February 24, 2025; Business Scaling & Transitioning From Part Time to Full Time
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In this extensive video discussion, several entrepreneurial participants share their experiences and insights on scaling their Amazon businesses from initial revenue to substantial profits.
[00:00-05:30] The conversation opens with a personal update from one participant who just returned from a month-long trip to Hong Kong with a friend. They discuss their appreciation for the contributions of their colleagues, specifically about how they successfully scaled from initial earnings of $10K to $100K and beyond, transitioning from part-time to full-time efforts.
[05:30-15:00] Participants reflect on their respective journeys, emphasizing the importance of consistency, focus, and the need to shift mindsets about their business operations. They recount their beginnings, with one participant illustrating how they began in university and gradually built meaningful operational habits.
[15:00-25:00] Insights include the importance of setting daily goals, tracking spending, and leveraging proof of concept—a strategy for ensuring profitable leads. Discussions evolve into the challenges of sourcing, including managing returns and optimizing inventory.
[25:00-45:00] The group often pivots to discuss effective sourcing tactics, emphasizing the need for persistence and connection with distributors while sharing methodologies for analyzing inventory. They stress using tools like email and phone outreach to secure wholesale accounts, often fueled by personal relationships.
[45:00-1:15:00] The conversation shifts toward credit and financing. Insights into dealing with credit card companies, utilizing services like Loop, and securing favorable financing terms are shared. Each participant has their unique perspective on managing costs and investments, which enhances their operational workflow.
[1:15:00-1:30:00] Finally, the participants reflect on their current systems for managing returns and inventory. They stress maintaining a consistent practice to handle returned products and approach reimbursements systematically, maximizing their capital.
The dialogue is pragmatic and rich with varied experiences, showcasing the complexities of running an Amazon business while navigating challenges effectively.
Key Insights and Summary from Video Transcript
Journey to Entrepreneurship
Initial Start:
Participants discussed how they started their businesses, often while still in school or holding another job.
Importance of consistency and focus highlighted as essential to growth.
Transitioning to Full-Time:
Many shared their experience of changing from part-time to full-time, with some feeling the pressure of abandoned traditional career paths.
Personal anecdotes about managing fear and securing financial stability before making the leap were shared.
Scaling and Growth
Milestones:
Various revenue benchmarks were mentioned, with comparisons drawn on how to transition from $10k to $50k and beyond.
Main barriers identified included capital for investment, time constraints, and knowledge gaps.
Consistency and Daily Habits:
Emphasis on consistency was made, also recommending setting specific daily goals to track progress.
Importance of daily commitment and the evolution of work-life balance was discussed, particularly during busy months like Q4.
Sourcing Strategies
Sourcing Methods:
Multiple channels discussed including Online Arbitrage (OA) and Wholesale.
Emphasis on reverse sourcing from successful brands as a strategy for finding profitable leads.
Utilizing Technology:
Several participants mentioned the use of tools like Keepa for tracking products and managing inventory.
Future plans for automation were highlighted, particularly the use of certain spreadsheets for tracking and managing leads more efficiently.
Financial Insights
Leveraging Capital:
Conversations on using student loans for initial capital investment, along with discussions on credit card strategies to maximize rewards in the business.
Different approaches to financing discussed, including pros and cons of using traditional banks versus newer platforms like Loop and Vault.
Returns Management:
Discussed processes for handling returns from Amazon, with suggestions on tracking returns and maximizing reimbursement claims.
Emphasis on systematic approaches to returns and disposals to ensure nothing valuable is lost, along with utilizing Google Sheets for better organization.
Personal Development and Mental Health
Work-Life Balance:
Some shared personal experiences about battling burnout due to long hours, particularly during peak seasons.
Many emphasized the importance of setting boundaries in their work schedule to ensure they maintain their passion for the business.
Buddy System:
Participants discussed the benefits of having a business partner and how that relationship aids in decision-making, stress relief, and shared accountability.
Communication and transparency in partnerships were noted as critical for long-term success.
Future Engagements and Collaborations
Networking and Community:
Potential collaborations with platforms like Loop and Vault were discussed regarding how to leverage group buying power for better deals and partnerships.
Suggestions for upcoming meetups or workshops to help build community and share further insights on business strategies.
Key Takeaways Stay Committed: Consistency is crucial for scaling any business. Embrace Challenges: Use barriers as learning opportunities rather than stopping points. Utilize Networks: Connect with peers and resources to leverage knowledge and support. Automate Wisely: Implement systems that save time, especially when scaling up operations. Invest in People: Both in terms of team building and personal networking to share insights.
Actionable Advice If you're considering going full-time, ensure you have a solid financial backup. Develop a regular review process for your returns to maximize reimbursements. Explore potential credit solutions that can help leverage your budget better. Regularly network within your industry to keep learning and sharing knowledge.
(00:00) back home yeah I'm just kidding you were gone for a full month though right yeah it was beautiful man did you just go by yourself or did you take anybody with you no I went with uh one friend nice and I ended up uh meeting someone else in Hong Kong oh like business like like meeting meeting somebody or you like you no no I had a I had a friend that just randomly was in an area I went to oh sweet yeah it was pretty cool cool man so yeah like I appreciate both your yourself and robertt coming into this call I know I
(00:33) kind of Blindsided you guys but um I we've had a lot of people request talking about um people on how they've scaled how kind of you started how you guys have scaled to where you know from just starting to like 10K to 50K to 100K Beyond and then also like transitioning from doing this part-time into like your fulltime gig so there's only so much that I can say and I'm talking from my one personal experience so I figur it'd be very good to talk to you guys as well Dan just popped in here too hello hello mic check can you hear me I can hear you
(01:10) how's it going pretty good pretty good sorry m y no problem what up what up so yeah I was just like um really hoping that you guys could kind of share more or less your experience on what that's been like for you guys because you guys uh have all kind of started around the same time you've all been extremely consistent you've all all grown at a fairly realistic Pace what what I figure um compared to some of the people that we see nowadays who just kind of blow out of the water like but you guys have grown very very good very
(01:42) consistent and you've obviously made long-term sustainable businesses out of it and I imagine each one of you kind of have your own individual way on how you got there so I'm just hoping that you guys can more or less talk about it and share your story and then uh later on uh we may also talk to Fred and Anthony if they pop in here a little bit later today and then also potentially Stefan as well because all you guys are kind of on or getting close to the same level and I think all you guys would have valuable insights for a lot of people in
(02:14) the group yeah yeah I think um I don't know I guess we can just kind of go with the flow and maybe get into like some deeper topics as we get into them but in general it's what you said man it's just consistency and like Focus like for long like when I started I was still in University or I was in my Co-op term and it just started with like the classic like driving to Walmarts and just like finding what works but it really only started picking up when like my buddy and I were my buddy just graduated I was in my final ter but I decided to uh
(02:47) change it to part-time just to like focus more on this that's where it kind of started and then really when we got our first Warehouse in like May of 2023 is where it feels like it took off just because it was just it was just the consist consy like we were there every mo
(03:03) rning at like 9:00 a.m. and leaving at like 8:00 p.m. or something 9:00 p.m. and it was just every day and I think that is like the biggest thing is just showing up every single day and doing stuff you know 100% And so like just for reference you started what was it early or mid 2022 I think yeah it was mid 2022 it was the summer uh I was in a co-op and I was doing yeah my final engineering Co-op and it was just like it was cool but I just had like a lot of extra time and so on the side I would just be like researching [ __ ] and I would always like
(03:35) listen to podcasts on my way to work and [ __ ] and I was listening like private label podcasts and then they were telling they were always talking they would always have guests on and they would say oh I always started out with Arbitrage and then I learned Amazon I was like okay what is this Arbitrage thing and then I just tried and it worked and then just keep going with it once you have the proof of concept you just kind of keep going yeah honestly it was a proof of concept and I just kind of kept at it so then it really cool I think I
(04:08) think like the benefit of OA or ra is the like the startup cost is so little and my first box that I sent to Amazon was like I don't know like two Grandma secret cleaner things and a couple screwdrivers from uh Canadian Tire and that was it it was like an 8un shipment and I was like so scared to send it but like all in it was like less than a 100 bucks plus like a $20 keepa and a Sellar an maybe I don't know if we even had s back then but it was just like that's all I needed and it checked in and I I remember like the grandma secret thing
(04:43) sold all as soon as they checked in like both of them I made like four bucks on each and I was like holy [ __ ] this is crazy and then I went and then like it's just that was the proof of concept then you can like double it next time and double it next time I guess I was lucky that I was in a co-op so I had like some spending money at least like I remember for a while my goal was to spend like 500 bucks a week um and that was like a big goal for me but at least I could do that I probably had like five grand that
(05:10) I could like throw around um so that helped not be scared of scaling but but yeah you you can start so small which is nice and you can just get the proof of concept and do it like at whatever Comfort level you want yeah and uh I think the obvious thing to do is also um if you have a day job is to keep it don't go all in full ham uh like the second you find this business just so you can fuel the business with your salary um and also like Dan said I mean on my end how I started it was uh it wasn't even already I did the books in
(05:46) the beginning so it's like I think level zero it's like almost zero investment just so I can understand the concept of like the shipping uh how Amazon Works uh and everything and then once I had like this proof of concept after 2 weeks I started doing ra um and gradually build up to OA and wholesale um but but yeah I mean uh for sure initially uh you you you cannot uh just spend like $5,000 and hope that it's going to work you start small obviously and then uh you gradually build up your uh um the momentum but one
(06:28) thing uh that really helped me is uh once you get to the let's say OA wholesale uh side of the business is to um put some goals every day um in the business so I don't know if Dan or M you did that but for me what really helped me is to uh follow my my spending so uh one one big thing that helped me scale was to say okay uh I was in a in a situation where I was comfortable let's say to spend $200 a day and then to uh my my other goal was to find one new lead so this way I could in a in a way sense if I had a bad a good or bad day I
(07:10) don't know if you you see what I mean so if let's say one day I haven't spent the $200 okay I knew that the the next day I would have to maybe try to spend $250 or $300 to make up of the you know the even even if the number is kind of arbitrary like it's nice to just have a number so you can like have something to refer to to know if you're above or below because I noticed this in the warehouse a lot like we have now three guys that are in the warehouse and it's like unless so I guess to preface a little bit we have
(07:39) two guys that are full-time prepping and we have this additional role that we've kind of created of necessity which we I guess we kind of spun off probably from like an Amazon Lit video we saw um but it's called staging which is basically like taking in all our shipments and kind of organizing everything like putting the bundles together and stuff just so the prep guys have like an easy job at like knowing what's what um but that was like a new role that we implemented and there was no like track we didn't really have targets for that I
(08:03) don't know how many units per hour you're supposed to Stage um but we set like a arbitrary Target like okay let's do uh 10 different asens per hour and I just threw the number out there but we use that number to just kind of see like if we're above or below um and then you can kind of track progress and you can see like okay that one was really fast or that one was really slow I don't know what the number should be realistically but I know if we're doing really good or or poorly compared to that number and then you can refine the number over time
(08:31) and if like your number was 200 bucks a day and then if you're consistently getting three 400 you can bump it and you can make exactly once it get easier then it's like the gym I I'm seeing your icon Dan it's like uh how do we say it it's a progressive over Prive yeah yeah yeah so once it's the bench is too easy you put another plate you know yeah it's a good profile picture I love that show you know that show Rocky what what's the name it's an anime yeah watch yeah I know it I saw some clips on YouTube I didn't see the
(09:07) show dude someone said baky changed my life me too CH my life it was crazy for the gym yeah yeah it was crazy but anyways the goal you're right though the goals is is very important this year uh me and my partner for the first time we actually sat down and set like and I kind of posted about it in the goals chat here but we did like a really deep dive into our goals because like for a while the consistency works and like we were just showing up every day and just like both of us would sit down at our desks and just do work and
(09:42) we got far with that but if you have like very specific goals um and you want to grow at like a certain rate you kind of have to like really break it down to make sure you can get there so for us for this year we kind of set the goal we have like a general goal of 2 Xing every year which is like pretty hard but I think possible um and we kind of just like randomly we kind of randomly decided on that I mean b basically we're looking at pattern we're like can we ever beat [ __ ] pattern and we're like okay if we 2x every year it'll only take
(10:15) it'll only take like 30 years to catch up to pattern that's that's not too bad and so we said it as that it was funny we talked to the the VP of operations or something the head of chief of operations at at am United and we told them that we said we're going to catch you bro just give me 30 years um but because of that we kind of set the target it was 10 mil this year and we did it fully from ground up we looked at like how much we're gonna have to spend each month how much do we think we can spend with each supplier and how much do
(10:42) we think we can grow that and like breaking it down to like a monthly or even weekly Target is like really good because then we know okay we'll you know in May we'll have to get another guy in the warehouse in June we'll have to get another one and we we know what we're going to have to do each month um even now we're in the process of hiring a puring guy which is going to be a game changer because yeah like now we just spend so much time just like placing orders yeah and going with your logic right now I mean uh this is a great way
(11:09) to to scale is to identify in your business what's uh taking the longest time so uh yeah if it's the if it's the packing or the packaging or whatever you hire someone or maybe you can uh hire a prep Center which is going to give you like more time uh to do the the more more important stuff so on my end what happened is um I can I can see I mean between the time when I went full-time like the month just after the fulltime and the month before when I was still at my day job it's crazy how the the sales I mean I think I had like 50 or 70%
(11:46) increase in sales just because I was full-time I had more time to source and I had I mean yeah more focus on the business so definitely if you want to scale you have to uh to Outsource course some tasks for sure when did you go fulltime so um I started in uh uh beginning of May of um sorry uh of 2020 in 2022 and I went fulltime around May or June in this year so after six months yeah yeah yeah but it was like a uh I mean I the thing is um my logic was if this doesn't work I'm I'm going to go back like I have my diploma I'm going to
(12:33) go back to work my day job so it's now or never you know I cannot wait to have like kids and stuff like that to to do the this my logic too yeah and uh you graduated is is it right you graduated from scho I graduated it's like your backup I guess yeah it is yeah I I ended up I mean I graduated a year after all my friends because my last semester I just like went parttime and just took like one course every semester we already had the warehouse at that point so but before every semester I would like email the professor and I'd
(13:03) be like hey can I like not come to the LA like I was trying not to drive my school's like 30 minutes away so I was just trying to do whatever I could to like not go to class or not just to pass theum I said put everything onto the exam and I'll just pass the exam and I'll like please I told him I'm like I have a full-time job like my degree I mean I feel I felt bad doing that but I had a lot of friends that were like okay we we just passed and there's no like double uh like double how do we say it in English but like you need to pass the
(13:33) exams and also the lab so once they got like the 60% it didn't show up to the final yeah I mean it's a good thing at the end of the day nobody's gonna ask you for your grades as long as you pass but um so another thing that also helped me a lot in the to scale is to um think about the business in like multiple steps it's like so right now you're doing uh let's say someone is doing books but why not add o to it not like keep doing books and doing o it's like uh going to like give you an extension to the business but also another way to
(14:09) think about it is like um you're doing right now Canada to Canada why not add Canada to us yeah you can you can even introduce each thing slowly like the same way as when you start you take a step by step and you just get proof of concept like you can do that with anything and if and if you know us to Canada works really well then double down on and triple down and then maybe becomes your whole business until the tariffs come I guess but yeah that's exactly oh my God man I'm scared right now you think they he's gonna put them
(14:43) back I don't know no I don't think so I don't think I don't think long term but like we might have a little bit with it I don't know man I think I think he really wants Canada as the 51st date bro that just I can't that would take decades though I don't think I know I know well I mean uh they could they could do it pretty quick but it would like I just think that there's no way we would be like sort of like you know how Puerto Rico is yeah I think that's crazy we'll see but us got to be the 11 Province hopefully we become a tax
(15:20) Haven yeah honestly for us it would be a good thing but so with you guys though so like just to kind of give context to like where you guys are at so mey you also started in 2022 is that right yeah May 2022 and I think I started taking it serious like October 2022 okay cool and Robert you mentioned that you went full-time was it this year or he said within like like the following year of 2022 it was the same year I just uh I mean I was so obsessed like Dan said um I wasn't I think I was listening to like 20 videos a day on YouTube and uh I was
(15:58) like I wasn't even uh listening to music in my car I was just listening to podcast about Amazon you know I was so obsessed to quit my job it's crazy I think I met mey and Jordan both in like the Flips For Miles Discord like two years ago way back in like the Canada chat and then Jordan got banned we all came here um but I remember that but cool so like um like Robert you're doing OA in wholesale and you're using a prep center right now right exactly I'm a full-time prep Center I'm the lazy guy here that's okay and like though I like to see
(16:39) everybody's perspective and I think it's important because everybody has different perspective and business models and that's completely fine um so then for like your own employees like how many vas do you have working for you right now honestly it's just me and my in one VA that's it me and one VA um I mean I I could uh pass on more task to her but for now I'm I'm still I would say a lot in the business um yeah I'm I'm still working a lot in the business like doing like some some let's say like uh replic replicative
(17:16) tasks but yeah only one VA and two prep centers right now I think that's good though to be honest like the same thing you mentioned about like Outsourcing like the only time you really need to Outsource like obviously depends on whatever lifestyle you want but like you only really need to Outsource when like certain tasks are impacting other tasks and so we me and my partner I don't remember what we got to maybe like two two m a year or something and we were still doing all the packing ourselves like it was crazy and at a certain point
(17:46) we were packing so much that we like couldn't Place orders and that was like clearly a bottleneck because like we had to pack [ __ ] but we also had to buy [ __ ] and we just couldn't and we had to hire we're I feel like we're always like even right now with the purchasing hire is because like other things are slipping because we're spending so much time purchasing and so like maybe that's a little bit inefficient but also allows you to be really lean and I think that like if you delegate too much too fast like things just slip away and yeah I
(18:15) don't know I kind of fall on the other side of that argument a lot yeah I mean I I saw I mean I'm seeing your uh in the in the Arcane group that you're sometimes you you you write your how your operation is uh is running like it's way more sophisticated than than my operation lately I'm still like on the Google sheet and everything iut but we have automation yeah for the first time my partner and I were just talking about this an hour ago before I left the office uh we we we're debating and I would hate to do this but
(18:49) we're debating moving to like some sort of Erp system because some of our Google Sheets have gotten too big like it exceeded 10 million cells and we literally can't do any more in those sheets and so like we had to like delete different sheets and stuff and it's just like we might be getting physically limited by Google Sheets but I love it and it's so nice everything we have is in Google Drive and we have our Automation in Google collaboratory so it's like both of us can access and just run stuff to just kind of move
(19:13) information around um I like it I don't want to move to an Erp it's going to be a mess but we might have to and so Robert if you don't mind sharing uh what kind of like Revenue were you at for 2024 yeah so um our biggest month in 2024 was around uh if we take into consideration uh Canada and the USA combined in can Canadian money uh I think it was around like 450,000 we did in a month uh but um for the year for the year in total it was around like 4.
