From $7.25 to 7 Figures With Amazon FBA with Joshua Crisp

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like The Product Boss. Today, we'll be breaking down how one entrepreneur went from$7.25 to seven figures with Amazon FBA. To drop these value bombs, I am brought to Joshua Crisp in the EO Fire Studios. Joshua is a world-renowned expert in the e-commerce industry, recognized as one of the leading authorities in the field. His deep understanding of the e-commerce landscape, combined with his extensive experience in real estate, uniquely positions him to guide and mentor aspiring entrepreneurs towards financial success.

0:45In today's Foundation, we'll talk about private label, how it's different from other FBA methods like wholesale and arbitrage. We'll talk about passive income, mistakes other people are making in this space, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Joshua and our sponsors. Online Marketing Made Easy podcast, hosted by Amy Porterfield, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. With a focus on online business, including digital courses, list building content, and more, Online Marketing Made Easy breaks down big ideas and strategies into actionable step-by-step processes.

1:20A recent episode that will help you get more results with a whole lot less stress is on four ways to avoid burnout. Listen to Online Marketing Made Easy wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training, where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Joshua, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:59Awesome. Thanks for having me. And what's up, Fire Nation? I think one of the most devious things is I think a lot of people feel that you need to become lucky or you need to be given this crazy opportunity when really consistent and dedicated work out trumps any type of skill anytime. So that's what I believe. Fire Nation, we're just getting going today. We're talking about going from$7.25 to seven figures with Amazon FBA. And just for people out there that may not know, Joshua, what the heck is Amazon FBA? Yeah, so Amazon FBA is essentially where you partner with Amazon and Amazon is going to pick, pack, store, and ship these products.

2:42FBA is on the consumer side. When you shop on Amazon and you are a prime member, you're able to receive products within two days, guaranteed, free shipping, low prices, and that's the consumer side. From the seller side or the producer side. It's where we basically partner with them and they handle all the logistics as well as bring us all of the clientele. FBA fulfilled by Amazon. So Fire Nation, it's a lot, a lot of people to come up with a great idea, a great product, and then utilize Amazon's unbelievable logistics system plus marketing. I mean, there's a whole other bag that we can get into there to sell your products.

3:24And that's incredible. But I want to move into some more details about private label and how private label is actually different from other FBA methods, like let's say wholesale or arbitrage. So let's get into that. What the heck is private label? Yeah, great question. So there's three main different strategies or selling selling processes. As you mentioned, you have private label, you have wholesale, then you have arbitrage. So all of them are essentially selling physical products and branded products. The main difference is with wholesale, you are a distributor of a well-known already existing brand and you are buying them below minimum advertised pricing, which is MAP, and you're selling them at retail.

4:13So you buy them below MSRP, which is manufacturer suggested retail pricing and you sell them at MSRP, you keep the difference. Now, arbitrage is where you are not a distributor, but you are going to buy these brands and these products at a discount, whether it be online or in physical person, going to the actual location yourself, finding them on sale, and then you're selling them at retail and you're keeping the spread. So the pros and the cons, I mean, with arbitrage, you can start with little to no money. You can just buy stuff on sale. The con is it's not sustainable as these sales don't always exist.

4:48Number one, going over to wholesale, the pro with wholesale is you don't have to invent any products or find any products or build a brand. The cons are going to be you don't really have any intellectual property. You're just a distributor. And as a distributor, you're competing with all of these large distribution chains such as Walmart, Costco, Best Buy, all these different distributors that have more buying power than you. A second con with wholesale is you're going to have to prepare the products and send them in to Amazon, or you're going to have to facilitate them and do it from your own facility or your own home, right?

5:26The path that I chose and what I believe is the best is going to be private label. And the con that a lot of people feel that is a con is, well, you have to find the product and you have to invest in inventory. The reason why I like it is because there's less restriction and there's less opportunity in terms of people getting started with little to no money, which means there's not that much competition. The second reason why I like it is because you have intellectual property. So there's two things I'm looking for when starting a business. Number one is, is it sustainable? Can I generate this income 24-7, 365, regardless of what's going on in the economy?

6:01And number two, can I sell or exit this business? So it's very difficult. You can't sell an arbitrage business. And when you're doing wholesale, the margins are very, very low. Therefore, the EBITDA or the evaluation on selling the company is low as well. So the highest evaluations on selling these companies that we've seen are privately owned, labeled businesses and brands where we can cash flow. And then when we sell them, we can sell them for a large price. So there's a lot that I like here, Fire Nation. One thing I want to just double back on is the whole thing about competition. A lot of people, they're like, well, you know what?

