Amazon Reseller Workshop With Ann Sieg

Episode 544: Amazon Reseller Workshop With Ann Sieg

 

Reselling is a business move where an individual sells something they have previously bought from someone else, usually for a higher price to profit. It is a thriving business, even more so today, with e-commerce websites like Amazon readily available to help people expand their market reach. Today, Ann Sieg will teach us about reselling on Amazon. Ann is the Founder and CEO of the E-Commerce Business School. She helps clients create an automated e-commerce business they can operate from anywhere. Tune in to learn how to become a successful Amazon reseller and build a profitable e-commerce business. They are also offering a free Amazon workshop, so you don’t want to miss this episode.

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I’m here with Ann Sieg, and we’re going to be talking about how to become an Amazon reseller. You might be thinking to yourself, “What in the heck is a real estate investor show talking about Amazon reselling for?” Sometimes, people think that because I’m in real estate, that’s what I know to talk about, that’s what a lot of my guests talk about, and that’s the end-all for this program, and it’s not. This show is designed to help you find your financial independence. I don’t care how you do it or where you do it, as long as we do it legal and we’re not hurting anybody when we do it.

Whether you get me as your coach and you go into real estate or you get in and you’re going, I don’t care. Just find a way to make whatever you’re making now at your job so you can quit. Why is that important? Because that will free up 2,600 hours that you get back control of that you use to give control to your boss or your employer. Now we can find out who you are, what you’re meant to do, what your passions are, and what you’re good at. I believe that ultimately leads to a better life. Am I on the right path, Ann?

You are dead on. At the end of the day, we’ll call it for what it is. We’re opportunity seekers. We’re looking for an opportunity to create a different outcome than we’re currently in. For anyone who’s reading this, the bottom line is we’re looking for a different outcome to whatever extent. It ranges from A to Z, but eCommerce is one of many potential opportunities to give you the desired outcome.

I don’t care how you find your financial freedom. I just want to help spark some interest or some ideas for you. There’s no excuse. Every minute of my life that I had a job, I was burning the candle at both ends after hours and on the weekends trying to get something off the ground so I could get out of that. I thought it was about money at first, and it’s not about money. It’s tied closely to money but when you get down to it, it’s about freedom. It’s about the freedom to do, go and be and decide for yourself what’s going to happen tomorrow, for the most part. Businesses make demands too. Be careful that you don’t set up a business that you’re a slave to because it’s easy to do that too. We try to set up a business that we can operate even above the CEO. We don’t work for the business.

We are talking about Amazon reselling. What I like about certain businesses is that they’re global. I started to notice that I’m in real estate investing and I do seller financing. That’s not global. It easily gets to be pretty niche. There are some states you can’t even do that in because of laws or regulations. Sometimes I wish I would hang around and look for a global opportunity where I can be open to the world. This is one of those.

When you’re an online seller and you are open up online, you’re open to the world. I think that’s very interesting. What’s your opinion on this, Ann? COVID brought it to light. We didn’t need to go to the grocery store anymore. We didn’t need to go to all these places anymore. We learned to shop online. If you weren’t already shopping online, you figured it out.

Yes. I came online eighteen years ago and I am very grateful I did. It was in part family happenstance because my son was pursuing online marketing, independent of me. We were working a lot together while he was in high school, different business things. He tried a lot of stuff, but we both organically went off into the online space, him with his and me with mine, and then we joined forces. He was 21 years old at that time. He became the top affiliate marketer for Walmart, Best Western, and GetResponse, which is an autoresponder. All to say he was doing that, I was doing my thing. We joined forces and we were doing real estate at that time too. We’re dribbling a lot of different balls to see what would work.

We landed in the online bucket. When COVID came down, I have a son who lives in China, by the way. We witnessed stateside aghast at what was going on there. They had just been here in December. In the very end, they proposed to his fiance. They go back to China and the next thing you know, COVID. If we could have just kept them here in the States, who would have known? We watched them from afar with all those lockdowns. I thought, “I guess that was contained to China.” We’re hoping they get unlocked and all this. No, then it hit us.

Here’s what happened. That was March. There was a lot of movement in March in our family and such. When the ruling came down, thus they shut down. I had a son from Minnesota who move down to come to Arkansas where he felt safer. It’s a little stricter and tighter up there. There was a lot of movement in my family, but we were like in Noah’s Ark, not only in my company, we have about 21 people. We’ve got a team of VAs that work with us too. The company was in Noah’s Ark, meaning we were safe, but my sellers were exploding in sales in March.

What happened in March is Amazon brought in 100 million new Prime buyers. It happened because of the shutdown. It was so prolific that Amazon limited what we could ship as third-party sellers to five categories like baby, household, pets, and the bare essentials. Everyone is trying to get the mask and the sanitizer. Everyone is freaked out about going to the store and they’re wiping down all the doorknobs and even the fluid they bring in the house etc.

