8 Figured Automated Ecommerce Businesses with Neil Twa

Josh
 All right, good day, fellow dealmakers. Welcome to the deal scale on today's show. We're going to have a conversation with a return champion. He was on my other show, a uncensored advice for men. Now he's coming to talk about business, about investing about growing scaling and selling businesses. Neil trois. Welcome to the show. 

 Neil
 Hey Josh, thanks for having me. I'm honored that you offer to bring me back on after that last conversation was not drilling at the business, but I'm honored that you brought me back here today to talk to people about business. Something I'm very passionate about. 

 Josh
 Yeah. Exciting. You and I are hanging out in a coffee shop or we're whatever, and someone comes up and they go, Hey Neil, who are you? What do you do? Cause that's typically how we start out every conversation, right? 

 Neil
 Yeah. That's a crazy one. Cause it's difficult for me to explain. I mean, I guess I can default to the defacto, I'm an entrepreneur and I own multiple businesses at the same time. That's kind of weird because then people want to dig in and it's like, it's kinda difficult. I really just preface it at the most simplest thing is just by saying that, I, I own an e-commerce company that I train and help people learn how to launch and grow and scale these e-commerce businesses and then exit them if they choose to exit these businesses for high potential multiples. We talk about e-comm and physical products and building businesses. 

 Josh
 Nice. All right. They're going to, the common path of the conversation was like, oh really? How did you get started? Talk to us about some of the deals you work on. Let's just go the route of commonality of that. 

 Neil
 Yeah. Yeah. The commonality really has to do with people, understanding that physical products are a normal part of our world. We all buy, consume and use products of the world. We just don't always think about ourselves in the buyer seller space. We think about ourselves in the seller or buyer or consumer space. That means that we don't always understand how the products and brands around our lives actually got to be in our possession. That's one of the things about creating these e-comm models is getting people to unlock and train their brains to actually it literally everything you see behind me and everything in your studio and stuff they're listening to. Even the film they've got right now was produced, created, and branded by someone else. That it's possible for you to do that too. Once they realize that they suddenly, the doors of possibilities unlock, and the mind starts to race through all the possibilities of products, where then you get into the potentiality of analysis paralysis, and there's ways to deal with that too, which is all of these things to sell what actually in the hello should I sell? 

 Neil
 Right. Which gets the bigger question Nate started rolling. 

 Josh
 Yeah. So let's go. In terms of the, the brains behind what we use every day, right? The, the wireless headphones, the barriers, the sunglasses, the toilet paper, everything that we have in our house, to me, that's just Walmart, it's Walmart, Amazon Sam's club. 

 Neil
 You see a fault, your brain goes to the big box. Retailers are things that you can name, which are brands of companies selling other brands. 

 Josh
 Right? So, so I think what for us to do more, or maybe even participate in the upside, right? Cause if someone was like, let's just say, I had, I have a business or, I'm a high earner and I'm like, man, I'd really like to invest in other businesses or build something of my own. 

 Neil
 Right. 

 Josh
 I could to get into e-commerce. I can invest in Amazon. I can invest in Walmart or Kroger or one of these places that have online business. You're saying I could show you, or I've seen people do it on their own brands or their own products. Give us an idea, expose us. 

 Neil
 Well, I mean, honestly, I wasn't a, an e-com guy per se. I learned to become one. If I learned to become one, I can get others to learn to. At the end of the day, it's really just a process of understanding what you should do, what steps you should take. Where the real value in the business lies in terms of how you make it work and how you do your revenue generating activities that actually produce money in a business model like this. So let's keep it pretty simple. The, the answer is you create a product that someone else wants to buy and you sell it to them for a higher price than you paid for the product. Plus it's cost plus it's shipping and you make a profit. Obviously you repeat that process as many times as you can. Each time you do that, there's profit in the product for you. 

 Neil
 For the basic one-on-one understanding is of course I'm not flipping products. I may have already purchased. I'm not going to retail and arbitraging products or wholesaling. I'm actually creating, what's called private label brands, which are products that are customized to by brand created in brand affinity and therefore driven as a brand strategy, meaning that I want people to become involved emotionally and physically to my products. I want them to tell other people, I want them to get a better than experience with my products. I create an entire brand around my products. I learned to do that when I wasn't doing that. That's a strange way of saying I was an affiliate marketer at one point, who was doing a lot of mobile media driven marketing, online, doing lead generation for other people's products, digital and physical products. One day I woke up and realized, well, there's no reason I couldn't do that activity. 

 Neil
 S extended one more step, which was actually creating a product and a brand myself, and then getting people to come buy that product. That was a very big moment of relo revelation, because it actually helped me realize there's more profit, there's more upside potential. There's obviously a business model that can be deployed there. That is something that continues on organically beyond me. If I was going to apply my time, which is the biggest asset we all have that we can't get back. Where did I want to put it in the most useful manner? It's actually building something that's worth value, right? It's actually an intrinsic value in it. I can cash flow and make it profitable as I grow it. It's worth something to somebody else later on. I'm actually built something of organic lifestyle legacy, something I can tilt, teach my children. I got my daughter involved in product research. 

 Neil
 It's actually something that goes beyond the scope of normal everyday life and activities, which a lot of people flow into. I did for a long time. That was go to college, get a job in a work, put in a 401k and do that life. And that's fine for people. That's great. And everybody can't be an entrepreneur. I completely understand that, but there are opportunities for everybody to try that there's a lot of learning lessons in those steps. Even if you're not necessarily successful, you're going to learn to mitigate risk. You're going to learn better money management. You're going to learn trials. You're going to learn opportunities to expand yourself and your network. Just that entire process is huge, right? The goal of course, is to not fail in that process or at least fail up in the process, not fail out of the process, which unfortunately for about 500,000 companies every year is exactly what happens. 

 Neil
 They fail out. 

 Josh
 What is failing up versus failing out. What, what do you mean by failing up? 

 Neil
 Well, okay. If you visualize a staircase with me for a second, and maybe we go back in time and you look at people who've fallen upstairs, they usually continue up the staircase. Even though they follow down. What I'm saying is there are many people who go up the steps and they realize they have to keep climbing the stairs to reach whatever goal it is at the top of the stairs. They'll go up the stairs and fall up the stairs, but then turn around and go right back down and say, I can't keep walking up the stairs. Well, it's completely possible for you to keep walking up the stairs. You just chose not to keep going. Anyone can choose to do that. So the difference is failing up. It means I may fall up the stairs for some reason on my way up the stairs, but I'm going to just keep climbing because every step is going to get me to my goal. 