(19:57) 3 million Canadian we did um but yeah I mean uh it's it's a lot of um I've been doing that for three years now and it's it's a lot of reinvesting the profits in into the business and doing so gives you more spending power and uh keeping track of your spending is a is a big big uh key Point here because I don't know if Dan or Miz is the it's the same thing but I found that rule of thumb uh you you your sales are half of the cost of the so if you keep spending like not spending like you're spending like for good leads event you're gonna have
(20:38) bigger sales number you know eventually yeah yeah that's kind of how we built our goals is like we started at the 10 million number and we determined like what that will need to be in sales every month and then yeah the ratio is about 1 to two for spend to sale so that we have to spend like something like 400k a month or something to get there exact so let's say there's a month where you decide to I don't know for some reason you have to back down a little bit uh buy less inventory you know approximately in two months or maybe
(21:10) three months your sales are going to slow down just because you it always lags too that's true like yeah sometimes you feel like you're cooking and this happened to us this happened to us when we uh had to hire our first Warehouse guys like we didn't realize that we were missing out on purchasing really because you're just so in the day-to-day just packing items whatever whatever comes up like oh we got a IP complaint let me go deal with that for two hours or whatever like things just come up but then two months later you see your sales go down
(21:37) you're like what the [ __ ] is happening and then you back and like oh I shipped nothing few months ago that makes sense exactly and so you you do have to keep on top of it or else it is easy to slip away and like the sales are just going to keep rolling even if I stop purchasing completely like sales are going to still keep pumping stuff's going to check in stuff's going to come out of FC transfer for like a month and a half and I'm going to think I'm cooking but then you're just 100% yeah and and the contrary is true
(22:01) too like you're spending like I don't know $5,000 $500,000 and then you don't see the results before two months maybe just because I don't know if you noticed but recently I've been I had like so many inventory that were already available that went to for to FC transfer like randomly I don't know if it happened to they're being weird I don't look into it that much but like they're they're weird they do [ __ ] like that all the time yeah so I I definitely do want to talk talk to you guys about like day-to-day
(22:30) processes and like where at what point like you met plateaus and like the kind of things that you face that all of us face and like like what Dan mentioned about like just doing kind of [ __ ] tasks every day and then having your day just eaten up and not doing like actually like Revenue producing tasks um but I do also want to grab a base from everybody here so measy for yourself um you're doing strictly OA is that correct yeah 100% OA Beauty and you were utilizing prep centers and now you brought all back in house is that right
(23:00) so I was using prep centers then I I did bring it back but because of the US the cad I kept the prep Center for that that's it that's it you stayed in the good side man so the cad CAD was all in Beauty how's it going you like it you like yeah I loved it but now I'm cooked so are you doing so go ahead oh I was just gonna ask are you doing all the prep yourself or have you hired any local employees no no I haven't hired anyone I don't even have a VA but cads a cad I do prep myself uh sometimes my mom will come
(23:30) over help but other than that yeah it's just me I love that that's cool yeah um so if you don't mind sharing and of course if you don't want to share don't don't feel like you have to but what kind of Revenue were you at for 20244 so my biggest month was 235k and I closed 2024 at 2 something 2.34 mil Beauty that's yeah that's dope you guys are that's actually super impressive like Robert with only one VA and mey with just solo Mission like that's no it's pretty Co Army yeah it's keeping it super lean yeah it's the best
(24:16) honestly oh know I think I possible you think you might have to what get some help soon though as soon as things get overwhelming that's kind of what exactly if it starts limiting other [ __ ] you of have to yeah bringing the prep back inh house limits a lot like I can't Source nearly as much so I might have to Outsource a little bit yeah and so for yourself Dan you're strictly wholesale right yeah yeah we have some we're the same way that Robert was talking about like trying out other business models we've been trying out
(24:49) brand direct stuff and we've launched a few brands or we've taken I mean a lot of what we do is like bringing us Brands to Canada or Canada Brands to the US and that's been cool and honestly it's like given us the proof of concept to like probably try to Double Down um but it is hard because we have high growth goals and wholesale is just a lot easier to scale fast than brand direct like from initially reaching out to a brand or a thousand Brands let's say it might take like two months before you actually like
(25:22) place your first order versus a wholesale account you can message a th you can get an order in like after 5 days if you go through their whole catalog or something like they just say yes eventually and then yeah you place are you can I ask you if you when you open a wholesale account with a distributor um are you telling them that you're selling on Amazon yeah yeah we always tell them I I don't like people that lie I mean I know that a lot of people do but like it comes it has come to our advantage a lot of times like we
(25:51) do get a lot of declines because of that and like we even have sales rep come to our warehouse and they're like oh this is so great this is so cool but my head office is going to say no CU you guys don't have a storefront and we're like [ __ ] like whatever but it's like it has benefit if you have like counter where customers can that we've debated doing like a showroom we have the space in the front to do a showroom but like it's just like I don't know we don't know if we if we were to do that do we take it
(26:17) seriously and do we actually like I mean it's going to give you an edge man because I had so many like suppliers telling me you just have to have like a fake let's say counter like just like so people can come in this feels so bro when I when I look up people's addresses and I'm like how does this how is this seller selling this item I know that they don't sell to anyone and I look at their their Amazon account and then I look at their business and then they have like a picture of like a [ __ ] counter with like a Dap on it I'm like
(26:45) bro like who these are the people that you guys are working with but it it's paid off like I mean because if we're honest about Amazon like if the supplier is into that this is where our best relationships have came from is like they're like oh you guys do Amazon like holy [ __ ] let's double down on this let's what about this what about this and like they probably have other Amazon sellers that just aren't telling them that they're selling on Amazon but we're getting special treatment because they see that we're doing Amazon and they
(27:12) like it and they're like oh try this or like do you want to launch this on Amazon this might work good and so I don't know and it just feels more real like if I I we can invite them to our warehouse and they can come chill and they can I don't have to like set up a quick desk and and put like some fake products on it like it just feels weird you know what I mean it feels scummy like I'm we're trying to have like a regular business I don't know no I guess no hate don't hate the player hate the game but it's just not me no obviously
(27:37) I'm with you with that like I don't want to lie uh it's the same for me I always tell the truth about Amazon just I think because at the end of the day it's uh it's going to reward you more than if you lie but you definitely get an edge if you lie that's Express Health supplies whole [ __ ] business model is just lying bro like there's so many brands that say like oh we don't sell the any Amazon sellers we only have two accounts and I'm like well this is this guy who has a PO Box in New York or New Jersey that sells [ __ ] 8,000 units of
(28:06) a month from you guys probably one of your best retail stores but it's actually all going to Amazon Canada are you able to win the buy you've been salty over Express health for a couple of years bro I hate Express health I think everyone here hates it's yeah it's okay like we could work around it but like there's just been so many times I've talked to a supplier or brand where they're like no no no we don't do we don't touch Amazon I'm like who's this guy that sells 8,000 a month with a PO Box in New Jersey it's crazy I'm I'm
(28:34) he has like a crazy operation the way he's been able to hide his everything like we have never I know his name I've never been able to find anything about him besides that like I and Jordan you're pretty good at digging too yeah [ __ ] Joel you're good at digging too and like I don't know if you've ever found his warehouse but like I have not and I've been able to find like anyone's Warehouse if I try hard enough if I care but never his yeah that's what it's his whole his whole business is just like this weird ominous thing that's one I
(29:03) haven't been able to track down too well but he's cooking though he I don't know how much he sells like 20 mil a month or 10 mil I don't know crazy he has like 600 reviews a month or something the thing is I'm I'm never able to beat him in the buy box he's always like I match his price and he's always like uh 99% I've I've very rarely unsummon I don't I don't care if I see him on a listing I'll just I'll go anyways him and vers sure but like it's uh yeah I've been a couple listings I've been able to beat him in buy box but almost
(29:34) never and so Dan with yourself for 2024 you were at 4.85 million is that correct 4.85 yep Beauty and you mentioned you have three guys in your Warehouse yeah three guys in the warehouse and then my partner and I do all like the front end all computer stuff um we have a VA that's like basically just on call we like to do all everything in house our El just for like quality purposes and like whatever but sometimes we hit him up and be like hey can you help us with this one-off task and he's good but yeah and so yeah like just so like everybody
(30:09) can see is like so a lot of these guys like they are very competitive in revenues but they all have relatively different businesses and that's kind of what I was going with when I wanted to talk to the three of you especially is because like uh Robert is basically exclusively prep Center and he does a mix of OA wholesale mey does almost exclusively OA and he was prep center now he's mostly in house and then yourself Dan you're wholesale and you're exclusively in house so you have like a lot of variety in what you guys are
(30:41) doing but you're all all able to accomplish very substantial goals yeah it's cool it's cool and it yeah it just depends on like lifestyle choices too like there's so many headaches with having a warehouse and having people come in and dealing with that like I've only had to fire one person but like there have been there have been disasters in the warehouse and like it is a pain in the ass a lot of the time so I get it but it's also fun it's also cool to like have people come in and like today for example we had
(31:11) lunch with all the guys because was one of their birthdays over the weekend and like that was really cool it's part of the reason why we're trying to hire a purchaser that's going to be like in person in office because it's just cool it's cool to have people around um and I think it also like helps with accountability like going in to a different building and at like a certain time every day like just allows you to just lock in and work versus like when I was at home I would still be focused but it's so easy to like just [ __ ] off and
(31:40) like go make some food or whatever but if you're there you can't really do that that makes sense yeah and so like even with myself like I have a warehouse separate but we don't have any office space in the warehouse so I'm always working in my house and I also have my nephew my entire operation is almost entire families and friends which I don't recommend for most people it can be [ __ ] treacherous sometimes but yeah like I that what's that I feel like I'd like that to be honest I think it all depends on like who your family is
(32:12) and like I've had a lot of different family work with me over the years and like some of them they kind of take it for granted because it's like oh I was going to say if there's performance issues like that must be a harder conversation and if it's just like someone that you hired like straight up you know yeah and and it was a lot um and I've had like bad blood with my with two of my sisters with my brother's girlfriend and so like I try to explain it now with everybody that I hire it's like this is you know work is work and
(32:38) we have certain things that we need to meet I'm going to treat you like an employee you're not you're not going to get treated like my brother or my sister or my nephew you're gonna be treated like an actual just an everyday employee Abdul you want to mute yourself mute yourself kick you disconnected um um but yeah like so I need to set like realistic expectations up front otherwise I have had people certainly try to take advantage of it or just feel like oh I can do this or I can show up late just because it's my brother or
(33:16) whatever it is right yeah that's that's yeah that's difficult even for me like even though I'm not hiring family like it's been like a learning process to even like learn how to like call people out like I'm I'm not a confrontational person and I'm like super nice and so like if someone's like having performance issues I'm always like super benefit of the D like a you know it's all right like he did this or like maybe's dealing with this but if you don't it just things just slip and so you have to like learn how to man like
(33:45) just be a manager is a completely different thing and if it's family I could imagine that's even harder because there's completely different set of expectations from them perhaps 100% and it was like that at the beginning and I certainly let [ __ ] slide way too much and like even when I first started hiring like outside a family and like just like look at like the vas that I I would hire um it was the same thing but you kind of have to learn it and build those expectations over time and then really learn how to like stick with it
(34:12) and address problems and deal with it right away instead of you know just trying to let things go all the time yeah yeah I think having a warehouse is definitely a big Edge uh to open accounts with Wholesales like like for for my end uh it's uh it's like um I'm not hiding anything I'm I'm still super honest but it's like more difficult for me I think to open accounts when I just I say I just have like a uh I just sell on Amazon you know from my house but uh the the thing is I try to um I try to make it the uh like the prep
(34:54) centers are my my let's say my my warehouses in a way so I try to be like bigger than I really am so this helps a lot but I I feel like uh maybe in the in the future because I I'll be I'm honest with myself I don't think I have the heart to run a an operation like you're you're doing with employees and everything like that but maybe in the future uh if there's any opportunity uh I I thought uh outside of Amazon so Dan said he's helping us businesses to to sell in Canada MH this is a great opportunity maybe to have like some
(35:31) exclusive distribution in the Canadian Marketplace having a warehouse would really help yeah I remember doing the the prep Center thing and trying to I sometimes I sometimes I look up sellers addresses and then I find their website and then they say that they have like 15 warehouses across Canada and they're like calling the Amazon Fulfillment centers their warehouses too or something it's people stretch people stretch that all the time but you kind of have to you're right like you kind of have to say like oh no
(36:00) I loading dock like I can receive your pal because a lot of times they're just like skeptical they're like you said you're going to spend 10,000 but like where it's not going to your house we have a full truck we're like no like there the warehouse is here there's a loading dock you're good like [ __ ] like that I'm sure you found too that like even if they're skeptical once you place some orders and they see that like you're not weird then like it's usually good and they usually end up liking you and they can give you discounts and a
(36:31) lot of times like even though people say Amazon is so saturated like so many times we work with a supplier or a distributor and they're like so blown away with their volume and we become like their number one and like crazy treatment like they invite us for dinner and they invite us to their warehouse and stuff like so it's still fairly untapped and like they are still so um shocked by like the volume of Amazon and if you don't lie about it then it's like a really cool opportunity for them if they're into it to like grow that side
(37:01) and you can just be like their person for that yeah and most people like when we look at just like the scope of quote unquote art competition most people to put it lightly are dumb [ __ ] don't know how to run a business and like they just try to like just run by like the the skirt of their tail or however you put it and like they're just kind of in it just as a hobby and they're not running an actual business and so when you're talking to people like specifically with uh wholesalers suppliers Etc they're not
(37:30) used to talking to people that are selling through Amazon that are actual business people and that actually know how to run an a real operation that's true yeah when you look at some of the competition like that's that's like that that's that's out there that's even doing like decent numbers it's like it's very surprising that they're able to get to where they are and I've like I've talked about this a lot but like my dad is a prime example it's no idea how he's able to get to the the volume that he is every month but he is able to and he
(38:01) hardly knows what he's doing right um so have all three of you guys uh I know I know Dan and mey have but have you guys used external funding at all and if so what kind of funding did you guys what kind of funding did you guys get uh I can start we started with BDC SL futurpreneur loan 60 Grand that was super nice I uh we did that the end of 2023 I think so we did have our first Warehouse um which helped and was it end of 2023 it was I think yeah and and that and there's super like open about it it's like the process is really easy
(38:47) because it's supposed to be for like starting businesses and stuff um and that was like extremely helpful the interest rate is good too which is why we took it and then we had like some random 15K loan from uh like some random bank that we just like I don't know I don't even know why we did that but then eventually we we tried all of the big Banks to get like a real loan or line of credit because we're like [ __ ] trying to look for these like random secondhand loan places like there's so many weird places that have like 25% aprs but they
(39:18) like have this weird payment model where you don't know what the AP is um and then we eventually landed with TD and we got an 150k Landing credit and Loan which we've been pretty set with for now beautiful and mey how about yourself I got the uh future pure one I think I had I think it was 45 Grand or 40 grand um besides that I just applied for hella credit cards got hella credit and then last year I got offered the Amazon loan for 92 Grand 92.
(39:54) 5 I just been running with that and how have you found the the payment terms for the Amazon loan um it it it it takes a lot of your cash flow cuz you're I was paying like 25% of all my payouts so it's a hefty payback but I mean it did help with the spend so I guess it's fine I I wouldn't prefer it though 25% is a lot for cash flow yeah I was spending like 20 I think it was 20 grand a month on cash flow that was just gone to that loan so was that loan fully paid off now yeah I paid it off last year Beauty right before Q4 right at the end of Q4
(40:33) and Robert what about you have you utilized any external funding at all except my day job salary when I started uh I just used my credit cards I never really uh I mean knock on wood I never really needed the funding uh just because I was reusing my profits from um I I was just reinvesting around 90% of my profits into back into the business and grew this way and I got some Amazon lending offers too but uh I don't want to touch that yeah got that high with no loan yeah it is yeah it's crazy I mean it's also like
(41:10) you don't need to like yeah whatever whatever you're comfortable with too like even for us like because we were so like we were both in the office every day like we had at a certain point when we had um somebody helping us with prep and we had like our sourcing down we had enough suppliers like it was clear that Capital was our bottleneck and we just didn't have money but we had the items lined up and we had the guy ready to prep and then it was just it was clear for us and we could have just took it slow and stayed there but we were ready
(41:42) to like we that's how I always see our business is like you just keep moving forward until you hit a bottleneck and then you break it and then you go into the next one and so like sometimes it's space and you need to get a warehouse or you need to like do something and then other times it's labor and you need to hire a guy or get a prep Center other times it's capital and need to get like a loan or just chill out and other times it's sourcing and you to go Source or hire a sourcing guy you just run into like it's pretty clear what your
(42:10) bottleneck will become and then you just do whatever you can to break that down and then you move unlock a little bit more growth and then you hit the next one yeah it's true I mean when I started I was a little bit stupid I was like really maxing out all my credit cards and uh the way I could pay off the credit cards were with the sales I mean the balance of what Amazon was holding which is like super risky but luckily uh they sent me the money because yeah if they had like knock on with if they were to close my
(42:43) account out I'll be [ __ ] yeah that's kind of like that's kind of the benefit of like we got the line of credit from TD for 150 Grand and like we haven't touched it and it's just kind of like a back safety net yeah it's a safy it's like if if we get our dispersements paused like we can at least pay back all of our suppliers and like pay off our credit cards and then just like wait it out and figure our [ __ ] out but yeah if it's a credit card like they're not going to be nice to you and so yeah it's very interesting to see
(43:14) everybody a different perspective because like with Robert like so you started again all you guys started like 20122 is whereas with myself I started 2018 I've never leveraged any external funding what's whatever but I've also grown a lot slower than most of these guys so like I am slightly ahead of like quote unquote Revenue uh with most of these guys but most of them are probably going to catch and surpass me this year and obviously like a big thing for myself has been capital and I if I were able to secure external Capital I'd be
(43:47) able to grow a lot quicker so like with Robert specifically it's it's very surprising that you're able to grow as much as you did without any external funding as well have a good job I mean he was he was only working for six months before he quit that's true yeah but but again I had like some uh let's say backup funding because I worked for uh three years and a half uh but when I started this business I quit after six months yeah that's true W but um yeah I mean it was just a steady growth I mean uh I didn't go crazy like
(44:25) Fred I don't know if you saw Fred the growth but he went like Z to 100 in like two months yeah that was I to do that I would need like a loan of course but I went like slowly steady reinvesting the profits and yeah and so where he said he may pop in here a little bit later he might be like around like 900 PM is yeah he was com I remember his come up was so insane like yeah it's just like 20K month 100K month 200k month 500k month okay sick Bro yeah another beast but again like that's kind of false expectations for
(45:08) most people because like Fred had the funding to support it right whereas most true most people will not have that yeah and he also had M massive balls to go that deep that quick yo yeah he said [ __ ] proof of concept first month scene that I worked I like yeah going all in yeah it's true so with you guys then um what kind of specific um plateaus and bottlenecks have you experienced going from say Zer to 10K 10 to 50K 50k to 100K months and Beyond what's kind of the main plateaus that you've hit and how did you get past
(45:49) them yeah I mean I don't know I don't even know at what Revenue number they happen at um but kind it's like I said it's always like one of those three or four things it's either Capital labor or what did I say or like sourcing yeah exactly and it's just like it always balc like for us right now it's sourcing so we're looking at a purchaser a few months ago it was space physical space I guess that was the fourth one and we had to move warehouses we were so constrained that we like were stacking pallets on pallets and like
(46:22) literally barely able to move in the warehouse and at one point we had the three guys in the back and then me and my buddy in the front and it was like a 1500 foot space it was just insane and so we were clearly limited by space that's a harder one to fix like it's really hard to just get a warehouse or get a bigger Warehouse we didn't even finish our lease on the last one we just moved and then we had to like try to subl it and we eventually did but that was definitely more risky but it was that was a big bottleneck for us yeah
(46:50) you just bounce back and forth between those I think I don't know if you guys a different experience yeah I mean initially obviously the bottleneck is the is the sourcing uh you're not you're not skilled enough to find leads so this is where personally I I went on the the gold Le lead list of Jordan which helped a lot not only uh finding don't talk about anything that I offer that's not what this is for I can give you referral code if you need if you guys want to yeah but uh but yeah it's true I mean I use I used the leads list uh initially
(47:29) to help me uh find new leads and I was also using the leads list to uh to find like new um buying uh sources because I mean uh yeah the lead list was was showing like like online places where I I didn't know existed like online stores new websites exactly and yeah you just have to be creative with these list because the leads are good but also you have to think about okay I would try to uh maybe start my own sourcing from one of these Le leads leads as and it can bring you to other better maybe leads so yeah so initially it was the sourcing
(48:11) that was an issue and like Dan said eventually it's going to be time and money that's going to impact you so once um after actually when I it's funny because when I quit my job I also decided to hire a prep Center so it was like a double uh double boost uh to uh to help me scale and mey do you have any other additional things that you would throw in there from your personal experience uh no I mean it really was just the leads and the capital I also I also went with the leads list but I kind of took a different approach I I use
(48:50) your lead list to like build a big ass database of uh storefronts so to this day I have like 600 fronts now a lot of it was from your um your leads list but that's kind of how I took that approach that kind of solved the leads issue and then the capital eventually with the loans kind of help that out do you mean storefronts like Amazon storefronts like other sellers or or just likees other other storefronts that's like my main um way to source so that that little datab Bas is massive for me yeah it's super underrated I mean I don't know if it's
(49:25) underrated but it's super good like just finding that's how I that's how I scaled at the start completely is I would like as soon as I found my first lead I would find other people selling it and like assume that they're doing the same thing I am and then it's just free yeah it's it's a crazy Snowball Effect so that's that's why storefront is kind of my my go-to yeah I see some someone asked if they we recommend paying ourselves I don't know if you guys pay yourselves at all we didn't for a very long time um we
(49:55) just reinvested everything be just because we didn't need it necessarily I guess it just depends on like what your life is situation yeah but the more you reinvest the better it is for your business but the more you sacrifice in your life yes yeah I was about to answer Evan on chat it's the same thing when I started I haven't paid anything for myself but uh uh you you hit a point where like I mean you I mean I don't know maybe Dan is doing that because he's he's doubling every year but but I'm not going I'm not
(50:28) reinvesting all my money back into the inventory yeah we I mean we did for a long time we started paying ourselves like middle or end of last year and we just did a percentage of net profit so that like we know if we if we did like a salary thing then it would have just probably eaten up too big of a percent and the percentage of profit is cool it's a small percent it's 10% um but it's cool because like as you grow it gets bigger and I mean yeah for it's just because we could like we were just we had some money in savings and we just
(50:58) like lived off of that and our expenses are like pretty low we both have shitty cars and live at home still and so like we could our situation allowed for it yeah I mean right now my logic is like build money maybe park the bus buy something like a real estate and then build back the money buy real estate build back money but I don't know if it's the best way to do it yeah someone was asking about buy Box share percentage I don't even know I bubok bubok is so complicated I think it's so much just stock we've just