They were in Noah’s Ark, essentially. If everyone knows a metaphor there, as you get in the ark, you’re safe and the flood is coming. Not only were we safe, but we also exploded in growth. We had to teach them merchant fulfillment because we couldn’t get all our products in because they said only five categories. They were deluged. Amazon put up 1,000 new warehouses in that calendar year. Not always the huge ones. They’ve got their building, trucking fleets and everything now. A thousand new in that single calendar year.

Who benefited were the Amazon sellers. They were safe and sound. The other part about it that’s so profound is those who had been with me longer were driving to and from work and sheltering down. Do we homeschool our kids? Our people were already acclimated, those who had come into the program prior to that. They came pouring in 2020 because it was like, “This is nuts.” Also, people were thinking, “If this were to happen again, I want to be in a safe spot.”

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The global par, I want to give a little case study story to drive this point home. I used to train in online marketing, how to build sales funds, etc. I did that for about seven years then we transitioned into eCommerce. One of my students from my previous training program shifted into eCommerce. Her name is Dr. Josie Shepard. She started on Amazon when she was 71. Within five years, she had three automated business sets. I talked to her the other day. Now she’s building yet another prep and ship center. She’s had three different Amazon sellers.

Here’s the global. Her son in Thailand runs the prep and ship center in California. She lives up in Oregon and she’s opening up a second prep and ship center now. She’s got Amazon businesses. She’s now 79, but by a five-year sprint, she had multiple automated businesses. I said, “How did you learn to do that?” She said, “You told me that in your previous program.” I’m like, “Well, you’re a good student.” All to say, you can have a business. Her son is running the company and that’s brick and mortar. A shipping center is a brick and mortar, but he’s managing it.

All kinds of things are possible when you get with people that have done it and understand how things work and stay getting educated. Business just goes to different levels. There’s always another level to go to. I have learned that you’re never finished. There’s always another level. You don’t want to sit down and you don’t have to.

Yeah, if you’re the ambitious type. I’m like, “Josie, you’re 79.” “I’m having too much fun, Ann.” She’s having fun building businesses, rinse and repeat. She hadn’t built businesses previously, just to be clear. The reason this is such a shortcut is the marketing is all done. It’s all built. It’s called Amazon. They have the most rabid customer base on the planet.

People that go into eCommerce, why would they fail? How would they fail?

By diving into the deep end of the pool? I can talk that through because knowing the potential pitfalls or point of failure are incredibly important. You mentioned eCommerce. I’m going to get into this because people get very messed up and tripped up. They don’t have a point of context of where they’re entering into the skill development level. There’s a wide swath and realm of eCommerce opportunities. It’s bewildering and you can get lost. You read one guy’s sales letter and he sells you on Shopify as the way.

That’s what I got to do. I got to build a brand. I see the wholesale queen, “I’ve got to be like the wholesale queen.” You’ve got all these one-stop-shop gurus with their specific slice of the pie or expertise. What they think others should do, because that’s what they’re good at, they’re going to sell that. You’re unknowing a person who is evaluating eCommerce does not have a point of reference. Are you in the shallow end of the pool where you’re going to have the greatest likelihood of success and the risk mitigation is as small as possible? Are you up on the diving platform, 30 feet up, which you have no business doing, but you don’t know any better? “I read the so-and-so sales letter, videos and the testimony. It looks so awesome. I think that’s the way I’m going to go.” That’s the point of failure. That’s number one.

The second is the risk becomes higher when you go into a more advanced method because here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to tap out with having too many tasks in front of you. You’re going to feel like you’re drowning because you can’t keep up with that. I’m still talking Shopify, “I got to build it. I got to get traffic generation going. I’ve got to be able to learn how to convert it into a sale. I’ve never done that before. I got to make sure I get the right products and my brand.” You don’t all look at the competition. You think you do but as a newbie, you don’t. You go into this very risk-filled method, which would be Shopify. An affiliate is horrific. They’ll showcase the success. By the way, we taught all these methods that I’m talking about. I got to get real with people because there ends up being too many casualties in real estate. There’s a whole slew of different specialties. I could be wrong.

I see it all the time. They didn’t do much. They spread themselves too thin. They don’t drill down deep enough on the one strategy. They don’t even know that the strategies that they’re trying don’t work in California or vice versa. They don’t know what they don’t know. I was just talking to someone the other day. You have to get a coach that is going to help you avoid these pitfalls. I think about my own career. I didn’t get a coach. I learned from the street, there’s a huge fallout or failure from learning from the street. I was lucky enough to make it around the bend just in time. I almost closed up shop because some bad things were happening to me over and over again.

