Episode #1 - Going from broke to £300,000 in my first 12 months

Hey there. Very, very warm welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast.

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host, Oliver Denier. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 and work from anywhere in the world.

Now, I hope you like that rock and roll intro. Actually made that myself. And playing guitar is definitely one the of one of the things I love spending my time doing. Now, this podcast isn't just about business, okay? It's not just about learning how to make money, how to grow a business and all the intricate detail that goes along with it. Now obviously we're going to be talking about all that kind of stuff, definitely, for sure. I want to give you techniques, I want to give you methods and action steps actually take to get started and build yourself a business. But really this podcast is all about freedom, okay? Now I've managed to build a business within the e commerce industry which actually gives me so much spare time to do the things I enjoy doing, much like playing guitar and other cool stuff like that. I love eating at really awesome restaurants, I love watching films, I love playing PS4, I love traveling, I love teaching people how to get more freedom in their lives and become build businesses and I love helping people along their journey. So this podcast really is mainly about teaching you how to actually get yourself a new level of freedom through starting an E commerce business. And in this episode we're going to discuss a little bit about my journey, how I started, how I went from having pretty much nothing, no money in pretty dire circumstances to actually turning over £300,000 in my first year with my e commerce business. We're going to talk about some action steps which you can actually use and take away to get your journey started. And we're going to touch on a few other things, like, you know, what's possible, what levels can you actually take this stuff to? If you're coming in with a bit more money, where do you start from? Then if you've, you know, got a little bit of savings, you want to invest some money into this business, but you're a little bit unsure, how can you start very small and then scale up? That's exactly what this episode is going to be all about. The future we're going to be talking about in the next few episodes, a little bit more in detail of how you actually start to get your business rolling. What strategies do I use in my business? We're going to go through each strategy in a lot more depth. So I really hope you enjoy what we've got in store for you in this episode and I can't wait to unleash all this awesome content. And you've got so much cool stuff to share. So let me just tell you quickly how I got started out on my journey and how I started to build up my E commerce business. Now, in the beginning, basically my main motivation was the fact that I had next to no money, right? My finances were in quite a bad situation in 2014. Something pretty harsh happened to me and it revolved around the fact that I had no money. I was living with my girlfriend. We were together for around about five years at that point. And she was from Malaysia, I'm from the uk. She was living on a student visa and. And remained in the UK two years after that while she was working. And I'm obviously a UK citizen, so I was able to live there. We wanted to apply to extend her stay in the UK so we could go on to live together, right? And the plan was to get, like a couple's visa and it was all going to be fine, but one month before we applied for this visa, they put a financial requirement on it and we were earning nowhere near the amount that we had to earn to actually qualify. So long. Long story short, she had to leave and it was completely out of our hands. This was really, really tough. But I had a crazy idea in my head of how we were going to overcome it. And I thought to myself, if we could somehow generate an income online, start a business we could run remotely from anywhere in the world, even if we just only earn, say, a thousand pounds a month, we could find somewhere where we could get into the country relatively easy and live on the money we were earning from the online business and continue to earn the money somewhere else, right? So this was kind of my pipe dream. This was kind of my idea. And in the beginning, this is what we set out to do. So that's what happened, basically. And at the start of 2015, I was kind of looking for something that would work, right? I started trying to sell information products. In the beginning, I was actually trying to teach composers how to find paid work. I actually found a bit of paid work as a freelance composer myself, making music for video games. So I wanted to pass this information on as a sort of course and teach other people how to do this. But there was so many skill sets I needed to have in place. I needed to know how to put a course together, how to sell it, how to create websites, how to code. It goes on and on. And on. And it was just really, really tough. So I was trying loads of different things to try and make money. And I'm sure you guys, if any of you have ever looked for opportunities to make money online, there's a lot of crap out there, there's a lot of scams, stuff that just doesn't work. Luckily I didn't get involved in any because, you know, I like to do my due diligence and figure out whether things actually make sense before I dive in. But basically it was tough for a few months and then I stumbled across the world of E commerce. Now what's so fascinating about this business is it's probably one of the most accessible areas of business you can actually get into right now. As you guys know, some of you know me already, I sell on Amazon, okay? So in the beginning, I mean, what I was doing was running around brick and mortar retail stores, like places you can shop at like Tesco's, Asda in the uk, if you're ever in America, be places like Walmart, Sears, Kohl's, Target, and basically I was looking for cheap stock on clearance aisles that I could buy for cheap and then sell for a profit on Amazon. Now basically at this point I had next to nothing. Okay, right in the beginning I had pretty much no money. The only capital I actually did get was about £600 that I had on a credit card which an aqua credit cards ridiculous interest rate of like 35%. And what I did is I took out this card so I could start growing my business. Right, so you can start this with absolutely nothing if you want to. That's the beautiful thing about this business. And you know, E commerce, it's not a joke business, it's real. Like there's $1.5 trillion of revenue going through the market every single year and every year it's growing by 14%. So it's not going anywhere, right? So I thought, well, if I could just get started small and scale up my business somehow in the future, then I'd be part of an industry which is really growing and it really will serve me for a long time. So that's what I started in 2015. I was by myself in the UK, absolutely determined to make something work. E commerce is the path that I chose. So yeah, I was running around retail stores looking for products I could buy, bring home and sell on my Amazon account. Now one of the most amazing things about Amazon actually, and I realized this very early on, is that you don't need to be doing a lot of the labor that you do if you were to sell stuff on any other E commerce platform or even on your own website, right? So if you take a website like ebay, if you wanted to start selling stuff on ebay to make money, every single time you list a product on your account and it sells, you're gonna have to go to the post office, package up the stuff and send it to the buyer, right? It has to be there on time. It's best to do track shipping. Otherwise you're not covered by ebay's policies and so on and so on. You have a lot of responsibility. If the customer doesn't like it or whatever, then you're gonna have to give them a return. You're gonna have to allow them to mail it back to you and then give them a refund. So there's a lot of labor involved. But with Amazon, the amazing thing about it is if you use FBA fulfillment by Amazon, you can just send stuff into your account, right? You send all the things you want to sell into Amazon's warehouse and they will actually fulfill all of it for you on your behalf, right? So what this means is every single time you make a sale on your account, Amazon post the item from their warehouse to the customer. They do with all customer service, all returns, all questions or queries and everything. So, I mean, you have all of that stuff leveraged from day one, right? So that's why this stuff is so exciting to get into in the beginning, right? You have the opportunity to actually partner with one of the most powerful e commerce providers in the whole world, and they will do most of the work for you, right? So this is how I was able to just go from having like, say, £600 on a credit card in the beginning and actually scale up my business to ridiculous heights throughout, even just the first year. Okay? So, guys, what this podcast is all about really, is just showing you the possibilities, what you can achieve with this business, okay? What levels you can take it to in the future. Maybe you already have a decent lump sum of cash right now. You know, you already have some money that you want to put in to an E commerce business. Well, it can work really for you. Well, for you as well. You just come in at a different point. So we're going to be discussing all different strategies that you can use to get an E commerce business going and what levels you can take it to and all the different steps along the way. Okay? So what I want to do now is talk to you a little bit about how my mindset was in the first year of trading on Amazon and what I set out to do, what actually happened and what results I got at the end, okay? So in the beginning of 2015, I said to myself, look, the only way I'm going to make this work for me is if I actually decide going to be successful, right? Not hope or wish or think that you know, one day, oh, I wish I could make it. I hope I'm going to make it. I think it's going to happen. I said to myself, look, no, it's happening. I'm not giving myself any choice, right? So what I did was I took a piece of paper, right? I love writing in like a Moleskine books and I take Moleskine books and I'm constantly writing down notes. So I took out a page in one of my Moleskine notebooks and I wrote down some goals for the year, right? And I was really ultra specific about everything I wanted to achieve. I split the piece of paper into four pieces, right, so four different sections and I set myself 90 day goals for the year. And there's been a lot of evidence now out there saying that basically the brain works really, really well with time frames of 90 days, right? A month to human beings like that seems like it's coming around really, really soon. And there's not too much stuff you can get done in a month, year. I mean a year is a long time and you might put things off if you know you've got an entire year to achieve them. But if you break things down into three month goals or 90 day goals, I mean, it's long enough for you to achieve stuff, but still it's coming around pretty quick, right? So you want to get on with it. So this is what I did. I broke down the year into four different sections. And I don't know if any of my friends are listening right now, but I remember I told my friends, lot of them, what I wanted to achieve and that kind of worked as a way of holding myself accountable, right? Because you don't want to be known as one of those people who tells everyone you're going to do things and then it never happens, alright? You want to be someone whose word actually means something, right? If you say you're going to go out there and do it, then surely you want to be able to come back to them when it's done and just be like, hey, look, I've actually gone and done it, right? So much more inspiring than just being people who just talk, talk, talk and never actually take any action, right? So this is what I did. I set these goals. The first 90 days I aimed to be making £1,000amonth, right? That for me would have been actually transformational. That's pretty much more than what I was earning in my bio job. So I said to myself, look, I can do this. I can get enough stock selling on my account to be able to make a thousand pounds a month within 90 days, okay? The next 90 day period. I said to myself, look, I've never earned this much money in my life, but I want to get up to two and a half thousand pounds a month, okay, by the end of the first six months, end of the next 90 day period. By the end of the following 90 day period, I wanted to get up to, I think it was £6,000, right? So I really wanted to scale quickly. And my plan was to put all of the money that I earned from the business back in, right, Keep reinvesting everything and scaling and scaling and just spending the money I earned on more stock so I could actually sell more products and scale up even more. And then by the end of 2015, my aim, and I wrote this down in big bold letters or big numbers, I wanted to be doing £10,000amonth, okay? So some pretty big goals there. And the reason why I'd actually decided to set goals this high is because I've seen that other people were doing it. E commerce is one of those industries where, you know, it's not just a very select few number of people who are actually getting results. If you have a look around on Amazon right now and you get a good eye for who are the individual sellers and who are the big brands selling things. There's a lot of individual sellers, guys like you or me, who are making ridiculous incomes just selling stuff on the platform and also ebay as well. So I said to myself, right, if these guys can do it, and you see them all over YouTube as well. If you just type in like someone who's getting results on Amazon and YouTube, they're just normal people. So I'd seen that those guys are doing. And, you know, they weren't that clever or anything. And I don't see myself as being a genius, but I thought, well, if these guys can do it, then there's absolutely no reason why I can't do it as well. So for the first 90 days, I focused a lot on retail arbitrage. Okay. And we're going to talk a little bit more in depth in the next few episodes about how to do this stuff and what it actually means. But basically, like I said, running around brick and mortar stores that we already shop at, looking at clearance aisles, buying stuff for cheap and then selling it on the platform. So that was my main focus for those 90 days. I also did a little bit of ebay dropshipping and some other stuff to get some money coming in. In the following 90 day period, I focused a lot more online arbitrage. Okay, so what, this is basically the same thing as running around brick and mortar stores, supermarkets, high street stores, looking for clearance stuff. But instead of that going online and something absolutely crazy happened to me in the second 90 day period. And what happened was I was looking at all these strategies that I was using. I did actually invest in a few courses to figure out the best way to do this stuff. But I figured out a way to actually do online arbitrage without touching any of the stock. Okay, we're going to talk about this a little bit more in a few future episodes. But basically you can use a thing called a prep center, right? Where you basically buy the stuff from E commerce stores. Okay, so let's say you're looking@asda.com or you're looking at toys r us.co.uk and you see a really cheap toy on there. If you want to sell that on your Amazon account, you can get that sent to a prep center and they'll send it into Amazon's warehouse for you. Right? So I cracked a way to actually be able to run this stuff just using a laptop without seeing any stock. And what's really interesting about the second 90 day period for me is that's when things really started to kick off. I think it was around about May, when, if you look at the graph of my sales figures on Amazon, that's when things really started to skyrocket. I managed to figure out ways to actually outsource parts of the business. I had virtual assistants I hired in the Philippines using a bit of capital from the money I'd made from retail arbitrage. And these guys were costing me, say two or three dollars per hour to work. And I just literally outsource all the tasks I didn't want to do. I'd hire them and get them to doing it. So at this point, I had two VA's during the second 90 day period of 2015. And the most amazing thing about this was, you know, they were putting in collectively 80 hours of work a week. So if I decided to go for a nap, I knew that my business was still running, right? People were still searching for stock for me to sell my account and doing little administrative tasks for me and I could just take a day off guilt free. Now this is one of the most exciting things about this business, okay? You can actually free up so much of your time because a lot of the tasks that need to be done in an E commerce business need very, very high skill sets, right? They're very repetitive. So these are very, very good tasks to actually outsource to other people. You can get to the point where you have four or five people working for in your business, it's not costing you more than say a thousand pounds a month. And you know, if you're earning £10,000, that's nothing, right? And you can actually have an entire business running. And now basically the stage I've got to is I'm only working say 20 or 30 minutes a day and I'm just overseeing all of these people doing all these individual tasks so that I bas doing that kind of thing in the second 90 day period, running things remotely. And basically that's when the business really started to skyrocket. In the third 90 day period, I was working a lot more on this remote stuff and really scaling it up. Also I got a little bit into private labels, right? Importing stuff from China. And this is amazing. Basically, private label strategy is so exciting because you can actually import stuff from China which has already been manufactured, it's already been designed. These products already exist. You just put your own brand on them, right? And you're buying them for say one or two dollars per piece. And I was selling them for like 1499 each in the UK in pounds. So there's huge profit margins to be made. And the great thing about this is you can import say a thousand units, sell them on your account and they'll just keep selling in the background. As long as you've done a few tweaks and a few little marketing techniques, these things will keep selling in the background. And then as soon as basically you get low on stock, you just replenish. So this is an incredible other strategy that you can use as well as all the arbitrage stuff. I started that in the third 90 day period of 2015. In the final period, I was doing loads of all of these things and actually I started, as well as selling on Amazon, I started teaching other people how to do it. So I noticed that a lot of people were asking me, you know, what are you doing, Ollie? You know, how are you? So, you know, I was working in coffee shops all day, sipping on lattes. I didn't have a job. I was sort of starting to spend a little bit more money and I was appearing in like posh hotels in London occasionally and people were just starting to wonder what was going on. So I thought, well, look, if people are asking me what's happening, what I'm actually up to, then surely I've got some value to teach. So that's when I actually started doing a bit of coaching and teaching other people how to do this stuff. Okay? So in my first year I turned over just shy of £300,000 of stock on my Amazon business. Okay? I absolutely obliterated my goal of doing £10,000amonth. And I did it in November, in December, I think I made about £15,000 profit. Okay? So I did £5,000 more than I thought I was going to do. And guys, I'm not telling you this stuff to show off. I'm literally just trying to impress upon you the things that can be achieved in this business. There's a lot of money flowing through the E commerce market, through the industry, okay? If you just have a little bit of self belief, you just take a few. Just take one of the things I teach you how to do and just do it over and over and over and over again and keep implementing little bits of knowledge that you have about this business and you can take it to whatever level you like. And there's countless examples of other people doing this. In fact, if you look on Amazon right now and you type in spiralizer, go to Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, type in spiralizer vegetable slicer. You will see several hundred individual people selling these spiralizers. These aren't big brands. It's not people who make, you know, huge brands like Bosch or any other big companies that make kitchen utensils. These are individuals like you and me who've imported this stuff from China and they're selling it on their account and they're making repeated sales just selling these spiralizers. And that's just one product. In the UK there's about 260 million products listed live on Amazon. And in the US there's around 500 million. So you just think of the scope of the opportunity that we have to actually make this stuff work for us. Take a little bit of belief, apply the things I'm going to be teaching you in the next few episodes of the podcast. And I mean, you can really set up a business where you manage to change your entire life. So I mean, let's just talk about a few of the Situations you might be in now, I don't know much about you, but let's say you're in a job. If you just put in an hour each day, just, just cut out the TV for a little bit. Just don't watch as much TV for the next three months, just put in one hour each day, you can start building yourself a side income with an E commerce business, right? Eventually you could, let's say you manage to grow that side income to a point where it matches your full time income. At some point you could actually quit your job and do this stuff full time, still only working one or two hours a day. If you manage to leverage enough virtual assistants or do strategies like private labels where they don't require that much time, you could actually replace your job income by just doing a couple of hours a day. Maybe you're broke at the moment, maybe you don't have a job or maybe you're in between jobs or maybe you're a stay at home mum and you need a bit of an income. You can put all of your time into doing this. You could put eight hours a day instead of a job. In the beginning like I was run around doing the retail arbitrage, buying things from stores, setting them into your account, making a profit, reinvesting stuff. This stuff takes time, but after a while, after a couple of months you'll have a big chunk of capital there. Like I turned £600 into around about five, £6,000 in a couple months doing this stuff. At that point I was able to go into the more leverageable strategies like doing the stuff online, private labels and things like that. Let's say you've got a really time intensive business right now. You own like a traditional business. Maybe it's a brick and mortar store, maybe I know some, I know I was chatting to a guy the weekend who, who runs a company that sells stocks and shares. He's got a 4,000 foot square office and he earns a lot of money, but he doesn't have any time for himself, right? And the actions he takes in his business that they don't directly affect how much money he's making. If he was to start an E commerce business, this whole thing would be flipped on its head. He could just outsource all the, all the jobs he didn't want to do, work as many hours in a week as he wanted to and everything that he did in his business would directly affect his income. Not to mention all the passive income he could have in the background from products that just continue to Sell. And that's what's so amazing about this business. If you have an income coming in with an E commerce business, it can be very, very, very steady if you've got enough systems in place, things that are repeatedly happening over and over again to make sure you earn profit. But if at some point you decide, look, I need to ramp up my business, I need to take things to the next level, you can, if you want to go on a holiday, just put in some more hours that month and get that extra income so you can go on a holiday. And by the way, did I even mention you can do this stuff from anywhere in the world? Just to illustrate this point now, actually, to finish off my story, it's now 2016, we're in May. My girlfriend has actually moved from Malaysia now to Sweden and I'm sitting here in Stockholm, Sodom. I'm looking over at the street down there in Stockholm City. I'm living here in my flat with my girlfriend. We've completely managed to bypass all of the UK's visa laws by actually moving to another European country where I still have rights to stay with her in the eu. And we're still running the business. It's running in the UK as I speak now. I think it's early in the morning at the moment and I've already done £500 in sales on my Amazon account. But I'm in Stockholm, I'm not even in the uk. The weekend just passed. Just now, I was in Marbella talking at an E commerce event. Sorry, it was a property event, but I was talking about E commerce and marketing and things. My business was still running, I was still making sales on Amazon whilst I was there. And you have the opportunity to literally work from anywhere you like. Once you get into these online strategies, this is actually a reality. And over the next few episodes, I'm going to really. I don't just want you to believe me at face value. You know when people say, oh, you can start a business or you can run it from anywhere, you can have free time, I'm going to show you exactly how it works. What actions do you need to take? So you're actually at the point where you have this business and it doesn't matter where you're starting from if you haven't got any money, you can start by just spending £20 on stock and selling it and getting, say, £70 back and then spending £70 and then getting £200 back or whatever. If you've got a