6:35I mean, I want to just go for the lowest hanging fruit. And if there's a lot of competition, that means a lot of people are successfully doing it. So maybe that's a good idea. To me, it's the higher the barrier, the lower the competition. So you actually want a high barrier in place. That's why I did a seven day a week podcast because I raised the flipping barrier. You can't just say, I'm going to put out four episodes a month and compete with entrepreneurs on fire. I wanted the barrier to be high. I wanted people to have to work their butts off to compete with me. And this is an opportunity with private label because of what Joshua was sharing with you.

7:10Now, before we move on, Joshua, give me just one or two examples of private label and how you've seen it work specifically, like a specific product. And again, we can just kind of be as vague or as specific as you're able to on this, but I'm really curious to see how this works in the real world. I'll give you a perfect example of a product that I've launched in the past that's generated me over a million dollars. So it was a bath bomb set. The number one competition in the world was Lush. And Lush has retail stores all over the world and they have a huge online presence. one of their most popular lines of products are bath bombs.

7:50So I got introduced to the bath and body industry by my first mentor whom I met through my wife. And he just happened to be a manufacturer and he sold business to business for bath and body products. So that's how I got into that world. And one of my first products that really crushed it was in that industry and it was the bath bomb. So essentially what we're looking for when we're bringing products to the marketplace is we're looking for a product that is going to, that has been selling, is selling, and will continue to sell. You can use free tools like Google Trends to look at the historical data.

8:23If it's been selling, is selling, and will continue to sell, that's a good product. I'm looking for products that really aren't gender or age specific. So with bath bombs, you can have a 56-year-old woman who's getting off work and wants to wind down who can use them. You can get a 35-year-old male who just got out the gym and got done working out who can use them. Or you can get five and six-year-old kids whose parents want to use them to make bath time fun. So it met that criteria. They've been searched. They've been used. And we could predict that they're going to continue to use. Because when you're doing research and you're pulling the data, you want to make decisions based off of data, never off of emotions.

9:01So that's how the preliminary research that I did. And then what I did and what all of you guys can do when you're building any type of product, whether physical or digital, is look at what the consumers love. Make sure you keep that. Too many people let their emotion get involved when it comes to product development. So I knew what they loved, but I really honed in on what they hate. So during product development, I'm really studying one to three stars. So I segment them three to five, and I keep those. Those are good reviews. Those are things that people love. and then I'm segmenting one to three and I'm putting them on an Excel sheet and I'm studying what people hate.

9:35So I was able to exploit that a majority of people, they had brand loyalty, they had brands that they love, they had different packages that they were buying that they loved, but the biggest concern was people only offered one set or one variation and they would have to go try different brands to get different fragrances or colors or sizes or shapes. So what I did is I took that one problem and this you can learn a lot from this because I learned this from Naveel James Who is a billionaire? I've heard him speak at keynotes and when asked how did you become a billionaire? He said I focused on one problem, which was the biggest problem and I just solved that problem So the biggest problem in my industry was the selection So we were the only company in the world every single month to drop new selections.

10:20I worked that out with the supplier I had 12 different purchase orders. I had sizes colors shapes fragrances already pre-discussed pre-negotiated and every single month we were dropping and releasing new variations and that's how we're able to crush it and become you know uh top top seller in the world selling bath bombs we've sold literally hundreds of thousands of units um and the beautiful thing about amazon is once you get known and you get brand uh notoriety and you get it you know to the first page you're going to get sales that come from two areas you're going to have organic, which is people just shopping for keywords or search terms for your products, you popping up and having a combination of a few things, good listing image, good price, good reviews.

11:01And then you're going to have the paid traffic, which is where you're paying to play. And Amazon has its own ecosystem, just like Facebook, just like Instagram, just like YouTube, which is called PPC or pay per click. So in a combination of getting all these people that coming to Amazon already with buyer intent, ready to buy this product, I was then advertising my product. And that's essentially where I say, Amazon, I'm going to pay you to put my product in front of people who are using search terms relevant to my product, like bath bomb gift set, bath bombs, bath bombs for Mother's Day, gifts for her, et cetera.