(51:31) noticed like it's like a I don't even know what to call it's like a law of the universe like you think you you think you should buy 24 units on an as so you buy 24 and you sell them in a month and you're like okay let me buy 48 and then you sell them in a month and you're like let me buy 96 then you sell them in a month and it's just like the more you stock the more buy box you get so now we just we don't even look at competition or who's on the listing or whatever I just we just buy as much as I think 50 days worth of stock is exactly do the
(52:02) same so that's how you're doing your criteria are you figuring out like your weighted average and then timesing that by 50 and that's how you're determining how much you're purchasing weighted average of buy box of like your how many units you sold in like the past 30 days or whatever you have yeah exactly yeah we have uh like we essentially just use like a sales velocity like seller board planner has but we just have a script that does it like with some additional logic like it pulls Amazon reports and then it like it basically just sees if
(52:31) we were because sell seller board planner is good but also if you were like out of stock for one of the days it'll count that as a zero sales day but technically you're out of stock so you would have sold so our script just like has additional logic but yeah basically it it'll give us recommendations on how much to sell um and so it's like in all of our cataloges we call them that have all our items that we purchase from different suppliers um but we've ran into this a lot of times Maybe this is discussion we can go down is like the
(52:59) the battle between Automation and manual or like human we went down a really big push of Automation and we automated like pricing um like in terms like getting current Max cost and and [ __ ] like that and then we automated like sales velocity and telling us how much to order uh but there's just so much Nuance to stuff and like like we were saying if Express health is on a listing it changes everything and so like I guess you can code that in but then there's going to be a new guy like verser that comes around and does the same [ __ ] and
(53:32) like there's just so much Nuance to some things we had to like bring back from Automation and bring it back inh house and actually look at it uh with our own eyes and app apply like real logic to and so we kind of do that now for sales velocity and like quantity I use this estimated sales per day thing to get an idea but I'll always look at a listing if it's like I don't know if I'm only buying 24 if it says says if it tells me to buy 24 whatever I'll buy it but if it's something bigger then I'll always look at it and try to like get more
(54:03) basically like I I our in stock rate I think that's like the biggest challenge is like inst stock rate and yeah it just requires more of like a human to look at it I think do concerning uh oh go ahead sorry no Robert go ahead no I wanted to speak about another subject problem I was just going to ask we can come back to this so do you guys specifically have an issue staying in stock yeah I think yeah the more the more as you have in your catalog the harder it is to stay in stock I don't know if Dan and M are doing the same
(54:42) thing but for me like The Wider the better but then the wider the more time you have to spend to uh uh restock and which is right now my biggest I would say task um that I'm doing in a business is just like inventory I'm still not comfortable giving that to my VI having like a credit card of uh I don't know what's the limit on the credit card uh even if she's like the most sweet person I know you never know how people going to react having this much spending power under their hand yeah even for us if we're hiring a
(55:18) purchaser it'll probably for a while be just like we would have to review them first but they can do all the numbers and the quantities and I would we would just just look it over but yeah it's definitely a a big responsibility to hand over so yeah it took us probably like a year to really get like our flow in checked so that we're we almost have probably about like 80% not in stock so like we're only out of stock about have stock outs about 20% of the time on the main asens that we're going to be restocking and it took me about a
(55:51) year with my nephew every day one-on-one training him doing POS me reviewing them before uh putting them out before he got to a place where like I would feel like it was sufficient for him to do it by himself yeah and this again you're trusting your family I mean I don't think he's GNA scam you yeah like I I I don't believe my nephew is gonna scam me he knows I'll probably break his legs if he does but but yeah it took a long time for for us to get to that point like I think a lot of it was because I didn't have like any
(56:23) systems or training in place and who's basically like he's not from any kind of background like this he's kind of just like a have no idea what I do what I want to do with my life kid you know just kind of dropped out of school not really old hasn't really held on like a a stable job previously so it had taken longer versus somebody that had experience in like a purchasing role or that was very intelligent doing those types of tasks right but I still think like like you said Dan it's very nuanced so it's very
(56:53) difficult to train that yeah yeah concerning my biggest mistake uh um for me I think um so I had like one instance where uh I I was selling a product that I was sourcing from the US and it was at a time where I still was a sneaky guy and I didn't like fully uh like was telling them that I was selling on Amazon but I didn't I I was I was selling the product like with no issue and got hit like I mean almost got hit with the IP complaints uh so what happened is I knew someone that was selling these same products that got hit
(57:37) before me so luckily I removed my inventory but I ended up with like thousands worth of inventory that it I'm still having right now I'm trying to sell out um and another mistake I made I made was that I imported a lot of um topical products from the states to sell in Canada and obviously they're not registered with health Canada and Amazon took off the listing which ended up with around like $3,000 or $4,000 worth of inventory like lost inventory that I could almost not sell yeah I've I've heard about that a lot like is iherb
(58:19) still viable for OA I haven't touched ierb in a while but like that all of it is that right like comes from us barely anything the listings really come and go so like Amazon will do a catalog clean up a bunch of [ __ ] will go away but then the listings will pop up somewhere else and you can reset them back into other listings they're like their listings that are going against to but that's kind of how the process bends but a lot of listings stay around and they they're viable for a year two years plus yeah I know I know someone who got
(58:48) a section three from IH herb damn really yeah twice did he so he beat he beat them both two months L he beat it the first time I don't know about the second time but he beat it the first time and two months later he got another one Jesus I don't know what what's going on now but yeah I mean it is crazy I don't even is I heard even allowed to do that I don't even I don't know how that works like well they sell so much into Canada they're importing technically for personal use right so like you like your caps for the amount of order that you
(59:20) could place where you were prior um I don't know about now they don't do that anymore I I have't order from them for quite a while but I heard somebody said that they may have removed that cap wow I heard was gold back in the days I remember Jordan I was talking to you about I used to buy like before you told me about how to like make those fake email addresses with the plus one or whatever they used to just like buy 50 emails from Pakistan and just make new accounts and get the 20% discount stack that was good and so uh I'm not
(59:55) saying this to to [ __ ] on you anyway Robert but I just wanted to bring this up because um the reason why like we have a community of people and like talk to people and like talk about each other's experiences is because I almost guarantee for yourself Robert when you mentioned about your ran those issues about like uh kind of fiban about you being an Amazon Seller I guarantee that I told you like not to do that a long time ago but you did and it could have potentially uh ran into like other issues right like obviously you learn
(1:00:24) you learned you go through the process you when you learn uh but when we talk about these things like there's a lot of things that um you can learn from other people without having to pay for that mistake yourself yeah 100% And um yeah I mean uh it wasn't a good experience and uh I mean it's a shortcut not telling you your Amazon business is a shortcut but it's a shortcut to uh bad things so yeah don't do it and so like one other recent examp example and if he's in here JD uh I just mentioned to him a a while ago not to go
(1:01:02) so deep on individual SKS right I was like always like spread out your risk a lot more especially like with OA and then JD also recently had a product that sold for a long time was doing a lot of Revenue with and then all of a sudden that one got shut down right so then all of a sudden a lot of Revenue goes into one place and I'm like man I told you yeah yeah I'm still recovering from that that's that was brutal I one thing go ahead no go ahead uh one thing that we do look at when we do go deep on as is like at least
(1:01:39) Alternatives like maybe it's in the US Marketplace so we can just get rid of it there even if for a loss or break even like we're not going to be stuck with it um because yeah I mean we have stories like that too we have a death pile or a death pallet in the warehouse that's just been there for like a year it's like it's banned in Canada and us nobody [ __ ] wants it on Marketplace and so I was just sitting there hoping for like another listing to pop up the one time we bought the smoke detectors this was crazy we bought like a smoke detectors
(1:02:09) it was 60 Grand on one AC we ship it all to the US and then while it's in transit the listing gets taken down for some safety [ __ ] like even though it was fine this is what Amazon does and so we had to like call our carrier and like tell them to hold it in the warehouse and then I'm working with Amazon for like two or three weeks to try to get the listing back and they're just like whatever they take five days to respond each time then we had to bring the whole all that 60 Grand worth of [ __ ] back to our warehouse and at least for that one
(1:02:40) there was a lot of other listings like one pack two pack whatever so it wasn't a big deal but that was like super nerve-wracking because if that would have checked if we would have let that check into Amazon since the listing was down they would have received it they would have received it FC transferred it everywhere and then it would have went unavailable and bringing that back from the US would be such a nightmare like crossb pickups would have to like receive like 12 pallets of one I don't even know if they could do that I don't
(1:03:05) know what the [ __ ] we would have done so that would have been insane but because we looked at other like we knew we were going super deep on this listing and we had Alternatives then it wasn't it wasn't as bad but yeah it could have been like could have been could have taken us out so with that specific Ace and when that when you guys did that like what kind of percentage of your total catalog or like expected revenue or spend what that would that one as be at that time like expected spend it was maybe like 20% of
(1:03:37) the month spend it would have been crazy for Revenue it was so weird the listing got banned we're literally under undercutting Amazon on it and so like you're telling me they're sell selling a listing that's banned that's like it was it was a stupid thing to get banned we thought it was safe that Amazon was selling it but the listing's still gone to this day so I don't even know that means they have stranded inventory themselves so then you were able you were able to assign those that inventory to other yeah thank God we caught it
(1:04:05) like the thank God we caught it at the carrier before it got to Amazon we literally just like I just put capital letters urgent in the email and CC everyone from the carrier and said like do not deliver this to Amazon like I'll pay whatever fee to store it just like don't and then we eventually took it back and yeah there was lots of other listings it wasn't a big deal in that sense it stck to have to repack everything and we would have like and then we were super overstocked and all these other Asin but like we still got
(1:04:32) rid of it it wasn't a big deal financially in the end but it could have been a disaster 100% and so would you say that was probably like one of the biggest mistakes you've ever made I don't even know I don't know it's hard to say like what the biggest mistake like that even I don't even consider that a mistake like I don't even I don't know why the Lis thing got banned like anything on Amazon has a risk of getting banned any second like that's just that just the game that we're in um yeah I don't know I don't I
(1:05:01) can't think of any single biggest mistake there's lots of like many things that happen along the way but you just deal with it like like same thing like selling sketchy listings that are like generic branded or that are branded other some random [ __ ] and they're more risky to get banned and like you know if you look back a lot of the times like that you probably could have seen that like okay this is like a ghetto listing I probably shouldn't have bought this sometimes it's just sometimes when you're starting it's just too juicy not
(1:05:25) to you're like okay this listing has like a weird brand name but it looks so good and no one's selling it so like let me just buy it anyways I remember like I used to sell a lot of the ordinary when I did OA and [ __ ] and there was a lot of like weird listings like that but you know you I don't know you guess you just decide what kind of risk you're willing to take definitely and so mey um we're kind of uh going based on the key F flips question there about the biggest mistakes or most painful that you made
(1:05:54) you mentioned about chasing Revenue new numbers and doing bad buy just to hit a number do you want to elaborate on that at all yeah I mean I always I remember I wanted the the six figure month so I used to kind of just almost buy anything just to kind of hit it so and obviously that's a mistake on giving up profit and just to chasing the orange bars just to chase the orange bars so yeah orange bars that's all it's all better now now we chase the the profit margins yeah I think that was a big thing for me when I was just starting
(1:06:25) out is like eventually you try to look for things to you try to look for reasons to not buy a listing versus just trying to find any listing that works and buying it you know what I mean like if you see risks of like IP stuff or you see like weird brand stuff where you're G to you might have a problem with like authenticity because the brand name doesn't match up like eventually I got confident enough in sourcing that I'm I I knew that I could find some other thing to buy and so I would just try to be more safe and avoid those things but
(1:06:53) at the start I would just literally Buy anything I remember I bought [ __ ] from like a bin store like they don't even give you a receipt they like give you like it says like five units $5 and like there's no I would have got instantly bned if I submitted that to Amazon but like thank God I didn't get caught for anything but I mean when you're starting you just kind of find whatever it's just yeah it's just risky I guess I guess it makes sense though like if you don't have as much to lose then you're willing
(1:07:18) to do more and eventually as you grow you kind of have to take things more seriously because like you can't afford for it to just get shut down over like a stupid receipt well and you also have other people depending on you too right so it's not just yourself so even feel like you're not that concerned about you know a business for yourself going belly up it's like you have other people's families that you're feeding now yeah for sure yeah I think for on this side I've been super paranoid because again I mean
(1:07:48) potential profit losing potential profit is better better than losing your account obviously but I've been super paranoid since like like one year ago trying to uh you've been paranoid since day one dude yeah yeah but I mean yeah I'm super let's see I'm yeah my my my my biggest fear is like all of course losing my account but um yeah I'm creating stories in my head I I should well I think it also depends so much on like the age of your account like I think we like we just got lucky that we didn't get hit with an IP complaint in our first three
(1:08:28) or four months cuz it just would have killed us like or we would have had to take like two months to get it back I have a friend that just started Amazon just like just for fun on the side and like one IP complaint from ResMed and his account shut down for two months and that sucks like that could have happened to us it could have happened for any of our products like it just can happen randomly and at this point where like I I kind of feel safer like our account we don't even have an account Health number anymore it just like went away we were
(1:08:56) at a th for so long disappeared okay you're this you're I think you're the second person I know that has this uh this error like I don't know though like right now we like I I get like five IP complaints at once and like two authenticity complaints and we're still fine so I guess we're it's just at a good point but if that would have happened to me like a year or two ago it just would have been game over for like two months until you get it back so I think a lot of it is luck like getting past the early stages and like you can
(1:09:24) definitely head that by playing it safe early on but I think early on it's like you have such a tendency to just buy whatever and and just maximize sales that you tend to overlook all these safety things but early on is when it matters the most 100% so Danny asked for you guys how did you guys go against the pressure to get a regular nin to-5 from friends and family versus going all in on the on the business I know some of you guys may have had uh quite a bit of pressure having like degrees and going to school
(1:09:55) yeah um so I'm I'm I'm a bit older but I uh I've been making money online prior to Amazon so I never I never had any pressures really yeah he's the Pro Trader in the group one of the ogs how how old are you I'd rather not say you know what I'm saying you're probably you're probably not older than me man I I just I just turned 30 yeah I'm older than you calm down you're fine I'm like un now you know yeah I don't know I don't know if Robert you dealt with any of that stuff I mean I didn't really I didn't really
(1:10:35) deal with that many pressures because I I mean there's definitely pressures to finish school but in the back of my head I also knew I should probably finish school like I had one semester left I'm like am I really GNA drop like my four and a half years of engineering to like do this [ __ ] like I I trusted myself but it's still like Robert said it's nice to have the backup plan and so I just finished and in terms of like going fulltime on this I don't know I didn't have that many pressures like I there was enough proof of concept
(1:11:06) before I went full-time and got a warehouse that like you know I think it was okay and Robert how about yourself weren wasn't your family a little bit more hesitant yeah of course I mean uh my dad was going crazy a little bit because he was like you work that hard to to just you know put it on the side and do something that maybe is going to work my mom was actually super supportive um but uh yeah I mean I was lucky that uh I could work from home so I could like do Amazon on the side and I mean I had six month of
(1:11:46) of like preview of how the business uh Works um and yeah I I convinced my parents I mean I it's 100% there's a resistance because your parents they want the safest thing for you but um yeah luckily knock on would I was able to prove my dad wrong yeah it makes sense though it's just it's just not a traditional thing like it's so new and so like it makes sense that there's and it is probably more risky I'm sure than just going with the flow and going with what you're supposed to do but yeah I mean I if you have a proof of concept like I think all
(1:12:27) of us did it in a pretty safe manner like you were working alongside doing Amazon and you grew it to a point where it even made sense it's not like you dropped your job and then okay let me start researching what keepa is exactly what I mean yeah exactly and there were I mean yeah I I was showing them like the the progress and everything so um and again I mean um they know that like I had like this diploma if something happens I can just you know that's good backup plan yeah for myself I would have been like
(1:13:00) and I wouldn't even consider like super high risk because I didn't have any dependence or anything but uh out of everybody that's spoken so far I had quote unquote the highest risk because I had no post-secondary education I had what you would consider a decent job uh and I like I already owned my own place so I had expenses and liabilities and so I quit my job when it's like Co popped off and we started having like double sales in one month and I did it I honestly did it too early because I had a false expectation of what my profits
(1:13:32) were CU I was just taking the numbers that we saw on solar board I was like yeah that's what we're profiting per month I'm good and then once I actually sat and broke it down a little bit more I'm like oh we didn't actually make that much so I'm like I need to be a little bit more lenient with my spending but I've always been able to live frugally uh and I have full confidence in my skills to be able to survive yeah and were you doing stuff online before you quit for at all like prior to Amazon yeah no I I never did like any online
(1:14:05) business I always like was doing like random like flips because I grew up with my aunt and uncle who were antique dealers so we I spend my Summers going like auctions buying [ __ ] selling [ __ ] going to flea markets I was always doing stuff like that but that was about the extent of it yeah that's cool maybe that's something cool to dive into like Robert mey I guess me you've been a Trader for a while Robert did you do any uh any other stuff any other side hustles before Amazon no honestly besides selling uh like
(1:14:35) flipping stuff on Facebook Marketplace not really I tried to do some penny stock trading did some money but it everybody has a phase of day trading I tried to and it was [ __ ] dog [ __ ] but I always en be people that like like mey that actually like do it it's so cool like part of me doesn't believe that you can I'm like socks are so random day to day but people do it it's very cool I was uh telling a story when we had our last live call where you guys were in where in high school at a point where a friend of mine's brother was a
(1:15:14) weed dealer in high school he his friend used to work at like Pepsi or Coke whoever made Rockstar so his friend would always Rob these rock stars off the delivery trucks them to my brother's friend for weed and then Cody didn't know what to do with them so he'd sell them to me and then I sell them out of my locker in school and made a good bit of money doing that young entrepreneur hustling since they W I remember when I was a little kid I used to sell like Pokemon cards I used to like put 10 of them together and
(1:15:44) wrap them up in paper and like try to sell them to like the kids other neighbor kids and then yeah I that was I guess that was that was humble beginning selling Pokemon cards and then in high School in in early uni I would like flip Instagram accounts that was like a random hustle I used to do too yeah oh yeah you said that right or Twitter accounts Twitter and Instagram yeah yeah I only did it once I had like I had one page that I I was honestly my entire goal was to like start like a Shopify Drop Shipping thing so I like started this
(1:16:15) like dog page and then I grew it to like uh eventually I grew it to like 150k followers but then I was going to do like Drop Shipping and then I just realized it was way too saturated TR it and then I ended up selling the account but it was It was kind of cool from 0 to 150 and I sold it for like three grand oh that's pretty that's super dope that was fun I'm just looking through some questions here um Anthony I know you mentioned that you're sick but you're here did you want to share anything about yourself because I know that
(1:16:46) you've been able to also be extremely consistent and scale quite well minus your recent suspension if you're here and willing to talk Anthony maybe maybe not Cole chill's asking about we to start completely over how would we scale the fastest it's a good question I don't know you guys go ahead well the fastest list yeah honestly though leads list in Reverse sourcing I would say reverse sourcing super good find a couple stores that are doing good and you can like see that they're doing the same business model as you and
(1:17:28) just like just grind like and a lot of it is like Jordan always calls it the rabbit hole method and it's it's just so it never goes away like you you find one product and you're like oh that's cool let me look at the other brands or let me look at other stores that have this item and then you find this new store let me see what other items the store has and it just it literally can go forever and even with wholesale we do the same thing like we can start from another seller and look at what like health will go through I mean he does a
(1:17:56) lot of like weird beauty stuff but you can go through his list and see his best sellers and look at that or we can look at certain brands that we have from one distributor and go contact that brand and say who are your other Distributors and do it that way it's it's all the same it's just like Rabb H holding down what works yeah and a lot of people are asking like how do you go from OA to uh wholesale and in my opinion the best way is to Source OA leads you Source o leads and then from OA you can jump like the
(1:18:31) the leads that you're finding that are profitable you can try maybe to instead of buying them from Walmart you try to buy them from the supplier or from uh yeah or or yeah I would say that or if you stumble upon items that because a lot of times you'll be sourcing and you're you find a product that's moving well but you just can't find it listed for any sort of good price online and so a lot of times those listings are just good indicator yeah and then you know that like okay these this brand must have some wholesale Network that's like
(1:19:02) easy enough to access and you can kind of go from there you get an idea because a lot of times looking at super big like Beauty Brands like Shane moisture like you're not going to open up a Shan moisture account or like SRA or something you're not going to open an account with like whoever the [ __ ] owns them PNG or something like yeah so those are more like the Retail Arbitrage leads or are always leads because you're not you know there's really no wholesale access to that kind of stuff um but you can try to sniff out those wholesale
(1:19:32) listings and if you see like for example I'm sure one that we all know of I don't know if it's still around but Mel the Mel oils that was like 20 plus or something I never tou this listing cuz the brand was never the the same like on the listing I know it's because because it's nml Beauty he does weird stuff but he uh like that that was like it's such a that was such a Gateway wholesale product cuz there's so many people that were on it and then you look it up like Mel oil wholesale and it's just like asung which is a wholesaler that's
(1:20:00) really easy to open an account with in Canada and like that can be the start of the rabbit hole asung is like I don't know I'm sure they have some good leads but they open up accounts with everyone so it's pretty hard yeah asong um but like yeah it's just a good start and then you can see the other people on those listings and then you can see what other [ __ ] they sell and those accounts are probably easy enough to open um and then again it's just the hole method like that yeah and also another marker I found is uh the quantities like how many
(1:20:32) uh the the sellers are holding yeah if the seller is holding like 200 units he's not buying them from Walmart and consistently restocking yeah that's a big thing if you see someone that just keeps restocking for like a year or two he clearly he has more than just like a Walmart connection yeah exactly are you selling a lot of beauty products right now because I'm asking that because it's been a long time I I try to just stay away from this category yeah we have some I don't know what percentage of our business like maybe 10 15 but we're
(1:21:05) pretty all over the place to be honest like people always I don't know if I'm sure all of you guys deal with this everyone in this call people are like talk to you and they're like oh you sell on Amazon cool like what do you sell and I'm like and like shampoo smoke detector weed killer I don't know like literally everything you know what I mean it's just an impossible answer exact second the second thing they ask and they're like oh so it's Drop Shipping yeah I'm like no pretty sure I bought a smoke detector
(1:21:31) off you last summer then no way hope I hope you like it yeah it's working good no way that's hilarious I'm sure that it happens man sometimes I'm so shocked like smoke detector is a great example like there were times where we would sell like a 100 a day for like a month I'm like bro who needs this many smoke DET I couldn't even imagine that this is a niche there's so many that's what I mean but like Amazon is untapped it's just like there's so many crazy niches that probably none of us have even heard of still that like are
(1:22:01) just so huge and people build their entire businesses around like one Niche you know what I mean like nml beauty is beauty they have there's so many people that are just in like the pet Niche there so many people that are adjus in like batteries like there's so many crazy niches that you can build an entire business you know what I mean very cool but Cole chill and also like to elaborate on the questions that you asked there so like you mentioned that you have less than 20K so like whether you want to hop into wholesale