Every time I thought I had one bad thing, another bad thing will happen and I almost quit. I was this far from quitting a business that was going to be millions and millions of dollars to me over my career. I got a coach and he navigated me through, showed me what I was doing wrong, and saved me from quitting. I hired the coach to help me liquidate so I could quit.

You were in a precipice but you worked with him and he got you catapulted.

I said, “Look, I got these 25 houses. They’re killing me. They’re eating my lunch. I just want out, how do I sell them? I can’t sell them. I’ve been trying to sell them. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to file for bankruptcy. My credit and my name are important to me. How do I get out of this and save my good name?” He fixed me and I’ve been doing that forever since.

 

You’re hitting on that other point of failure. This is a painful one, “I’m just going to piecemeal it all together. I got this thing. I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos.” Yeah, you and a million others. This guy said they’re going to piecemeal it together. Some might be able to do that. As Robert Kiyosaki says, “Intelligence is the ability to make finer distinctions.” The distinction is the power to follow someone where you’re in a linear, clear, step-by-step process that is proven. I call it the training model. I make it clear with people. I’m not interested in just training the digital marketing niche in the online marketing space, which I’ve written books about.

The real excellence in creating change in people’s lives is training with mentorship. There are people who grew up and they decide, “I’m going to do digital marketing,” and started to do crazy course courses. It’s all over the place. There are thousands and thousands. I’ve been here for eighteen years. There were thousands of them. How do you make the distinction of who’s the real deal? Who’s got roots that have gone down deep that I can really follow and I know that I’m going to be cultured and mentor with an eye on who you are becoming through the process?”

I always tell people, “You’re not going to be the same person when you go through as an entrepreneur. Who you are when you come in and what you evolve to be successful are going to be two different people. You better be ready for these changes and shifts that are going to have to happen inherently in your heart.”

That’s what I tell people that come on with me. I said, “You’re not going to recognize yourself in a year.” Let’s write down the day. Write it down and put it on your phone. I want an anniversary reminder.” The question is, how far have I come since the day when I teamed up with Mitch on the first day? How far have I come? That’s the question. I said, “You’re not going to recognize yourself at the end of the year if you’ll just do most of what I say.” My way is not the only way to do anything. I don’t know about your business. The main thing I’m trying to do is get you to quit your job and be able to make a living, hold your head above water, and be able to breathe and be okay.

Now, do you want to make a run at being rich? Let’s talk about that, but the first thing is to get control of your life. Get control of that 2,600 hours. Pull away the glass ceilings and break them all up. There are no ceilings anymore. It’s all up to you. What do you want to do? Do you want to go 5,000 feet or do you want to go 10,000 feet? It doesn’t matter at that point. You can go anywhere you want but you’re not going to recognize yourself in a year.

That’s exactly it. You’re not even going to think the same. How you process things and your view of the world, everything shifts. You have a different lens now. You evaluate the world in a different way than someone else. They’re oblivious. They don’t see what you see but generally, you have a fresh pair of eyes. Back to the points of failure is diving into the deep end of the pool instead of getting a big zoom out. I was talking about Shopify would be a deep end and then it’s sequential. We like to start with people where there’s the easiest, most dependable and reliable method. The reason we do that is because you then have what we call more bandwidth to actually start offsetting your tasks a lot sooner in a more logical progression that, “Okay, I learned that. Now I’m going to offset that.”

This was something we did after evaluating. It was two years ago. We looked at our student body and we did exactly that. Where are the points of failure and how could we make things better? That sense of overwhelm was we get them coming in as a CEO from day one. You’re going to be offsetting tasks. You’re not going to be Mrs. Wear Every Hat kind of business owner. We have people who are literally offsetting within their first month. We guide them through that because you’re going to have to where you can’t scale. You’re going to be capped. With real estate, you can maybe get to cashflow faster. I’m not sure, we do a method that’s very quick. It’s a bigger and faster move, but you got to put more money into real estate.

In real estate, you have to make a couple of strikes and then just roll it back into the business, minus whatever you need to eat that month, two months or three months. Everything else, you got to put it back in. Now you have a budget. Now you can get a VA. It’s always the first deals that are the hardest. Those are the ones that give you your first big breath of confidence. I remember the first time I flipped a house and made money. It was proof of concept.

It was proof that I could do the concept that they personally could do it, but I did it even though I didn’t make that much money. It wasn’t the point of how much money I made. The point was I bought something. I sold it and I made a profit. I think I can do this. That’s what a good coach is supposed to do. When they come to you, they would say, “Show me how to do online marketing.” You already know where the pitfalls are. You already know how to start out where you’re not over your skis or not too far over your skis.

