Here's How To Tell If You'll Be Successful

Hey, how's it going? It's Olly here. Very warm welcome to the Ecommerce Freedom Podcast. So, just before we dive in, I've got two special new resources for you. First resource is a PDF with 15 smash hit products on it, ready to go. Examples of products you can sell on Amazon. So you can use this for inspiration or you can just see, you know, what types of products do really, really, really well. I've even included revenue examples so you can see the amount of money that each product is likely to generate. The Amazon Marketplace. If you want to grab this free PDF, just go to ecommercefreedom.com and you'll see a link at the top of the page where you can grab the PDF. The second resource I want to give you is a free Amazon Accelerator call. The whole point of this call is for us to have a quick chat and we'll gather up a little bit of information about your situation and together we'll develop a plan for you to build an Amazon business that either works as a side hustle for you or could replace your your job and will take into account your situation, your experience, your background and give you a clear set of action steps to go ahead and build the business. If you want to book one of Those, go to ecommercefreedom.com go to the top of the page and click Amazon Accelerator Call. You fill out a quick form and you can book the call. Alright, thanks so much for joining me for another episode. This one's going to be good and enjoy it. Hey, how's it going? It's Oli here. So today we're going to talk about you and specifically we're going to be discussing whether or not you are going to be successful. So after many years of dealing with clients and helping people build Amazon businesses, and after many years of running my own Amazon business, I feel fairly certain that I've developed crystal ball. In fact, I feel that I can look at somebody, I can just figure out a little bit about their situation, about their attitude, and hear a few things they have to say about what they want to do and their expectations from building an Amazon business. And I can tell pretty quickly whether they're going to be successful, whether they're not. And this stuff all happens, by the way, before they even take any action towards building their business. So what I wanted to talk to you about today was how I can tell whether someone's going to be successful. And so you can ask yourself if it's true of you. If you have these qualities, then I Have no doubt in my mind that you're going to make it. So there's six qualities we'll be talking about today, and these are all observations I've made from working with literally thousands of people to build Amazon businesses. I've seen people completely transform their lives and build incomes that have helped replace their job. And I've seen people who've had the best intentions but have failed miserably and have either just stopped or had things go wrong or burnt out really quickly and realized the whole thing just isn't for them. So the reason why I like to do this, and I like to tell you whether you're going to be successful or not before you start, is because then it saves you the heartache of going through this stuff for the wrong reasons, building this business for the wrong reasons, going out there and getting burnt or getting disappointed. It's so funny because it's like I know what's going to happen before it even happens, just because I've worked with so many people. So let's kick off. Let's talk about the first thing that you have to have if you want to be successful. The first thing that every single one of my successful clients has had who went on to actually build a business. You've got to be ready, right? You've got to be ready to do this. So many people are interested in building a business and they come to me and they talk about it and they've got loads of questions, but you can just tell they're not ready yet, right? How can you tell when someone's not ready to build a business and not ready to get started? Generally, it's because they're freaking out and they're panicking. If you're panicking right now about building a business and you're genuinely terrified of the whole process, then you're not ready, right? You're not ready. People who are ready to start building a business and ready to make this stuff happen are relaxed. They feel very relaxed about the process. They feel calm, they feel clear in their intentions and what they want to do, and they're certain that this is for them. If you're not ready, you won't be certain this is for you. You'll be terrified. Now, being nervous is definitely normal. I would expect you to be nervous if you're about to go and do something new. When I started my first year of building an Amazon business, even setting up the Amazon account, I was nervous. Spending the first £20 on products, I was nervous, but I wasn't freaking out. And that's the difference, right? You have to be ready. I was ready, so I wasn't freaking out. I was nervous at some times, right? But I knew this is what I wanted to do. I felt clear in my mind this is what I wanted to do. So you have to be ready before you start. So maybe ask yourself, do I feel ready to do this right now? If you're not ready, then maybe put this on the shelf for a couple of months. The opportunity is still going to be here. You know, you don't have to rush. You don't have to jump into this right now. If you're not ready, that's okay. Sometimes it's a much braver thing to do, to actually say no and to not start something if you're not ready yet versus just diving in because you're worried that the opportunity is going to disappear. Takes guts to say no sometimes. So you have to think about whether you're ready or not. The second thing is, if you're patient, you're willing to be patient now. I love it. It makes me so happy and relieved when I'm speaking to someone about building a business and maybe they're thinking