(1:22:29) with that is going to be really up to your personal experience like because that is a decent start to get started with wholesale or yeah started with wholesale but if you have relatively low experience with Amazon it would still probably be in your best interest to go more heavy with Arbitrage first just to more limit your risk just because like with wholesalers like you don't have a chance to return products generally speaking unless you have like high restock fees um most of them have minimum order quantities usually like a lot of them
(1:23:01) can be relatively low but some of them have 500 750,000 bucks some more some multiple pallets uh half truckloads whatever it may be so then your risk increases with those and it's just a lot harder to come back if you make a mistake like say if you purchase something where you think it's like shelf stable and you think you can sell it but then you get it and you figure out that it has to be refrigerated you're not going to be able to return that [ __ ] ask me how I know that I made that [ __ ] mistake voice yeah I was I was going to
(1:23:30) say that yeah I was going to say that that's like wholesale is a lot about relationships um and when you're doing a way there is no relationship which is kind of nice because you can return [ __ ] and I've returned so much [ __ ] to like Walmart that just like didn't end up working and it's just it's just really nice when like the starting out like proof of concept phase and like and into scale like even at scale it's it's super nice backup to have um yeah because I do think that whol sale is as much as it is
(1:24:01) like a money thing it is relationship and money goes a long way but like if you start asking them to like take [ __ ] back like hey this thing got banned you take it back like this just they they're just going to see that as like weird you're not serious yeah exactly yeah and then like the other question that you ask Will chilling about like to add on to it can you elaborate more on like business side such as Sops organization business process Etc like early on in my opinion it doesn't most of that stuff doesn't
(1:24:28) matter and if you're sitting there trying to think about that stuff you're going to really limit your growth like if you're sitting there trying to figure out oh I need to put together an SLP for this or a process for this early on it doesn't matter like what you need to do just like put your head down work find products flip them and repeat and then as you need processes like so as you start hiring people or Outsourcing your prep or do like Outsourcing wholesale Outreach or catalog sourcing whatever that may be
(1:24:54) you're going to develop your process and how you want to do that and then you can build your sop based on your process and so like you can start off with just let me clarify so basically my question was geared more towards like say if you already know how to Source you've done it for a while you're familiar with it that part of the business you got down the next part is building the processes the tools and getting a structure and because a lot of times a lot of time wasted is in admin work and and all these other things and getting things
(1:25:27) efficient right cuz there's a lot of time wasted uh regarding that so that that's kind of where my question was geared towards like say given the fact that you know what you know how to Source you know how to run uh how to find profitable leads what would you do given that knowledge and with a little bit of cash so everybody else can provide their own answers but for myself like in that scenario like say you know the entire process you're experienced you know how to Source um but you're still kind of in the entry level so like you're just
(1:25:58) getting back in Amazon you're rebuilding those sales right I would say honestly [ __ ] everything else ignore like bookkeeping ignore taxes unless you're in tax season [ __ ] all that [ __ ] don't worry about hiring people sit down Source buy find leads send it in Amazon buy send leads uh or buy Source send into Amazon and that's it rinse and repeat until you're at like 20 30 40 50k months once you hit that then we can start looking at implementing those processes and Outsourcing some of those things do you guys have anything that
(1:26:31) you want to add no I think I think that's good I also think that a lot of it will come naturally like the same way that I was saying like you will hit a bottleneck and then you know you have to like hire someone for prep because I'm spending my whole time prepping like if you're spending your whole time looking for those leaves that you purchased before in your emails or something then it's like okay I should probably make like a database of leads but I don't think there's like there there's like a slippery slope of trying to over sop and
(1:27:00) over optimize Everything at Once because the issue with that is probably three months down the line you're going to be like this is stupid I I i' would like this in a completely different way anyways and so I I don't know it kind of go with the flow like I feel like maybe we're too slow at doing that and we like we take too long to higher and we take too long to automate things maybe but the down the the opposite also sucks if you spend so much time building Sops and making these clean stuff and you're not actually doing the thing then that will
(1:27:30) limit you and then you know chances are three months down the line you're going to want to change up how it is anyways because you've learned something new or you need some new information in there yeah I mean a lot of people focus on the non-important stuff but yeah initially if you're going to start you have to do like the like do the yeah the most important thing sourcing and sending your products Amazon the rest will come yeah and then like when it comes down time where it's like I have to like literally start considering bookkeeping
(1:28:03) and figuring out how to do taxes and all the admin [ __ ] updating repricers whatever that may be then you can start building those process processes slowly one by one so it's like okay like now I'm at a point where I've scaled to 50 as or whatever it may be so it's like okay now I need to implement better processes with my repricer and now you know I'm sourcing so much per month now I need to figure out a process for how to store my receipts and how to upload that [ __ ] into QuickBooks and whether or not I'm going to use a2x and stuff like
(1:28:31) that and then just keep slowly building on it step by step like that kind of as as you need to as you need it you're you're kind of going as you need it yeah a lot of those processes like when it comes a time where it's like you are super busy and you are growing and all of a sudden like you get hit with these things where it's like you have to do them like you have to get your bookeeping done your taxes done prepared to get super overwhelmed and super stressed out but that's kind of the the joy in fun of it for the
(1:28:59) first year when you are going hard and you have to figure out everything out uh there are ways where like sure you can try to implement all this stuff up front to try to get those processes going up front but again I think where if you do a lot of implementing like Dan side with these processes too quickly one I think it stunts a lot of people it gives a lot of people analysis paralysis they get stuck instead of just doing the [ __ ] admin tasks they get stuck building those processes instead of doing the actual real Revenue
(1:29:30) producing tasks um and then it just ends up not being good growth for your business overall yeah and things change all the time and like we've built so many automations that we thought are going to be so cool and we spend a month or my my partner just like locks himself in his room for a month to code this thing and then we use it for like four months five months they were like you know I'll be really sick if it also like did all this and he's like bro it's a completely different API like it's basically all in
(1:30:02) the guard but it's true like and then we're like yeah that would be way better objectively and then it's like okay well on to the next so it's just a fine line but yeah's I think like a big thing is just trying to grow and not over complicating it uh mey what were you going to say no no I just I was just looking up what Dex was I never heard of that it's like a receipt uploading thing I think exactly yeah Okay C makes us [ __ ] but I always forget a couple guys asked so for those of you that do open wholesale
(1:30:39) accounts what do you find is the best way to find Distributors to open accounts oh yeah yeah I meant to answer that one honestly the biggest one for us is hitting up the brand and asking them who their Distributors are and that also helps you like avoid the weird gray Market ones um and you can even be honest with the brand about Amazon like a lot of times you don't even have to you can just be like hey who are your Distributors and they probably will just answer or they probably have a link on their website
(1:31:06) that'll just tell you and then go from there I don't I don't know it's pretty hard to do it through Google search because if it's accessible through Google search a it's probably super saturated like uh like asung um but also these supplier websites are always old and shitty and you often can't like just find suppliers that way so I think reaching out to the brand is like the easiest and most foolproof and they'll give you a big list too and you can hit up all of them and you can you can find so many additional brands from sourcing
(1:31:38) all those catalogs because they're not just going to be carrying the brand that you're looking for exactly yeah exactly and you can say that like hey I'm looking for this one product um I got referred by this this guy from xbrand um but then once you open up the account yeah of course you're going to be buying a bunch of different stuff and they'll see that it's like it's worth it for them yeah always go to the closest s to the source so the manufacturer the brand and uh you're sure as Dan said that you're going to buy if they don't want
(1:32:07) to open account with you directly you're going to buy from their distributor and you're going to be sure that their distributor are an authorized distributor and I would also add to this like obviously if you try to contact Nike they're not going to accept you and even I think they're Distributors are not going to accept you exactly so the The Sweet Spot I found is to try to contact small to mediumsized Brands this is the highest chance that they're gonna accept like your your request yeah and I mean yeah people are
(1:32:38) saying if the brand doesn't want to give you Distributors it's either way it's still a numbers game and like there will be tons of them that just say like uh no you can't buy any and we're not looking for any more dealers sorry and like that's going to be the bulk of the answers it's still just a numbers you still just have to hit up a ton of them and eventually you can find your way in to some and you don't need that many like even for us right now we're doing like 500k a month or something we still only have
(1:33:04) like five to yeah we have like six Distributors that we buy from on repeat and then maybe a couple that are like seasonal but that's it yeah I have like 20 25 different accounts like actively open at the moment and we only actively buy from at most 10 and like some of those are only a couple Grand a month yeah yeah so you don't really need much you can go a long way and that's actually where like a lot of our growth plan for this year was doubling down in our suppliers that we have currently yeah and you can just go so deep and I
(1:33:36) think that's actually like you get outsized returns like if I had 10K to spend I would want to spend that all on one supplier versus do like two here two here two here obviously distributed across products but I think putting it all with one supplier will help build that relationship which gives you like additional returns besides like like Roi on the products you know what I mean and so you might be able to like get better discounts or get terms or get them to special order stuff for you or what get them to cover Freight or whatever and a
(1:34:05) lot of it just comes down to that 100% yep I agree so for terms are good sorry go ahead for you guys Bob was asking what's the biggest difference for you guys from your perspective in selling 10K among mon versus 100K a month besides cash flow I think I think you just at that point it things just become more serious maybe like At first like I said like I was taking a ton of risks on like like sketchy listings and stuff and at a certain point you just kind of it gets more real and you try to like do things more
(1:34:47) seriously and you start worrying I mean this is kind of cash FL related but you start worrying about maxing out credit cards and like if I do get suspended like I'm actually not going to be able to I'm going to be [ __ ] if I get suspended and can't pay off this credit card versus before if my credit card was at like 3,000 like I would figure it out but if you have three credit cards maxed at like 30k like that's pretty bad and so you have to like start thinking about cash flow and thinking about like [ __ ]
(1:35:13) like that and yeah maybe like at this point you're going to receive more customer uh uh questions you're going to maybe receive more complaints on your account um the more you grow the more like issues can happen obviously the the listings uh but also uh more potential uh so if you're selling 100K a month with um profitable inventory you're going to make more money and you're going to be able to scale faster this like at this point also I also think that it's like like a lot of the challenges that come with growth and of like making it like a real
(1:35:58) business is really cool and like you have to start thinking about like your operation side and like you start building a little thing on your table to mount your tape gun because it's like one second faster to like grab the tape from there and like Jordan has really cool setups with like his rly cart with the FN skew stuff like that's that's really cool and I'm sure that saves time and I I I like all that stuff I like having cool little automations or spreadsheets that do like save small amounts of time or on the operation side
(1:36:24) like I said like mounting a tape gun or putting all the poly bags right in front of you and laying them out like all that stuff just kind of comes with growing and you have to start thinking about all the little things um but I think it's cool it's very fun and it makes it feel everything it makes it feel more of like a business than like at the start when it's kind of like just like a hustle and I think the really cool thing about Amazon and Arbitrage and all this stuff is like it's a very clean progression
(1:36:50) from like just a hustle into like a operation and it's not it's not like if you're trying to open up like a [ __ ] hedge fund or something you have to go or like a like a tech startup you basically go from nothing to like a full business a full operation you have like a corporate structure and like everything but with this you can start like like all of us did in our basement or whatever and then it can just be like a clean progression all the way up to like wherever you want all the way up to pattern they have billions of dollars a
(1:37:19) year yeah patterns operation is crazy crazy I don't know I guess this could be something we talk about have you guys heard of the middle mile program do you guys use that to send to us at all do you know what that is never heard of that middle mile it's crazy we they um we were at AMZ United um in the summer in August and like I said the co at pattern they were like they were talking at some of the like some of the on stage stuff there but they were also there to promote like their new program which is called middle Mile and it's it's really
(1:37:53) cool I don't even know how to explain it properly but it's for the US basically to like if you're doing SPD and you're doing stallion Express I guess it doesn't matter um but it's with like all the shipping splits you can send your pallets to pattern and then they will break down your pallets and then basically split your shipments onto their trucks and send it to all the different FC's and it's like way cheaper than me sending five LTL trucks of like one pallet each to like one to California one to Ohio all this [ __ ] you
(1:38:26) can send all five of your pallets to Middle Mile with all your different boxes going to different warehouses then they put it on their like automation conveyor thing which automatically sorts all these boxes and puts them on trailers and it just goes to the Fulfillment center and you go with them like their products are on there other people's products are on there it's like a really cool way to save money if you're doing LTL and you're shipping into the states and you're dealing with like this placement [ __ ] I remember we
(1:38:50) were trying I guess that was one of the things I should have mentioned for our mistake mes we were doing like weird stuff to try to like avoid the placement fees and looking back that was probably not a good idea um but now they have middle mile which is like a really cool thing you send all your [ __ ] to pattern so you still have to pay for Freight only to one location and they'll split it up for you it's really cool interesting nobody's ever heard of that E I thought it was big I just want the website now yeah
(1:39:16) yeah go send you a referral code if you want but it's very it's very cool they have like because they have videos on there they have a [ __ ] conveyor with like a vision system and so they just have cameras that scan every box and it goes down there it scans your box sticker it determines okay this one's going to mem1 or whatever whatever us fulfillment center and they just send so many trucks like they send like a full truck load to every FC every day and so they'll just it'll just get separated and sorted on the conveyor and goes down
(1:39:45) the line and goes onto the truck that's going to that FC and it'll just go there and their accuracy is really good like I haven't I've hadn't had much [ __ ] that was lost or whatever ever a couple units have gone to the wrong location but it wasn't a big deal um and it's really cool it saved us a ton we've done like when placement fees came out and we kind of decided like we should no longer be trying to like do this weird 2D workflow glitch to like avoid the placement fees we like did a ton of quotes and like
(1:40:11) really tried to figure out what the best way forward was and then we discovered this thing or we talked to the pattern guy Rob um and it it's like it is really good they obviously charge a fee it's like a a volume base fee but it We've ran the quotes multiple times and for us it's a lot cheaper to just ship all of our pallets to them versus splitting our shipments up into like five different pallets and shipping it across the states damn it's very like unless you're sending full truck like unless you're sending five
(1:40:42) full truck loads in a shipment and then you split it up into five and it you're still sending like an FTL to every filing Center then like this is way cheaper because splitting ltls into smaller ltls and making them go everywhere sucks ass but if you guys are using us prep centers um then obviously that's it's different but I think for us Canadians that don't have Amazon Freight but we still sell in the US and have to deal with placements it's really good uh Danny you asked about how the [ __ ] do you get insured because you
(1:41:15) tried so um that's going to be really dependent on like the insurance companies that you talk to there's going to be a bunch of insurance companies that will quote you out the ass that say that they won't insure you if you sell toys or baby products Etc but then you just have to find the insurance companies that will uh I personally found one locally that's like that's a scatching company um but like through like a local insurance broker they insured me for a very reasonable price uh yeah Dan and Robert what kind
(1:41:45) of uh insurance companies do you guys use yeah local is the way to go if you just do Google search you're going to find like Zen insurance and stuff and they know all about Amazon and they're going to like try to tax the [ __ ] out of you and really I did quote to them recently but it wasn't that great I remember I got a quote for like five grand and I was like nah and then I I looked locally found one but someone told me his inur is pretty cheap now that's good I know that like back when we were looking for it we got the
(1:42:13) scary email from amazon.com saying like you need to submit Insurance ORS yeah yeah yeah and then yeah we looked around and local was the way to go we ended up switching insurances recently because we moved warehouses and we had to get it switched anyways and we needed like a bigger limit which our current couldn't do and like yeah I think I think you just have to look more Niche or local the current one we have is we found them at a like we met them at a trade show for like landscapers and they're like oh we sell insurance I'm like oh we don't
(1:42:42) have equipment or anything like we sell on Amazon they like oh that's fine here take my card and then I quoted a [ __ ] ton of people when I was switching insurances and they actually were like the cheapest and they didn't give a [ __ ] about the items and they insured us for like all of our pesticides and stuff and they covered our building and everything and so you just have to you just have to look like you just have to is this the one you told me about no I think I said Apollo Insurance before right yeah
(1:43:08) Apollo Apollo denied me really I I was with Apollo for a while but then I needed like I needed more coverage because the building that we're in now required like five mil of liability instead of two and they don't go up to five so I had to REO Robert who are you guys using yeah so uh it's funny because I'm actually in the process of getting a cat from a local insurance but um I'm insured only on the I mean it's not a good thing but I'm sure I'm insured only in the US right now with a company called hiscock I don't know if anybody
(1:43:44) heard of it called what his what yeah I mean it's a they're offering a good price I mean we French no it's a it's a US company actually yeah I mean so right now I'm trying to find a company that can that can do Canada and the US together I mean the the the chat is uh so funny right now but um but uh yeah I mean are you guys insured in in both Marketplace like with your insurance insurance yeah I I got a local Canadian company I just asked them to put the um my do on and they just add in myom store yeah that's the thing is I
(1:44:42) don't even know a lot of them understand really like you can just tell them to put Doc you can tell them to put whatever you want un additionally insured and they don't usually care like you say oh can you add Amazon there and like oh yeah so I don't I don't know how Insurance works I thought that they would care about that but they don't seem to how how much are you declaring like your sales uh is it the like are you giving the full number or we were we were accurate yeah do you know do you remember how much you're paying per year
(1:45:09) um this new one covers our building and covers Amazon so it's more it's like 10K a month or sorry 10K a year 10K a year we used to we used to pay like a we used to pay like a thousand a year and that was good but that was only foron not covering the building um so now everything's together and it also I I realized that our other one didn't cover like pesticides and [ __ ] like that so that was also a risk that we were taking now this one is like full covers pesticides everything and it covers our building and it covers our
(1:45:40) employees and it covers damages theft and also Amazon so 10K a year with like that you also have like product insurance as well yeah cool and so do you good at all do you have like employee theft Insurance mhm it literally yeah everything that was on there we have like a ton of there was a lot of requirements by our landlord like we needed like all like the flood and earthquake and equipment and all that [ __ ] and I just literally sent the insurance broker our lease agreement and said put everything in there and then
(1:46:12) plus all like the Amazon requirements as well but I I shopped around like I the first quotes I was getting the pesticides really hurt us um the first quotes I was getting were like 20K a year I was like [ __ ] like that sounds crazy but I don't know like maybe that's what it is but then eventually I quoted enough around and I was just like saying like oh this guy gave me this this guy gave me this and eventually I got him down to like and that was I think that's pretty yeah and with anybody that has Insurance here like shop shop around
(1:46:40) when you get your renewal every year if you have the time because you never know like what kind of prices you're going to get you sometimes you can get surprise and on another plays can offer you a substantially better price and also tell them what quote you get from another insurance broker CU they'll they'll be like it's so it's scummy that they work like this but I mean wholesale is the same you can be like oh they'd be like oh the best quote I can give you is 20K I'm like oh these guys just said 14 and they're like all right we got 12 I'm
(1:47:06) like what do you mean I thought you just said your break even at 20 and like wholesale is the same like it sucks to go back and forth and give quotes from one guy to another but like it's the same [ __ ] they'll say my best price is this and then you're like all right well I'm might have to go with these guys they gave me a cheaper price and then all of a sudden they just like got 20% more margin when they said they were at break even I leverage [ __ ] uh modern Beauty and Cosmo Prof against each other all the time yeah dude you have to
(1:47:34) because they I mean they're just playing the game too I understand like they're 100% yeah same with insurance but yeah like it's easy to take your renewal when you get it and just like send that to other places and like this is what I'm getting let me know what you can quote for me they might ask you some additional questions but it's pretty easy because most of it's laid out on your insurance renewal M and they're used to it too like a lot of times they can't even go to their like higher up or whatever and be like hey we need to get
(1:47:59) this cheaper like unless there's another quote to compare to it's okay well we're gonna lose the business these guys are doing this and then they can make something happen yeah yeah because they definitely do look at that like I came from the insurance world and when they're sending that to the underwriters that they talk to they're essentially trying to paint a picture I'm like these guys have insurance with this company for so long this is what they're doing they're low risk we can take this on to if we're willing to be competitive with
(1:48:24) them and we have a very low risk of actual litigation are Underwriters like a third party or is there Underwriters in the business it's just so weird like you're you're from insurance but like anytime I talk to an insurance it's like the underwriter is like this like ominous thing and they're like oh I'm gonna see if the underwriter says yes and then like they're like I got this message from the underwriter and it's like this weird on line thing and I don't know so usually like if you talk to a broker like they're talking to multiple
(1:48:50) different insurance companies and then the underwriters are like the representatives of those insurance companies and telling them whether or not they can uh secure that risk essentially they're the ones that do like the whole assessment correct the broker is like your middleman that you're talking to to relay that information to the underwriters yeah do you have to go through a broker or could like do a lot of people just cut out the middleman and try to hit up the insurance guys themselves or can you not really do that there are some that do
(1:49:18) there are some insurance companies that exist that will require you to go through Brokers but there definitely are some that you can go direct and there's uh more and more services popping up online all the time that you can get like basically no middleman quotes for all these different companies and like sometimes like if you're doing multiple at once they'll take a smaller percentage versus like a broker so it costs you less or you can deal with more insurance companies direct just with like some of the companies like say if
(1:49:42) you deal like the banks directly with like commercial insurance and stuff sometimes they're [ __ ] horrendous like to do like any type of customer service if you have claims like if you try to get like business insurance through TD good luck if you ever have a [ __ ] claim you're gonna have such a pain in the ass but besides that like if you just do some reviews on the insurance company and just make sure that like people don't have generally bad experiences with them you'll be fine they all have certain they have laws
(1:50:06) that they have to follow right yeah yeah it's interesting it's just a crazy industry that I like don't understand but I kind of have to when I'm shopping around for big insurance quote yeah and if anybody in here ever has a claim and you get denied come talk to me because that's the kind of [ __ ] I love dealing with I love [ __ ] the insurance companies and I will read those contracts and make sure you get covered we'll make it uh go in your favor as much as we can I used to do that all the time it's funny uh but with yourself Dan
(1:50:34) for yourself and your partner um have you guys looked into any like of personal like health insurance for you guys or like key person Insurance kind of stuff like that we have like yeah we do have a benefits plan set up for all our warehouse guys and so after like a three-month probation everyone gets set up on like an HSA where they can can like get all the basic like dental and health stuff and just recently I set my partner and I up on it you need like a apparently like a T4 like an actual actual T4 to get set up on it so you
(1:51:05) have to be on payroll so we didn't have that until like this year so we just got set up on that but it's like a small HSA but it's nice I haven't used it yet it's good to have though yeah like if I would assume that that plan covers some but like something that you guys may want to consider in like the future because if you guys are still key parts of your business and like say when you get disabled you probably don't have standard like EI [ __ ] like that yeah so you might want to consider finding like disability yeah it's interesting yeah
(1:51:34) when we were getting our big line of credit and loan from TD or big whatever one for DK the our our our rep had to like come to our warehouse and like talk to us and like take pictures I guess to like prove that it's real or whatever but she also offered us like something like that it was like a health insurance on us the owners that like if one of the other person like dies your you don't have to pay back your loan or something and we like we thought about it but we're like I don't know if we're going to die so we didn't I would never get on
(1:52:02) a loan because like I mean like if you have like unless if only one of you die I mean you're still going to probably be operating your business if you both die who gives a [ __ ] right right so I mean but like in the event like that you guys like something happens and you physically can't work and like say one of you guys are like key or you're both key to the business and like you say you l lose 30 or 50% of your production that can be a big impact to your business right and that's what like your key person insurance or like
(1:52:29) your personal disability plans could cover oh yeah that's what you meant by health insurance not HSA yeah no none of that [ __ ] but even even like the the loan thing was interest we thought about it and I was like it sounds like cool but it was I don't know what it was it was like 50 or 100 bucks a month I was like eh yeah probably probably not needed um Heine flips ask for those guys that do OA how do you split your sour seat in POS um do you do them both at the same time or do you do them differently I know for the same deals those are more
(1:53:03) limited time frame so I think that'll be directed heavily at mey and a little bit at Robert what was the question when you're doing OA sourcing how do you split your sourcing sessions and like your purchase order sessions do do all your sourcing at once and then do all your purchasing or do you purchase as your sourcing I actually source and purch same time yeah I do the same thing I don't uh I don't in unless it's something that okay maybe I cannot buy right now because it's out of stock um or I have to double check or
(1:53:36) know I have to get ungated yeah I usually buy directly um yeah I guess this is a question too for you OA guys that are doing it at scale like do you guys have all of your I'm sure you have all your past purchases saved but is that like a a good chunk of where your next orders come from like you do a lot of replanning or is it like constantly looking for for new stuff um I'm constantly looking for new stuff but I start my sourcing with replanning every day so I get the replans out the way and then I'll just Source new products and and go from
(1:54:09) there are you are you like replenishing like 30 50% of your catalog or even less um n Pro well probably like 25 30% yeah I'd say that that's pretty solid for OA most of it is I mean because order limits you can't replan uh stuff tanks can't replan so I'd rather just keep going wide and replay what I can while I can and keep it moving yeah it's a pretty different model I guess because for us like opening up a wholesale account there's a ton of upfront work like going through an entire Wholesale catalog and we do
(1:54:43) like a really deep scrape um and so that might take like up to a week before we place any even think about placing an order like first just finding all the listings and matching them up and then we even like we don't even look at pricing at that point we're just like finding everything and then you start looking at how much would you buy and then maybe you request a quote and maybe you can get some of the prices down but there's a lot more upfront work then if you get into brand direct it's even more upfront work like dealing with like
(1:55:10) regulatory [ __ ] or like setting up listings or whatever like it might take over a month to like before you buy something but then but then like I guess that's always the tradeoff you always have more upfront work for like it being more chill long term yeah after it get it gets easier to place orders and just replan replan replan yeah that would be nice honestly but I suck at wholesale so I'm stuck with OA I mean you're still killing with o man and I mean you can always attempt to Branch out into wholesale if you want to
(1:55:42) but you can still definely tried it's like I'm just deny deny so I'm like all let me go back to what I know how to do and I just stick with OA that's it's happened every time I've never I've never like sat down and really really tried wholesale the right way I guess but every time I have tried it's it's been bad so I was like let me just go back to o yeah it's the same thing though still lot of room to scale OA massively even more than what you're doing right now though oh I that guy who does 100 Mil with OA only after
(1:56:12) that I was like I can really scale this as much as I want there's um I don't know he was on flip for Miles podcast but he does like 100 100 Mil a year it Jeff yeah is it yeah probably Jeff that guy's crazy see yeah I didn't even know that was possible for OA so he's he does a lot of ra ra too that's insane yeah I know he has like purchasers and all that stuff but that that's Insanity it's cool though and like honestly a lot of there's so much speculation about like people a lot of people say like OA is dead and [ __ ] but I think it'll never
(1:56:45) die like we speak to so many so many brands or so many distributors or whatever that are just so against Amazon that they're like ah we'll never sell to an Amazon Seller but all those items are just going to end up on Amazon through OA like you can't control Walmart and so it'll get there you know what I mean so it'll will always exist yeah and Walmart sometimes they sell lower than the wholesale price I'm not kidding they're selling stuff like at a loss it's it's crazy yeah well like there's definitely loss leaders but then there's also like
(1:57:17) the economies of scale so like I talk about a few wholesale accounts that I have because I know like either they're not viable or just they're really hard to get so a couple wholesale accounts that I've had is like Cisco and Gordon Foods they're mixed viable but like they're more so restaurant focused right and so I used to compare them a lot to Wholesale Club because Wholesale Club carries a lot of the same [ __ ] but it's just like a store you can go to at Wholesale Club almost everything that they sell they can get the same stuff
(1:57:43) that Cisco and GFS has and they sell it for cheaper than what they will sell for and Cisco and GFS are quote unquote wholesalers but they're doing it because they have less Logistics because Cisco is also factor in the delivery to yourself they deliver next day all the time and then they factor in like the freebies and classes that they throw into restaurants and stuff which is obviously not relevant to us yeah next day delivery is crazy yeah always next day delivery order it's there the next day you ever run into stock
(1:58:15) issues I back I never went too too deep with Cisco and GFS just because uh wholesale always had better pricing and I was able to get a relationship with the sales manager there and I was able to just order pallets off of her that's cool I think a lot of the things that we deal with is like back orders and [ __ ] like a lot of these Distributors are used to working with like stores or like garden centers and [ __ ] and then if you ask like Amazon's just so different and that like there could be one listing that you want 600 of and like another
(1:58:47) list like another listing of like basically the basically the same thing but you only want 24 of and they just like can't comprehend that like I'm looking for this one specific screwdriver and even if you have another one that does the exact same thing but it says a different brand on it I can't substitute it like I can't just take the rest we have all these ones they're even better like not the same they're not the same I can't yeah that's so true they always try to substitute I can't I'm gonna get banned um I
(1:59:18) found I had have thought I completely lost it I was going to go somewhere with it I'll come back to it whatever you're saying Cisco stocko it's back order it's gone I think it's gone I think it's gone I lost it it'll come back someone said they watch the podcast that they do ra 30 mil a year that's crazy ra operations are so cool having like purchasers running around the city or like different states like buying [ __ ] super cool completely different operation shut up Danny not you Dan Danny no age [ __ ] I'll remove your Staff
(2:00:03) Roll um yeah but like it just goes to show you like there's so many different ways you can skin a cat right like I've talked to guys that do 20 plus Mill a year and it's literally them in a part-time VA and they have like they're dealing strictly in Google Sheets have almost no like external software is very very um very very basic right but then there's guys that do things like ton of automation they have all kinds of processes they have all kinds of employees and some of them are not even able to get close to that or some are
(2:00:36) able to scale way past that right yeah a lot of it just comes down to like ASP too like if you're selling expensive [ __ ] you can just you know you can do less work for the same amount of sales or more you know what I mean like there's so many sellers that just sell like Electric [ __ ] which like I'm sure comes with its own problems but if everything you sell is like a 100 bucks or more like that's and you know for RP is like 20 or 30 bucks or something like we have to do three times more work to do the same thing as they do three times
(2:01:06) more POS three times more packing everything your ASP is 20 bucks no I think it's 30 I lied ours like sits at a comfortable 45 man that's wild yeah yeah there's some cheap items it gets it gets boosted up by some products like in the summer um some seasonal [ __ ] but yeah there's a lot of I mean it's hard to ignore like we've there's a lot of times where we've like sat down and been like okay we should like obviously higher ASP is nicer and it would be really cool to just like have a business that only needs to pack like 5,000 units a month
(2:01:38) instead of like 20,000 and do the same thing but then then what do I do with all my leads that work like I'm just going to throw them in the garbage not I still want to buy them they're still good I think at a certain point like you'll probably and I imagine you guys are probably having those discussions because like I saw like a lot of stuff that only profits like one two bucks and like the selling price of those products are like 15 to $20 but like they're also super cheap to get but we sell hundreds per month uh but some of those things
(2:02:05) I'm also reconsidering because it's like well my profit that I talk about like my net profit is net like after all expenses um but like I'm thinking it's like well what if my employees could spend more time packing and prepping more profitable units I can probably send less units and have more profit overall yeah right yeah that's true I mean you're right because you can sell like the the number that matters if you're all just trying to maximize profit from like a packing perspective is like the dollars are profit packed
(2:02:38) per hour and so if you have like more expensive [ __ ] that's profiting profiting more per unit then you can do yeah you have to pack less and send out more profit per hour and it'll result in more and the other way what you can do is hire more if if you have the space for it and that's what we're kind of thinking of is like so far or at least for now we have the space if we need to hire more we can and like it's down to like a pretty decent science and so at this point we don't need to like throw out our leads and kind of push for a
(2:03:08) higher ASP it would be nice and like if we when we do do sourcing for new brands we are more gravitated towards like higher ASP [ __ ] but it's still hard to justify like throwing out existing leads that are still good and still make like a good profit a good return after factoring in like all the net expenses and shipping and poly bag and labor yeah um because we can't you know like we can dir it in and we can't still pack it 100% um for you guys doing wholesale there's a question if you receive more result more results for wholesale from
(2:03:44) email or cold calling uh cold calling definitely you want to have this uh human relationship as soon as you can and sometimes what happens is I call and then there's customer service that's going to answer and then they're going to tell me yeah just send an email to whatever sales at the name of the company but I always try to ask her or ask him can I please also have a phone number I can reach out uh the person in charge too just so my email doesn't get forgotten CU I'm sure they're receiving like tons and tons of emails every day
(2:04:24) and just so I can have this first quick conversation with the person and U make them comfortable show them that we're serious and that we want to spend money with the company that's a good point I was going to say yeah like calling is sometimes difficult even email because it's hard to get in front of the right person a lot of times it will just be customer service that'll just like funnel you down like their their message request form on their page or whatever but you have to do something to try to like get
(2:04:50) in front of the right person especially for people like us when we're not like a Home Hardware or something there's no like they're not going to know our name and so you kind of have to like prove it in a sense um how many times did you oh sorry go ahead just wanted to ask Dan how many times did you meet the person uh like face to face before opening an account honestly not too much like I don't know maybe three or four times they've asked to come by um and then a couple more times like they asked to meet us like
(2:05:25) after we have an account with them for a while and like we're a good account I think we see that more often like after they open the account and we're like doing good they're like oh let's like you know clearly they're trying to grow the business more and they see the potential and so they'll even ask like we've been taken out to lunch locally by like guys or some of them will tell us to like come to a trade show and they'll like buy us tickets to like go meet them or something pretty cool that's nice yeah yeah that happened last week I like
(2:05:51) called I met this one supplier at a trade show and I had his card and then I called him back and he said oh he's like are you going to the concrete show next week I'm like I'm like no he said oh oh you should come you should come by like I'll send you an email for tickets or whatever and then I did and like it was cool I talked to him for like an hour or whatever but then I just like spent the rest of the day like walking around and talking to the other brand and stuff that that one specifically was pretty non-eventful but yeah I don't know we
(2:06:17) haven't talked about trade shows I we I haven't been to that many but it's pretty fun and you can get some like cool you can talk to cool Brands talk to suppliers like it is very cool and trade shows are probably slept on yeah 100% I went it's true I went more to meet like face to face uh my sales rep after I open my account then before opening the account yeah just so because what happens usually I'm sure you have the same experience is like they I don't think like when you when you contact a wholesale company or a brand
(2:06:53) direct I don't think they realize how much you're going to spend with them because usually you already identify the item you know how much you're going to buy per per month and whatever but then when they see the consistency of your orders they're like okay [ __ ] this guy uh there's a huge potential with this guy we're going to try to push him other products but as you mentioned I mean I cannot sell all your catalog I'm not I'm not going to yeah we have some sales reps that are so hungry and they just keep like they're like hey hey Dan look
(2:07:22) this one up on Amazon does this make you any money like he'll I'll have guys that send me like an Amazon listing and they're like oh look it sells for 100 bucks I can get you to it I can give you it for 85 like you should make 15 I'm like no bro I I send them the link to the Amazon Revenue calculator I'm like plug it in here Amazon will take 40 bucks off the 100 so like I need like I need it for 30 buddy that's funny yeah or like oh yeah we're seeing it it's selling at 150 and we can sell it to 100 bucks but then when you check the kead
(2:07:51) charge s they like one every year yeah yeah dude but it's it's cool though and I like I like when they're like that and they're giving suggestions and like clearly they care and so I I don't mind but sometimes it's funny sometimes they're just spamming with suggestions and I'll just give them the link to the revenue calculator figure it out before you send it to me yeah learn how to it's true though what you're saying Robert is true like a lot of these Distributors are used to working with stores and and they're they're also in like the volume
(2:08:24) game like they need to have an account with all the stores in the city to like put up good numbers and they're not used to One Singular store like us doing that much volume like how many screwdrivers is a Home Hardware going to sell in a month like 20 30 but like we might buy hundreds of screwdrivers in a month like what the [ __ ] like this is crazy yeah 100% And they they think that we're magicians you know it's like oh this guy is going to flip this product is going to be able to sell like this reference
(2:08:53) as it's not selling anywhere a 100 times a month it's like it's still pretty untapped man like I just that's that's always the or it's quite often that's the sentiment that we feel from suppliers like once we actually like scale it up and like we have the money to spend with them and if they have good products and good pricing then like it grows a lot and there's suppliers that we spend like over 100k a month with and they're like so shocked um because all of their other retail stores are doing like way like you know they
(2:09:23) have 150 retail stores that do like 2K a month each and that's like most of their business yeah yeah so I think my thought kind of came back to me I don't know if I have the full thought yet but like when you were mentioning about uh suppliers having back orders a lot of it has to do with that like with the volume that you're ordering right because they're not used to that kind of volume until they've had you as a customer for probably like six months plus yeah that's probably one of our biggest pain points is back orders like there's some
(2:09:50) listings that and they they just they just never expect that volume like there could be some like light bulb listing that we want like 4,000 of and they usually stock like a hundred and that holds them off for like a couple months and they're just like what and then they have to go talk to their and and sometimes we'll even stock out the manufacturer and like the manufacturer doesn't have it we have to wait like for production and it's just like it's crazy but I guess I it's cool it's just it's hard to deal with and like we also being
(2:10:17) on Amazon we can't it's not like we have the luxury of ordering like four months in advance like a because Amazon will just hit you with restock fees but even if I kept it in my warehouse like Amazon listings are just too volatile and like things just get deleted all the time for no reason for me to feel comfortable holding like four months of inventory um 100% yeah yeah so you just the back orders is like a really tough a really tough thing yeah we had a supplier that supplies primarily convenience stores and we bought out a lot of stuff and
(2:10:47) they said at like the very first order that we placed they're like you guys can't do that anymore like all my Reg their convenient stores they can't get the stock that they need there depending on the stock so they said now when you order stuff you guys have to send it in like an order like two weeks in advance so that we can order get it and then get it to you guys yeah yeah do you have some suppliers that do bookings like um uh they because there are some suppliers that are super seasonal so they uh ask you to do like uh bookings
(2:11:17) in advance that's hard we just finished the call like a few ago with one of our with like one of our very seasonal products and like yeah we're we had to tell them our projections for the whole summer which is like really hard and like we tried to like tell them like it's hard to commit to this but last year we ran into the same issue where like we were selling so much of this stuff and we wanted more and they just like you got to have this in like February like we don't have it yeah but usually I don't know if it's the same
(2:11:45) thing but uh when you like give a promise that you're going to buy this amount the give you a discount so they have like a booking program that they call where you're going to say okay I want to um uh work like this amount of products but I want them to be delivered during the SE the you know the season that's going to sell and usually they're going to give you a discount and you pay just before receiving it so this is a good thing but again at the same time it's like uh you're scared cuz you don't know down the line like six months ahead
(2:12:17) what's going to happen you know yeah it's so hard for those are so hard like cuz yeah a lot of suppliers they're just like can you just send me projections for the year and we'll make sure to stock your stuff but it's it's really hard I I don't want to [ __ ] you if something exactly I'm also I also never have gone back to a supplier and said like never mind or like hey can you take this stuff back I don't want to ruin the relationship in that way so but that for that reason I'm very careful about like telling them projections and saying like
(2:12:43) Okay I'll buy this much for the next year even though it'll be beneficial for us to like not have to back order [ __ ] it's just like I I don't want to put in this situation yeah we'll go through some of these last questions here I don't want to keep you guys too too long but uh Max asked if anybody is buying brand direct at the moment we are a little bit we're uh I still feel like we're still kind of in the like proof of concept phase but it's it's like it's paying off like it's really cool we we went pretty serious
(2:13:15) with like the ads side of it like we um hired like an ads agency that we pay like two grand a month to like do it properly because we thought how much plus you're paying the ads yourself too yeah yeah plus the ads ourself yeah I don't know how much we pay a month on ads like 15K or something but they're good like they're really good and it was worth it and it's it's cool to be able to like even use that as part of our pitch like hey we have like this really good ads agency that we use because we we just had like before that we just had
(2:13:46) a general all skew low bid campaign as per Jordan advice and that works really well for like General wholesale or Arbitrage stuff um but if you're doing brand direct like it's kind of an expectation that you're doing ads and you're doing them well yeah so when you were doing that was the budget eaten every day or like when you were doing like all your catalog with low low bids um every day the budget to hit the like I I had a pretty low I don't even remember what our bids used to be like I used to have like eight Cent bids and so
(2:14:22) like I don't think so I think that if the budget was getting close like we would bump it up but I think we're at a low enough bid that it never like it never was going too crazy yeah if you ever want to look into some like some in-depth advertising Sops I have access to like over 200 of them from somebody that has launched some pretty decently sized PL Browns yeah it's just such like I I know that advertising is like an entire business in itself and looking at the way that our ads managers handle stuff and the way that they like the reports
(2:14:57) that they send us like this would have taken my partner and I like three months each to get this good so we thought we should just Outsource and like focus on the [ __ ] that we know um because it is it's C like yeah you can go infinitely in depth with it 100% but that I think that only applies to Brand direct because with stuff where there's like competitors and the prices fluctuate like you can't afford that like margin hit because things can whenever and unless you you have like a huge uh profit per unit yeah but I'm
(2:15:32) wondering I mean if let's say um I mean you're G to still have more sales than your your competitor if you're doing ads on with M with multiple sellers on the listing yeah it'll help you it'll help you get more sales too for sure and a lot of times people just don't run any ads so if you even have like a 10 send bid like you're just going to get free sales and so I think that everyone at the very least should just have like a very low bid campaign with every single one of their products yeah and it's not going to impact your profit really if
(2:16:02) it's like five cents a click um but and you're not going to be able to compete with like people that are actually doing real ads but there's a lot of things that nobody's running ads for and you can just be at the top yeah and you can get some really easy return on just general all skew PPC stuff for just standard OA and wholesale listings 100% yeah I'd say that's a must have it's just free 100% but um yeah like after the call if you want I'll send you like a a screenshot of all the Sops I have access to for advertising if you ever want to
(2:16:36) take a look at those just let me know a lot of them go in depth and talk about a lot of different processes I'll be interested um super uninformed and I just do like automatic I don't know what it's called the automatic PPC stuff I don't do something nothing fancy a lot of the stuff goes Super in depth and there's a lot of written out processes on how to do everything step by step yeah that's awesome been getting access to a few things over these last couple months cool guys so um did anybody else have any other questions at all for
(2:17:13) Robert Dan or mey at all I think we're probably going to be wrapping it up here shortly any question on the insurance company any any cheaper car insurance I'm just looking at my policy renewal and it's $3,000 a year I'm like my car cost me 20 grand bum sell your car and take the buso you're too fany Jaden for what wait 3K a year that's 250 a month this is like it's not even that bad I that's what mine yeah I comparatively I that's what mine is for torono for likeon PR insurance is like sub 80 bucks a month damn that's uh government
(2:18:05) insurance though right not privatized I mean when you think about it like where I live and in this I like really Drive in downtown Toronto and the number of people in things that can happen kind of makes sense oh you're in uh parf capital the world that's why your insurance is up crazy as long as I thankfully I don't drive a TOA or a Honda is not a wild thing to say you don't everyone wants to toyoto Honda for reliability but you can't drive it cuz it's going to be reliably stolen yeah but just remember to keep your key
(2:18:48) fobs outside so don't so uh Robert Dan mey any closing thoughts or anything else you want to share at all dude I don't know man I think I think it everything just comes down to consistency if if you if people are trying to do big things and that's like a goal then it's just just a matter of showing up every day and like just doing [ __ ] like Sops matter and and making things optimized matters but I think think what matters more is just like showing up and like head down grinding and then maybe every once in a while
(2:19:26) once a week or once a month you kind of put your head up and you look at the processes and you look at what's what needs to be optimized a bit or if you need to Outsource or whatever but I think that a lot of people overthink I had a lot of friends that were like see what I do and they're like super interested and I'm super down to like help them like start out with OA and [ __ ] but then they like they just get stuck at like keepa videos I'm like bro just like buy some products and just try it they're like but I don't know how to
(2:19:50) make a shipment I'm going just figure it out like just start and just I don't know a lot of it is just the consistency and showing up and and doing it every day and you can go super far and I think that I think that in the short term people overestimate how far they can get and they can and they'll be like damn I only sold like I only found two leads and I've been sourcing for a week um but in the long or like the medium to long term like you know six months or a year people heavily underestimate how far they can get yeah so it just comes down
(2:20:19) to that uh Dan I I know you mentioned previously that like you were putting in some consistently in-depth hours are you still working some crazy hours today uh now our schedule and I guess it's a good thing to touch on at first we were just kind of we didn't have defined hours and we were working like if we needed to we would work 16 hours a day and it was it was fun but it was definitely crazy and like now I think we're on like a pretty consistent like 10 to 7:30 or 9:30 to 7:30 type of thing which I don't know
(2:20:52) how many hours it is like nine hours a day um and then the weekends are just kind of whatever if if we have to catch up on [ __ ] we do but I think it's it's nice it's nice to like break it up and it allows us to kind of be more focused during like work time like burnout is a real thing and my partner and I both hit it many times and so it's nice to have a balance on on the note of burnout like some Founders have startup strategies and they're like cool I'm going to exit by you know selling my business and making million
(2:21:27) bucks obviously you're still in the growth stage but like when you think you're like cool I'm just going to you know Outsource this business make me money on the side take my earnings from this reinvest it and what do you think is enough is ever is that a question even I don't know yeah I I definitely don't have yeah there's no not for me at least um it's also really hard to just think that far out in the future like I don't know I like I like to look at the short to medium term like even planning for a year I know it's good to do but even
(2:22:03) that's hard to imagine like where what you're going to look like in a year um so yeah I'm more of a day-to-day person I like doing the head down doing my [ __ ] and just kind of like I said like taking your head out of the water once a month and just kind of look around to see where you're at and then you go back down so question for all you guys do you still enjoy what you do do you enjoy Amazon as a whole do you enjoy building a business do you enjoy what you're doing for sure I I definitely do I love definitely on my end yeah still to this
(2:22:35) day after uh three years three years and a half yeah do you love do you love the process of Amazon specifically or do you love the process of building a business I think I love the the process of building a business but also so the business model is is so nice because every time I find a new brand or I find a new opportunity it's it excites me um and obviously the the the control you have over your time is super nice you can work for I mean on my end I work during the night I work during the morning not like you Jordan like during
(2:23:12) the evening I don't work during the night night but yeah you can work at any you want Jordan is like he's always awake I don't know what's going on J you need you need to ask Jordan the question of when do you sleep not when do you if that's the easy answer so I I'll tell you I don't take any drugs besides caffeine okay I'm I'm not on any oper is just taking caffeine uh but uh he fine flips ask if I if I burn out 100% I do um it's less right now so I find like if I'm in a stage I really love the process building a business I don't spe I don't
(2:23:53) specifically love maybe just Amazon I love the process of building that's what I am personally obsessed with so when I'm in that stage when I'm actually building when I'm super engaged it's super hard for me to burn out when I get stuck in like a lot of the day-to-day stuff or if I'm not enjoying it as much I can burn out very quickly yeah yeah that makes sense and it also depends on like how deep into the burnout you push yourself like the longer you push it the harder it is to like get out which is why for me
(2:24:27) like at first it was just kind of like full Grind Mode but pivoting it to more of like a nin to-5 structure does help because you you need to set boundaries exactly exactly and like you know that you're GNA go home tonight and you can do something if you want or you'll have like a day on the weekend to just like chill out if you want to and a lot of times I don't like a lot of times I come home and I end up just like uh looking at seller Snapper or whatever but I know that if I want to I can and there's a lot of nights where I just like [ __ ]
(2:24:58) play video games or just take a nap or whatever and it that's like a nice reset for me because I know that I don't feel like I'm that stuck and like that is the benefit of a nine to5 is like you know that you can just drop it at five o'clock and go home and just like kind of chill and then for mental health that is important and so maybe it's not 9 to5 like maybe you do more hours than that and you work 60 hours a week or whatever you're comfortable with but having some sort of defined thing yeah is the the
(2:25:26) more rested you are the better decision you make that's true too yeah I mean if you're just not sleeping in Burnout burnout mode then like you're also going to be working slower and it's going to be miserable and like that sucks too and it's probably less it's probably more efficient for you to like take a day and sleep and then you'll be ready for it so like some of you guys are uh relatively active in the server you may have noticed like over like these last couple months I'm basically almost entirely Mia on most of the
(2:25:53) weekend like typically like Friday Saturday you don't hear from me whatsoever yeah and it's because I I started setting those boundaries where it's like I need a little bit of time where I can chillax whatever and so that's why you typically don't hear from me on like throw up Friday and Saturday most of the time it's good though I think that's good yeah only took me uh seven years start do you need to go vacation you told me about two years yeah I know it's the works I have points I got to spend man yeah can't imagine
(2:26:26) how much points you have my goodness I have a few million at this point Jesus but I I don't I I don't get too much anymore because I don't use credit cards as much anymore yeah well that's true I can help you find deals to book your points if you need find me somewhere that I can go that's like just hot cheap I was like think Thailand or like four five 4 hour five hour flight like Caribbean just one Island go for five days and back or like a a backpacking trip no it's like backpack just a beach no just like he's a
(2:27:02) backpack guy no just just somewhere where I'm just gonna chill out and go away and uh be a Hermit for like six months I'll just go I'll go there and work and chill out that' be cool okay P 100% puket my Ron says he has a free house in Jamaica or what I'm GNA come and make some of your special brownies um I know I like we were mentioning coming to the end of the conversation but I see that Stefan popped in here so of course if you guys like don't feel obligated that you have to stick around I definitely appreciate
(2:27:43) you guys coming and giving these thoughts and insights into your processes like I'm very very grateful and I imagine everybody else here is if you want to stick around certainly feel free but because Stephan popped in here I also want to talk to him if he's free and willing to speak yeah I'd be down to chime in a little what up Stephan what's up nothing much Dan doing good I'm probably hey I'm probably gonna head out but um yeah super cool to talk to you guys and Stephan feel free to DM me anything and we talk in DMS all the time
(2:28:16) so anyone here anyone here if you want to ask questions go ahead so Dan we might have to um you mentioned like you want to show like processes and stuff one day I'd be very interested seeing that but yeah I was I was trying to set that up for this call too I just got hella busy over the weekend I wanted to like take our uh spreadsheets and like redact a bunch of [ __ ] and like show it that would be really cool but that's just going to take like some work 100% completely get it but I was thinking that maybe we'll have to start having a
(2:28:45) competition to see who can hit 10 mil first okay [ __ ] I didn't even know you you've been doing so much work in like the the Arcane Society side of things I didn't even know you're still like that on the Amazon side that's crazy we're growing slow but I'm still selling I still I still look up storefronts and try to find ones that are in Saskatoon or wherever I'm like maybe this is there ain't too many of us but uh who knows maybe my address is not even Saskatoon bro I know dude that's I know I know you bro you're Express Health aren't you no
(2:29:20) no no no I think the tax rates and all the benefits of being registered in Saskatoon and your accounted in sasun I can bet 100 bucks you are oh okay we got a detective that's good well when you find my account and you can prove to me then let me know oh yeah anyways anyways I was good talking to everyone and yeah if anyone has questions feel free likewise man it's very appreciated all right take care guys well done take care have a good one later easy see it so Stefan yeah we've been having conversations with Dan
(2:29:54) Robert and mey here uh just kind of what their process has been like where they started from how they grew and kind of like how they went from zero to 10K to 50K to 100K plus per month and what the process has been like going from part-time on Amazon and working full-time to then selling on Amazon completely full-time so your full-time Amazon right now is that correct yeah that's correct Beauty and how long have you been selling on Amazon for uh I've been selling on Amazon for about two and a half years right now but
(2:30:32) I've been full-time for just under a year now beautiful and it's yourself and a partner correct yeah that's right it's a business partner in this cool and uh with you guys like if if you don't mind sharing of course if you don't want to share certainly feel free not to but what kind of revenues did you guys have for 2024 yeah I can definitely share that um we hit I think I sharity in the gold chat too we hit the three million Mark uh last year Beauty and are you uh specifically all wholesale do you do some Arbitrage what's kind of your
(2:31:08) business model so think the majority majority is AA there's very very small percentages all right and then there's a good chunk I would say probably 60 40 from OA to wholesale so we have a good chunk in wholesale right now nice and um for employee wise is it just a two of you do you guys have any local employees vas what's kind of your situation looking like yeah so there is the two of us which is kind of like I mean I wouldn't say help us but it helped us not really hire much uh up to this point we did have a part-time preer last year during
(2:31:47) Q Q3 and Q4 but after Q4 the person he was on contract and so he had another job lined up and so right now we are just in the process of hiring someone I'm actually going to be actually someone starting this week uh in the warehouse right now so and so the position that you're hiring for is specifically for pack and prep yeah just pack and prep beautiful and it was this past year that you got a warehouse is that correct yeah that's correct we are currently in a warehousing space so I don't know if you guys are familiar with
(2:32:23) that but essentially you have a company that rents out a whole warehouse and they put fences up and then you have a multitude of small businesses kind of like in these fenced areas beautiful so what kind of has been your process about from like when you started how did you start and then what kind of things have you done to escalate that from zero to 10K to then to 50K then to 100K bus yeah so I think the most important thing and I missed the whole first part of the conversation but it's sourcing at the end of the day like it's very easy
(2:32:57) to get caught up in the little things like your operations or getting the right supplies for prep but honestly at the beginning all I did was source and I remember like the easiest things to soures at the time was just Legos so like I just remember like going to every single store online whether it was just local hobby shops whether it's to go online to like Walmart or Canadian Tire and just go through all their Legos right and I think that cling manual sourcing of just going through this one category kind of just showed me like
(2:33:24) okay like what does a good product look like here and I really just stuck with Legos all at the beginning once they got comfortable and then I started to Branch out into other categories Beauty and so have you had to secure any outside financing at all to get to where you are today yeah I'll be pretty transparent here um so I started the business uh during school and in school I did have the opportunity to work and at that time I did Leverage my student loans as well so essentially what I was able to do is H take the student loans and uh don't
(2:34:01) tell that the CRA this or government this but use the the student loans to fund the business and then um I use the money for my job to to pay for school Beauty I love that and so how much outs how much outside funding did you have to leverage to get to where you are today then yeah allegedly um I took out the Max uh I think up the max I was in engineering so I think the max for me was around 50k I was able to put out and um it's not like I put 50k right away I think that's something that people hear like oh you got 100K for a bus or 50k it
(2:34:40) first started with like a couple hundred bucks the first Lego buy then it was like 500 bucks and it was like a th000 bucks and then I kept scaling to a couple th000 and then you know kept going there and there until I kind of reached that you know like tens of thousands of dollars and then from there it just kept slowly growing where I didn't have to keep putting Capital into the business Beauty and so has it have you had your partner involved in the business since day one um so not since day one I did kind of I would say start the business but I
(2:35:14) still started as a So Pro so I kind of discovered oh like there's you know this business where you can sell on Amazon there away and wholesale and during the time I was much more involved because we were both at school during the time I was much more involved in the business and we did have a agreement where um until we graduate like I would have majority ownership uh in the business because I did spend more time and I did start it and I did have a big capital investment into it but once we both shifted to fulltime we then had that
(2:35:45) discussion and made an appropriate split between us okay excellent excellent and so just because you kind of missed a lot of the conversation I'm kind of asking some of the same questions that we talked with Robert and Dan and mey about just because I'm curious about like everybody's kind of had a a different journey and how they got there different processes different overall business model and everything so it's just nice to hear different perspectives on like how many different ways this business can really be
(2:36:14) done um so now like you mentioned like you're about 40% Wholesales that correct yeah that's correct and so are you still planning on going a lot deeper with Arbitrage or are you trying to transition more into wholesale um we don't really have like a set amount I think what we see is that sometimes we might be limited with the wholesale especially in Canada like there's not as many wholesalers in Canada versus like in America that you see where you can like download um like lists from wholesalers and do like tax
(2:36:49) Arbitrage or something I found it was a much more manual process um but I think the big thing with OA is just we don't have the the Manpower enough to really fully scale that out and it's more it's easier for me just to go through like wholesale and create just big purchas orders all at once versus just like manual sourcing all the time I will say um in our day-to-day wholesale kind of takes that 60/40 split but when it was like Q4 we wen't really deep into OA and like completely crushed it during that time just with the amount of like sales that
(2:37:22) happened Black Friday happens I mean feel like there's a sale that whole month of November and before November and after November so we really leveraged away when there was the opportunity to 100% so are you guys actively when you're having to do like sourcing catalog sourcing OA sourcing uh all those kind of good things do you have like a homebased office you're doing that out of or are you doing that at the warehouse as well yeah so uh we do have desks at the warehouse um I guess like how this works out with business partners is I'm mainly
(2:37:57) in charge of purchasing and the finance side and then my partners more involved in the warehouse and the day-to-day operations and um while like sourcing is like a very important part of the business there's now a lot of moving parts now that we move up so a big thing right now that we're dealing with is like reimbursements returns that come and trying to find ways to kind of deal with that and now his main job right now now that we kind of we're past this Q4 rush in q1 is basically start expanding the team so right now he's focusing on
(2:38:29) like hiring someone to help pep and pack and then after that he'll start moving on to hiring some sourcing Vaas and after sourcing VA being admin VA and then on gotcha gotcha and so what I know you kind of posted it in the chat previously but for those that didn't see what kind of goals did you have for this year here um I think I had a lot of goals I think I had to quickly uh quickly pull them up real quick if you give me one second here put into the goal I think I saw Dan Post like ah like I should I should
(2:39:08) probably uh get some goals there so I think so yeah a big thing right now is as we grow with scale uh sourcing it kind of that dayto day just gets more complex and you know before when we had like like an ITP complaints like I was able to like put out the time to like cover that but now that as we get bigger and bigger bigger and bigger there's more complaints there's more emails I'm getting there's more T to do whether it's with like full keep fting or whether it's finances or whether it's with you know the sourcing as well so I
(2:39:42) think with this incre increased complexity we just have to create systems and Outsource some of that so we can kind of keep growing sustainably another one as well is that right now we're very involved in the tasks I remember even in the Q4 rush and I kind of heard that tail end of the conversation about having like a balanced work life and like being able to set off N9 to5 during Q4 it was just like Madness it felt like that whole month of November was just like wake up work go to sleep which like yeah like we
(2:40:14) made money but like I don't want to do that for year after year after year so I think a big thing is kind of breaking it down and being like how do we actually do this process and then figuring out either how to automate it or how to Outsource it 100% yeah like so going through those months and having those Works uh those work days and like sometimes putting in like 16 plus hour days can be super exhilarating and exciting but only for a short period of time and you can only do it for so long yeah yeah 100% agree um so you are
(2:40:49) in the short term looking to hire somebody for pack and prep and then you're looking for some vas as well uh what kind what kind of other things are you going to be doing to look at specifically Outsourcing for yourself are you looking at potentially Outsourcing any type of sourcing Wholesale catalog sourcing wholesale Outreach OA sourcing anything like that I think the um it's it feels hard to give up with the sourcing it's like I guess in my mind and this is not a good mindset to have it's like oh like I'm
(2:41:20) I'm really good at this I don't want to give this up but I think it's like and I'm kind of working through it now is like kind of having that mindset is like I don't need someone 100% as good as me and that that they'll never happen right if I could get someone like 80% good that is like the best thing that can ever happen so um looking looking to to Outsource some of like the the lead inbounds kind of that manual sourcing or if there's like a sale going on having that outsourced is like it's not rocket science at the end of the day I think
(2:41:52) the big thing is like if you want to Outsource like you're purchasing or you're buying you really need to get someone that like you trust right and that'll just take like time so even if I do hire a VA from day one I still have to build that trust with them if I want to have them in charge of purchasing 100% uh I think a couple of us have talked about uh Outsourcing purchasing because that is one thing that I have outsourced this past year and I believe Dan was mentioning that working on that uh for both of us we are doing uh
(2:42:23) purchasing for employees in house not Outsourcing to vas for that yeah I think what's like special in uh in our case is that we have two like two partners in the business so like once the you know my business partner to once he outsources like the warehouse cep in Outsource of the operations then he can totally be uh in charge or help me out with the purchasing as well so I think for us like purchasing is kind of the last thing we want to give up just because there is two of us in the business so that's kind of the leeway we
(2:42:58) have there um I will say like the only downside and this is literally the only downside of working in a partner is there's like a profit share right um you know I think it's something realistic to to look at it's like yeah we can grow very big and big but like you have Partners if you have financing if you have debt like numbers are great revenues are great but really at the end of the day like what goes in your pocket is kind of like the important part and I'm very lucky to have a business partner in this because it's definitely
(2:43:31) allowed me to focus like more on the purchasing right and then able to scale it to there so 100% I think it's just kind of like just kind of like being a bit transparent there because like I tried searching online like I remember when we were creating the um the business contract and it's like there's not many sources online of like to do this only source is like go hire a lawyer right so so and there's not many people that I talk to that have business partners uh so you and Dad are some of the few um if anybody else in here does have any
(2:44:03) business partners let me know because I'd be interested to hear your stories as well um but for yourself how have you found the process with your business partner because I know you mentioned like your business partner is like a long-term friend of yours right yeah so um yeah long-term friend we went to school together like junior high high school and then University as well so I think the most important thing here is the trust that we built up this wasn't someone that I met like four months ago and they're like hey let's
(2:44:30) start this business together that can work out but we've been friends for a decade or two so um really it's just the trust we built and even before that even before we kind of went together we just had a discussion and it's like what do you want your life to look like right because at the end of the day like be working together all the time be spending a lot of time together so it's like what's your outlook on life and then what's my outlook on life and then if it's something like similar doesn't have to be exact but if it's like
(2:45:00) something similar we have the same path and yeah let's do this together 100% so have you since You' started business because I know sometimes there can be some disagreements with with things um especially like depending what kind of personalities you have have you had many serious disagreements have you had a lot of um headbutting at all throughout this business or has it been pretty smooth sailing overall it's been pretty smooth I think the biggest headbutting we had was the profit share agreement um that's
(2:45:35) you know very gu it's a delicate subject right money's a a difficult thing to talk about you know at the end of the day we're like really good friends so for us to talk about money together it's like oh this is like this is awkward right um but we went through through a rational point in the daytoday business I think in general we have very little friction we're both very like rational and logical people so if I were to bring something up being like hey I think something in the warehouse like this needs to change or like the order sheet
(2:46:06) needs to be adjusted um he'll have an open mind and like listen to what I have to say and then you'll be able to respond back saying like hey that's a great idea or actually you might have like no but we actually need this part so I think a big thing is like whenever we do bring up stuff it's not personal and like sometimes I have to practice like hey this is not a personal thing I'm not trying to like like say you're bad or anything but I think we need to bring this up in chat about it so communication is like the biggest
(2:46:38) thing there and understanding where you're coming from definitely and with this question like this might be super personal but I'm just curious and of course you don't have to answer it feel free not too but since starting your business and being in the partnership with your friend do you feel like you're still as good of friends as what you were prior um TR to think I would say it's better because I think the more and more we're business partners the more and more we're talking about life in the future and what we want or like we'll go
(2:47:10) on like vacations together or weekend trips together so I think over time it's just gotten better and better uh it's just being able to separate business and personal time that's kind of a key thing there 100% Beauty and so with yourself since you've started started growing and scaling uh have there been any specific things that you have found that cause you to Plateau or cause you to have any forms of bottlenecks any that you've identified that Ma stuck at a certain place and that you've been able to overcome yeah I think a big thing what
(2:47:49) we did is we broke down like what are bottlenecks in this business we broke it down into three main ones one is time one is capital other one's knowledge so at the beginning like we didn't have we didn't have anything but time we had all the time in the world but we didn't really have the knowledge to sell on Amazon nor the capital as we've grown Capital kind of Teeters to oh we don't have enough to we have enough um right now at this point we kind of have like a lot of the knowledge we need to succeed and we find
(2:48:20) the big thing right now is we're lacking on time so whenever we have our monthly meetings we kind of break down being like okay what do we struggling right now like maybe it is a knowledge thing maybe like oh I don't know how to like do this like bookkeeping thing right you know like ask the accountant or it could be like during Q4 I know as a big was like we need more Capital like we have so many leads that are coming in so many opportunities we don't have enough Capital right and I guess with that we had so much time because we were so
(2:48:48) invested during that Q4 time so we spent a lot of time we have the knowledge we're lacking the capital so we kind of identified what we needed and we pursued it and we're kind of able to to overcome that and now you're probably like you mentioned kind of revers you have you have the capital available but now you're very extremely limited on time yeah yeah yeah that's been a big thing right now and also it's like like we've both talked about it and we're like hey we want to like work a little less in q1 Q2 right not just like completely not do
(2:49:21) anything right but let's stick to a normal schedule now and then once we kind of start ranting up to Q3 and Q4 what we realize is like there's opportunity everywhere for sure but we've noticed at least for us Q3 and Q4 there's just so much more opportunity that like the time you invest into it it's like you get so much back versus if I were just to like start manual sourcing out versus like at the height of like Black Friday right 100% so with your primary I'm just curious kind of going off topic here with with
(2:49:54) your primary source scene for OA and for wholeale what kind of primary sourcing methods are you utilizing yeah so a big one is the seller watch so it's just reverse sourcing right find the storefront to like and then start reverse sourcing from there um we found during like times of sales like just picking stores we know that we we love and going through the Flyers going through their weekly sales that was very good during like like holidays right like it doesn't have to be like4 it could be just like when Easter rolls
(2:50:29) around or when I don't know like Family Day right just like manually sourcing through there we found the highest Roi items have been through just manual sourcing takes the most time but we really find some good gems in there second has to be the first sing going through Sal just sourcing there yeah that's kind of our bread and butter there okay cool and so when you get a Wholesale catalog how are you primarily sourcing those cataloges so I I think I think what's interesting here um is a lot of the wholesale we do is maybe not like
(2:51:12) traditional wholesale you know go to a wholesale like oh can I please hand your catalog a lot of it has been is we identify products um so let's say it's um like a beauty product for example and we find a brand that we really like and we're like well we can buy it at retail but it's just not really profitable it's not really working let's search up who distributes this product who like sells this and then from there we kind of Target those Distributors and wholesalers and say oh we we want to buy like this product right from this brand
(2:51:49) and then a lot of times we get denied flat out I think that the big thing there is we're Amazon sellers and sketchy people and cannot trust us um I found the most success securing not even securing wholesale deals but just getting them to you know give a list is persistence um number one is just getting the call right once they hear your voice you can smooth a lot of things out and kind of build trust there another good example I remember is um I found a product that was really good I found the distributor for it and I
(2:52:25) wanted to buy direct from them rather than the retailer because you knowly mark up there and I asked them first I'm like hey can I let see your wholesale list and they're like oh sorry like we don't deal with like sellers like you please contact this retail store and I went back and forth saying like well I want to buy like a large amount of quantities and I think a big thing there was showing like hey I'm ready to spend you know like 3,000 bucks with you right like like here's my purchase order and then he referred me someone else and
(2:52:55) then they responded back oh we don't ship to Alberta right and I'm like they go back to them being like hey your retailers they can't fulfill my order like they're not helping me out um can I just buy directs from you here's my purchase order so basically that was me admitting like I'm ready to buy from you right and then from there they sent me the forms to fill out for for wholesale right there so it's kind of a key thing there if you're wholesale is being persistent and then showing that you're serious 100%
(2:53:30) money definitely talks in the wholesale business and if you're ready buy and if you're ready to spend bigger amounts you're certainly more likely to open those accounts for sure for sure yeah so with those accounts that you open up then um are you only targeting like one specific product or brand and then that's all you're getting access to or are you also trying to get access to that distributor's entire catalog on top of that yeah so it's usually getting the whole catalog there it always starts out as like Hey we're really interested in
(2:53:58) like X product right can we get a Wholesale catalog or can you give us pricing for that and then with doing that they'll just send their whole catalog anyways definitely and like are you actively leveraging that entire catalog or you still just kind of being selective with just a couple brands well yeah like you look at the catalog and most of it like sucks so like for example we found like a grocery distributor right and we were very interested in this like one product one brand of it and we're able to get access
