Persistence (Three Amazon Case Studies)

Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. Welcome to the Ecommerce Freedom Podcast. Before we dive in with today's episode, I've got two cool resources for you. The first one is my new E Commerce Q and A group on Facebook. So in this group, the point is, you ask questions in the Facebook group and I answer them with daily videos, okay? So you can get your questions answered really, really, really quick. It's a great resource. If you go to ecommercefreedom.com and look at the top of the page, you'll see a button for the Q and A group. Click on that, it will take you to the Facebook group. Second resource I got for you is an Amazon accelerator call. So what I'd love to do with you is talk about your goals, talk about where you are now, and talk about the stuff that could prevent you from hitting your goals right together. On a strategy session, we will come up with a plan for you to replace your income with an Amazon business. If you'd like to book a call where we can do this, go to ecommercefreedom.com, look at the top of the page and click Amazon Accelerator Call. You'll be taken to a very short application page. You can fill that in on the next page. You should be able to book your call. Alright, hope you really enjoy the episode. Hey, how's it going? It's Olly here. So today I'm making a video about the topic of persistence, persistence in business and why it is so unbelievably crucial that you are persistent and why it's so much more important than the luck you have, the skills you have as an Amazon seller, the resources you have, or any other factors you could possibly imagine when building your business. So today I'm going to give you three case studies of people I've worked with as they've built their Amazon businesses. Okay? I'm going to keep them anonymous because obviously it's not fair to, you know, name names, but I'm going to be referring to free Real world case Stud. Now, you're going to notice that these people had all different backgrounds, all different levels of resources, and just because of their level of persistence, they actually had very different results. So if nothing else from today's video, I just want you to think about your levels of persistence and hopefully this will encourage you not to give up too soon. It will encourage you to keep moving forward if things aren't going well and to focus on the big picture and the light at the end of the tunnel, rather than whatever barrier you're dealing with right now. So let's talk about case study number one. So this guy is fantastic client of mine, really, really, really took everything I said, put it into action and got really great results. Actually sold for about 18 months in his business and he actually, during the time he was selling, managed to build the business to six figures. Alright, so built a six figure business, which is very commendable, right? That is what I would say is a solid foundation for your business, right? Getting to six figures proves now that you have something that's working, that's able to provide at least some level of income and it's a good starting point. And then what you want to do is grow from there and even establish, you know, a high six figure or seven figure business from that point. So this is what happened, right? He built it to six figures within a year or two, obviously following the stuff that I said. And he was the one who put all the work in, of course, so I can't take the credit for it. But then he decided it wasn't profitable and decided to start another business and leave this one behind, right? So not sell on Amazon anymore, do something else. Now look, I don't know the ins and outs of the situation. Sometimes leaving a business behind and moving on can be the right decision to make. Sometimes, you know, it's just a good decision to do that. If the business has serious problems, if you can't figure out any future for the business and there's no way out, sometimes it's better just to close the business and start a new one. However many other people have been in this same situation where they have a business and it's running, they've got momentum, they've hit maybe six figures, maybe some people even get to seven figures with their business. But it's not perfect. Things are going very wrong with the business. Maybe it's not profitable, maybe it has cash flow issues, maybe there's operational issues. You know, the suppliers are annoying, take forever to ship you the goods, maybe you lose a supplier. You know, all businesses have problems. That's the whole point of being a business owner as you work to fix these problems. But one thing I can guarantee is it is a million times easier to fix a broken business than it is to start a new one. This is so, so true. And no matter what stage of the business you're at, so let's say you've been doing your Amazon business for three months, you've set up your account, you've got a little bit of stock You've sent it into the warehouse, maybe made one or two sales. This progress that you've made to actually generate some money in that business has got you so much further than if you were to start a new business from scratch. In other words, taking this product that you've shipped into the warehouse, that's got maybe one or two sales and turning that into a steady stream of income is a million times easier than trying to find a new way to make income somewhere out there going along with that, just because it seems like it's much easier. So one thing that completely kills persistence in entrepreneurs, and it's not just newbies, it's very successful entrepreneurs as well, is shiny object syndrome. And this affects so many entrepreneurs. You be shocked with the amount of cases of shiny object syndrome that have happened with business owners who have like eight, nine figure businesses who are ridiculously successful, and the thing that they have is working very, very, very well, but they see something in the distance, another opportunity that looks very, very, very profitable, and they lose focus of the current business to pursue this shiny object. And what happens is the shiny object turns out not to be as easy as they thought it would be. They jeopardize the current business, right? This happens so often now. I don't know if this happened in this case. In fact, this guy, it could have been the perfect decision actually to stop selling Amazon. I don't know. But in a lot of cases, just if you have a business that isn't profitable, figuring out how to make it profitable is the better decision because there's always a way, just a bit of innovation, lowering costs, finding a way to charge more, finding different ways to do things, like steering a ship that's already moving forward. And just changing the direction of the ship is so much easier, requires so little energy compared to getting a ship from standing to moving. You see the metaphor? You see what I'm trying to say? It's so much easier. So don't let shiny object syndrome distract you. Focus on what you have and be in this for the long game. You'll be much more chances of being successful. So case study number two. Okay? So this person actually tested a product, okay? And here's what happened, right? So found a product, tested it, sent it into the warehouse. But as what can happen sometimes when you're new to this entire process, right? You just set up your Amazon account. You've never shipped anything over from China before. You've never shipped anything into the warehouse before. You've never got things to sell on Amazon before. Everything just Took a little bit too long. It just took a little bit too long. There were delays right now there's always going to be some unexpected delays with suppliers. With Amazon, the first time you do things just because it's all new and you don't know the supplier yet. Right. You know, a year down the line, you'll have suppliers who you trust. Everything will become a lot smoother. And these delays won't happen as often. Right. They'll be more unlikely. But in the beginning, I mean, you have no idea. And there's no way to prevent this stuff, right? The supplier might say one thing and do another thing. The shipping method they use might not be as quick as you thought it would be. Amazon might take a while to make your stock go live. Like, delays are expected in the beginning and they are frustrating as hell, but it's part of the process anyway. This person got freaked out after he had sent his stuff into the warehouse. It wasn't selling as quickly as he thought it would, then quit before the marketing had a chance to actually take effect. Get his product to sell consistently and then make him profit. So he would be in a position to reorder, maybe with a bigger order, and then move forward to earning a thousand pounds per month profit or whatever the potential for that product could have been. Who knows? It could have been even more. So. The lesson here is, if there's delays in the early stages of your business, that's to be expected. Don't get too freaked out if there are delays, like, that's probably what's going to happen. We don't want it to happen. A lot of people don't have delays, right? But if you do, the key thing is just to hang in there and not get freaked out, right? Because if things are taking too long, just keep persisting and sooner or later everything will click right? The product will be right, the supplier will be right, the marketing will be right and it will begin to work. Case study number three, okay? So this person had delays with their first product. Big delays. In fact, it took about four months to get the first product even ready to ship from China. Okay? And this was really frustrating for them because it took four months to figure out the product, the packaging, the design, how they were going to differentiate in the marketplace. And then there was an issue with the supplier and all the work that this person had done to get the product moving and almost ready to ship. You have to start from scratch, right? So this is just. It's so painful because four months right. Of work pretty much went down. The drain. But they didn't let that derail them. In fact, they used it as momentum to go even faster. So rather than, you know, letting this get to them, they went for a second product. And rather than ordering a big amount and having to modify it and wait for all these delays, they Simply went to AliExpress, ordered relatively small quantities of this product and received it in a couple days, sent it into the Amazon warehouse and this product started selling like crazy, right? It was going insane. The amount of sales, the amount of profit in this niche was unbelievable. Is an untapped area of the marketplace. Crazy. So they ordered more stock to top up, right? To keep the momentum going. And the momentum kept going and it was like an upwards curve. It was really, really exciting and it was such a good thing to happen after this frustrating four month delay. But then something else happened. There was an issue with this product, some legal issue, alright? Which again, it's very difficult to predict this kind of thing, but it happened and the product got shut down. So again, very frustrating and annoying. But the person didn't give up. They just kept going and realized, you know, well, if I can get a product to sell this well, then I just need to find another product that I can get to sell this well and get several of them. Before you know it, I have a business. So a few months later they did this and the next product went live. Okay. And it started to sell relatively consistently. It wasn't as hot as the product that got shut down, but it was consistent and it was steady. And this started the basis for the income coming in from the business. So if you look at the first year of this person's journey, they didn't get as far as they wanted in there in their first year by any means. And rather than getting discouraged and thinking, oh, I've wasted so much time, they just looked on to the future and just kept on moving. Right. Bear in mind, this is all happening while the person had a full time job. Okay? So only 5, 10 hours a week while this person was building their business. Fast forward to today. This person has a six figure business business. And now they've got several products selling extremely well, very consistently, and they've got a really solid income coming in from the job. So what's the difference between case study one, case study two, case study three? Well, interestingly, case study one and two, the two people that had issues either built the business very well and then quit, or didn't really get the business off the ground and then quit. Those two people had the most Resources, they had the most cash. Some of them had the most time. In fact, both of them had more time, didn't have jobs, they didn't need jobs at the time, and they just had more stuff on the. On their side. In fact, they had more luck in some ways because they didn't, you know, persist for four months and then have to restart the whole process. They had more things go their way, especially in the first year, but they're not getting results today. Person getting results today wasn't the one who had the most resources, the most luck, or the most things go right. It was. It was the person who persisted the longest and just kept moving forward in spite of all the stuff that went wrong. So if you have very limited resources right now, you know, if you've had some bad luck, if you don't feel like you're maybe as bright as a lot of entrepreneurs out there, or if you feel like you have other disadvantages, just remember it's not really about having advantages or being better than other people. In many cases, whoever is the most persistent and just keeps moving forward for longer, like almost as if you're just smashing your head through a ton of walls right until the thing works. Whoever's willing to do that the longest generally wins. In fact, you find that intelligence can sometimes be a big inhibiting factor for entrepreneurs. Some entrepreneurs who are unbelievably intelligent have a big problem because they know that statistically this stuff is improbable. They also know that what they're doing is kind of stupid. If you keep bashing your head through walls to get somewhere, then, I mean, it doesn't take much intelligence to realize that this is ridiculous. In fact, sometimes it's people who are slightly less intelligent who don't seem to have the awareness that this entire process is ridiculous and keep persisting anyway. They're the ones who get the results right? So keep this in mind. It's not about your resources, it's not about your situation. It's about how long you can persist. And these case studies, and the case studies of everyone who I work with that gets unbelievable results is testament to this. And I'm testament to this as well, because I had problems, I had issues, I had no resources, and yet I kept pushing forward. So hope this video has been helpful. Hope it's giving you a little bit of insight about what really counts and what really matters with your business. And if you have encountered someone, maybe a friend, who is having some issues with their business, and you know, things are taking longer than they wanted. Maybe they just need a boost of inspiration. Then show them this video. Because it's all about the long term we have to think about, not the short term. Right? Cool. So I really hope you enjoyed this video. By the way, if you watch this video outside of my Facebook group, then please click the link above or below the video to join us and you can get your questions answered on daily videos. Just ask a question as you enter the group. You'll see a box that appears and I'll approve your request and I'll answer your videos. Answer your question on a video as well. All right, thanks so much for watching today's video and we'll speak soon.