about getting some help from me, and they say to me that they're willing to fail in the first year. Nothing indicates to me that a client's going to be more perfect to build this business than when they say they're willing to fail in the first year. So what does failure mean? Does it mean that you're going to lose your shirt, you're going to spend all of your money, that you're going to have to remortgage your house or go bankrupt? No. Obviously we want to avoid all of that stuff, and you have to try pretty hard to make any of that stuff happen, right? But when I say fail, I mean perhaps not be profitable enough, perhaps not be able to pay yourself the amount that you wanted to pay yourself, perhaps not sustain the kind of lifestyle you want to sustain just from the income from your business your first year. When someone says that to me that they're willing to not necessarily hit big goals in their first year, it indicates to me that they're not in this for the short term. They're not just trying to make a little bit of cash and then throw this opportunity away and try something else, indicates to me they're in this for the long run. And the first year maybe will be just learning, and from that point on, they can improve. I did have success in my first year, but I also made a ton of mistakes. And I didn't hit as big goals as I wanted to. I could have taken things further, you know, and not everything went my way, but I was willing to learn and make those mistakes in the first year and I stuck with it. And that's why I continued to have bigger and bigger success. So you've got to ask yourself, are you willing to be patient? Are you willing to be in this for a long term, for maybe three to five years? Or are you just looking to make some cash in the next 30 to 90 days and then dump the opportunity? Because doing that, there's no surefire way. You're not certain whether you will make cash in the next 30 to 90 days. We don't know if that's going to happen. And you have to be in it a little bit more long term than that. In fact, the worst Amazon sellers on the planet and the worst clients that I've had in the past have been people who are desperate to make money now. As in, they have the attitude of if this doesn't work, then I'm going to be screwed. If this doesn't work, then I'm going to lose my house. Right? That kind of desperation, if you're in that state, you're never going to be able to build a business. It's just not going to happen. In fact, if you're in such a desperate state right now that you're about to lose your house, you're about to have something else happen to you, it's going to be traumatic. Because your financial situation. Don't build a business, sort that problem out, then build the business. Because when you're building a business, like I said just now, you have to be relaxed, clear, certain, right? Because when you're relaxed, clear and certain, you can have a little bit of fun building the business. It's not some big chore. It's not a really serious, rigid thing that has to go right now. It's a fun experiment that you're going to try and you're going to be creative and you're going to try things, right? And when you have that space to be creative and that space to kind of screw things up sometimes that's where you actually make the money. That's where all the money is made. In fact, I started to accelerate my personal income at the fastest rate. Once I just got past the point where I could pay myself. Once I could pay myself comfortably and everything was sorted, I didn't have the stress about financial obligations anymore. From that point onward, that's when the income started to explode because then I had the ability to fail. I could fail in some ways. I could try something, it might not work. I could experiment, I could have fun. I could be creative. That's when things really started to skyrocket. You got to be patient, got to be able to have fun and be creative. Sting, number two. Thing number three is you've got to be in a stable situation right now. And again, these things all tie in to one another, right? You've got to be in a stable situation so you don't expect the business to pay you from day one, right? You have to have some income coming in at the moment to live on while you're waiting for the business to be able to pay you. Because if you look at any business, I don't care what the industry is, I don't care how incredible the business opportunity. Nobody is able to pay themselves a wage in the first month. In fact, nobody's really able to pay themselves a wage in the first few months. Sometimes it can take a while before you get to that stage because ideally, any money you make in the beginning, you want to reinvest it back into the business so you can actually grow to the level you really want to get to. And if you're paying yourself a big wage from day one, it's going to eat up all the money from the company and you're just not going to have anything to spend on stock, on marketing, on growing your product lines, and all the other important stuff you need to pay for, right? So having some kind of income, some kind of stable situation where you know you're not going to starve if the business doesn't pay you is super important. And the chances of you getting success if you don't have income are considerably lower. Now, it doesn't have to be income. Some people might have a lot of savings that would last them for six months. You know, that's fine, too. But as long as you can survive about the business having to go well again, you can be in that creative state, that fun state. You can have the ability to fail and you'll still be okay. Let's talk about thing number four. Thing number four is having some sort of budget. Now, it's quite funny, a lot of people ask me, how much money do I need to build an Amazon business? Like, what sort of budget do I need? And it's funny, I had someone I was speaking to last week, I believe it