If you're not in the US or Canada, please visit voltage dm dot com. That's voltage dm dot com. Click Get Started and book a no-pressure discovery call with me or a member of my team to learn more about the Business Builders one-on-one coaching and mentoring for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and those looking to build an empire or retire using the power of e-commerce. Once again, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new episode of the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast.