Episode #18 - How Quickly Can You Grow An Amazon Business? (The Concrete Seed Formula)

So let's talk a second about the psychology of success. If you want to achieve crazy things in your business, like be the exception, grow really, really, really, really fast. Your mindset is way more important than all the strategy, the tactics, and, you know, all the little shiny object softwares and stuff like that that's supposed to get you easy money, right? The mindset behind all of that stuff is the most important and the reason.

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.

Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. Very warm welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Freedom Podcast. Now, in this episode, I want to answer the question, how fast can you scale an Amazon business from scratch and actually hit your goals? So how fast can you grow? Does it take years to actually get from where you are now and whatever experience levels you have now to get to that point in the future in your mind, where you want to get to, whether it's an income level, whether it's being able to run a business and travel, whether it's being able to quit your job and actually just work on the business full time or create a side income, how long does it take? And once you find an answer to that question, how do you actually create a plan to make this really happen, not just fantasize about it, think about building an Amazon business and, you know, have a load of theory, pie in the sky goals. How do you create a real plan to actually make this happen in a short space of time as physically possible? Well, I've been thinking about this answer to this question for the past few years and in the beginning of my journey. If you've listened to previous podcast episodes, you probably know I actually got this stuff working relatively fast. In my first year of selling on Amazon, I did 300, 300,000 pounds in sales and I started with absolutely no money. I started with about $600 on a credit card, which wasn't even really my money. I had to. That was lending, right? So I couldn't just waste it. I had to invest it properly to make sure I could pay off the payments on the credit card. So really I started off with nothing. And I quickly reinvested that money in products which I knew were going to sell. Started off with a tiny bit of spend and then ramped it up as I felt more confident and then got really, really awesome results in my first year. So this is how quickly it happened for me. But you might be thinking, well, Ollie, you know, you're the exception. Not everybody's going to have results like that. Well, after I actually got to the end of my first year and I was using, you know, I was using the same strategies everybody else uses to build an Amazon business. I was using arbitrage, I was using bits of wholesale, I was importing stuff from China and I'd got awesome results. But I'd see people using the exact same strategies as me in the same Facebook groups. I was in with the same goals, working just as hard, and they were getting nowhere. They'd been working on their business. Some of them started before I even started and they had done, you know, a few grand in sales and I had definitely done something slightly different. Even though they were working really, really hard, it seemed like they were getting nowhere fast. So by the end of my first year, I actually thought to myself, well, you look, I must be doing something different. I must have something here to offer to people who really want to build their businesses quickly and scale fast and grow. So at the end of my first year, I decided to put together a little course outlining a few of the steps I took in my first 12 months to build my Amazon business really, really quickly. I thought, well, look, if people can just follow these videos and just rip off the stuff that I'd done throughout my first year, they'll probably get some you in it, right? They'll probably find it really valuable. So I put together, I shot these videos using some screen recording software and just talking over some slides and screen recording, how to find products and all these other techniques and things, threw them up on a little membership site using like a software that allows you to build a membership site, put it all together in a course and charged like 200 bucks for it or something. I just thought, you know what if I can help a few people, just charge them a little fee, give them some awesome information, hopefully they'll get something from it. If they can just get one thing valuable from this course, then I would have done a good thing for the world and made a little bit of extra cash to help with my Amazon business at the same time. So I called this course FBA Secrets, and the first ever edition of FBA Secrets was out in somewhere around October, maybe November 2015. So it's at the end of my first year selling on Amazon. So a few people joined the course and they get the videos and they seemed really happy with it and they were enjoying watching the training and everything, and I just kind of left it at that. Now, a couple weeks later, I started to get all these messages from people who had actually started to watch the videos in the first edition of FBA Secrets. And I was blown away by the response. First of all, I didn't really think that these people were really going to use the stuff in the course, because I know how many people join courses, watch the videos, you know, watch a few of the videos, are really intent on building a huge business, and then just do nothing. So I thought that a lot of people would probably do that, that join the course, think, yeah, this is awesome, and they're not really taking the action. Boy, was I wrong. One chap who joined did I think it was £3,000 in his first month using the stuff that I taught. He was buying stuff from online stores and retail stores using just some of the suppliers I mentioned in the course and selling it on Amazon. And he had a background in retail, so he had a bit of an eye for the type of products that people want to buy. And he had a little bit of money on a credit card and a little bit of savings saved up. And he went crazy and got unbelievable results with it. So that was like, the first time I started to realize the power of the stuff inside FBA Secrets. And now remember, this was during quarter four, during Christmas time. So he had an advantage. Stuff sells really, really quickly around Christmas time. So he did. He did really, really well. But then I started to see other people getting crazy results with the course as well. Had, like, tons of screenshots were posted in the little Facebook group that I made to go along with the course. People were saying, you know, I sent in products the second they go live for sale, they've sold. You know, I've got tons of stock here in a shopping cart ready to bring home with me. I just sent off a huge shipment, and people were starting to build up loads and loads of traction. They were getting, like crazy results really, really quickly with this course. So this, this blew me away. This, this made me feel really good because I thought, you know, I've charged these people a very small amount of money for a few videos and just to allow them to rip off the stuff that I did in my first year selling on Amazon, and they're actually getting use out of it. And, you know, most of them, a large proportion of them had made more money from the sales than they did spending on the course. So I was like, this is. This is awesome. This is what I wanted. And it was just a really nice surprise. So I decided to actually keep selling the course and I did things to promote it, webinars and other stuff, and started to build up a bit of an email list and started selling people and getting them into the course because I knew if they just joined and they took action, they would get results. And over the next few months, we had tons and tons and tons of success stories. People starting with £200 doing £10,000 in sales. Four months we had someone do a thousand pounds in sales in his first week. We had, I mean, just success stories coming out of the walls and it was just getting crazy. And in May, I thought to myself, actually, this is so much fun. I'm having so much fun teaching people. I think I'm going to host a live event. So we had a live event just for the people who've taken the course. They came along and they were showing me even more stories about how they had got success with the content. People literally quitting their jobs because of the stu inside this FBA Secrets course. Now this was. This felt great. And you know, to be honest, I didn't really add much to the course since I first put it together. As the community grew, I actually increased the price because I thought, you know, this stuff's really valuable so I should probably be charging a bit more for it. And I added a few things inside the, the training and did a few like live master classes and things. And yeah, it was going really well. But about halfway through 2016, I started thinking to myself, what is it that's enabled people to get such good results of FBA Secrets? I was really desperate to actually work out what it was because there's loads of make money online courses out there that suck, that are just garbage. You buy them and you're instantly disappointed when you open up the login and you look at the stuff in there. It's just like, this is not going to work and it's you. The guy is just selling snake oil. So I had a course here that people could use and they were actually getting results with it and they were getting results really, really, really quickly. So I clearly done something right, but I was annoyed because I'd done it by accident. So for the next few months after that, what I made it my mission to do was actually figure out what I had done right. And I was pulling apart the content throughout the course. And this took me forever. Speaking to the students inside FBA Secrets, talking to my one one to one clients. I'd taken on a few one to One clients as well, to help them out. Coaching and things like that, and just talking to them, just asking them, you know, what was it about the course that you think made the difference? What was it about the course that was powerful that enabled you to get results? I did surveys, like, I did loads of stuff. I sent emails to my email list and said, you know, reply, tell me please, what is it that made this course successful? So I just really wanted to know what I did right. I'd never built a course before, before this. After a bit of time trying to investigate, I actually figured out exactly what I had done. By accident, I'd actually built a course that tapped into the psychology of success. This is why the course was working so well. Here's the thing with business in general, when a lot of people try to build businesses, like, you know, you probably got like a weird uncle who's like always trying a new business opportunity or like a weird friend who's just like constantly seems to be like Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses are always trying new ways to make get rich quick, then just quitting, right? As soon as, like it starts to get a bit tough, quitting. I think the reason why is because the learning curve with business is very, very steep. If you go at it by yourself and you're trying to build a business, like, there's just so many barriers in your way. So tons of people quit. And coupled with this, people have limiting beliefs. Like they don't think that they can actually achieve building a business or achieve the results from building a business have beliefs, things such as, I'm not good enough, you need to be a millionaire to build a business. Money is evil anyway. So if I build a business, I'm evil. I'm not the master of my own destiny. Like, all these beliefs that people actually have are success killers. Now FBA Secrets was so results oriented. Like, I didn't mention anything about like, you know, random general knowledge about Amazon. I didn't rant on about philosophy. It was literally just do this, do this, make sales, and then do this, do this, make some more sales. It was so results oriented that it actually gave students a ton of confidence to keep going. Right. They started off, got a bit of early wins and then built on those early wins and actually had the confidence to keep moving through. So the learning curve didn't feel was tough because every step of the way, I mean, yeah, there was challenges, but there was also success. So it kept them motivated. This was the difference that made FBA Secrets work so well. So the point I'm actually telling you about this isn't to just try and sell you on FBA Secrets. I mean, it's launching this week, the cart's open right now. But I'm not trying to sell you on the course. What I'm trying to sell you on is the concept why FBA Secrets was so powerful, because then you can just apply this to your business. And, like, this is the secret that I realize, enable people to really grow their businesses fast. So let's talk a second about the psychology of success. If you want to achieve crazy things in your business, like, be the exception, grow really, really, really, really fast. Your mindset is way more important than all the strategy, the tactics, and, you know, all the little shiny object softwares and stuff like that that's supposed to get you easy money, right? The mindset behind all of that stuff. The most important and the reason I know this is because I've had people who've joined my courses get outstanding success, and they've had the exact same material, that exact same training, the exact same background, the exact same circumstances as other people on the courses, and other people have got nowhere. So it's clearly not the training, it's not the knowledge, it's the mindset, all right? That's the thing that differentiates people. So the way to build a crazy, stable, powerful, empowering mindset is to be super, super confident about what you're doing every step of the way and to break through those limiting beliefs that convince you that you're not capable of doing what you need to do to build the business. This is the difference, right? This is the stuff that makes people pursue longer, that will keep you in the game, right? I call it what is called self efficacy. That's the scientific term, self efficacy, the unshakable belief that you can actually achieve what it is you want to achieve. So with FBA Secrets, it was like a powerhouse for self efficacy. It was designed to get you really, really confident by getting you early wins so you could progress. And then with that confidence, you'd learn a little bit more complicated strategies. And as your confidence grew, your knowledge grew. And as those two things grew, your sales expanded as well. So I realized this was the reason why. This is the reason why the course was successful, and it all happened by accident. Now, recently, I wanted to completely re haul FBA Secrets and make it thousand times better and take the bits from the original FBA secrets that were amazing and expand on them. And in order to do this, I wanted to break apart all the stuff I'D done in the original course and kind of give the formula that I used a name. So what I called it was the Concrete Seed Formula. Here's why. When I was building FBA secrets and people were getting success, I realized something profound. And this, this happened to me. Trying to build a limit, a business with limiting beliefs is like watching a seed trying to go grow through concrete, right? It's just not going to happen. A seed cannot grow through concrete. In order to get success selling on Amazon or with any other big challenge that you're facing, first you need to crack these limiting beliefs, like cranky cracking, right? So the seed can actually grow through. Once this has happened, then you can start learning all the complex strategies and systemizing things and taking everything to the next level. Okay? So I called it the Concrete Seed Formula. And there's four phases in the concrete seed formula. And if you apply this system to your business, you're going to have the capabilities of getting crazy results. And to answer the question, how fast can you grow an Amazon business? Well, every time somebody puts this stuff into practice, I am genuinely shocked at the results. So we had a guy who was doing a thousand pounds in sales per day within his first six months of building a business. Now he spent four months just trying out by himself, using YouTube videos, not really getting anywhere. And then four months in, he joined FBA Secrets. From there, making minimal sales. Only took him two months to get to the point where he was making a grand a day in sales. It's because of this stuff, right? So if I, if I can convince you anything in this podcast episode, apply these four phases of my concrete seed formula in your Amazon business. This is what I want. This is what the message I want to give you in this episode. So let me break down what these four phases are. And as you start to, as I start to explain them, I think you'll get it. I think you'll understand why this stuff is so powerful. And please apply this. I want to give it to you so you can actually take it away, rip it off and use. So phase one is called release limits. Now, one of the most destructive success killing things a person can have in the beginning of their journey to building a business is a limiting belief. As we discussed before, if you don't believe that you can achieve what you want to achieve, if you think that money is evil, if you think you're too stupid to build a business, if you think you have to be a millionaire to get going, if you think that Amazon is too saturated, your beliefs and your Thoughts directly affect your emotions, which directly affect your behavior. Right. This is actually one of the things that psychiatrists, psychologists work on in cognitive behavioral therapy. If you want to change your behavior, someone has a stutter or somebody has, you know, really bad eating disorder, anxiety disorder, they're behaving, you know, in a frantic and unhealthy way. The way to deal with that is to first look at the beliefs, weaken them, any negative beliefs, any errors in the way that you think, and then through doing that, you affect your behavior. So we've got to apply that same principle to building a business. Look at the beliefs which are preventing you move from moving forward. Weaken them, replace them with empowering beliefs that will turn you into a steam train. That will mean that you have no choice but to get results. Right. So how do we do this? What's the practical steps we can do to make that crack in the concrete appear so you can release your limits? Well, it's very simple. First thing you should do in your Amazon business is focus on getting that first sale. That doesn't mean researching 300,000 different strategies, looking up tons of software, trying to read the encyclopedia of Amazon and absorb all of the terms and conditions. Look on Google for horror stories of people getting their Amazon accounts shut down. Worry about saturation. Like all of that stuff is a complete waste of time. You should just be focusing on getting your first sale. So there's two reasons for this. Number one, to break through limiting beliefs. Like we just said, when you get that first sale, this is when things really start to change in your mind. You can't have a limiting belief that you can't make sales on Amazon. You if there's evidence that you can because you made a sale, right? So this starts the process. Second is because you need to learn the basics. How do you find products? How do you send them into your Amazon account? How do you make sure they're profitable, they're going to sell quickly, all that stuff. So you're learning as you're uncovering your beliefs. Now another thing you can do in phase one is actually consciously start to work on your psychology. So work on finding evidence that your limiting beliefs are false. Learn how to control your emotional state so you can get hold of a load of certainty when it matters. And you need to take action and, you know, move forward with confidence in your business. So start working on your psychology as you begin to learn the ropes and make your first few sales. When you've done this stuff, everything else in your business becomes a hundred times easier. And then you're ready to move on to phase two now, working on your mindset, uncovering, limiting beliefs, all that stuff is really, really, really powerful. But the mistake people make with that stuff is they'll think, okay, all I've got to do is sit in a room, close my eyes, visualize a Lamborghini, and I'll wake up tomorrow and there'll be a Lamborghini in my. In my driveway. Now, unfortunately, this does not work. You cannot just sit in a room visualizing a Lamborghini or a mansion, and then just the next week, the universe aligns and all of a sudden you've got all this stuff. It just does not happen right now. I know you already know this, right? I'm probably preaching to the choir here. But we just have to remind ourselves, as well as a good mindset, we need decent strategies and we need resources. So phase two is all about getting those resources and learning these strategies. So once you've got some small wins and you've got your first sale and you've sent some products into your account, you started breaking through your limiting beliefs and working on your mindset and being conscious of that. Next, we want to build some capital. So this means learning new strategies. So if you've done a bit of arbitrage to get your first sale, best strategy to get your first sale, by the way, reselling stock from retail outlets, online outlets. It's the easiest way to make money. Do more of whatever you did to get that first sale to build your capital. So if you turned, say 5 pounds into 10 pounds with arbitrage, then put the 10 pounds back into products, turn into 20, right? And just keep doing that over and over and over and over again. You can maybe do some small imports from China. Maybe you could look at a tiny bit of wholesale as well. Get in touch with some wholesale dealers and get more stock and just turn the little bit of money you have right now into. Into more money. You'll be surprised at how quickly you can do this. By the way, you probably heard my story of the call blockers. I was buying them for £5, selling them for £40 in the UK. I turned £150 into £950 in my first week. This is how you build capital. This is the next stage. And you can only really do this effectively once you've been through phase one. This is, this is what people don't get. Has to be a progression. Right now you can start to kind of look at more strategies and things and don't get into information overload. But you can begin thinking about other strategies and stuff. So build capital. Now, once you've hit a few grand in sales, like there's no real absolute rule for this, but I'd say at least three to five grand in sales, you'll know that what you're doing is working. The methods you're using to source products are working. So they're probably repeatable. If you've spent $100 or $100 on stock and you've turned it into $200, £200, you could probably do that over and over and over again. And we all know that a real business, one that pays the bills, that gives you consistent income, isn't made of loads of random actions here and there. It's made of systems. So phase three is develop systems. At this point, you will have developed a skill for finding products that actually sell, right? Stuff that sells. You know what you're doing now you're a bit more experienced now. What you need to do is make things consistent. So that could mean a simple system such as sending in a box of products into your Amazon account every week, religiously, just sending more and more stock into your Amazon account every week. It could be, well, it could be contacting a wholesaler and getting shipments delivered from him every week. Could be spending two hours a night looking for arbitrage products. Whatever it is, as long as it happens over and over and over and over again, it's a system. This could be actually creating the perfect work week and scheduling in all your hours on a calendar so you know, every single week, same amount of hours are going in. That probably means the same amount of output is going to come out. Getting these systems set in stone so your business starts moving and the money is consistent. Once you've got these systems set up, phase four is to automate the systems as much as you possibly can and scale, right? So grow the systems, put more juice into the machine and watch it expand. So this could be hiring a virtual assistant to get products sent into your account automatically. Right? Research products on a database. I've got like six of these guys and I absolutely love virtual assistants. And it's just a great way to grow your business because they run it for you. You just tell them what to do and make sure they're all doing the jobs they need to do. Right. Great way of running a business. You'll transition from like a sole trader, you know, one man band, into a CEO, which is very, very powerful. You can use prep centers to send products into your account without seeing them or Touching them. And once you scaled a bit, they're easier to work with. These guys can do all your prep for. You can send them products, they'll put them in boxes, put labels on, send them into Amazon so you can be running the whole thing from your laptop. And finally, phase four, this is the perfect time to start really getting into importing private label products. So rather than just starting, I'll give you an example of this in a second. Rather than just starting, you know, spending 10 grand on a product from day one on your Amazon account, do the groundwork first. Build up your confidence, build up your knowledge. Then when you get to phase four, start importing bigger shipments. Okay, so this is the. This is how the concrete seed formula works. And as you can imagine the metaphor, don't want to label the point a little bit too much, but it will start off as a seed, it will germinate, go through the crack in the concrete, and before you know it, you've got an entire forest. Right? You see what I'm getting at? You see why this is so powerful? It's this natural progression of confidence, of knowledge, of skills, and of sales. So this is why my original FBA Secrets course work so well. Now I've revamped all this and put everything into the new course. But can you see why this is so powerful? Can you see the difference between Jimmy, the aspiring entrepreneur, having terrible mindset, badly wired, brain riddled with limiting beliefs, terrified of things going wrong, doesn't think that he's capable of building an Amazon business. Imagine if he skipped all the way to phase four. Hiring virtual assistants, importing ten grand worth of stock from. From China, you know, doing all the really complex stuff that requires you to be, you know, quite a solid person, knowledgeable person with a good mindset. Imagine if you jumped right in the deep end and started there. Phase four, it will be a disaster, right? It will just be a disaster. So this is why the concrete seed formula is so powerful. You start with phase one, then when you're ready, you made your first few sales. Phase two, then three, and then four. First you release limits, then you build capital, then you develop systems to get the income more consistent. And then you automate those systems, put as much juice into them as possible, and scale your business. So I really hope you've enjoyed today's episode. I just wanted to give you an inside sneak peek into my theory on the fastest possible way to grow an Amazon business. And I've seen, I keep seeing more and more crazy things happen with people's businesses. Using this stuff. So the answer to the question how quickly can you grow an Amazon business? To be honest, I still don't think I know the answer because it's just going to get more and more crazy. I think we're going to get more and more success stories, people putting this system into practice. And maybe you can come come to me and tell me that you've beaten the record. And I would love to see that happen. So hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you want to get moving and release your limits and get those first few sales to help break your limiting beliefs, then on the Episode Show Notes webpage, if you go to ecommercefreedom.com 18 I'm going to give you my Fast Start guide that enables you to get your first sale. Do everything you need to do to get your first sale on Amazon for free. Okay, so go to ecommercefreedom.com18ecommercefreedom.com 18 so numbers okay and you can grab my Fast Start Guide. Teach you how to find profitable stock. Check that it's profitable. It's going to sell quickly with my 60 second product analysis. Send it into your Amazon account and oh, it teaches you how to set up your account as well. So four videos teach you everything you know to get your first sale and actually get moving with this concrete seed formula to build your business. Awesome. Put this stuff into practice. I can't wait to see your results using this theory and I'll catch up with you on the next episode. Take care, keep believing and we'll speak soon.