couple thousand pounds, you can just import some stock. From China. There's a way in, no matter what it is, okay? There's resources out there in the e commerce industry for everyone. It's just depending on how resourceful you are and how you choose to learn them. So I really hope I've inspired you. I hope something that I've said in the last few minutes has connected with you and made you think about, at least considered getting into this opportunity. Opportunity. And if you're interested, if this sounds like something that you want to do, then what I want to do is introduce you to my Fast Start guide. Okay? No matter what level of income you have right now, I recommend you watch this Fast Start guide and just do yourself a little bit of retail arbitrage. Okay? This is a four part video series. I'm going to give you to you for free. Okay? If you just go to ecommercefreedom.com 1 okay, that's ecommercefreedom.com 1 the number one. And you will see a link to my Fast Start guide there, plus a few show notes from this episode and a few other resources and things. You click on that link to the Fast Start guide and you'll get a four part video series. I'll teach you how to set up your Amazon account, how to find stock to sell on your account for cheap and how to sell it for a profit. There's a video on analyzing the stock and there's ways which you can actually tell how quickly stock is going to sell. You can tell how many other sellers are selling the same product, what competition you're going to have, how many daily sales you're going to get, how to figure out if something's a hot seller and how much profit you're going to get after fees. Okay? You do a bit of analysis to make sure you're not wasting money on things that aren't going to sell. And then video four, I tell you all about exactly how to create a shipment and send this stuff into Amazon's warehouse so they can fulfill it all for you and you can make sales without having to do anything. Okay? So I really recommend you go there ecommercefreedom.com 1 and grab this fast Start guide that I've got for you. I think you'll find it really, really, really valuable. In the next episode, we're going to be talking a little bit more in detail about retail arbitrage. Okay? So make sure you grab that Fast Start guide and then we'll expand on some of the ideas and go through like a step by step process to Making this stuff work. I'll drop you a few tips about a few things that can work to make you accelerate your income and really take things to the next level. And all the little hacks that I used to use when I was doing retail arbitrage to get to those products that sell quickly and give you lots of profit so you can get great return on your investment and grow your capital as fast as possible. And in upcoming episodes, we'll have interviews with people who are actually doing this stuff right now. Because I'm not doing retail arbitrage anymore. I'm focusing more on private labels. So we're going to talk to people who are on the ground making their break into the E commerce business and how they're going about it. You'll get to hear from the horse's mouth exactly how this stuff works and they'll inspire you to go out and do this stuff as well. Also, we're going to be delving into other strategies, such as online arbitrage. I might touch on dropshipping. I'll touch on private labels. We're going to be talking about everything you need to know to make this business an actual reality for you. And I really want to give you absolutely all the resources I can to help you really start to transform your life. Because this has actually completely turned my life on its head. I'm sitting now in the beautiful apartment where we've got so much space, and I was just comparing it to when I used to live as a lodger in some guy's house in Hatfield when I was just after uni, working in a bar. And, you know, I used to be in the room next to me was his teenage daughter. She was 16, right? And he would go out on trips to other countries for a few weeks and she would just fill the house with drunk teenagers, right? So I'd have to come back to this house full of drunk teenagers after a long shift at the bar and I wouldn't be able to sleep because it'll be drinking, throwing up everywhere, blasting music. And, you know, the reason why I was in that situation was because I was broke. I couldn't afford more than £400amonth rent. You know, so if you can get your finances sorted and if you can actually run a business that you enjoy and you can't wait to get back to. To wake up and do these little actions, you know, are going to give you big results, then your life transforms. I absolutely love what I do. I love importing new products or sell on my account. I love hiring new VAs and outsourcing little parts of my business and thinking of new goals. I've just set a huge goal, actually to make half a million in the next six months. And you know, to some of you, that's. That's completely insane. And yeah, it is insane, but it's doable. And it's doable within the e commerce industry. So think big. And I really hope you found this podcast inspiring, and I really want you to join me throughout the next few episodes. So take care. And whatever you do, keep believing. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode.