Tips on Giving Up Your 9-to-5 to Start a Passion Project

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest I'm really excited about, all the way from Ireland, and he's going to teach us about passive income on a little website that probably none of you have ever heard of. It's really, really small and obscure, but we'll talk about it. But before we talk to our guests, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host. You know him, you love him. The brain, the professor, your fight school sherpa, Scott Todd from Scott Todd.net landmodo.com learning anything about anything. Learn more, go to investor ninjas.com Scott Todd. How are you?

Mark? I'm great.

How are you?

I'm great. I'm great. I'm really excited about our guest today, Stephen Summers. If you're not familiar with Stephen, he began selling online almost seven years ago. And he has spent years trying to figure out how to build an online business. Now, he invested thousands upon thousands trying to find someone who would show him how to actually build a business that would pay him every single month and allow him to move from working a job that was crushing his soul to building businesses full time. And after working in a year in his model, he learned everything he could about how to create an online business. He went on to generate millions of dollars in revenue on Amazon and other online marketplaces. Now Stephen is a serial entrepreneur who operates with Multiple partners, generating multiple seven figures in revenue from Marketplacesuperheroes.com Stephen Summers. Welcome, guys.

Thank you so much. What an energetic introduction. I really enjoyed that. Thank you.

Well, let's just rewind the tape, Stephen, and you're kind of lost in the woods out there working a job. Tell us about it.

Yeah. So just to give some context, I'm 33 now, so it was about 10 years ago. And like a lot of people listening to this show, I'm sure I was looking to figure out how to make money, how to get out of this job I was in. So, you know, I wasn't still pretty young, but I've been working for a number of years. Why? Because I was trying to make it as a musician and you probably guessed it didn't work out. So anyway, I'm okay, honestly. So here I was, like a lot of people working in a job. I was a data processor. Incredibly boring job. Literally just typing information from a form into a computer all day. I started searching on the Internet how to make Money online now, like a lot of people, I found a lot of shady websites, cheap products that were terrible to taught you absolutely nothing. And I wasted a couple of years of my life doing that while working this job and all the rest. So I get to be in my early 20s and I'm at that point where, you know, I still have a lot of early days of my career. And I thought, you know, I have a real opportunity now before I have kids, before I have a family and all the rest, I can actually figure out what I want to do. So I realized selling products online was something that would be great for me to do because I wasn't an expert in anything. I was a data processor. I really wanted to learn how business worked. Had no idea. I was totally clueless. And luckily for me, I met this guy called Robert, still my business partner today. Cut a long story short, my aunt introduced me to this guy. He was selling products on Amazon and ebay in the UK at the time. And he basically said, look, if you want to learn, come up and I'll show you how it's done. So I spent nearly a year working with him for free, selling his secondhand products that were laying around the warehouse, learning my trade, working in his warehouse in two warehouses at the time, lots of staff, rats running around the place. It wasn't, well, it wasn't that bad, but it was pretty bad, it was pretty cold. And I was like, okay, this isn't the laptop lifestyle, but I'm finally seeing how a business works. So again, cutting a long story short, Robert and I decided to really dig in and re engineer his business where we didn't need warehouses, we didn't need staff, we could sell on Amazon globally using something called Amazon FBA Fulfillment by Amazon, which basically means we could send stock to their warehouses around the world and we could sell our own branded products that were our own brands globally on Amazon. And so after working with him for a year, earned the ropes, we started our own business. We got rid of the warehouses, rid of the staff and everything. We rebuilt the company from complete scratch because the products he was selling were very saturated and stuff like that. And then we turned it around in a year we had built IT to a seven figure revenue level at about 30% net profit. So we were making a couple hundred grand a year. Just two guys with no staff, with no warehouses or anything like that. We grew for a couple years and then like a lot of people, we got bored and we're like, right, this is great and all, but it's not very exciting anymore. And so a lot of people were asking us at the time, like they would ask you guys at the Land Geek, how do you do this? What should I do? And all of that. And yeah, we started teaching people. And, you know, that was now five years ago. And now five years later, we've taught nearly 8,000 people how to do this. We have our own freight company where we help our members ship stuff from China to the US with a big warehouse in Houston, over to the UK and over to Australia as well. And we're helping hundreds and hundreds of people build their business on Amazon, selling their own brand of products.

I have so many questions, so many questions. But Scott, Todd, I want to have. I want to start with you first. What are your thoughts?

All right, so this whole thing, like the whole product thing always excites me, right? Like, I always get excited about it and then I, like, go on the hunt for a product, okay? Like, I go and I look, I follow the advice of people, oh, go see what's selling. Oh, go look at the keywords and all this other stuff, okay? I go do all that stuff. And then what happens is I go down this rabbit hole where I end up on AliExpress or Alibaba or whatever, and I find this thing that I think can sell. And then I go over to Amazon and there's like 50 different listings or 100 different listings, and they all have the same stupid picture stock picture taken from the seller. Put it over here, and you know what? They're in a race to zero. Why would I do this? Or am I doing it wrong?

Yeah, I would say you are doing it wrong, as intelligent as you are. But I was the exact same. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And so a lot of people follow that process, right? Where we go to what's selling, what's hot now, what can they get involved in? A lot of people give the advice to go look at Google trends and all that and see what's on the upward trend and get involved in that. We go the other way. We sell the most boring products you can imagine. And so before I actually answer your question, I'll tell you what our strategy is just so you guys can understand that. So we follow something called a rule of five, right? Which basically means you got five products you can sell on Amazon. You sell them in five different Amazon countries at the same time. You're making five sales per day in each country, and you're making an average of $5 net profit every time you make a sale that's 5 by 5 by 5 by 5 over a 30 day period. That's $18,750 in net profit before tax. Now that's all well and good, but why am I telling you guys this? Because we're not looking for products that sell hundreds a day. We're looking for products that sell like five a day in multiple countries. So five in each country. So that's number one. We're not going after the really hyper competitive products. The other thing that I think is different with us is a lot of people in this space, they tell you like, go use a tool and the tool would just tell you what to sell. That's what everybody does. Where's what we do is a couple of different things. I'll tell you like the quickest, hackiest way, just so we can get some kind of context. What I would do is a little different. I would go to Wikipedia, for example. Go look at the hobbies page on Wikipedia. Tons of hobbies. Just pick any. Not any hobby, but let's just say you pick any old hobby. You go with, I don't know, fly fishing or something like that. So go to Amazon, search fly fishing accessories. That's the key word, accessories. We're never looking to sell the main thing. We're always selling accessories for marketplace superheroes. And then what we're looking for is a couple of things. We're looking for the generic keyword of a product. So let's say it was. I picked a terrible example. Now fly fishing lures, right? I'm just picking a terrible example. Let's say, for example, we search that on Amazon, looking for a couple of things. The first thing we're looking for is how many results are on Amazon for those keywords, right? So fly fishing lures, we want that to be less than 1,000. Ideally, they'll literally tell you this when you search something on Amazon. So let's say it was 722, like, okay, cool, that's interesting. It's less than 1,000. Then we look at the fly fishing lures that are on sale on Amazon and we look to identify a product that is selling well with that keyword. It is less than 30,000 bestseller rank. So it's less than 30,000 best selling product in that category. And then a couple more little things we do, which again will take a while to explain, but we're essentially validating a product idea. Before we go over to Alibaba, there's a lot of people that go to Aliexpress. What's hot there. Bring it back and see what's working. And as you just said really well, Scott is exactly the problem. We see the same stupid pictures. That's why I laugh when he said it, because I see it all the time and the same products all the time. Because there's another problem in our space and in the real estate space as well. There'll be the same kind of deal where people basically are just like, here in Amazon, here's the hundred products you should go and sell right now on Amazon. That's what everybody does. They go and they sell those products and they become saturated. We're way more interested in teaching our members how to fish a little bit. Like we yourselves teach people how to go find land deals, teach people how to do it themselves so they don't have to rely on, you know, here's 10 land deals you should go ahead and do right now, because everyone's going to jump on that. Right? So really we're looking for boring, everyday products that make a small number of sales in a number of countries. And then we're looking to create our own branded version and a better offer. It's essentially our model.

I like it. I like it. I like that you guys have an algorithm. I like the strategy. It. It certainly is, you know, something that's not going to be constantly in flux with, you know, a market. Okay, so I'm listening to this and like, okay, you guys have this algorithm. I think the next logical question is, do I need a lot of money to get started in this? What's my initial startup capital that I need?