 Neil
 I may fall two or three more times walking up those stairs, but there's still the goal it's still there. It didn't change. I just didn't turn around and give up and go back down the stairs and say, I can't do it. 

 Josh
 Yeah. All right. This is probably so we're having coffee and that person came up and they were like, oh, I know this e-commerce thing. My brother-in-law, started a t-shirt company. He invested, five, 10 grand, and now he has a garage of t-shirts. 

 Neil
 Or whatever, good story, man. Right. 

 Josh
 They say, that's not for me. There's no way I could compete versus Walmart target Amazon. Right? That's the prominent, like common thought going into. 

 Neil
 It is a common thought organized by a common narrative, addressing the same point. They fell up the stairs and turned around and walked back down instead of adjusting, changing, choose taking their shoes off, whatever it was necessary, climbing on their belly, if needed and getting on their knees, they turned around and walked back down. The, the iterative is there's plenty of people who sell everything. If you're wearing a t-shirt right now, somebody sold it to so most likely they were having some success doing that. The end result is, there are mindsets at play behind the scenes here that we're talking about. While I have these discussions with people brand new every week, I am typically looking for somebody who's in the right mindset. They know that they are going to make this succeed. They are just looking for the right path and the right person to help them up. 

 Neil
 It's, call Amazon the Everest mountain, right? We're at base camp when we meet in the coffee shop and everybody wants to know how to gear up correctly, to get to the top of the mountain. Many people are eager to run. Of course we know on the mountain of Everest, there's a lot of dead bodies for people who tried to get up there and obviously died ill prepared, or without the right leadership to help them get up there. Our goal here is to make sure that the right people are equipped with the right knowledge, the right information and the right money and the right plan of action to actually make this succeed. They will understand the metrics and business and go correctly by the right numbers in business and not on the emotional feel of it, but by the actual logical and the numbers of the business model to ensure profitability, which will sustain them all the way to the top of the mountain. 

 Neil
 That's where a lot of people in conditional learning of the products, don't actually take the time to go by the numbers to ensure that every unit will be profitable when sold in the market. And I'm by profit. I don't just mean a dollar per unit. Okay. I mean that there's actual profit in the unit that sustained you 10, $20 or more in profit. It's a, so that automatically would eliminate t-shirts in my line of business, unless I can sell a t-shirt for 10 or $20 in profit. I have a few friends that do that in niche markets. They are able to do that, but not everyone can. Really the idea of understanding of what to sell is a conditioning of the mind and understanding what product I should consider. One of the things I have people do is walk through an exercise in 21 days of coming up with 500 product ideas, 21 days. 

 Neil
 So it's a traditional training. Let me give you an example, okay, it's what I call the white car syndrome. That is actually the belief or understanding that there are things going on around you. There are things that exist around you, even if they're not in your conscious mind at the moment, because you can't see them or process them subconsciously you're your product. Brain is a product itself has actually gleaned that information and put it somewhere on your brain, even though you aren't consciously recalling it at the moment. The goal of getting into a business model, I guess, is actually to condition your brain into a position where you see these things. I had a friend who wanted to go buy a Ford Explorer. Now he wanted this green ugly one. And I really don't like it. It's not exactly white, but it's a green for this story. 

 Neil
 And he wanted this green Ford Explorer. He had it in his mind, which size, which trim had colored the shape. You know, he wanted the sunroof. He wanted the, you know, leather. He had the whole thing in mind, right? It goes down to the dealer and he's like, this is going to be cool. It's unique. No one I don't see in these, these, nobody's got a car like this. None of my neighbors have one, I'm going go grab this car and I'm going to be Mr. Cool. He gets down there, does the deal, gets the paperwork as he's getting out to the car. He sets down for the first time to start the car and drive off the lot. He looks across the parking lot and what's he see the exact same green Ford Explorer never saw it before walked right past it twice on the way in and out of the dealer. 

 Neil
 Never saw it. It wasn't looking wasn't in his conscious state of mind. So he's thinking this is really strange. I'd never saw that car. How did that car just appear? Like what, that's weird. The universe might be telling me something. As he's driving home for the 20 minute drive home, he sees another one. He sees one in the park. He sees one at the stop sign. He sees when the light he's like, where did all these green Ford explorers come from? What changed did the universe suddenly bring, green Ford explorers into his focal point? Or were they always there? His conscious mind was simply not aware of them. The answer is he wasn't conditioned to see them. The conditioning mechanism, the subconscious was now being brought into the conscious. He was now being in a position to actually see and receive that information. I'm not talking about spiritual awareness or in metaphysical or anything like that. 

 Neil
 I'm literally talking about your ability to see things in front of you that you don't normally see, and that's a conditioning and a training of your brain. In our study, we have gone through and created mechanisms where people can go and start to train and condition their brain to see products everywhere in their environment and see white cars everywhere. They never saw them before. When they see that they'll actually find they have a different problem and that is they'll have more products than they can ever do in an entire lifetime. How do we filter those products down? We go by the numbers. We actually determine where the real profitability that competition and the opportunity to create volume of sales in that metric is actually driven. That's one of the things I loved about Amazon. When I discovered it about 10 years ago, it was that I could pull information directly from Amazon enough to get about 80% picture that the product would sell and sell. 

 Neil
 Well, the 20% I gleaned was actually just starting to sell the product in the market, even in perfectly just getting it in there and letting Amazon give me the rest of the data. Once Amazon gave me that data, I had a pretty good picture as to whether or not this product could sell, would sell, would be profitable and have enough sales velocity to actually make it a quarter by quarter and annual run rate over one year. As I treated it as a business model, I understood that I had to fail up through a lot of products that looked 80% confidence, but the market simply just didn't accept them. There are metrics within there that I did not understand that I went through and trained and trained on until I started to understand what were metrics that this particular platform that I started into, which is called Amazon FBA or fulfilled by Amazon. 