was, who said, everyone says you need different amounts of money to build this Amazon business. I've heard People that say you can do it with a thousand pounds or 500 pounds. And I've heard people who say you need 15,000 pounds or more to even have a hope of building this business. And I thought about it for a second before I gave him an answer. And I was thinking, what is the real amount of money you need to actually make this business work? Is it £500 or a thousand pounds, or is it £15,000 or more? And I thought to myself, actually, you know what? All of those answers are correct. All of those answers are correct. So let's say you start your Amazon business and you don't want to go huge in the beginning. You want to start with a test batch. This is something that I am a big advocate of. Start small, learn the process, test the market, all right? So many reasons, just for confidence purposes, just to validate the niche that you actually are going to make some sales, get loads of data, figure out the price point, figure out what profit you could make, figure out the sales volume, you know, figure out whether the value you're adding to the market is going to be well received, right? All these things start with a test batch. You can do a test batch for £500. Some of my clients have done test patches for $100 all in. I've done that in the past as well. It's doable, right? So from one perspective, you could say, yeah, you can start the business with £500. You really can. You can get started, you can make some sales and you can see something happen. But obviously then at some point you're going to want to have to restock and reorder. Let's say you sell out the 50 units in the test batch. Well, now you're going to want to go ahead and order more stock. So you do need more money. If you place an order of, say, another 200 units, you might need maybe two grand or something like that to place that reorder, right? And then obviously, as you grow and you build, you're probably going to want to put more money into the business to launch more products. So while, yeah, it's true, you could start with £500, you know, over the first maybe year, you might end up putting in 15 grand into the business. The reason why all of these answers are true, and it's not just as black and white as saying you need a grand or you need 15 grand, is because what you'll find is once you have a business that's starting to grow, money comes to you. And this is what happened to me. Right. In the beginning, I started my business with £600 on a credit card. That was all my working capital. That was everything. And I spent 300 pounds of that on stock and I spent the other 300 pounds on a program to learn how to actually buy the stock. Because I thought, you know, I'd rather get this stuff right and not lose all the money than just gamble the whole budget on some products and then not know what to do next. Anyway, the 300 pounds turned into about 1500 pounds after buying and selling lots of products, right? And then the 1500 pounds started to grow and I started to get consistent income. And then I found that you can actually get quite a lot of lending services who plug in directly into your Amazon account, see what revenue you're generating, and give you a loan based off of that, not based off your credit score. Mine in the beginning was appalling, right? So I started to get money from these places and that helped me grow my business. Also. I got some lines of credit and some other things that helped me grow as well. As I paid off that initial £600 on the credit card, the company said, would you want to borrow more money? And I said, hell, yeah. Took the money, bought more stock and kept growing. So money will come to you once you're actually generating some. So you don't have to start off with £15,000 in the bank from day one, but you might end up spending £15,000, your business over time, and it could come from different lines of credit and different sources. But the point is, you do have to have some budget and ideally, probably a couple thousand is a good place to start because then you can buy some stock pretty quickly, you can reorder pretty quickly and you can get some momentum and then you might have to find some more money in the future. But if you can order, say 300 units of a product, you'll probably make profit on that and you can reinvest that back into the business and grow the little bit of money you have. So a couple grand is a good place to start, but you have to have something, right? And another thing on this point with budget is, you know, some people assume that just because you have more money, your life's going to be easier, or just because you have less money, your life's going to be harder. I've got some clients who have built up, you know, six figure Amazon businesses starting with a thousand pounds, and they had barely anything in the beginning and now their business is going really, really well. I've had other clients who Started with me and they've had 50 grand to put into the business and they got nowhere because they just weren't that committed or they just didn't allocate the money very well. Any number of reasons. Probably because they didn't have some of the other things in this list, right? The patience, stuff like that. So that's the important thing. You have to have some budget, but don't necessarily need a ton of money. Where are we? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This is probably the most important one. These aren't in any order, by the way. These are just all the things that I thought of, that I've observed. Number five is that you must enjoy the process. So so many people come into my world of how to build a business, how to get started on Amazon, because they get excited by the rewards. It's a little bit like applying for a really fancy job where they give you a company car, company accommodation in like a really fancy apartment block in the middle of the city, huge salary, 500k a year salary, getting really excited about all that stuff, but having absolutely zero skills to do the job and having absolutely no intention of learning what you need to do to do the job, right? And you get a lot of people like this. You want to build Amazon businesses and they see that you can make millions, you know, you really can make millions selling on Amazon. They see that you can boost up your ego and, you know, tell people you run a business and they want that. They see that you could buy a flashy car and you can have a team who you boss around, right? And they see that you can show off these big screenshots and you can say that you're building a brand and all this flashy, exciting stuff, and they see that you can travel and you can, you know, bump up your lifestyle and all these things and they get excited about all this stuff. Right, Quite right. It is exciting, right? But they only want that. They don't want to do any of the things to get any of that stuff. And it's crazy because this point just sounds so unbelievably obvious. Well, yes, you could get lots of money and everything, but remember, you do have to build a business in order to get all of that money. It doesn't just drop down from the sky. You have to actually build the business, right? You have to do that. And this is the thing you're going to be doing probably for several hours a day. So if you hate it, there's not going to be any chance in hell that you're going to get any of those rewards. And a lot of people get caught up in the whole flashiness of the business and they forget that actually this is what you need to do to get all that flashy stuff. And really the flashy stuff is quite a small part really. I don't spend that much time traveling and going on holidays. I spend more time running my business. That's what I'm doing really. Right. So that is the thing you have to love, not the rewards. All of my clients have got really, really far the business and me. We all love finding products. We all love talking to suppliers and placing that order and seeing that first DHL package come through with a sample. We all love finding ways to make our products better than everyone else. We all love managing the back end and seeing what pricing strategies we can use to get more profit. We all love finding ways of cutting back on costs and being creative and innovative so we have bigger margins. Like we love all of this stuff. That's what we love. The rewards are nice. Yeah, sure. I do want to be able to travel, I do want to be able to work from home. You know, I do want all that stuff. But really I'm addicted to the business and that's the thing that really counts. So you have to be able to love the process. And if you don't, you're not going to be successful, right? I mean, if somebody offered me more money, let's say somebody offered me 2 million a year, okay, to work as an employee in somebody else's business, I genuinely would turn them down. And some of you might think that's crazy and you might think that you know I'm lying. But in all seriousness, I would never take on a job like that. And the reason why is because I am obsessed with what I do right now, right? I'm obsessed with it and I couldn't think of doing anything else. And I know that if I keep working on my business, 2 million a year is nothing. I could grow my business to whatever level I like and not be told when I'm gonna get a raise. I'll make my own raise, right? One day, maybe I could even sell my business for a multiple seven figure sum anyway. Alright? That's the level of love you have to have for the process, alright? You have to, you have to fall in love with building the business. And if you can do that and if you really enjoy it, it's almost like nothing can get in your way because you love it. You're going to find ways to fix problems, right? You're going to find ways to make it work. And that's been the thing that has got clients results. So that's number five. Number six is you've got to be able to listen like my best clients. It's actually really funny. My best clients have pretty much built businesses that follow my exact predictions. And this is really bizarre. I didn't think it was going to be so crystal clear, but it really is. Like I've got clients who, you know, I always say you should aim to make a thousand pounds profit per month per product. If you're selling on Amazon UK,000 pounds profit per product per month. So for example, if you want to make 10 grand a month, launch 10 products, right? 10 products that sell consistently. Now to launch 10 products, you know, you might that sell consistently, you might need to launch 15 products altogether and expect maybe five of them not to do as well as you hoped. It's just part of the game. Some products just don't work. Let's be real, right? My clients who are crushing it, have exactly that. I'll ask them like, okay, how many products do you have? And they'll be like, okay, I've got five that are selling well, but how much profit you making per month? Five grand a month. I'm like, wow, I really didn't expect your business to actually meet my predictions so closely. And I thought about it for a second, I was like, why did that happen? Why did their business, you know, perform in the exact way I said it would? It's because they listened and they actually followed my advice and they just did everything in the way that I said that they should do it. Alright, what does this mean? Does this mean I'm a control freak and I just want you to tell you what to do so you can just listen to me constantly? No, right? Not at all. It's just that here's the thing, there's gonna be loads of people out there who they, they're teaching the same stuff as me. There's loads of people out there who teach Amazon and they will say things that almost the polar opposite of what I say. But I say do a test batch, for God's sake, start with a test batch, right? Let's say you've got another Amazon coach and he says whatever you do, do not start with a test batch. Do not start with a test batch, right? Just don't just go for a big order and place an order of two months worth of stock from day one, for example, right? Which one of us is correct? Who's right? The truth is we're both right. There's many ways to be right. At the end of the day, you could. The point is, if you follow five different people's methods, you're going to be combining all of these five things at once. Taking one bit of advice, cherry picking it from this person and then taking another bit of advice from this person. And those two things in the context of what you're doing could completely clash. Like if you follow my methods of doing things and you don't do a test batch, you might get your fingers burnt, right? Because it's just the way my blueprint works means you should do a test batch. If you follow someone else's program and you don't, and you do do a test batch and they said don't, it might not work out because you didn't follow the steps you followed. You know, step one of my program and then step two of his program, etc, etc, etc. So the point is pick one person that you want to learn from and then treat them like they're a God and just copy everything that they do, right? Because then you give yourself up to them and you put your, your success into their hands, right? And this is much better than thinking that you know how to do it yourself. Because if you did know how to do it yourself, you would have a business by now, right? You would already have hit your goals. So that's, that's a really important final thing. You have to be able to listen. And you know, if you're going to pay someone for their advice, then take the advice. Otherwise just don't, don't pay them. So that's important. So just listen. Now look, obviously you do have to use your own judgment as well and you do have to pick the right mentor. You know, it's a bad idea to pick someone to work with who you feel doesn't know what they're talking about, because obviously then they're going to lead you down a terrible path, right? But pick someone who's been proven to get others results, right? And I can show you lists of people who've worked with me and if they just follow what I say and they have all these other five qualities, they've made it, right? You can see them on the YouTube channel. All right, so do you feel like you have all six of these success indicators? Do you feel like you have all of them? Do you feel like you have one of them? Do you feel like you have none of them? Just have a think about it and just be honest with yourself, really. Because if you have all these six things, then really you will be successful. As long as you stick with it, you will be successful. It doesn't matter what the economy is doing. It doesn't matter, you know, whether you have challenges. It just doesn't matter. But if you ask someone, any business owner, as they were building their business, did everything go their way? They'll laugh in your face. They'll be like, what are you talking about? Did everything go my way? I think the real question is, did anything go my way? Like, the amount of stuff that happens when you're building a business is so unexpected and just really, you really wouldn't have even seen that coming. I mean, it's unbelievable, right? So it's not whether everything's perfect the whole time. It's, are you willing to actually be resilient, keep moving and be creative and have fun while things aren't going your way? So you can still hit your goals even though you have those challenges. That's the real deciding factor. So I hope this video has been helpful for you. I hope it's given you some perspective. Listen, if you feel like you do meet all of these six requirements, I'm looking to fill a few more spaces in my community of coaching clients, and I would love it if you book a call with me so we can talk about your goals and see if you're a fit and work together. All right. I think that would be. That would be really cool. So I'm looking for more people who really meet all of these requirements. Funny thing is about my coaching program is that I turn away so many people. I turn away just so many people because I can see whether you're going to be successful before you even start. And it's because of all this stuff. If I find that somebody is really, really desperate to make money and they really want to make money in the next, like, two months, then I don't work with them because it's just going to be so stressful because they're not going to. They might do it. I've actually had people do that several times. Right. But they're going to be so stressy the whole way that it's actually going to put a strain on my community and on my team and on me. It's not really worth it. So, you know, if you do feel like you're a fit, you can apply and there's a link in the description, or you can just go to ecommercefreedom.com, click accelerator, call at the top of the page, and we can have a talk. And we can first of all just double check that you are ready and you are a fit. And if you are, if it seems like you might be a good fit, then we can talk about the next steps and we can build a plan to help you build your business, hit your goals, and then we can talk about how you can work with me. So go do that if you like. But either way, if you know anyone who's looking to build a business and they're really serious about it and they genuinely want to know if they're in the right space of mind to do it, now, share this video with them. Because I think I've covered some stuff that a lot of people don't talk about. I've tried to be super blunt, black and white and honest, and I think a lot of people need this kind of thing. All right, so thanks so much for checking out my content. Make sure you subscribe, by the way, if you want updates and new content and we'll speak very, very soon.