Absolutely. So I'll go a step back before I answer this as well. Really annoying guest who goes a step back every time. But the thing is, it's like everything, right? And again, I do, I think it's great to talk about land and real estate and things like that, where the investment, in some cases that you guys are much bigger experts than I is going to be a little chunkier at times. Right? Because you're buying into something where you got to put some money down in order to buy a real asset. In this business, we, we look at it similarly, but not the same. In other words, we're not looking for the minimum we can do to start a business. We're always looking for, well, how much is it gonna actually cost me to bring in a product? So I would say to bring in a product to start your business, it's gonna be anywhere from about $800 to about $3,000. Ish. Right. So that would mean you could launch a very relatively big business for well less than $10,000. Well, less. You could launch a decent business for less than 5,000. But it's like everything, you know, if you put in $5,000 into your business, you never put anything else in. It's only going to grow so far. But again, the reason I say 3, 800 to 3,000, it depends, right? What's the cost price of the item, how big is it, how heavy is it? So there's a lot of things that are dependent for us to figure out, like what's your actual investment going to be? I've seen people start a product for $500, I've seen people start a product for $2,000, $3,000, etc. So that's a big thing to understand. And I will go into this business in one of two ways. First way is you've got capital, you're looking to get a better return than the banks, which are heading towards a minus percentage. In other words, you'll be paying the bank to keep your money there. So it wouldn't be very hard to beat that. And just to give you guys some ideas, whenever we invest a dollar into this business, we're looking to grow that by 100%. We have an ROI, you could call it, we call it a profit on investment of 100% on a grower money. Double our money every time we make a sale. So there's that as well to consider. So if you put in, let's say $5,000 and you put nothing else in, in your first nine months have been in stock, we want you to double that at least. But then you take your 10 and you turn into 20 and on and on and on you go. And obviously as you start to get in more products into your business, you'll find it's the 80, 20 rule. There'll be that 20% which really blows up. Your 80% will do okay, that 20%, you may flip that again, using real estate kind of terminology, for those of you who are into flipping, you can flip it maybe three, four times a year. So you're selling it out and you're turning your money a lot more quickly. But that takes a little bit of time to develop. So I would say 800 to $3,000 to launch a product. I would highly recommend going in with five to ten grand that you may not want to put your hand on today, but you're able to. And then the final thing would be, even if you do start small, my goal is get products with proven sales Histories, I can then bring all that sales history. I can bring the economics behind the product to a traditional lender. I can show them all of my figures, I can show them what's going on, where I get my products, etc. I can get them to fund it. If they can fund it, they're going to fund it for less than 10%. Therefore, if I'm making 100% every time I make a sale, I don't mind giving them 7% to fund it. Makes sense, right?

Absolutely. Scott Todd, what do you think?

I mean, I think that that's the thing. It's like you got to be able to bootstrap it, right? Like you got to be able to keep growing. And I think that the most important thing, Mark, that a lot of people miss is there is a recipe, right? Like we talk about a recipe in flight school, for example. We talk about a repeatable process. That's what a recipe is. It's a repeatable process and it's a strategy. And clearly if you get the wrong strategy from the get go, like me, well then you're not going to be successful at something. But if you go out and you apply the right strategy and a recipe that produces the end result the same every time, well then all of a sudden you're cooking. But then you got to be able to reinvest in your business. And I think a lot of times people, they want to start to pull the money back out immediately, right? Like I just want to do this and then I want to sit on the beach.

Scott Todd is a genius. Everyone. Scott Todd is a very smart man. I fully agree with that dude. But it's the same thing as everything. It's like, you know, if you, if you, let's say, invest in land and it's like, when do I get my check? When do I get my money? Do I get her? Today, right now, immediately. And everything. As you just said, you're 100% correct. Recipe, the right strategy. I mean you literally, you could be teaching my course. Actually, Scott, the way you're talking, you're right. Because the right research, it makes everything easier.

No, no, absolutely. And you know, Stephen, let's not give Scott any bigger head than he already has.

I mean, look, maybe I should start teaching the course. I don't know.

Okay, so, but you know what we, what we like about our model is, is it's a one time sale. And then we get this recurring income every single month until they pay off this note. So we have something similar. We have this algorithm, we're going to buy this property 25, 30 cents in the dollar. We know where to go get them. There's certain areas that are going to be better than others. So, you know, in that sense it seems very similar. Where is the one time sale and then I keep getting my passive income every month.

Yeah. So the answer to that really is in your initial investment, in many cases. In other words, your initial investment to bring in a product. Ultimately that's going to tell you what's going to happen for the lifetime of that product. And it's a little different than that. There is a one time, but then you will continue to purchase the product. In other words, you'll only be replenishing items that are working for you. So it's a little different for sure. And yes, as you grow your business, you can. If you don't bring in outside capital like I talked about, you can get into some cash flow crunches simply because your products are kicking ass or performing like crazy. You're taking the profitability of those items that are doing well to buy more of them because they're continuing to grow. You want to keep them in stock. So that can be an issue for people. That's why I mentioned earlier on Mark, the big thing is when you get something that's proven, get other people to fund that. So I would say looking at your model and trying to kind of give a comparison, it's like investing in the first, let's say iteration of the product, bringing it in, proving the sales, proving the concept, then starting to reorder the product yourself. And then as that product gets a bit more traction, getting to a lender and getting them to pay for that be my recommendation. And then really you've proven it with your own money, using other people's money to keep it in stock and grow it. And I suppose in essence you're getting recurring income off of that initial investment. But. Well, it is a little bit different. But I suppose that's the similarity. If I was to draw one.

I see Scott. Todd.

I don't know, Martin. I mean, that's the thing is like if you have something that works, do it right?

Like.

But I think, you know, one of the things that Stephen pulls out too is it's not necessarily about the vehicle that you're in. But I think one, you gotta have a vehicle, you gotta have a strategy. But two, in a way you kind of have to like it, right? Like you kind of, if you don't like it, man, then I don't care what you do, it's gonna be a pain because if I don't like, and Steve, if I'm wrong, but, like, do you like everything about your business or is there some things that you don't like too? Like the task work?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm in a fortunate position now and that we have a big team and we have multiple partners now in Amazon businesses. So my life's a lot easier now. I don't have to do the things that I didn't want to do. But yeah, as we were growing the business, certainly many things I didn't love, like sorting out accounting and making sure everything was correct and doing stock reports and making sure everything was in stock and was trending to stay in stock and stuff like that, at times that was a little bit tedious. But yeah, like, overall, I love it. And again, you're right, because if I didn't love it, I literally said the word Amazon every day for about the last over 10 years of my life. And you guys have probably been the same. And what you do, talking about land, you probably said the word land every day for the last how many years? So you're 100% correct. And even for those of you who never teach this thing, if you go into it and just do it and you don't ever get into teaching it, whatever, I agree with that, too. You do have to like it. Because if not, it does become a chore, it does become boring. But the really nice thing about selling these types of products is I get such a kick out of, like I'm selling, for example, as one of our members. I love the example. He sells the little things that cover the feet of a washing machine and stop it from scratching the floor. Right now, I can't get passionate about that product. There is no way on earth I can. But I get passionate about finding something weird like that. Seeing it come in, seeing it sell and then sell in multiple countries. That's where you get the novelty of this business model. But yeah, I fully agree with that, Scott. Absolutely.

So, Stephen, last question before we get to tip of the week. What's the hardest part of the business? Is it customer service? Is it fulfillment? Is it answering? Well, I guess customer service answer questions. Is it managing capital? Is it finding the right inventory? What would you say with your members? This is the part where they have the time, Toughest time, Hundred percent.

It's finding the products. And I think in any of these businesses, like, if it's finding deals in your world for us, finding products, if you're in an agency or something. And you're helping. It's finding clients, right? It's that first step always is the thing for people. Because we've taught thousands of students now. We just did a boot camp here recently online and I was able to see a lot of people and what they were doing with their research and seeing what was going on. And the thing I realized is that it's in our world, people don't go deep enough when they're starting out. In other words, like, they're selling these. They think they're gonna be able to sell plastic water bottles, which is like, everyone knows in my world, I go crazy about selling plastic water bottles. Do not sell them. What are you talking about? It's too competitive kind of thing. I'm screaming at the computer.

Whereas then it's Scott Todd.

Yeah, Scott and I, there we go. We're brothers in arms here. But it's that same idea. It's like, go deeper, you gotta go deeper. You gotta drill down to the weird products. And so that's where people do struggle at the start. But when they get into the. And we understand, we call it segue searching, which basically just means we find a winning product, we segue off of that. We look for related products that are not as competitive, using the algorithm thing I talked about earlier on to find products that make more sense, then we can get excited. But that is absolutely the hardest part. But also it's the part that unlocks everything. If you don't have a good product, forget about it. If you don't have multiple good products, forget about it. So it's very important.

Alright, well, this has been fantastic. I want to just remind the listeners that today's podcast is sponsored by flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can literally transform your life. Go up the mountain of land investing with Scott Todd, who's done it thousands of times. But when you're going up that mountain, do it quickly, safely, efficiently, and best of all, we guarantee that the tuition you're going to make back 180 days or less and guaranteed. Just show us that you're working. That's it. No risk. Learn more. Go to thelandgeek.com training get on a call, find out if this model is right for you. Thelandgeek.com training all right, Stephen, we are now at that point in the podcast where your mentorship has been great. I think Scott and I are both going to start our own FBA business as soon as we end this, but we're going to ask you for one more Tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

Well, look, maybe it's been recommended before, but if you're looking to get the real philosophy of passive income, there is no better book than the Millionaire Fast Lane by MJ Marco. It is my favorite book. Maybe it's been recommended before, I'm not sure. But has it been, you know, the.

Millionaire Fast Lane, Scott? I don't think so.

I know of it, but we haven't recommended it.

I'm telling you, it's an excellent book. It's well worth the read. And especially for the business model that all of your listeners are involved in as well. It makes a lot of sense. And there's great stuff in there, like become a producer, not a consumer. A lot of people are consuming. They're not producing. There's other great stuff as well. It's a real philosophy for building up a business, whatever business you're in. Like what Scott was saying earlier on. The vehicle is the thing. You choose your vehicle, you. You build up your business. And the idea is everybody is told to invest in stocks, bonds, whatever, index funds and everything, but they're investing with tiny amounts of money for a long time. And of course, someone said before everyone can become a millionaire, the unfortunate thing is most people are going to have to live. They're like 250 in order to get there. And so the idea of the book is to build up your business and then down the line, then have more capital to put into these more, let's call them, boring investments that can be very, very passive. So it's a great book. I think it'll teach people a lot, especially for people listening to this podcast, I would definitely recommend it. It's one of my favorite books. All of our thousands of people all read it, and I'll love it.

The Millionaire Fastlane.

Yep.

All right, fantastic, Scott. Todd, what's your tip of the week?

You know, look, I would say that the Millionaire Fast Lane is a good book, by the way, because he talks a lot about, like, I think his history is like, he had a limo. He had a website that I got into the limo business, right?

Like, he.

He was like the lead, lead thing of the limo business, but he really talks about how to scale your growth. And I think it's a good book. That's good. But check this one out, Mark. This one's called I Just Went Blank How I Built this. The Unexpected Paths of Success of the world's most inspirational entrepreneurs. And basically they look at, they look at different entrepreneurs and they talk to them about basically how it was that they grew into success. So I think it's pretty interesting when you can look at another successful entrepreneur. Remember, success, leads, clues. You know, they talked to some, some, you know, entrepreneurs, All Birds. They talked to the entrepreneurs who started All Birds, the shoes and Stacy's pita chips and the, the, the app Headspace. So I think it's pretty cool, Pretty cool book. Check it out.

Yeah, Guy Raz is from npr. I think he was on Tim Ferriss podcast as well talking about this. So both of you, great, great book recommendations. No one's going to trump my tip of the week because my tip of the week will literally start making you money from day one, which is. Learn more at marketplacesuperheroes.com marketplacesuperheroes.com Go there, learn more, Tons of free training, and, you know, start doubling your money. 100% is not bad, right?

Absolutely. I agree.

I want to thank the listeners. Remind them the only way Marketplacesuperheroes.com is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, get a rate, review the podcast, Send us a screenshot of that review to supportlandgeek.com we're going to send you the $97 wholetailing course, how to double your money 30 days or less for free. So please do that. All right, Scott, we ready to do this? 1, 2, 3. Let freedom ring would sound a lot better with a Irish accent. Stephen, you want to say it.

So let freedom ring. Is that what we're saying here?

Beautiful. Beautiful. All right, thanks, everybody.

That's all I have to do.

That's all. That is it. You're done. Boom, boom. Thanks, everybody.