 Neil
 I'll explain some more of that in a minute was one I wanted to deploy because I wanted the lazy marketer lifestyle. I was somebody who was pretty lazy at marketing, got a pretty good at affiliate marketing and could do that from literally an internet connection anywhere in the world. I had certain criteria of my lifestyle that had a business, not my business that created a lifestyle that I wanted to maintain. Because of that, anything I changed at that point had to start meeting that criteria. It came to Amazon, it was like, great. I don't have to own the warehouse. The employees, I don't have to, send the products and ship the products from my garage. I send my products to Amazon. I can send it to a third party logistics warehouse who can package it and do things and then they can send it to Amazon. 

 Neil
 So I don't even have touch it. Man, that keeps my freedom that keeps me in the lazy marketer status. And so I really liked that. I hung on to that and I went crazy with it and just kept launching products and finding which failed and which didn't, and then documenting those results along the way so that I could repeat the process because like any good business model to be able to continue to do it is to not only repeat it in your business, but to get others to repeat it so that that it isn't just you, that you're not just like, this is not a unicorn business model that I just came up with and no one else can repeat. E-commerce obviously is a model that many people can, do Amazon FBA is one that many people can do. There's two and a half million sellers on the platform right now. 

 Neil
 The ability to actually find people who, want to see those products that you're selling is the other reason I've kind of fell in love with the platform is it has 200 million people a month coming to just add to cart, add to cart, all things to all people in 30 seconds or less, that was drive and that's what's happening. It was only a two lane highway when I got on nearly a decade ago. Now it's about a seven lane highway running 24 7 with about 47% market share. So it's gone even bigger and better. It's competition's got a little more fierce. The drive for brands is becoming more important. There are more important business, best practices that have to be followed than just throwing hail Mary passes on a side hustle or a hobby business. You need to treat this like a real business. Therefore you apply your time and the right revenue generating activities. 

 Neil
 Of course you deploy capital in to get capital out under specific metrics. It's kinda changed the game in the way we see it, but it's evolved, which is really cool. 

 Josh
 All right. That was a lot. I didn't hit record, so we need no, I'm just kidding, dude. That'd. 

 Neil
 Be terrible. Almost. Maybe you maybe look up at the recording. 

 Josh
 All right. Let me just recap some of this. I love, I love what you're saying. We've got to pull out some of the golden nuggets to chew on these things. All right. As you're talking to that perfect person in the car, in the coffee shop, one of the things that we must do is we must train ourself. We must condition our brain to see opportunities or other people aren't seeing. All right. That's like, almost like baby step one is like, we have to see the opportunity because it's passing by most people. All right. You've run through the scenario where you help people, identify maybe 500 products, 21 days, it's training their eyes to see what is possible because we do not, that's not a natural thing for most. It is not all right. What challenges do most people who let's see, who wins in that scenario? 

 Josh
 Who, who can do that thing, and then who do you see not succeeding at that base camp step number one. 

 Neil
 Yeah. Well, in a typically here's where people think it fails. I'll tell you where it actually fails. People think it fails in the mechanics. People are very caught up in the idea. This is again, transitory to the way they've been taught, the way they were schooled, the way they went into jobs or other mechanisms where your hour of time and money are equatable to your life and to your skill set and therefore your value at a certain point. You can only exceed that certain point if you exceed certain expectations, whereas business and entrepreneurial-ism, I can exceed a bond beyond that because I can reach millions of people who have an opportunity to produce, buy my products. You have to really invert the way you think about this. My hour of time is no longer worth a certain dollar amount. If I were to actually put a dollar amount on it right now, you wouldn't pay for it. 

 Neil
 Maybe they, because you would think it's ridiculous, but the end result is that is now true. Again, how to understand which products to go after and what steps to take next is really a mindset thing. It actually has to do with your ability to comprehend things that are beyond you that you understand. Well, I've never seen an actual million dollars, setting on a pallet in front of me that I could touch. I do know that it exists, right? So you're a neatly understanding. You're one step ahead of a lot of people are like, well, I've never been able to achieve it. I can't ever get to a million dollars. Never, never. They have a different mindset than most people who are successful. This can be coming from walks of life that have nothing to do with each other that it has to do with a particular mindset and aptitude. 

 Neil
 I mean, I've got guys who are self, self-proclaimed dirt farmers with golf course management degrees. Who've been successful at this, right? I've got guys with limited business experience. And second languages were English. I've got ladies from Australia who were home moms and stayed at home with their kids and whatnot, and then started this business and suddenly it's taken off and it's their full-time thing now. And they've retired their husbands. The end result is really about aptitude and attitude. It has everything to do with altitude. I know that's a silly saying, but it is so true. I talk to people and I'm listening to the way they respond and communicate with me and the first 30 seconds, I can determine whether or not this is going to be successful for them. It has everything to do with the way they position their mindset, the way they talk about life, the way they talk about opportunity opportunities and the way they talk about what they're willing to do and not willing to do at the end of the day. 

 Neil
 That is the biggest difference because the mechanics of this can be taught to virtual assistants for seven bucks an hour, who do all the mechanics. Now I don't touch any of it and allows us to work five to seven hours a week on multi seven figure businesses. Because of that, again, it has to do with who you are and what you're capable of understanding. Can you be trained, coached, and mentored into the things you do not understand currently gain that knowledge and then grow it from there. Those who fail are typically ones who are not able, capable or willing to make that jump. They still think they know more than the person who's being coached. They don't believe that it's possible because in their life they've never seen something like that. Being done to them and done them around them, to the family members, whatever it's not within their sphere of influence. 

 Neil
 They simply can't grasp the concept that they can make the kind of money you can in e-commerce. 

 Josh
 Wow. So this capitalism mindset, right? That there's opportunities out there that are passing, speeding bias every day and we're missing it because we're just running on the rat race treadmill, or we're, clocking in and clocking out, trading my dollars for time or whatever the case may be. Right. I grew up on a construction site, right? Not the smartest guy. I I'm good at digging holes and swinging hammers. Right. And I'm 40 now. I've, I've gone through all sorts of business ventures and such like that, but it wasn't until like, I got money for someone else doing the work. I got a big check in the mail that I didn't earn. Right. Like I didn't have to go work if I wanted extra money growing up. If I wanted beer money, I'd have to go work extra time. When I, when the first time I got that, I was like, oh wow. 

 Josh
 It was like, I'm looking around going like, what just happened here? It wasn't until I saw it that I believed that it was real. Otherwise I heard people's stories. I've interviewed a thousand people. I didn't believe it. That mindset, now I go, how could I do that more? Right. 

 Neil
 It's a scarcity and abundance mindset at the end of it. Right. If you break it down to two simple scenarios, there's someone who says, yeah, I understand there's abundance in the world, but it's not, for me. I'm never going to gain it. You understand that people who are maybe at their same level and say, yeah, there's abundance in the world, but I just want to figure out how to go get it. I'm willing to go get it right. I understand I'm going to be learning along the way. There may be things that I don't do. Right. But I'm going to go get it. Those are typically mindsets that have shifted. You're not born that way. You are, as you just mentioned, conditioned and trained into those positions through changes in your life. I listened to people speak and they talk and stuff, I'm always, I'm usually questioning them because this is a mentoring of my application. 

 Neil
 I want to make sure I know where they are. If they tell me they've never failed. If they tell me this is the first venture, but they've never really risked anything to get going yet. In any other mechanism, I'm going to ward them off, right? Because I don't want them to fail on their dime on my time. At the end of this, I want to make sure that they're willing to take some risks and have taken risks already. At this point, they're starting to know who they are better. They're willing to do the next thing to actually get it done legally and ethically, of course, to make this kind of be something that they want to see changed in their life, right. To nice tenacity is one of the things I'm thinking of, perseverance in life and struggles. What happens is, as a needle in a haystack analogy goes, I get a lot of people in the haystack, but every once in a while, I actually find needles that meet me in trajectory. 

 Neil
 They say, when the student is ready, the mentor will appear. What ends up happening is they immediately see the opportunity and boom, they jump on it and they're figuring out any way they can to get involved because they suddenly realized this is exactly what they've been looking for two to three months or two to three years. The end result is again, you get to the position and I've understood this as I've failed up and out in life. Many times to get to where I am is that, you grow your network around those five people. It really is true, who are not just net worth. It's not just money, but it's mindset. It's situation. It's the way they apply the life. It's the way they think about business. It's ethics and integrity. It's other things that all revolve around it that draw that person into your network. 

 Neil
 You realize that is going to be someone who you're working with in that group that is going to elevate everybody in the group, because you're all going to be working for the same goal. 

 Josh
 Yeah. I love that saying I was having a, I went out to dinner with my wife and her friend and her husband. He was asking me about, some of the stuff I was doing, this was when I was in maybe venture capital or something. He S he had a panic attack hearing, like the kind of, the kind of work that I'm doing. I don't have, like structured 401k and this and that. He, the dude had a panic attack and I was like, okay, maybe not an entrepreneur. It does take a specific, strict mindset to see these kinds of opportunities. To dive into these kinds of opportunities, 

 Neil
 Without hearing all risk, risk. I'm not in the 401k. I don't play in the stock market. I don't do these normalized things. People look at that and go, well, you're risky. Like your where's all your money. Where's your business. How you, how do you manage it? I was like, you think I'm the one playing with risk, right? Cause it's a whole different perspective. You're one side of the island, I'm on the other side of the island. We're both looking at how do we get to this utopic place across there? Obviously there are sharks in the water and I'm going to be rowing in a boat that I know is secure. That doesn't get controlled by somebody else because I have control of the horse. We're going to go where I want to go. When I put my money in the 401k and the market and all this other stuff, I'm literally basically just getting in the boat and telling someone else to row and just sitting back and expecting them to go exactly where I want them to go. 

 Neil
 I have no control over that boat. I'm going to literally, and it's not holes and I'm going to be my sharks. All right. There's, there's no end in sight to that. I want control over the business. I want control over that as much control as I can gain. I think that's one of the biggest things I'm looking for in those mindsets are people willing to accept, understand, or glean that information and be able to apply it to their lives. That's more, as you can tell than just physical e-commerce product, because it's business mentoring. That's where a lot of people do not understand the inner complexities of business. We usually will look for those aptitudes and then teach people the business of how to do this, and then show them that e-commerce is a mechanism they can deploy in business for success. Of course, where's the profitability of that and how do I get people to buy my products? 

 Neil
 That's why we start them on Amazon FBA, because we know people are going to buy their everyday 630 million a day. You just go put your product in largest market in the world with the biggest market share and you go see who wants to buy it? It's a lot lower risk than putting your money in a 401k. Quite honestly. 

 Josh
 Awesome, man. I heard, and these are some of the things that I heard in terms of my tech cause first man, when you're meeting with a person in and having coffee, you're going all right. Who's the, who's someone that we're going to go the distance with. Right. And who's right. And then who's weeding themselves out, right? 

 Neil
 Who's eliminating themselves by the conversation, 

 Josh
 Right? 99% of what it feels like is a mindset thing that you're looking for. 

 Neil
 It really is. It a trainable, coachable growable mindset of abundance. It's very easy to pick out the world of scarcity today. It really is. I'm not a, a lay you down on the couch mentality. Let's talk about your feelings kind of person. I live in a house with five women. I get plenty of that every day. I don't need it in my business life. I don't do business mentoring for kumbaya. Let's sit around and talk about your feelings. Facts, don't care about your feelings as the saying goes. At the end of the day, this is an emotion, not an emotional driven business model. This is a data-driven business model of success. Yes. There's emotional components to it. Sure. I get that. I'm not an ogre. Who's totally unfeeling or all the women in my life would leave me. At the end of the day, there's a specific route of path that needs to be followed to make these successful at having done this myself 10 times in my companies and having taught 50, a hundred thousand people to do this and having well over 50 people become millionaires because of it. 

 Neil
 There is a specific path of process. Now the end result is not always the same because every person is unique. Every brand is unique and every market competition for that brand is different. The end result is teaching people how to become their best Sherpa, how they can become the one who eventually gets into a position to teach someone else how to be successful. It's funny to be in this conversation. You talk about the person who shows up it's that everybody wants to evaluate what's in it for them. When, what am I going to do for them? What am I going to do? What are you doing? How much are you going to do? What do you do? And what do I do? No. I'm creating CEO operators. I have no interest in anybody becoming dependent on me or my system. I have an interest in training you to a position and to become dependent on yourself, to build your own business, create uniqueness in that is yours, whatever you change to slightly make it unique, but giving you the opportunity to do that and become your own CEO operator. 

 Neil
 You don't just simply put CEO behind your name and be a CEO. There are a level of operations in the business. You are the window washer, and then maybe you're the guy that gets the job. You said like, you hire someone else to start doing it. Now you're an operator. Once you get past the operator stage, then you may become the owner. Once you're in the owner stage and you understand the inner complexities of ownership, then you actually reach the point where you could become a CEO. You don't simply just jump to the end of the line. 

 Josh
 Awesome cash. I have so much to talk to you about that, but let's do this there. What I see is the next thing that we got to talk is about the mechanics, right? Like, Hey, if we could get over the hurdle of, someone's still paying attention, about this, the mindset, then we could get into the mechanics, but here are five things that I pulled from you have five opportunity killers, five mindset killers, complexity is too complex amount, right? Confusion, lack of capital or the perceived lack of capital competition and then lack of coachability. Right. Did I, do you think that. 

 Neil
 Those are great. 

 Josh
 Okay. So, I mean, I pulled, you were the one doing the talking. I was just writing notes. 

 Neil
 Well, you got it. That's what I, hopefully you're going out of it. 

 Josh
 Alright. So let's just say, 

 Neil
 Yup. 

 Josh
 We passed the five check marks. So you're you're you're listening. You're going. Okay. Check, check, check. Let's get into the mechanics of e-commerce right. Building the company to one day sell and I want to do it as a lifestyle support, right? Like I, I love walking my kids to school. I don't want to give that up. I want to go on vacation with them, go on our big camper and take them on trips. What are some of the mechanics that I need to understand to what makes a profitable brand? 

 Neil
 At the beginning of the product analysis part where you actually understand, okay, there are all these products I could actually sell. That conditioning for 21 days starts to get you to suddenly realize there are a lot of product opportunities that you could get excited about. Okay. The next thing is to get yourself out of it and to get into the numbers. We talked about that a minute ago, that is to understand the competition, the profitability, all the things that lead into the mechanical components of understanding the brand in the market. And then understanding the things about Amazon. If you're going to choose Amazon as the first platform or Shopify or other, mechanisms that you're going to use to bring said product to the market, you need to understand some of those inner complexities. One of the ways to do that is to obviously understand the mechanics of that platform. 

 Neil
 Amazon itself is a platform that creates these things called listings. You've probably seen them when you clicked on your phone while you're looking at your products, when the images pull up and you see the add to cart, and you're looking at the details and reviews, et cetera, that's called a listing. That is the one of the mechanics that you use to reach the customer on the platform. Every seller has a seller account that you sign up for a pro account. Inside that pro account, you're able to list your products. You're also able to send your product into Amazon's warehouses and use their fulfilled by Amazon system to deliver that product to the last mile, to the customer. It shows up at the doorstep right in two days or one hour, depending upon where you are, Amazon handles that customer support delivery and logistics and management of the customer process, leaving you with the logistic marketing brand position. 

 Neil
 A lot of the mechanics, you initially set up to create that listing, to get the graphics created, to actually get the product manufactured from a supplier or vendor for you. Okay. Actually created and shipped into the system is where a lot of the mechanics get caught up with people, but they're one and done mechanics. Once you develop that brand and develop that product and put it into the market, and then you are actually doing some similar little marketing inside of Amazon, what are called sponsored brands and sponsored ads. This is all done on the platform. At this point, I'm not talking about anything for social media marketing and all this other stuff. Those are just activities right now that are just masking productivity. Real productivity is product in the system and making sure that someone has a visibility to that. Okay. When you do that, you're now gaining the systems access. 

 Neil
 It's a big artificial intelligence system. It's a big filing system. Okay. While Amazon might be a river, it's also a big decision tree system. Okay. Inside of this big decision tree are all these things called departments and categories and subcategories and nodes. That's just the way that files all that data and this big technology. It has this big engine called an a nine system that runs around. It's a big artificial intelligence system doing all this stuff. We said products cause there's 600 million products. There's no way there's enough people to manage that. They have a big system of computing that manages the listings and helps track and do rankings with your products and handles the reviews and does all the technical stuff. You don't have to do any of that. You don't have to build a website. You don't have to optimize the website. You don't have to put all the places, nothing technical like that, but you do have to be able to learn how to put that listing in. 

 Neil
 There's some mechanics behind the scenes that you have to button push, not terribly complex and can be learned. Once you learn how to do it, one time, it's easily repeatable over and over again. So it's not a really complex task. Now, the individual tasks themselves like getting graphics or putting a listing or getting the products. Isn't very, you know, isn't very complex. Really. It's just, there's a series of a number of those things that stack up, which kind of make the whole thing, feel a little complex. That's why you've got to walk each step. What I mentioned a minute ago, going from base camp to Everest is literally walking every three feet and then looking back to make sure you're not going the wrong direction, or you're not falling off. Then, you're going to go the next three feet. It's like, you're climbing every three feet. 

 Neil
 You have enough oxygen. You know what you're doing? You're making sure you stay on the path. There is a critical path of success. You have to follow to get to the top of that mountain. Having been up on it. A bunch of times, myself, I can tell you that this is the same kind of path. Every person has to stay on that path. We call the critical path of success. Each of those steps kind of stack up on each other and you learn each step as you go along to ensure that as you go up there, you're now gaining more knowledge. It's one of the biggest things that businesses fail on. They do not have the correct knowledge or the correct steps or game plan to actually execute the entire portion of the that's, why we work with them over 12 months, because you have to go through the whole steps, the whole process and the whole learning phase. 

 Neil
 How to actually deploy your capital correctly. If you have capital, you're going to bring in. That's. The second thing that most businesses fail on in this process is understanding where do I deploy that capital into the right mechanisms to make sure that it's actually going to get me money back out of the system. If you don't do that correctly, you're going to fail on the second reason why most of those 500,000 businesses fail the third one, not as usual, but are run across it. Cause I've consulted with some of these big, hedge funds. I've consulted with some of these SPACs that are buying up. These Amazon businesses is they're over capitalized, over capitalization leads to complacency and the ability that they don't understand any of the complexities of how this works. That just means they blow capital and things. They don't know what to do. 