(2:54:31) to the Wholesale catalog and we look through the whole thing and we come and find that there's nothing profitable except the one item that we were looking for right so well like securing those wholesale cataloges are definitely good I think it's good to go in there already showing interest in certain products if you just go and being like Oh I'm interested in your Wholesale catalog please send it over they may not take you seriously but if you show hey we've done some research research and it shows that you know you sell X product of X
(2:55:01) brand and we're interested in purchasing you know like two to 300 units then they'll take you a bit more seriously there definitely cool and then so like I'm more so just curious and like just to if I'm able to provide any help for yourself was sourcing those catalogs so like say if you end up getting that distributor catalog from that uh grocery distributor and you're looking through it are you manually sourcing through it are you running it through a UPC scanner or you put it in ta what's kind of your process um it's it's it's a bad process
(2:55:35) but I'm going one by one and uh looking up every product one by one yeah well I mean I I like the think I'm smart with it so for example if they show me a whole catalog and they show all the products and they show all the Brands too I'll first search up the brand one by one on Amazon to see if there's like you know like if there even is any listings a lot of the times there's just the Brand's not on there or there's products that have a VSR like way over 100k so I can immediately eliminate like brand by brand um just by searching on
(2:56:07) Amazon like hey what are the types of listings on it um that's kind of been my main like strategy with wholesale sourcing is rather than sourcing product by product it's brand by brand once I identify a brand that's good I can then start going um product by product and sometimes I willing to go product by product I'll Source on Amazon um of that brand and then try to see if it's in that Wholesale catalog so for example if I search up a brand I might have like 50 products in the Wholesale catalog but on Amazon there
(2:56:40) might only be like 10 products under 100K bsmr so in that case I only have to like Source 10 products rather than 50 definitely I was going to say like I was going to be like oh like you're looking up manually every single product that takes forever but no the brand process a lot better 100% have you ever attempted to utilize any UPC scanners at all um I have not the reason why I have not I found that for some wholesalers or I guess some like untraditional wholesalers they won't have upcs with them yep um I've had some where it's
(2:57:17) just like Oh by and so you just like scroll in through the website brand by brand so I found that the UPC thing wasn't my favorite thing and maybe this is based on my experience and this is just not maybe this is not like right practice but I found that upc's don't always match up the products if I'm not mistaken so that's sound oh 100% And so yeah like in my experience yes doing like that manual sourcing like you mentioned is always going to extract the most value out of a catalog definitely it's just uh you're trading you're
(2:57:50) trading a little bit more time to do so so the process and again like my process isn't perfect but like I tell people about my process in case they want to attempt to figure out their own process around that of course you're not required to do that uh but we kind of do like a hybrid method so like uh if we have access to a catalog that has upcs we'll almost always run that into a UPC scraper specifically scan unlimited and you're right like a lot of stuff will not be UPC matched it won't find stuff that's bundles multi packs
(2:58:21) Etc but it'll help us more quickly identify potentially good brands that have some matches so say we're running it through and say we identify a brand that has a couple matches a a good couple leads that are profitable because it'll tell us immediately right away what our BSR is what our expected profit is based on our buy cost Etc then we'll go back in and then we'll manually look up that brand and then we'll find all the additional products that it missed the bundles the multi packs the uh upcs that didn't
(2:58:49) match um and then and then like if I also like scroll through manually and look through a catalog and just see like if any Brands kind of stick out to me and like or or like things that like maybe just maybe I've seen them somewhere maybe I've seen them being viable on Amazon before I'll grab I'll grab some of those Brands out and I'll start doing some manual sourcing for those guys as well just to see what else we can find just doing some freestyling after first running that UPC scanner and that took down process for sourcing like
(2:59:19) say a 10,000 skew catalog from like a week to like one to two days one to two days at Max from like getting the catalog to place in the purchase order yeah yeah for sure I think there's a few good things you mentioned I think one thing that's like very underrated is um what do they call like rabbit hole sourcing um basically just like hey you found like a product of a brand maybe just like keep searching that brand like keep digging further like beyond the wholesale Catal like keep digging further because that's where you can
(2:59:51) really find some gems that's kind of that manual sourcing there obviously there's a tradeoff there now you're just spending more time you might not end up with anything but we found we were able to find like some pretty like good gems through this Rital sourcing method 100% And so yeah like I mean I imagine like in your experience manually sourcing a catalog brand by brand like you're going to find probably say 10 10 to 20% more products than what I would uh but I would also Imagine That doing the same sourcing like say if it's the
(3:00:24) exact same catalog with the process that you're utilizing today versus process that we're utilizing it probably takes us probably like 5x the amount of time to go through or like 5x less the amount of time I I I would just assume so based on our own our own experience so you're certainly not extracting as much value as you can out of that specific catalog but you are kind of going through that catalog and at least doing that initial p a little bit quicker and that's what I'm kind of looking at because when I
(3:00:52) first started wholesale I lost a lot of accounts for not uh following up with them quick enough and not placing orders quick enough they they just assumed that you know within like a week or so I would have um a PO out to them and I wasn't able to whether it was lack capital or I couldn't get through the catalog in enough time and I lost probably like three4 probably that that were going to be viable accounts doing that yeah that that's that's definitely a big thing that's like urgency in business like like speed kills so like
(3:01:23) if you get a catalog like turn it around in like two business days right like boom purchase order um from there because people people appreciate that people people want that right at the end of the day they want the best case scenario is someone signs up someone looks at their catalog and gives them money right away right so it's kind of their goal there so that's a good point definitely and so I know you've been discussing a little bit recently like you mentioned to myself today about and you mentioned the chats about looking into different
(3:01:55) softwares for your processes um do you mind sharing kind of what your processes look like today yeah so right now we live and breathe in Google Sheets um heavily inspired by yours uh your your template I'll say that so you looked at my video and copied it no you you you have the free one right you have the free one right okay okay okay no um we started off with the free one right and then just slowly Implement things um through there and so the big thing for us is we have one major kind order inventory sheet um and then within
(3:02:38) that sheet you have essentially in one sheet holds all the orders and that's where you're able to record like how much you ordered and uh when you ordered it and then from there that's what the warehouse would see it's literally the same as yours we also have a buy list in there so I find that when I'm creating like purchase orders or um I need to order something but it's like just out of stock or I need to order it like on a Friday because that's when the sale is I'll have a high list where it's basically the same as the order list but
(3:03:07) it's orders I haven't made yet and in there I'm able to see like like oh like how much is in the buy list how much is queued up for me to kind of swipe the credit card Are All Leads that have been verified there and I think the one thing that differs is I don't really have like a leads list per se and that's something we're trying to implement right now because with the introduction of vas essentially we'll have like unverified leads that'll come in and they won't really belong on this vi list because I won't know essentially the V
(3:03:40) list all the leads that come on the Bist is either from me and when I Source I'm able to figure out what's needs to be ordered or it's my business partner right and he'll put leads on there as well and he obviously knows how to figure out okay how much do we need to buy here and then all I have to do is just quickly review and purchase it there definitely so then are you looking at implementing just like a general like VA sourcing sheet kind of deal yeah so we were looking into your template and I think it's great I think
(3:04:12) it's pretty much along the lines of what we were thinking we were trying to find a way where essentially what we would have is we would have like you like you had each VA have their own lead sheet and then from there you're able to like approve or reject and then provide like some reasoning behind it and then all approved leads would live in the lead list there and then what we want is that in that lead list leads live forever so you don't delete a lead stays in there and the reason why it stays in there is that you
(3:04:44) might have a product that you know you approve of it but it's like out of stock and you want it to live there or you have a lead that was really good in Q4 and then when Q4 rolls around the next year you can go back into your lead list and be like oh let me check up on you know this lead I sourced you know that Black Friday right let's see if that deal pops up again and I I think a big thing there is that once we have this kind of mastered lead list there we can integrate some keepa in there and it'll be able to provide some updated BSR kind
(3:05:15) of like on the spot so updated BSR updated FBA price based on when we exported it maybe we export it and we say oh there's you know too many sellers on it right now but it has potential right it could live on there and then once we want to look back in that in that lead list uh we could have a script set up where it can display kind of the updated uh VSR the updated FBA price and that can tell us like oh this lead is now like profitable fairly quickly let's dive into this uh lead from there and then the idea is that from the lead you
(3:05:47) can export it either to the buy list where you're going to purchase it or you can export it directly to your order list so it's funny that you mention that because flipper actually sent me a template of something that she's working on and I believe correct me if I'm wrong flipper that she's going to be sharing it with everybody um but it was a sheet almost exactly what you mentioned that already has Keep integration inside of it and that will update uh it'll have keep a chart and then update like your prices your estimated fees Etc
(3:06:19) um yeah so I'm working on it right now so if anybody wants a particular data points that they want to see so I haven't put in drops or BSR but I can definitely add that it just makes the sheet wider that's all yeah yeah so just post in Amazon if there's something you want me to add and just yeah so there's depending on what you want there's going to be different token use so that's why I was thinking I might provide like three different scripts um just because if you have lot of products it's going to take a long
(3:06:49) long time to update like if you wanted the stock data for example I think you have to use the offers parameter so it's like an extra six tokens the most basic sheet would be just one token per as so and I'm going to test that to see exactly like yeah how long it takes to update based on exactly what you're doing so yeah I'm working on that right now actually yeah so let me know if there's anything you guys want to see oh that sounds that sounds great honestly that some I feel like this like a lot of us developed that that skill of
(3:07:21) sourcing but we kind of let go of some like past leads and kind of forget about them and you know maybe we'll magically revisit them by rever sourcing but I think what you're building there is definitely going to be a great tool yeah so with something like that you can also customize it even further right so like because like if you say if you input leads into there and if you're inputting your buy cost uh when you originally import it of course that buy cost can change but if your buy cost stays the same you can have it so that like say
(3:07:54) this product doesn't make sense for you today but then you can add in some conditional formatting so like so that say when this product equals like $3 profit or more then highlight this this whole entire row green and then it will tell you very easily very visually you open up the sheet this product is now profitable you hardly even have to look at it right yeah I think that's bigas there yeah well that's what I've done right now it's just for the profit column I just put in some conditional formatting and so it'll highlight it green if it's
(3:08:27) profitable but you can do I don't know like if you had the BSR in there or something like that or the the 90day drops is what I like to use um yeah you could just have it color coded you can just easily just scroll down and see ones that might interest you but I also what I'm doing now because just because of feedback I've gotten over the uh the DM I'm going to put in a few blank columns just so people can put in their own notes and just make sure that the script doesn't touch those columns and you can just put in whatever
(3:09:01) you want so it's always it's always nice to see when these things come full circle she was just telling me about this today and then Stephan's like I'm looking for this exact solution yeah but to kind of circle back to what you're doing so if I look at just like say our OA side of our business which is exclusively our leadless business now because we're entirely wholesale so we have them separated out okay yeah so if you look at like the VA side all of our vas are utilizing their own uh VA sourcing sheet like we have in that
(3:09:36) getbook and it's basically identical to what we have in there I think I may have made a few minor changes to what's in there since I posted it but not many and that's to give like that visual feedback show their individual stats and really be able to um assess somebody's performance basically just at like a look like a quick look don't have to like dig too deep into any data those types of things so then when their products always live in there just like you mentioned uh but however we always every time we are done an entire month vetting
(3:10:14) an entire month so everything's been vetted it's been qualified disqualified Etc those products then get exported to a product database so like we have a uh a template in there as well for the product data database template that we use and it builds something similar to like what you were mentioning so it'll be something similar to like what flipper mentioned about uh she's putting together like that database with all that additional info uh but what what with what we're utilizing right now it's that minus the automatic updated keepa
(3:10:42) info and so we'll we'll we'll import the qualified products will import the disqualified products in a separate sheet and then they each have their own filter so we can easily filter through that data and see like okay this product was out of stock we can look add a filter into that sheet just like the Canadian filter in that database right now and we can click the out of stock button and it'll show us all of our prodct leads that were disqualify because they're out of stock very very like just instantly yeah that sounds that sounds
(3:11:14) great honestly it's it's funny like like crazy timing like right when I'm looking into this right ah I can't find a solution I can't really find the right software and heing that's be built as we currently speak so great news um but yeah like there might be some Solutions in there like already that you can Implement if that's the process that you're looking for obviously my process isn't perfect and it's not viable for absolutely everybody but of course you can always change and edit that process to work for however you're working workflow
(3:11:49) is but yeah we we utilize that main product database similar like to what you mentioned because when we can go back through we can resource leads that were previously disqualified we can go back into products that say we see that a specific brands on sale or certain retailers running a sale and we can pull basically brand new leads out of those that were used previously in like split seconds right so like if sport Che is running like their sitewide 25% off friends and family sale we can very easily filter for sport Che see every single lead that
(3:12:24) we have previously sourced from sport Che weo through all those very quickly and see if they're viable today yeah that's um makes sense to me yeah so um that person that you mentioned I don't know if you want me to mention all the software and stuff that you were talking about today uh I have sure I book a call with him so I'll be talking to him next week and so I'll be interested to see what uh what their process is like yeah I I guess to give reference to everyone else um is basically kind of like a lead management uh purchasing software that
(3:13:03) is basically everything we're kind of talking about here but it's integrated into a web based app and what they're kind of building right now is that this is specifically for always sellers which is something kind of unique and that we haven't really seen like we've seen kind of for like very large wholesale sellers or just general e-commerce sellers having that Inventory management software but you have this company who's building specifically for uh away sellers so just in the future they kind of start scaling out their product going
(3:13:35) to share more information about that if it becomes viable yeah if it's a if it's a viable way to keep track of inventory and do proper repurchasing and Lead management then yeah of course if it's viable we'll mention it to everybody if it's [ __ ] you'll never hear you'll never hear about it from me we won't we won't know until we start trying it though exactly but based on what Stephan said with his call with these people it sounds like they have an idea of what they're doing and it sounds like they're implementing solutions that he's kind of
(3:14:06) looking for as well for sure for sure yeah um not to not to Pivot the conversation here but I wonder if you want to talk a bit about like some Finance stuff or some credit card stuff I know in the past we we DM we talked about uh different credit card providers like Lo kind of built for kind Amazon sellers are built for like e-commerce sellers in Canada was there any discussion kind of about that yeah so I'm currently working on booking calls with both Loop and Vault um their schedules have not been lining up with mine as of late but I'm hoping
(3:14:41) to have those calls booked for hopefully before mid next month so mid- March for for both for both them and we'll be having separate conversations with them both to see specifically what they can offer if they can be like any uh server specific deals that they can offer certain financing if they can change like the requirements on their vccs all types of things like that yeah I think it's it's definitely underrated like not to show them but not to like I don't gain anything from Shing them but I really I really like loop
(3:15:15) it's really like elevated in our business and the big thing there is like the crossb purchasing so we'll do like us to ca we'll import products there different wholesalers and retailers so it's very big for us being able to pay in USD uh and pay on credit as well which is a huge thing I think they have the similar credit card terms as like an ax card so what is it like the 55 days or like the three weeks of a grace period they have that as well and I did go through fin financing with them and I think kind of the standard right now is everyone's
(3:15:53) like at the at the lowest they'll offer around 2% a month in interest which is like a 2 yeah it's not like I think it's like aot line of credit so it's um a bit more flexible to kind of take money in and out that's kind of the best I've seen I think they advertise one to 2% but especially for you know us Amazon on sellers right a little bit more risky so I've seen them always offer kind of like 2% to me for financing and I never did take the financing just a little bit uh a little bit beyond our budget and I
(3:16:30) know there's like oh but like if you take it out you can make 100% Roi like it's just uh it's not how we roll always with that but we found that they're very very flexible in credit limits so like when we started out I I forget the number in my head but it must have been like 50k or something like that kind of matched our ax at the time and then like every three months we'd say like hey paying it off and we increase it and they'll be able to scale it up over time and time where I think at this point I think we're like at50 to
(3:17:03) 200k which is like very good for us that's like Beauty uh Danny yeah if you want to hop in the mic you have some questions of course can you guys hear me yep I don't sound like a potato no okay perfect perfect yeah um I was looking into like companies like Loop and vault as well because right now I'm with CIBC and I'm getting like no points on my credit cards no interest it's just I'm just paying fees right every month so it's it's kind of pointless in my eyes so and obviously there's better products out there um for Loop do they have an option
(3:17:40) for like a physical Visa Master Card yes um they do have an option forys physical uh I think they just switched to visas right now um so they have the option for physical and virtual ones I think um they also have like a a paid and a free one I think with a paid one like right now we're at $49 a month and the reason why is because we get a lower Forex fee and we do a lot of USD but I think their cheaper one is like either like 20 or 30 bucks a month uh you can get physical cards for you and your employees with that up to 10 and for the
(3:18:16) uh for the cor so you you mentioned like purchasing cross border you can like buy an USD on credit so pretty much like do the does the rate fluctuate or do you lock in that rate like okay I buy it today at like 1.43 um so you buy it in USD and then when you pay off your credit card that's when you quote unquote lock in uh that rate or so it's like every every month when we pay off the credit card right that's when we block it it so it's just like a normal credit card you just pay in USD and then you pay it off not at
(3:18:50) the end of the month but when it's yeah okay wrong Loop does your credit based on you link your Amazon store to them right or are they offering credit on other terms now based on all the factors um I think they have a multitude of factors I know you connect your your Amazon so they take that as a factor but you also connect to the CRA as well so they have all the information they ever need um on your business on you um to your Amazon portal because I think a big thing with the traditional Banks is that they don't understand like how Amazon
(3:19:28) works so I always say when I'm like applying to financing I show bank statements I'm like hey the the deposits you see is not Revenue right like Amazon takes their chunk first so don't count my deposits as Revenue like I'll show you my Amazon statements so if any of these companies I'm sure fault in do they both do this uh if they check out your Amazon they link up to Amazon then you're kind of on the right track on getting kind of better funding options so do you even have like a big six bank account or just you just purely use uh
(3:20:02) loop so we are with RBC um I hate it I hate paying monthly fees to them I hate paying fees on Bank transfers I just I hate getting nickel and dimes uh all the time and so what's going to happen in the near future is we're still waiting on a few features from from Loop where we're kind of comfortable fully integrating with them so right now all of our Canadian deposits go into our RBC Bank account and with that we're able to make like wire transfers to our wholesalers through there and make our payments to credit cards we have a USD
(3:20:41) bank account with Loop so Loop offers Canadian and USD bank accounts as well so we're able to deposit our USD because we do sell in America as well so we deposit USD in there and then able to pay off the credit cards in USD as well which is kind of a big thing if you guys are cross B okay okay gotcha and then just one more question for the big guys um when you get returns from Amazon so on so forth how do you go about like dealing with them because I just have a death pile and you know just sorting through it so on so forth um how
(3:21:17) like I'm I kind of want to get into your minds for that yes um I don't know Jordan if you want to chime on this first if you guys talked about this or yeah so you're just wanting to know specifically how we deal with our quote unquote death pile yeah so we do have a process in place when we get a returns back from Amazon we we have a rough Google sheet that we utilize to keep track of when we return inventory from Amazon what we're returning how many we're returning how many we're expecting and then how many we actually receive we do that to ensure
(3:21:58) a quicker way to confirm on whether or not we're receiving the random amount that is supposed to be sent back to us and then we're basically um we never used to we used to have [ __ ] piles and piles of boxes and products that would just sit there forever but after a certain point like you realize how much capital you have sitting there and it becomes quite a large issue and it has to be dealt with otherwise you're going to be leveraging so much less Capital than what you could be um so we try to once per week uh grab everything that we have
(3:22:36) that is in our return pile from Amazon and we open it up we we uh referenc our sheet that we have that has a couple note sections and then we're trying to determine what the disposition is of those of that inventory so a good trunk of it we determine disposition that it can be sent direct directly back into Amazon so it's sellable so it directly gets added back into our next shipment um if it is a different disposition we're determining right then and there on what we can do with that inventory so if it has value and can be
(3:23:06) sellable elsewhere if uh it should be donated if we sell it to staff or if it needs to be disposed of so if it has value figure that I could have value to sell elsewhere and it's worthwhile to do so we'll then uh put it in a pile to get listed on facebook/ eBay slash in our pile to do like a garage sale SL flea market um we try to get that listed ideally once every couple weeks realistically once a month um and then for the stuff that doesn't sell for you know x amount of time we typically hit a flea market twice per year in our city we have big
(3:23:43) flea markets here and that's where we offload a lot of EXs inventory that we have uh if it's in a pile where it has still has some some value we typically if it's going to be a hard sale or if it's like good enough that staff will want it we'll typically try to sell it to staff first and either like at cost or below cost depending on what it is so it's like hey we have a box of chocolate bars they're going to expire in a month retail on these guys is 10 bucks do you want them for like five OR7 whatever it may be and we get rid of a lot of stuff
(3:24:14) that way and of course you know qu unquote for the CRA if you're listening we record all that and um and allegedly Alle allegedly and then uh if stuff otherwise should be disposed of if it has no value if it's leaking if it's broken uh it's disposed of but then we keep track of that because you can claim um damage inventory damage and loss inventory uh as a business expense so that is then entered as a disposition of damage unable will typically make a note as to what is wrong with it just so we have it for reference and then what we did with
(3:24:53) that inventory so tossed it directly in the garbage can or gave it to whoever right typically it's going to be disposed and thrown away because then that's going to be factored in as um dispos or damage to destroyed inventory Stephan you want to talk about about your process at all yeah for sure so this was one of the things that I hated doing the most and was one of the things I I spent I think a good chunk time learning so I don't know if you're familiar with app sheet it's a a Google kind of add-on that you
(3:25:35) can essentially build some like very low code or no code software on top of kind of like Google Sheets and so what we were able to do there is that you know in the return process one thing we hated was like recording down the information needed um for the return also taking pictures so if you ever wanted a reimbursement from Amazon because maybe the return was materially different um you would have to record down a whole slute of information and also take pictures of the product and I hated doing that it would just be like a
(3:26:09) Google Drive thing and it's like oh you do the reimbursements like I don't know which ones I did it's just like a Google Drive things so it's very similar to a Google sheet essentially what we do is when we receive a return we open it up and we record down some key information um so let's say we open up and we identify you know there one Asin in there we'll record down the Asin we'll turn down the quantity and we'll do the claim type so claim type can be customer damage defective Overstock or it could be like an inbound damaged
(3:26:43) one and then from there we look at the product and we determine does this need a reimbursement or not and I'll tell you this a lot of the products we will find a way to get reimbursing we'll find the reason right because you'll be very surprised what Amazon will give you if you're persistent and also if you just ask for reimbursements for everything uh because a lot of the returns we get is to be truthful materially different uh I think yey you're the one that that kind of shows your template there and showed how
(3:27:19) like oh if you say like stuff's materially different you show proof of it like there's not much to argue there unless it's like a very expensive product and so yeah no no yeah I was I was going to say yeah that's I'm getting reimbursed for like 70% because of this so definitely for everyone else like if you can set up like at least just a Google sheet for your uh returns try getting reimbursed for like almost all of them if it's a product that's like perfectly fine okay just send it back in into Amazon but if the
(3:27:55) product is damaged right if it's customer damaged and it'll say every time you get a return you open the box up you'll get a little slip in there uh kind of like a manifest of some sort showing like hey what's in this sheet um and it's damaged like ask for that rement so essentially we determine if we can resell it great it gets kind of moved back into our inventory if it is damaged we'll figure out if we can get reimbursed or not sometimes um we think we can't get reimbursed like there's just there's no way to convince Amazon but a lot of the
(3:28:29) times we find a way so we'll say okay this needs to be reimbursed um me has this down somewhere as a template and like the key information you need yeah the LPN and you just have to take a picture of what what's wrong and um as long as when you type the message put in the removal order ID as in and order ID and uh just upload the pictures and you'll get reimburse most of the time is it is it sorry to cut in uh is it possible to get that template by chance I yeah I just um I'll copy and paste it in here someone just asked me
(3:29:09) earlier that's crazy yeah so exactly exactly what M say we record down like the shipment ID the VR um we have the warehouse staff for whoever's doing the returns put in a reimbursement reason so mostly it's just like it's materially different but we'll be specific saying like hey the product's been 50% used therefore it's materially different and then we have the options to upload photos so we take pictures of the packing slip shipping labels and then a few images of the product kind of like proof how that looks like you won't win
(3:29:43) uh you won't win 100% but you'll probably get reimbursed for like 80% of of the cases you file like I do this every every week I do this and so I forgot to mention that we do have a a process when we try to get reimbursed however we're not fully on top of it like we should be and we almost always look at it right now is if we can bundle so many products together and get them all kind of in one go if we only have like one Z's two Z's or something it's only worth a couple bucks we almost always just kind of pass on
(3:30:16) because as of right now it's not worth the time but that is something I'm actually looking into for this year is to hire basically a VA exclusively to do our product reimbursements through our Seller Central account and then also build out a sheet that we can input that data into and then they can go into the account and make reimbursement claims for uh physical inventory as well I see I see so for reimbursements um like I'm I'm currently using seller 6 right now like uh by or seller seller investigators Sorry by carbon 6 right
(3:30:48) now so the big guys most of you guys just do it like in-house all of you figure it out yourself and just send it in so I have I have what is it gatita and I have seller investigators so they do their thing like they'll get me reimbursements here or there but anytime they ask me for like an invoice I'll just do it myself cuz I don't see the point of paying them 25% if if I need to send you an invoice fair fair fair so that includes like lost inbound this that right yeah okay but all right maybe maybe this this
(3:31:21) might be a little confusing so do you go into seller investigators and see okay there's lost inventory here here here or do you go into Amazon sell find the shipment and do it like manually I I always go into shipments and look but s mes will actually like message me or email me like oh like we need invoices for this case this case this case or this shipment and I'll just at that point I'll do it myself cuz I'm not going to send you invoices and charging 25% yeah and uh speaking of which for inbound cases cuz sometimes
(3:31:51) like I I send invoices in and then they they're like oh we need some kind of packing slip or something like do you know do you know what they're talking about on a removal order no no for um lost inbound like they ask for let me let me let me pull it up right now give me a second yeah cuz the only time I get a packing slip is on a removal order no I know you're talking I know those LPN slips yeah for sure uh let me pull it up right now give me one second so they may be asking they may be asking for like packing data for like your boxes what
(3:32:24) you're shipping to Amazon yeah yeah I think that's what they're yeah so like it can be a pain in the ass if you're using specifically Seller Central uh I don't even know how the [ __ ] process works for Box contents in Celler Central anymore it's been so many years since I've used it uh but for us like we use a shipping software so like for us right now we're using scam power we literally go directly into scam power pull up that shipment we can pull up the physical box and we can take a screenshot that this
(3:32:50) was box six and these were the units that were inside of it this is the weight uh data that's directly in scam power and that's our quote unquote packing slip that we send screenshots of okay okay I see what you're saying here let me quickly send a screenshot in chat so you guys know what I'm talking about not applicable other ship packing list generator sign packing list I've actually never seen this in my life really never damn upload additional is this on sou investigator yeah okay that's probably why I never seen it um
(3:33:29) yeah I don't even so they probably they probably just want you to either an invoice or like a signature on like a I've had seller investigators before when we used to use them ask us to like basically produce our own invoice and sign it you shouldn't do that uh you should ask no do at that point because just open a case and manually do it yeah gotcha gotcha all right I see okay interesting thank you guys yeah so like we used to use seller investigators but it's been quite a while since we have because it just makes so much more sense assuming that
(3:34:05) we have the time to do it in house versus paying cell investigators 20 25% and that's why I want to hire somebody specifically that would be their entire job yeah no that would be smart because it does take a whole like for me it's I dedicate a day to it so that's literally a whole day I could I could be sourcing I could be packing but I'm doing reimbursements yeah so it's either like you can have a general VA that does additional tasks and you can add that on top or you can have somebody that um works for you part-time assuming that
(3:34:34) you can trust them with that child access yeah because like it is a relatively easy process to show somebody how to do it's just very tedious and timec consuming yeah I mean I have I have all the scripts I really just have to take the pictures and copy and paste the removal order and that's that's it so I guess I could hire somebody for that yeah so like if you had like my thought process for us is we're going to work on the current removal order sheet that we have uh I'm not sure how well it's going to work but I'm either going
(3:35:12) to have the pictures uploaded directly in that sheet or in a shareed Google Drive and then linked in that sheet so that the person that's working can just come in here see what the damage assessment is um and then grab those pictures whatever pictures are needed and then open up cases directly in Celler Central from that sheet and then Mark off what the progress is for that current case so if it's currently working if it's uh reimbursed if it's denied whatever the case may be gotcha gotcha and then uh just one
(3:35:42) more one more thing in that in that space um oh my God it flew out my head I'm having a Jordan moment I'll get back to you one sec down you know you know it's all love man I'm just trolling Stephan you're typing what's up uh yeah I was just entering in uh the template if anyone wants it for reimbursement so whenever we send it to Amazon basically like what it looks like on the back end sheets with all the information like uh like fsq quantity shipment ID V claim type uh reason for reimbursement and then the photo links
(3:36:28) as well and then we just have a template that basically like it just gets pre-filled right here so I'm just making sure there's not any that confidential information in there all right so I just woke up from uh you know whatever just happened but pretty much when you guys say material different right selling a lot of electronics right let's say for example someone turns the disc and you know you test it out it doesn't power on like it's there's something wrong with it but it's not like cosmetic it's it's more
(3:37:04) technical mechanical can you guys file claims for that sure be harder materially different is essentially different from when you sent it into Amazon in brand new working condition so it's a very broad term so so even if they like open the box and everything else is fine you can still file a CL correct I thought I thought when you get a return you're like you just take the hit you know but damn okay all right well I got to do a lot of work tonight then you're not going to get reimburse for absolutely everything that you try
(3:37:41) but a good chunk of it like mey said will if you push it enough how far back can you go for reimbursements I forget if there is a limitation didn't they change it recently for like 90 days or something or80 days change it I'm pretty sure the cap is 90 days 90 days okay yeah so it's even more important for us to like you said Jordan like on a weekly basis not on end of the year or oh no like that back corner is getting a bit too big it's like okay like and it's kind of like you know as you scale like it's not just when I need to do it's
(3:38:16) like oh there's now schedule of what I need to do it's a weekly task that needs to be uh done or it justs up yeah I think it's a good habit to get into even when you are you know newer getting into it and starting to scale that's a good habit to build because if you start doing it early you then you'll do it consistently um whereas like with us we basically left our returns basically sitting there for like a year year and a half cuz like we don't want to deal with this [ __ ] like we did it a couple times this a [ __ ] pay in the ass and it
(3:38:47) just we rip them in the box if we can't resell it it just sits there right and then it just becomes overwhelming and if you do it consistently then you can keep up with it get you get kind of surprised with how much you get how much money you get back 100% uh so Stefan about Loop specifically um do you primarily utilize Loop because of the crossboard feature or because of the credit that they made available to yourself yeah so I would say we mainly use Loop for anything in USD like instantly we just use the loop there um
(3:39:36) we do have two main credit cards that's the ax plat and then the loop card um essentially we plan majority of our purchases kind of around the what do you call it the billing statement like when it renews and so it's staggered kind of on a two we basis there so for example like our ax R is like on the 19th so right now we' be putting like all our purchases on the ax just because that billing statement just renewed but then when the loop one renews then will transfer all the purchasing on there um funny story I've
(3:40:12) got limited by ax twice now um two two years in a row it happens when you spend too much and you can always check so it never hurts the check being like Oh I'm GNA spend you know $10,000 can I do that and it'll tell you and the reason why I say like hey when you're kind of nearing that theoretical limit because there is a theoretical limit you know it's a charge card don't go over it because once they kind of put that ban on your account you basically have to like restart building that that credit with that it's a very good
(3:40:56) tip yeah it's it's funny that actually happened to me um like when I first got my ax I saw they had a feature for like 55 days like for cash or whatever instead of the regular 30 so I used it and they're like yeah we're limiting you I'm like what do you mean and so I was spending like $10,000 on this card a month right which is small but but I'm smaller seller uh at that at that time and pretty much they limited me down to a grand I'm like I could go to anyone else and get that limit man like what is what is this you know but they they let
(3:41:29) it go after a couple months so that's nice but see like the thing is with AMX though when they advertise like that 55 days interest free most other credit cards are very similar it's just like MX is the one that's advertising that feature most other credit cards work the exact same same way except for they have a slightly lower grace period so most other AMX or most other credit cards you have like a 21-day grace period so you have 21 days plus your 30 days from when your statement date hits to when it's when it's due so most other credit cards
(3:41:59) you have like 50 51 days AMX has a few extra days but they're they're the only ones that advertise it so like that is not like specifically a massive feature in of itself except for like you do get a couple extra days but it's nothing massive I did call Ax once and if you guys really want if you're like oh I don't want to get limited you can call them and say hey can you give me a hard limit like I don't want a charge card with the MX plat and they do they do offer that if if you ran into that issue before and I think at this point
(3:42:42) as much as we like the INX PL as much as be like metal credit cards um it makes more sense to us to kind of transition into into Loop especially when we don't like you know for ax we don't use a lot of the features it has like we don't use the point kind of in Jordan's case but like not really traveling much so like we're just getting a lot of points and cool to look at but I know we can use it but we don't use it that much so you know you know what I offered someone I they tra they travel quite a bit like they have to go
(3:43:20) different places for co-ops right they're they're in school right now I told them look I'll redeem my points for you and you just pay me how much you would pay for the ticket like give me 75% of it right so you're going to get more value than redeeming it on your statement either way right so that could be something you might want to look into just buying tickets for other people and this is a question I've I think in the chat and it's like it's been answered but I kind of want to confirm it if anyone has like an account
(3:43:50) in here this probably not the best place to ask I should probably ask my own Don accountant for this but for credit card reward points are you able to spend that on like personal stuff are you declaring that as income is this a great area kind of like how we say we throw a majority of returns in the trash like is this just the wishy-washy thing like what's going on here as far as I'm aware in Canada it's still relatively gray I believe there is some legislation about it but it's not super specified as far as I'm
(3:44:24) aware um if anybody else knows anything different let me know but yeah Big gr area in my case I have always operated under that is quote unquote free money um I can't say that that's right and we've never been audited so I can't tell you what the C would say if they audited us but that's what we've been doing so far unless something changed I think there was a case where these people um this couple bought like over a million dollars worth of mint coins Canadian Mint using their credit cards and what they would do they would just uh
(3:45:07) exchange that mint back at the bank so essentially they were just manufacturer spending so they would like say buy $10,000 with the coins using a credit card get the points and then they would just return the money to the bank exchange it and then just get their 10K back so the CRA took them to court and they essentially uh the CRA lost the case because um it was I forgot the specifics about it but essentially what it meant was that since they didn't file um their they got audited right so since they didn't file um profit on those
(3:45:44) points they uh they audited but they ended up winning the case so um from what I understand unless something changed um again I would double check with your accountant and that's good because our entire legal system operates on case law so if there's prior cases where that has happened you can say hey look at this you can't give one person special treatment not another yeah I'm pretty sure a big I heard of that case before and I'm pretty sure a big reason why they got off is cuz it was personal right like they did not do it through a
(3:46:15) business they did through their personal funds so that's another kind of way they got off of it yeah that was a big that was a big Point uh to make that's a yeah good idea that um good that you brought that up that is a pretty big distinction that um yeah you guys should be aware of yeah yeah and like so Abdul even said he's a CPA and he said it is technically income but it is a great area like many things got it all about a business is all about living in their gray right you know meals and entertainment right what meals and entertainment
(3:47:00) yeah all I gotta say well I was listening to this um CPA he was uh his uh business account he was basically saying that he had uh quite a few of his clients basically write off a lot of these you know these Guru type purchases like getting a Rolex or getting like um a G wagon stuff like that and essentially what this mind you this was in the States but I think he said that I could apply in Canada as well is that you would essentially buy them as a business expense and then like create a YouTube account or some form of media where you
(3:47:40) would essentially just say like look I'm buying this Rolex because I make videos on watches and that is uh to make that's for an income so essentially they would just write yeah technically business expense and the government can't yeah exactly bus well has to be reasonable right you can't be like buying watches and rxes and be like yeah I'm a I'm a watch and car and plane dealer and this and that you have to show evidence what you're doing right so hence the videos I'm a watch reviewer or I do this because it helps my my my lifestyle
(3:48:15) brand yeah exactly like for example if I place a purchase order to buy allegedly allegedly to buy a gift for someone like I buy some Legos and I you know take one from the batch and give as a gift to someone cuz my business deals with distribution and I write that off allegedly as as just as like a bad product right then that's you know it's a great area but you know allegedly so that's the but yeah like with the CRA I took I'm I'm I'm school for finance FYI and like accounting and all this stuff for CRA it just has to be reasonable like they're
(3:48:55) not going to come after you for like you are Arc oh yeah there's definitely an arc in here that actually works for the CRA I guarantee you oh 100% I'm not even joking I I guarantee there is I'm not aren't you a government worker bro I mean he kind of outed me but yeah I for I'm not an audit okay I'm not an audit uhuh if anybody in here gets audited you know why bro I have an nft pfp M that's what fed would say though yeah I I don't exist on paper so good luck finding me I actually have the identity of a uh a child that died in the 50s
(3:49:59) right no I'll tell you one thing is that CRA they're they have essentially systems where they they go for the low hanging fruit right they go for the um you know smaller businesses uh individuals so Proprietors over corporations because of you know it just takes more investment and time to go after corporations uh especially since they're more complex so they go for the easier Case Files first and they do have an automated system where they there are certain triggers that pop up and then if you're put on that trigger
(3:50:41) then yeah they're going to make your life kind of Hell cu once you get audited they they uh you put on like um put like on the list and essentially you know they'll scrutinize your transactions and uh your file a lot more than anyone else and I mean there's even even if if it's like a false positive like I know cases where for example uh one of my one of my friends uh mother she is retired but she gives a lot of Charity and they just Ed the hell out of her like every year every single year even though she doesn't do anything
(3:51:26) suspicious and she's giving to register Charities there was something I'm not sure he doesn't really know her history her tax history but uh she's just in their system 100% And yeah like obviously if you do things that look like the red flags where it's like you have way massive more income the year prior or you're claiming so much in certain expenses that is unreasonable those types of things will flag it more than usual right yeah but I'll tell you this like the CR is really low tag there like as as per usual with regards to government
(3:52:01) they're always very slow on optic um so there's a lot of things like for example in crypto that they're very uneducated or they don't have the resources in place to deal with auditing and all that stuff so yeah yeah I think they're still backlogged with uh auditing all the the co payments that people shouldn't have got oh yeah dude a lot of people frauded that system oh I know I have a lot of uh family members that did allegedly allegedly they alleged don't I know who you are Danny don't worry I'm [ __ ] um well just because you asked the
(3:52:45) question you mentioned about um how people go about finding wholesalers we did have the conversation a little bit earlier um people like Dan mentioned that his primary method was contacting Brands directly and asking for their list of wholesalers and Distributors and then also utilizing things like trade shows that tends to be some of the most popular methods and I would tend to agree that's why I find majority of mine as well and then Jaden asked do expire products which for example may never have got sent in ever count as disposed of in
(3:53:29) business expense 100% they do they're a product that has become unsellable so if it's deemed a disposition that this product that you purchased that you're not able to resell it is always considered a a business expense uh Bell not crate shows trade shows crate shows you're gonna be go watching dogs or something dude I don't know what kind of shows I don't know what kind of shows you're into some kind of furry stuff I mean dude the milk crate Market think about it the Exotic milk crate Market who's talking about it no one milk crate what
(3:54:20) is that yeah like like you know those crates those plastic ones in the grocery stores with like you know milk are you talking about what are you talking about are you talking about like actual milk or is this like no no the here here here let me send you a photo one sec SEC okay Home Depot don't call me a guru Abdul I I will I will banish you these oh oh okay okay okay okay okay yeah what about them n the Exotic Mark man it's out there start flipping them on Amazon they're they're they're worthless no I think like a crate a
(3:55:11) crate show like that's like a good place for like fur is and stuff of for rec convention just be not listening to this Ah that's hilarious melan she's like no I'm done that was too much the moment he said he a f yeah I'm out yeah there dude's finessing thousands of dollars of free cologne every month yeah hey you put me on those by the way a dude you like your collection's probably huge now the uh I make fun of you I'm done I'm done collect what's that I make fun of you I make fun of you for this all the time you're the most degenerate non
(3:56:12) Deen I've ever heard of well I mean I mean it depends what your definition of dgen is it's not real as long as it's not real money well I mean gambling with server points that's like you know different from actual money so nfts and mem coins no problem hey I never tou I never touched meme coins and nfts they have utility okay they're dead hold on hold on utility real quick one second so does that mean when Jordan gives out free points for the server and we can redeem it for a one month subscription which is actually a dollar
(3:56:52) amount that I told him we have to claim that as a as a as a benefit I don't know no no I told him that they have value because he's trying to well I mean I mean okay look are you running a gambling house now you're trading points is this the is that what I'm hearing okay I see B ban Jaden the unsanctioned currency get them out of here um no none of that well like for real in terms of utility uh block there's definitely a feature for blockchain utility um token identification um especially for if you look look at things that there's a
(3:57:34) there's a lot of I guess usage for if you look at legal files identification uh case case law uh for example Wills uh because the thing is with blockchain it's Unique identifiers right you can't really fake it unless well of course if quantum Computing comes around but that's a different story but with with that there is definitely utility so you could use it as a membership pass and there are large companies that have done that or are doing it where they use your nft token as a membership access pass um for events and products and
(3:58:14) early releases and that sort of stuff so yeah there there is utility there there are is definitely utility there but there's a lot of [ __ ] there's a lot of money laundering too there's a lot of uh people buying art for millions of dollars that's shouldn't be worth it that much and you know same same in I guess real art people are quoting about real art but yeah I'm fully out of nfts it's been like two years since I touched it so dude I don't think any nfts are worth anything anymore oh they are they are there's one called pudgy
(3:58:53) penguins and they have a deal with Disney actually oh so yeah no there's there's some big uh brands that well web 2 is what we call the traditional Brands and web 3 is the nft um I guess blockchain Brands but there are like you know real uh contracts and agreements and collabs that are going on between the two so it's not just you know a bunch of kids making monkeys and dogs and frogs and selling them and creating it and just rug pulling yeah there's a lot of that but there are legit companies that are putting a lot of money for example Nike
(3:59:35) and artifact I don't know if you heard of artifact maybe if you guys some of you guys who are into shoes sneaker Bing or sneakers the n heard of artifact Nik yeah yeah yeah so and I don't know if you heard of the um the artist one of the artists that they did a collab with um Nike artifact uh artifact is basically it was established as a web 3 company which is nft started as an nft and they have official uh collabs and then there's this one artist that is part of their who actually designed their nft he's the
(4:00:14) big Japanese guy hold on forgot his name uh satosi Nakamoto say that I was about to say that Jordan wait wait wait wait wait wait wait what's his name uh he does the flowers um those flowers what do you call it pretty big H I know who you're talking about it starts with the m like M Murray or something H I don't know clone X so the morami there you go morami yeah yeah yeah that that guy so I mean his uh tekashi morami so he does his his signature is those flowers those colorful uh flowers I mean his art pieces have sold for millions
(4:01:05) and millions of dollars and he even has like his own museum um and different art exhibits around the world so his his he was essentially behind behind the nfts that they created and and Nike essentially bought them out um bought the artifact out so they're part um Nike ownes artifact and so yeah I mean there's that and then there's um like I said pgy penguins which were um it just started out as a community it there wasn't any like VC funding behind or anything it was just a community of people that created it and
(4:01:40) then it just suddenly kep started growing and growing whereas other nfts kind of died out and it's and then it started to secure Partnerships with major companies so yeah I mean there is there is definitely promise there and utility um I wanted to ask because we're going super off combo uh Stephan mey uh was there anything else that you guys wanted to share or cover I know you guys have been kicking around for a while and I certainly appreciate everything that you shared in the session so far I'm I'm I'm pretty I'm tired as hell
(4:02:28) now for real yeah I was going to say kind of gave my the tail end here so it's probably late for everyone the East there so might as well have a good good wrap up here yeah well well I certainly appreciate everything that you guys have shared this evening I know it may not seem like it to you but these types of insights that we have are certainly valuable to a lot of people more than you probably know so it is very appreciated um always calls the last thing I wanted to mention is just because it was brought up with like the
(4:03:06) platforms like Loop and Vault when we're having those conversations I I can't promise anything but ideally um through the scales of economy and you know the potential to have more customers all flocking at one time it'll hopefully Earnest things like specialty interest rates certain perks with credit cards those types of things I can't guarantee it'll happen but I'm hoping that we'll be able to negotiate something like that and that's kind of how we want to Leverage The Power of this group kind of going forward for all
(4:03:40) types of different group buys and services because it can certainly help a lot to leverage a large group of people to negotiate much better pricing for all different types of things so hopefully we can start with Loop and Vault uh but we will see uh but yeah I think we'll wrap it up there so I appreciate everybody coming out and everybody that stuck around for this long it end up being quite a long session longer than I was expecting uh mey thank you for being here from the beginning and all the way to the end
(4:04:10) and yeah for everybody that shared any insights ask some good questions always very appreciated and yeah I hope everybody has themselves a good rest of their night and a solid week this week well good night y'all all right thanks thanks guys take care