I totally agree with the proof of concept. That’s what we tell people, “You got to make your first sale.” We try to get them to that first sale as quickly as possible. It can happen within 2 to 3 weeks, depending on how fast they run. Amazon now has a longer setup process because they had to weed out all these crazy fake sellers. China was flooding and diluting the quality of the Amazon marketplace. They raised the ante. It’s more like a 7 to 10-day process. We’ll walk you through that, then let’s hit the ground running. It’s one thing to hear stories. People can read your story and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s you but what about me?” What about you? Let’s get out the shovel and let’s start digging. It’s getting into that proof of concept. Maybe you didn’t pick the exact right product and it didn’t make the bigger profits you were hoping for, but you proved it works. Now we dial it in.

That was the coaching thing for me. Someone said, “What are you expecting to make your first month? I said, “I don’t care. I just want to see somebody pick up the phone, somebody hand over their credit card. I don’t care if it’s $10 or $40, I want to see it get cashed while I’m out doing what I’m doing. If that works, I’ll figure out how to 10X it or whatever. I’ll figure that out. I just want to see the first thing happen.” This was what I would be afraid of. As if marketing online is not enough, how do you find products to market? Are you going to flea markets and finding truckloads of stuff? How do you ship it?

Let’s break that down. To be clear, the term is sourcing products to find them. There are a number of different ways to do that. Each one is increasing in complexity, meaning more variables go wrong as you increase in complexity. Case in point, sourcing from China, your variables just quadrupled easily because everything under the sun can. My son is a sourcing agent in China. Trust me, it gets way riskier. You want to move the spectrum. Where is the quickest and fastest way? It will lead to a larger volume over time, but what’s so key is you want to make sure everything you’re doing has the right kind of sales velocity and has the profit margins. In other words, it is all about the data. That’s what we do. We teach people the data so you’re making smart investments.

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The data, you don’t want to start with it. You don’t want to buy something at a price and be a loser, from the beginning, I assume there are costs and expenses that happen along the way. If you buy something for $10 and think you can sell it for $15, you can’t just go out and say, “I’m going to make $5,” because there’s got to be some expenses in between.

Yes. We have a product evaluation spreadsheet. When you put in all the data points in this particular spreadsheet, the data points that are most relevant to making a decision, just like when you buy a house, you’re gathering up your data and you know the rent of this, that, whatever. It’s all your data points. The same is true with eCommerce. You line up and input all those data points, and then we have it within our formulation. It’s going to show you the exact profit, and the return on investment, and it’s going to light up the sales philosophy. In other words, we want what’s called turn rate.

Talk about house flipping. This is about flipping products as fast as humanly possible. An incredible turn rate is 30 days, which some of our sellers achieve. They’re dialed into their numbers. You get a flip in 30 days. More of an average is two months. Here is exactly like real estate. You make your money when you buy because your Amazon gives us the data. We have to input it in, and then our evaluation sheet shows that. You’re making poor choices when you can have the data all there.

I just want to make it clear and specific to the arbitrage method. When you start getting into wholesale, you’re dealing with, “How do I get on the front page because I heard you got to advertise to get on the front page?” You do. “How do I know I have the right product?” You’re going to have to do massive product research to make sure it’s as risk-free as possible because when you go to wholesale, you’re buying a bigger volume. A bigger volume means bigger risks. When you’re new, you’re going to start small. Do you want to know how small I’m talking? To get a proof of concept, we’re talking $200. If you want to spend $50, it’s not a big deal. It’s just you’re learning it.

You get those products so there is another expense called the Amazon seller fee. That’s in our data spreadsheet. You add it but, “I’m using software and I’ve got some VAs.” Those are data points. When you put in that product, you’re going to include your operational expenses. “It looks good. I want to make 25% here,” and you buy the product.

It takes X amount of days.

Knowing the turn rate has to do with what’s called sales philosophy on Amazon. That’s going to be a star rating. Everyone knows that. I bet you almost everyone reading this is a Prime buyer. I’m going to say it’s over two-thirds of American households. You guys all know when you’re on Amazon, you’re all shoppers, and you’re all addicted. Mitch, have you ever bought from Amazon? I’m just curious. Of course, you’re Prime and your wife probably loves it too.

Did you know that 58% of those are us, the third-party sellers? That’s 58% of the sales on Amazon. When people go, “What about the local shops?” I’m like, “It’s called redistribution of wealth.” Here’s what happens and it’s a weird thing to accept but it’s true. Either get on board with where we’re at in this time of the century or not. It shifted in part from local businesses to little mom and pops or running a multimillion-dollar business out of their homes to Amazon. It’s a shift.

The advantage of those who work from home using Amazon is I don’t have to do a look at marketing. I don’t have to advertise. Amazon has done all the work. With arbitrage, you’re only selling products that are already selling. When you do a wholesale, it’s a new listing so the risk goes up. You’re going to have to do a launch. There are just other things involved. You don’t have to launch at wholesale. They have a different product labels. You want to start where it’s easiest and with the greatest likelihood of success. That makes it more amenable to hiring people to do that work for you.

Explain arbitrage. The only time I’ve heard the word arbitrage is when people were talking about interest rates. If you bought at 8% and then you sold at 10%, you had a 2% arbitrage. Arbitrage just means markup to me.

It is essentially that. I wish I had a better product to demonstrate. This is Burt’s Bees. The gals here will know what Burt’s Bees is. This has got a UPC code on it. Amazon has made this easy for us. They have their own seller app that you get on your phone and you go into a local store and you scan it. It is going to give you the data to go, “Holy smokes. This thing has got this much profit,” just by putting it in this data. I happen to know this is not profitable on Amazon to buy at a local store, but we are talking literally. You can source from local stores. In fact, that has the least amount of competition. You’re mitigating other sellers just by doing that alone.

You scan it, “The data is lining up. I think I’ll grab twenty of these.” I’ve had it where my husband says, “There are 120 of these.” I look at the data to buy them all and sold like hotcakes. That data is provided to us but we moved it to do it online because there are some folks who don’t want to be going out to the stores. That’s fine. You can do it online. Everyone has heard of Walmart. When there’s a lift by law on Walmart and selling high on Amazon with profit, our members get an average of 25% to 31% profit. That’s when they vet the product properly. Some of our sellers get up to 50% profit because they know how to do discount stacking.

 

When someone else is paying $20 for that product, they may be able to buy it for $7 because they know how to discount stack. As I mentioned these things, you can have people offset these tasks. Specifically virtual assistants that you would be hiring from the Philippines. We walk you through this and they’re doing all this online vetting for you. Vetting means proving the products. They’re putting in the numbers and making sure that they’re winning numbers. You don’t buy it if they’re not winning numbers. In our minds as sellers, we don’t care if it’s cute or hideous. I saw this hideous purse at Walmart and I scan it. I thought this is the most hideous thing I have ever seen. It was selling fast. It was for little girls apparently. Who cares? It doesn’t matter in our mind what we think is cute. It’s a complete non-issue. We’ve sold a bunch of refrigerator filters, and super big droplets.

They’re refrigerator filters but if you make $1 million moving them from point A to point B, who cares? It gets romantic after that.

That’s exactly it. The romance comes as you’re making your sales. You fall in love with the numbers. That’s what you fall in love with, and then you go, “Now this is some hot smoking numbers.” You can offset that work. This was what lifted the success rate of our members. We used to recommend getting a VA down the pipeline. Not anymore. Now we recommend a VA or virtual assistant as soon as you are able to evaluate their work. You don’t have to be an expert at it but you better know how to assess their work. In other words, how are those numbers looking? That’s what we train people on. Your VAs are working during the night, our day. You wake up and they’ve evaluated these products.

We have a suite of trainers. Their numbers are one good virtual assistant is $70,000 in profit per year. A good quality VA. We have it all broken down. We do this in a workshop where we just show it point by point. We have hundreds of people who are sourcing and getting VAs to do that piece of the work, which is the most important. You got to have something to sell. That’s the most important. I’m going to talk about shipping and how that gets automated. These products have an FBA seller. To make that clear, because I’m throwing all the terms, FBA means Fulfillment By Amazon. Prime buyers love it. We get two free days of shipping. It shows up at our door, sometimes faster.

In order for a product to become FBA qualified, it has to be in an Amazon warehouse because Amazon is making a promise behind their brand name. It’s going to be there in two days. That’s their promise. When it’s merchant fulfilled, and you accidentally buy one of those and 7 days or10 days later, you’re like, “What? I didn’t even notice that was on Prime.” I’m always kicking myself. I made my decision. I want it here in two days.

We got to get those products into the warehouse. How does that get automated? There are three options. First, you do it, that’s one. The second is you train someone locally to do it. The third is that I don’t want to have anything to do with this. What do you do? There’s a new kind of industry in town. This is the prep and ship center people. They have a business that supports a third-party seller who was like, “I don’t want products in my house. I did that before with network marketing. I’m not going to do that.”

What they do is when they place that order online, because they’re ordering from online stores, it gets shipped to the prep and ship center. We’ll ship it out to you. Yes, there’s a cost to that but I like to look at life as my time is money. I’m going to now move up to work more on the business instead of in it because that’s where you need to be as a CEO. You start up at the ground level and you want to work your way up so that you’re growing the business and not doing the daily minutiae, which would be finding products and doing the shipping.

You might start with them and our members vary. Some love it, “I love doing the shipping.” That’s fine. Other people, “I want the prep and ship center right away. I do not want to be doing that one on my house.” What we’re interested in is what makes it scalable and what makes it hands-off so that people can actualize the lifestyle piece. Sure, they want the income. Most everyone reading this right now, that’s top of the list. They want the income because most people are looking to transition. There are some people right now who are real estate investors because they joined the program and I’ve talked to them. This is where you can have people offset that and do that work for you so that you can be the CEO of your business and that dream lifestyle. You get both financial and time freedom.

That’s like people in the real estate business going and painting their own house, and doing their own carpentry work. You’re like, “No, you’re making the money finding the house. That other stuff is a $15 an hour job. If you’re good at finding houses, you should be worth $1,000 an hour. Why in the world would you paint a house?” Nothing against painters. I’m not saying that. You can’t work below your pay grade. We’ve got to figure out what that is first. You got to figure out how to have a higher pay grade so you don’t have to do all this other stuff. Figure out what you’re good at. I’m going to guess that if you’re good at sourcing winning products in this business, then you probably never have to put tape on a box ever again in your life.

Your golden and at that point because that is the number one. The shipping is incidental. You deal with it, whether you’re doing it or hiring someone to do it local. What builds the house truly is being good at sourcing. One of our trainers has ten virtual assistants and has developed multiple companies by having a team. It allows her to branch out. When you talked about the global at the beginning, the other thing I like to tell people is, “This is the portal into a completely different world of opportunity that most people don’t realize just how big this eCommerce space is and the long-term potential and real estate too. That’s never going to go away. People have to live in a house.

It sounds a little less intimidating than real estate. Although, there’s a method to buy real estate with none of your own money and you partner with people. If you think it takes money to make money, then you’re going to be broke for a long time if you’re broke right now. You can’t look at it like that. If you think it takes money to make money, then you’ve set yourself up in a losing mindset that’s not ever going to work. What you have to do is find things that you can take a little bit of money and big enough that you’ll get ahead fast enough to get out of where you’re at.

If a person has a broke mentality and they start making money, the hardest thing to do is for them to hire someone or to pay for people to mow their lawn or to box their stuff. The dumbest thing you could do is mow your own lawn because if you spent the same two hours in an air-conditioned room trying to find a house or trying to source some products, you’re going to make $2,000 or $3,000 maybe or $10,000 or $20,000. I’m just saying it doesn’t pay to mow the lawn around my house.

Seize the day. What holds a lot of people back are internal thought processes that are self-sabotaging. Click To Tweet

That costs me some problems at my house because my wife is a worker bee and has always been a worker bee. She was like, “When are you going to mow the lawn?” I say, “I don’t mow the lawn anymore.” “You’re too good to mow the lawn?” I say, “I’m not too good to mow the lawn. It’s how much money to mow the lawn.” It’s hard for her to understand that. She’s like, “Can you pick up the dry cleaning today?” He says, “Look, I’m worth $800 an hour. Can we find someone else to pick up the dry cleaning because I am one expensive dry cleaning pick up and delivery man?”

The distinction there that’s so profound is that your time is more valuable. When you go to do those tasks, you’re robbing yourself of the money that you could have made. My mom is the same way, God bless her. Straight from the depression. My mom will never have an alternate worldview. I’m not saying that’s true for everybody, but I know for my mom, it’s like a prophet is not welcome in their own land. My family has no understanding of what I do. My husband’s like, “You should make it clear.” I said, “I don’t want to.” It’s too hard for them to understand. That’s okay.

This is how you get into this little portal with Ann Sieg. You can learn about this world. She’s got a giveaway called Profit Project Calculator. There’s a free workshop coming up. You need to go to the workshop because this show is just enough to get your interest up. All this could do for you is just to get your interest up. You’re going to have to follow up. Tell us about your giveaway and your workshop.

For the Profit Projection Calculator, you’ll want to register for the web class, and the workshop, so that you can get on the list to get the Profit Projection Calculator. We put this software together as a tool because so often people ask, “I want to make this amount of money. How much inventory is it going to cost?” It’s a very fair and legitimate question. “I want to make this much profit. How much inventory do I need?” We have a 21-minute training specifically that walks people through it and how to put things more into your favor. As you put the numbers into the calculator, how do you lower your costs? There are strategies to that. Your cost of acquisition, we call it. How do you increase your profit? There are strategies to that. More savvy sellers know what those secrets are that give you a better profit margin, which does what? More money to parlay and report in more inventory.

That’s how you perform other people or get to your end results that much faster. It’s making your dollar work further than someone else who is not as savvy and in the know. They might spend X amount to get this much profit. You would be let down and you’re getting that much more profit. That’s what you’ll learn in the Profit Projection Calculator. Furthermore, in the workshop, we’re going to go through it live. We’re also going to go through the arbitrage method and we’re going to go through the automation piece. There are all sorts of different sourcing methods. A gal just joined us and she sells $2 million to $3 million a year right now.

For 25% to 30%, if she’s doing $1 million, that’s $250,000. If she’s doing $2 million, that’s $500,000 a year.

You are right. The problem is she was utilizing a method. I don’t want to get into the weeds here but we follow Amazon’s terms of service to the T. Sorry, black hat stuff. Don’t try and do fancy stuff when it comes to Amazon. They’ll catch you and they’ll do something about it. She was utilizing a method that is taught out there and Amazon does not approve of that method. She lost that capability. Now she’s gone, “I got to turn my ship around. Most of all, I want to learn how to automate the business. I’m here to learn that piece.” She had followed some no-no stuff sadly. We make it very clear. If you want to win on Amazon, you’ll be like Amazon. You’re going to know everything about it so that you’re minding P’s and Q’s that you need to follow.

I’ll say what it is in case people haven’t looked at eCommerce, it’s drop shipping. On Amazon, you don’t. If you get caught, you’re done. We don’t teach that. Here’s why this is people’s focus. They want to build a strong foundation. We’re not interested in trying to figure out little cutesy tricks to get around Amazon’s rules. We want people to have a long-term. Our master trainer is going into his 14th year and he has never had an issue. He follows the rules and guidelines. It’s important for people to know that upfront. I digressed a little bit, but back to the workshop, you’ll learn about automation. We also go through the full scope of what can happen with an Amazon journey.

It’s pretty magnificent. We want you to see what that scope and that end game can look like. This is about building a legacy business where you flip these businesses to sell. You can grow a very substantial Amazon business. Now you have an asset just like a house. I talked about Dr. Josie earlier. They’re going for what used to be 2 to 3 multiples to 5 to 6 now. Why? Because it’s the here and now. It’s not just the future. Amazon stores are very valuable. You can throw your roots down here and do very well in the long term. We’re going to cover a lot of ground in the workshop, plenty of Q and A. Please bring your questions. We love that part of the workshop.

I want everyone to go to 1000Houses.com/Amazon. Everything we’ve talked about is over there. You can get your free Profit Project Calculator. You can sign up for the workshop. It will even be evergreen. If you missed it for some reason and you’re still interested, you can return to 1000Houses.com/Amazon. I want to use your exact words. Check out this little portal. Just go through it, move your head in and look around. What does the workshop cost?

It’s a free workshop. This is the eCommerce business school. I’ve always been education-based. I don’t like it when people don’t know what they’re getting involved with because they join and they’re like, “What did I sign up for it?” I want people to understand what this is about. What is this Amazon opportunity? How does it work exactly? We’ll go through that. We have a schematic to explain it. If nothing else, here’s another way to look at it. It may not be for you. Who knows, but I’ll tell you what. We live in strange times, Mitch. They are strange and people need to have backups. I am following the news and I’ve watched these kinds of things at a global, local and national level. You all better buckle up. You got to take ownership of your future. I am really serious about that. I learned that a long time ago. I do not want to be at the whim of anyone else.

They lay you off or they cancel it. What she’s saying is maybe you better work part-time while you have your job. Find something that might become your primary source of income in case your job right now goes away. Whatever you’re making a living at, maybe it quits. Only you as an individual can know what you’re doing and look out in the world and go, “What’s the chance that this is going to survive?” I’m with you. Multiple streams of income have always been a part of my plan because you never know which one’s going to boom, and which one’s going to go out the window. You need more than just one.

 

That’s it, honestly. If anyone saw Kiyosaki from way back maybe twenty years ago, get a kitchen table business going, tax write-ups. You have to have a plan B.

Some people’s plan B is, “I’m going to work extra on weekends or DoorDash or whatever.” I said, “No, get a plan B that could have the potential to exceed your job five times.” Be careful of what you pick. I’ve started businesses that I didn’t know that I was doing at the time. I put myself like a hamster on a wheel and I had to keep running to make payroll every Friday. It was horrible. Be careful what you pick. Then I picked businesses that I was great at it. Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day. The only way it works is me and it doesn’t work without me, so I can only work 24 hours a day. It might be good money but if I take a week off, I don’t make any money.