 Neil
 They buy the wrong brands. They don't probably hire the right people because they don't know what they're supposed to do. At the end of that, they come in and spending millions of dollars, their products and brands don't do very well. The companies they purchased are to go downhill and then they call somebody like me to say, Hey, what are we doing wrong? My answer is usually give the money back to the investors and go find something else to do before you ruin your lives, because they are not willing to learn how to do it correctly. Literally had that conversation with the CEO of one of these companies, because they don't understand the knowledge application, those three major things that all these are going to, all of these are going to fail on. Once you train the mechanics and you understand it, you actually will learn how to build a standard operating procedure, an SOP. 

 Neil
 Off of that, you will learn to be able to train someone like you mentioned earlier, to take over that specific task and complete that repeatedly and successfully, then you build into those things, what are called objectives and key results OKR. You can Google that and learn about objectives. Each particular piece of this model from product research to customer service, to product listing, to logistics and other components can be taught into an OKR, an objective with three primary key results. When someone learns how to do that, they are able to repeat that process. You're able to pay them for that particular task and objective. As they accomplish it and repeatedly do it over a quarter period of time and are successful, exactly how to bonus them or increase their pay. They're happy because they know what they need to do to be successful. You're happy because they did it and everybody wins. 

 Neil
 It only takes about 15 minutes a week to do these kinds of status meetings and check-ins to make sure the OKR is, are being hit. Once you set up those processes, automation and increase gross, those are some of the mechanics that you'll need. Now, you don't even need to set that stuff up yet. I have people going to seven figures with one person and no VA's because once you learn the mechanics of this, you don't have to necessarily repeat it. Once you learn her, your brand is, and you understand who your customer is. You double the understanding of that customer. You will double your revenues and that has nothing to do with them mechanics. It has everything to do with you and understanding who you're going to serve. It's servant leadership. We don't just produce products to sell products. That's pure capitalism. This is not a pure capitalistic model in which we're discussing that as a model in which it simply takes advantage of the customer for a pure capital play. 

 Neil
 There's too many people doing that out there that's too. As much of the short term nonsense, I have no interest in that whatsoever. There is capitalism for the growth and go to the people there's consumerism that provides great products that are better than, and provides a great experience for the customer. We serve them through creating those really great products. Therefore they're willing to pay more for those products are more emotionally connected. Of course it meets a solution that thereafter. You go to the dentist and you say, you got a hurt tooth. I had this happen the other day. You're like, man, this tooth absolutely is blowing up. I haven't to go get this thing taken care of. I pushed it off too long. It's like, sure, I can have, it's going to take about an hour. It's going to cost you about 200 bucks. You're like, oh, okay. 

 Neil
 Another hour, like at this point you've met your last hour. You say, okay, what else do you got? Then? It's like, Hey, great, 500 bucks. I can have that thing done in 10 minutes, done. 500 bucks, 10 minutes. I'm done. What changed that? The value of the procedure changed? Did the doctor change? Did the outcome actually change? No. The solution changed. The solution changed from a one-hour painful thing to a 10 minute painful thing for 500 bucks, same doctor, same procedure, two different outcomes. Two different people will approach each of those separately. One person will look at it as a pure commodity, how much it is and how long it takes. Money-wise only. The other will look at it and say, that's a solution I'm willing to pay money for. As long as I get the result I'm looking for, which is decreasing in pain, better tooth, it doesn't blow up. 

 Neil
 Don't have to get a root canal, then I'm in. What I want to do is approach those who are solution-oriented. I want those who look at that and say, yeah, 10 minutes and 500 bucks, because it provides my need. It's emotionally charging. It gives me a solution and it's better than, and when I look at that avatar, from that perspective, I suddenly unlock a whole different level of selling in the econ world then selling t-shirts. 

 Josh
 Yeah. Man. As a, growing up in a construction site, we counted pennies, right? We went through some really tough times and we counted pennies. When we went out to purchase something, we would try to find the best price. Right. We would spend a lot of time price shopping. Right. It came to one day, me graduating and working, after college and all this. So I started working with investors. The mindset of that, of them was a lot different than me. I had to learn how to serve investors who were more focused on saving time saving, then they were saving pennies. I once asked the rich investor, oh, what kind of gas mileage do you get in that luxury, fancy sports car? He goes, what he goes, do you think I'm worried about miles per gallon? Like that's not even in my brain. I had to. It comes to service, you say servant leadership, right? 

 Josh
 For these people who are serving a end customer, I'm not my ideal customer a lot of times. Right? Cause I'm dealing with investors who are a lot more successful than me. If I look at it through the lens of me serving Josh and looking at that, like, will I drop a million bucks right now on X? No, I can't. Well, they drop a million bucks on X. Yes. They will do it. You do it all the time. How do you help leaders get that in their mind? 

 Neil
 Well, I mean, it's a matter of understanding what time does it actually take to dedicate to a process like this and get a specific kind of outcome, right? Because for example, we are not a position where we don't launch a brand, unless we know it's going to achieve eight figures. What does it make at what time does it take, what activities do we need, what needs to be in line, how much capital will be deployed in order to make that occur? Those things are all pre known and pre-staged up before we even go to market. You approach it from that same, miles per gallon mentality, the goal here is to understand that time is saved as one of those biggest aspects that everyone wants to be approachable by S but many people don't understand that, just giving it to someone else to do is not necessarily saving time. 

 Neil
 It'll actually potentially cost you more time and money to just hand it to somebody else. What I do is I help people become the CEO operator. I help them understand where's the most appropriate use of my time. What are the most important revenue generating activities and how do I take something that's 10 to 15 to 20 hours max, a week of effort and reduce that as I grow and reduce that time down to say five to seven hours a week. Okay. Cause that's the goal that I'm shooting for with five to seven hours a week in an unexpected understanding of how this could be structured correctly, then you understand how to not reduce your time, but also maximize your output. Because remember, I'm one person here who can touch millions of people for a potential brand. Again, it isn't about how much time I put into this business model to reach those millions of people, you and I can go to market and you may spend 50 hours a week putting something in. 

 Neil
 I may spend five hours a week, but I'll actually get more than you. Because at this point I've gained all the knowledge, I've gained the aspect. This is one of the benefits of gleaning information and mentorship from somebody is that they can lower that time to market and reduce even potentially the cost of going to market from three to five years and 500,000 down to a hundred thousand in 12 months, and really change the output of the game. It's not about miles per gallon at that point, it's about how fast do I get to XYZ? It's why that same guy probably would take a helicopter or a private jet, then get on United airlines and fly first class, right? Because he's not actually getting there, but about a half a second faster than the people who are setting and coach at the end result is it's a totally different experience. 

 Neil
 He's able to fly from point a to B directly. He doesn't have to go through a hub. He doesn't have to go on a schedule. He literally calls the plane and goes from a to B. He's not only saved that time. He's probably done business in the air and a quiet place where no one else is bothering him and he can continue to do that business and even bring his family along and have an experience with that entire thing. Buying the time and the money also gains you the experience. It's really important to understand the differences in the way you think about this as you grow. The challenge is for you to get out of your own way, it's for you to get into a position, to learn and accept that there are certain paths to these things that others have already walked, that you can go do it your own on your own. 

 Neil
 That's just fine. You might find yourself lost in the middle of the Amazon with no compass and no way back, because that happens to a lot of people. 

 Josh
 It's not so much the miles per gallon. It's how fast can I get to where I want to go in my life. 

 Neil
 A to point B. 

 Josh
 Point a to point B. If I could get into the numbers and remove emotion, right? Like, so the emotion looking at a brand, cause you say it really doesn't make sense to build a brand unless it's going to hit eight figures, right? That's two commas, three commas to two commas, right? Yeah. It doesn't even make sense unless you're gonna hit that. You're looking at not do I want to sell pink gadgets or t-shirts, or this or that you're going the goal is the numbers, how what's the fastest way to get there. Let's look at 500 products and say, which product will help us get. 

 Neil
 That's I'm looking at a portfolio of products, not a single product. Every product has a position in the portfolio, but I was an average, how does the whole portfolio perform? Some of you may look at that in the stock world. You may look at it on your real estate portfolio. You may look at it in the other portfolios of your life from short-term rentals to whatever else it is you've got, or you're, 16 cars that are operating on Truro or whatever it is you're doing, or the nine subways or three Chick-fil-A's you on the end result is you're looking at as a portfolio, some may under produce but others are going to produce more. As an average, you see how the whole portfolio performs. Each product is not an individual product. In my mind, it is a product that adds to the whole. I don't look at a product as something that I step up to the plate and say, well, this product has to hit a home run. 

 Neil
 Everything was relying on this product, hitting a home run. Why? Because I know that in a, a sports analogy borrow mint for a second to get into the hall of fame, I have to hit a 300. That means that I got to go back 10 times and I'm only gonna hit the ball three, hit the ball. It doesn't mean anywhere in there. I got a home run. Like that would be way off and right field to borrow anatomy. The goal here of course, is that each product goes to market, has to perform under a certain metric over 90 days. If it does not, we simply let it go. We let higher performing products take over. There are some that are lower, mid and higher, but how does that entire portfolio run as a buyer of these companies, someone who's looking for operational independence, upside potential, whether or not this product or brand can expand beyond the FBA channel or beyond its current additional channels, wherever they may lie. 

 Neil
 I'm looking at that and saying, where's the whole product and brand portfolio. As entrepreneurs, you shouldn't really look at an e-comm as a single product or second product. You should look at it as like the five 10th and 50th product, because in there we'll come 5, 10, 20 skews that make up 80% of my revenue. If you think you can just sit down and go straight to those eight skews, you're horribly wrong, and you will fail at this model while you need to look at it. As if I launch 50 to a hundred products each quarter in a small test to a small minimum order quantity and a fast repetitive launch process that validates, am I setting on the Sandy beach? Or am I actually in the Amazon river? Or did I actually get in the current within that river? Okay. Cause there's products, that'll be in the river and doing okay. 

 Neil
 There's products that actually get in the current. All of a sudden they're sailing like crazy. Their organic growth is crazy. The profitability is going up and the demand is just going through the roof and you're not doing any more to do whatever you're doing because the AI, the system and the people are all pushing that product along. Your goal is to find those and continue to repeat that process. As Jim Collins says in good to great hedgehog into that brand and keep digging down into that brand and serving, serving those customers with more and more products, Amazon, for example, has 150 million prime members. Okay. Here's how the top end of that portfolio should look. There are a thousand, excuse me, a hundred million of those prime members spend a thousand dollars a year on Amazon, but they don't spend it like how you say that, right? 

 Neil
 They don't spend it with Amazon. They spend it with the people on Amazon because seven out of 10 sellers on Amazon are third-party sellers, just like us, 70% from the numbers we understand from Amazon. That means that the majority of that product is going to people like us who are buying and selling and getting these products loaded. Because of that, you understand the upside potential of this market is extremely large. There's a huge growth opportunity. There's a huge amount of products you can sell. There's a large amount of that product that can go into your portfolio. You want to target people who are spending a thousand dollars a month. That's the customer lifetime value for 12 months when we go into the market. I say, we're looking to make that a figure brand. We're looking for a product and a brand that will get the majority of those hundred million prime members who are spending a thousand dollars a year to spend it with our brand. 

 Neil
 We can have a 12 month CLTV customer lifetime value of a thousand dollars. Once you do that, you recognize, well, I can't sell a $19 t-shirt in and start reaching those kinds of metrics. What I have to do is recognize there's three tiers to any e-com avatar and you fit one of them. Sometimes you fit all three there's. The low seller, sub $30 looks on reviews, looks on price only and decides whether or not this is the one you want. There's the middle tier person, 50 to a hundred dollars or maybe a little over a hundred dollars who says, Hey, there's some solution. I'm a little bit price. I'll look at the reviews . Well, when I see that one, if it's 99 bucks, I'm going to buy that one. I don't care about the other one. There's the person who a hundred, $300 or more. 

 Neil
 And they're like, I want this solution. They're the dentist with $500 in a 10 minutes. So there shouldn't, they want that product. They're going to buy it. Even if it's 2 99, those are the three tiers. Once you get access to that knowledge and understanding and approach that brand portfolio. From that perspective, you're going to have products in each one of those tiers because you're going to build an entire portfolio. That portfolio is going to engage the goal of a thousand dollars in customer lifetime value over 12 month period. Once you start to approach that you now have a quarter by quarter growth run rate, expected capital deployment to get those products launched in the market and tested and from testing. You will now understand exactly where to deploy the majority of your capital. You'll know exactly which products to buy, which ones are selling, how much more you need and how much it's going to take to continue to serve the base for those growing products, you will let the other products continue to sell out because they're always going in the market profitable. 

 Neil
 They're always going to perform to some degree and they're going to sell. It's just, how much are they going to sell? Some are going to sell more than others. Did I really hit this live stream? Do I want to spend the time and energy optimizing that product to see if it'll go, can I spend more time doing it and maybe it's worth it? I don't know. Maybe it's not. I'll let that one roll out at the bottom of the line, cut a line across the bottom and say that one's going to fall. These are going to keep going. You repeat that process quarter by quarter and you see 60% plus organic growth every year in these kinds of businesses. By 24 months, we can take those businesses out and exit them. Okay. We can exit them for three to four X net profit or EBITDA. 

 Neil
 Okay. If you open multiple channels within that 24 month period, you open up an additional channel and Wayfair or Walmart, or you open a website with traffic and marketing activities that are now in social media, expanding your brand into the greater audience. You could see multiples of 6, 7, 8, or 10 at the time of exit for that business. That's how we approach this model on a 24 month, two exit run, zero to hero. 

 Josh
 Zero to hero. All right. Neil, you and I have had great conversations. If someone wants to listen to the personal side, the story of Neil, they there's many different spots. They could do that, but they can, head on over to our other show and listen to the background. We got into the mechanics, the numbers, the details of this show. So let's do this. I want you to, and I love you for this. I want you to just be very clear on the kind of person you want to connect with you, right? As people are listening in very clear on who they are and who should not connect with you, right? Let's just go if you fit this. 

 Neil
 Right. Okay. In the end we do business mentoring. We don't do courses and programs in this kinds of stuff, which can tell you at this moment, that means I'm not the cheapest person in the market. It also means I can't help everyone. And I'm not trying to help everybody. I hope that's clear. I will help those who want a hand up, but not a handout. The end of the line, if you're a business owner, an entrepreneur, or somebody who now reached a place where you recognize whatever I'm doing in life, I need to be an entrepreneur. I'm ready to change. I've met that point and I've been looking for the right road and path a and you want to go faster and easier. You want to walk up Everest with a Sherpa. Who's holding her hand up the entire way to make sure you don't die on the hill. 

 Neil
 You got the right amount of oxygen. Exactly what mechanics and gear you're going to take to get up this hill. So, the activities that will make you money, that you will know when the capital goes in, how you're going to get the capital back out of this business model. You may be somebody we can talk with, right? I'll help you understand how to skip the product research by giving you the data that we give our business builders to show them exactly which products they should sell. I'm looking for people who understand that mentoring is not just coaching. That it is also a business aspect of mentoring for growth, that they understand that when they're working with someone like us, my network and connections are people into the hundreds of millions and billions of dollars. We've sold over a hundred million in the Amazon FBA channel. 

 Neil
 My network is extremely strong. When the time comes for clients who get involved, I will introduce them to my network players. If they're looking to level up in business, if they're looking for the right network and connections, and they really want to tackle a business like this, or they want to expand some starting block that they've already been working on, that's what we do. We're growth consultants. Our goal is to get that business to exit profitably and to get it to my network. People are like, well, why do you do this? Is it all philanthropic or yoga? No, no. I actually disqualify people with the upfront costs of my mentoring. Those who do qualify on the goal orientation is the exit, my major band money in this. Okay. You ready for my big evil capitalistic agenda where I like stroke the cat and go move. 

 Neil
 Haha. That is to make sure that your business exit for profit and that I'm the person who's able to help you do. That might take you to my portfolio group, my hedge fund, my investors, my accredited investors, my friends who have capital to buy these companies. I help you sell the business for maximum profit. You win. I win on a brokering faith that I get paid by the seller and they win because they get a great business model. Voltage is a company that becomes the management of record on that business that sells thus, when we are taking control of that business, the people who are buying it are usually investing 500 to a million into that business to grow it to the next level of operational independence and upside. If it's a million dollar company, when it sells, they want to take it to 5 million in exit. 

 Neil
 If it's 5 million, we're going to take it to 10 or 20 and then exit again, that's what's in it for me. I'm really in to make sure that people understand how my model works, why I'm doing this. Yes, I'm in business. Sure. I have great relationships. Yeah. I understand philanthropic and all that nonsense, but we are under a consulting and performance arrangement. Okay. People will pay for the consulting, but we also have a performance goal of reaching a hundred thousand in net profit together in the first year. When that goal is achieved, we get the 15% remaining of our fees. If not, we forfeit it. We don't get paid for that. We, our performance and goal guaranteed to make sure I can't guarantee business. I don't guarantee your risk. I don't guarantee any of that. If you think that's how this works, then please do not go gate and business, stay on your job or do what you're doing. 

 Neil
 If you are interested in those kinds of things, I have a very short name, as you can tell, and I'm not a short guy. I'm like six foot five, but you can google me and I encourage you to do so. The old TWA, it's actually my last name. It's trois. It's not an acronym. You'll be able to connect with me in one of those mechanisms of social media and stuff and see if we resonate. And it's a culture too. There's the last part of this are Josh. That's a long-winded answer, but there's a culture on protecting. And obviously I'll steam. I interview every person to make sure they're a good fit for what we're doing. I don't have a lot of people that we take into our mentorship because I want to find the right people. I'm very hyper protective of those who get involved of the culture that we have already got moving inside of our group of business builders, because they anticipate and respect that. 

 Neil
 And they're all networking at certain levels. That's why I make sure to qualify those who come on board. 

 Josh
 Super cool. Fellow deal-makers, if that is you, all of Neil's contact information will be in the show notes below. You could connect with him directly say, Hey, Ben heard you on the deal scout and want to learn more on a dive in for you all out there. Fellow dealmakers. If you're looking at specific types of deals or want to do a deal, and you want to talk about it here on the show, head on over to the deal. Scout.com, fill out a quick form. There's a contact button at the top, a little microphone in the bottom. You could choose either route, but get in touch with us and maybe get you on the show next till then talk to you all on the next episode. See you guys.