Heaven forbid I want to take off a quarter, travel the world or anything, I would be broke by that time. I think this is that kind of business. Go to 1000Houses.com/Amazon. Pick up your free Profit Project Calculator, and get signed up for the free workshop. Poke your head and take a look around. If it’s not for you, go find something else. You’re going to have to get on a few horses to find the one you want to take to the Kentucky Derby. It may not be the first one you get on. It might not be the 10th one you get on but find one sooner than later and get on with it. Anything else we need to cover before we wrap it up?

Seize the day, carpe diem. What holds a lot of people back are internal thought processes that are self-sabotaging. Thankfully, I got exposed at a very young age. My mom had me selling Christmas bells in the neighborhood when I was 7 or 8 years old. I hand knitted them and it was an opportunity and I sold them. I was like, “This is crazy.” I’m just a little kid. Open your mind. If they’re in your shows, they’re already open-minded people, but just know that success is out there. I love your analogy about there being a lot of horses to ride. Just pick one and look for that one that gets you to the Kentucky Derby.

You got to try a couple of things and find out what works for you. Find out where you belong. It took me forever to find out where I belong. I didn’t find where I belonged until I was 34 years old and I was busting my butt. Even in high school, I was an entrepreneur. I had the business of the day. I was bartending at night to make sure I had some money, then I would have the business of the month. I have a stack of business cards this tall, but that didn’t work out. I finally found what I was supposed to do and maybe along the way I finally grew up too. It’s the intersection between those two things. It’s a pleasure talking to you always, Ann.

I love what you do. I know that you care about the people you teach. I know that you’re not in it just for the money. We have to charge sometimes as coaches and weed out the people that are going to waste our time. I’m doing it for what Ann does it for. At 61 years old, I don’t need any more money. What I need is to feel relevant to feel like I made a difference in people’s lives. That’s what I need. You can laugh at that all you want to but call me when you’re 61 and wealthy and see if you just want to sit around all day long on the back porch.

You’ll get very depressed about a lot of things that go through your head. As humans, we have an innate urge to want to be valuable and help the people that we can. Hopefully, you get there. I know Ann is there. Thank you so much for the way that you handle your business and the way that you handle your students. You are very sincere and it means a lot.

I appreciate that. I want to have significance here. This sometimes gets me choked up. I am about the family and strengthening the family economy. That’s my contribution to society as a citizen. There are a lot of different things you can do as a citizen. I’ve been called to be an entrepreneur. I am a teacher by heart. Both my parents were teachers. I’m an educator. I love building communities of people. My goal is to strengthen the family economy so they can stand strong because there are a lot of assaults going on right now. There just are.

I’m here to reinforce. It’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The first is to have your needs met, and then you go up and you self-actualize at the top. Shore up the family so that the family can self-actualize. Maybe they’re going to start working in charity organizations. Whatever it is, where is that end goal that you want to feel completely fulfilled because you found a business that can get you to a place where you can be a contribution to society? That’s not necessarily everyone’s goal or vision. I always told my boys, “Your job is to find out what your God-given duty is on this planet. I guarantee you, it’s going to be in service to people.”

It’s a great place to end. Thank you so much for joining us, Ann.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/Amazon  Sign up for the workshop
• 1000Houses.com/tff
• 1000Houses.com/VAHelp
• 1000Houses.com/100
• 1000Houses.com/books

 

About Ann Sieg

The author of some of the most widely read books in the world on how to get new customers and prospects to come to you, Ann Sieg is considered one of the pioneers of attraction marketing.

Since then, she has been able to impact the lives of 10’s of thousands of people, from CEOs to beginning entrepreneurs, through her groundbreaking coaching and training programs. Her reports have been read by over 400,000 people worldwide and she has helped many people achieve 6, 7 and even 8 figure incomes – many of them through her free training alone.

After training thousands of entrepreneurs and direct sales reps on how to build their own online sales funnels and info product businesses, Ann has since redirected her focus into the ecommerce retail space.

While having helped thousands of people become top sales producers in their companies, nothing has matched the rapid success her ecommerce students have reached. It is not at all uncommon for her students to cash flow their businesses in the first few days or weeks of starting their business.

Since this time Ann has developed multiple training courses, memberships and workshops to help meet her student’s needs at every level possible. Ann and her team deliver dozens of live, hands-on workshops every year across the country, as well as trips to China and the Canton Fair – the largest tradeshow in the world.

But what makes Ann’s community especially unique is the huge emphasis on a help-and-be-helped community that includes many private Facebook group support pages, high-level accountability and tracking systems to gauge business activities and results, and a strong emphasis on leadership development that has groomed up a highly skilled team of consultants, coaches and trainers.

Ann’s vision is to help 1000 people generate $10,000 a month in revenue. This is now entirely doable due to the rapidly growing e-commerce space combined with a powerful training system and community. Members who never made a dime online now routinely hit the 100K mark in e-commerce sales.

 

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