11:36And then the third stage is using exterior based traffic. And I went into influencers. And again, these are strategies that are applicable to any business, digital or physical. And we really, that's when we really turned it up. And that's where we use the Fashion Nova approach where we went and we partnered with influencers who had relevant audiences. And these are on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, mommy blog owners, blog owners, website owners. And we reached out and we basically said, hey, listen, this is our product. We think you'd be a good fit to market and advertise our product.

12:10How much does it cost? What does it look like? And the rest is history. Fire Nation, literally history. I mean, I love that concept of going in, looking at those one star, those two stars, picking out the biggest problem and saying, hey, can I realistically and effectively solve this problem, this complaint that people have in a meaningful way? And Joshua did it. And here we are today talking about it. And I love that other thing about the influencers. I mean, especially back in the day. I mean, it's still prevalent now, but a lot of those influencers, man, they didn't even know what they were sitting on.

12:44You could just be like, hey, what's your post price? And they'd be like, oh, like 50 bucks. You're like, okay, here's$50. And like they're posting something, you're like, holy crap. If they only knew the kind of authority, influence, and traffic and leads they were sending. Like it's worth checking out exactly what influencers would make the biggest impact for you and your products. And we have a lot more to talk about, Fire Nation, when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Expectations are at an all-time high these days for sales leaders and sales teams. Beyond your daily cold calls, the relationship building, and actually closing deals, you're also expected to leverage a slew of different tech to-dos.

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15:01ZipRecruiter.com slash fire. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash F-I-R-E. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Do you have a message inside that you know is meant to be shared with the world? Giving a TEDx talk is one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and Thought Leader can help you get there. Thought Leader is a speaker coaching company that has helped over 550 and counting coaches, speakers, entrepreneurs, authors, and experts land TEDxTalks. Thought Leader is not affiliated with TED or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder, Taylor Conroy, is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EO Fire guest.

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16:14The dream is passive income. We're talking sipping coconuts in a hammock while the money flows in. is it realistic that we could automate a business like this? Absolutely. This is a really good point because this is where the business model has some negative notion because I feel that any business to a certain consent, depending on the field, can be automated. And I follow this acronym, which is more of a framework. It's called ASAP, A-S-A-P, which stands for Autonomous Sustainable Action Perpetuity. And I feel that those are the four things to generating a cash flowing, true passive business, regardless of what industry you're in.

16:55But when we're talking about Amazon, Amazon is front in loaded. Anybody thinks that they're going to get started with Amazon and do nothing and retire in the first month or first week, it's just unrealistic. Now, Amazon is a catalyst and does have the capabilities and the opportunities to be able to be a passive business, but you have to put in the frameworks and the systems and the processes. So it looks like this. Step number one, and we truly believe like with one product, you can build a six-figure business. With four products, you can build a$1 million business. And the three products that make your four product portfolio are basically complementary to that one product.

17:34So when we're getting started, we want to find this one product, this one niche, this one category and break into that category. And we want to get this thing up and running. A lot of people have a misconception that, well, what if I find a bad product or a failing product or the product doesn't sell? I've been in this industry since 2015. I've been a consultant since 2017. I've coached thousands of clients. And nine times out of 10, when a product is not crushing it or a product is not doing as well as the client thought it would be, it's not a product problem. It's a person problem. So rule number one is identifying a winning product.

18:09and here's the thing and this is data that you can google right this isn't me just talking is this is googleable data like there's literally 300 million prime users there's less than 3 million sellers so mathematically it is impossible that it's going to be saturated and you're not going to be able to get started but once you get started and you find that product if the product is not selling it's a combination of a few things price point the amount of reviews that you have listing quality or you're just not advertising it efficiently, right? Once you have that all dialed in and you're starting to get your first set of sales, the minute you are profitable, you can then hire a virtual assistant.

18:47So you can hire a VA on onlinejobs.ph for anywhere between $2.50 to around$6. We've seen the best has been$4 to$5 for quality. The beautiful thing about VAs is if you're in America and you're working on PST or Central or EST, they are literally working while you sleep. So now your business is working 24 hours a day. You work during the day, they work at night. Once you get to that fourth product and you have a seven figure run rate, you hire another VA and they work the opposite shifts. So now you have 24 hours, seven days a week coverage and your business is being ran by these VAs. The beautiful thing is, like I said, it's front end loaded.

19:25Once you find the products, the products are up and running and they're selling, you only have two things. Number one, making sure that your account health is in order, which is a combination of not running out of inventory, responding to customer complaints or messages, and making sure that you monitor the account's overall status. And then number two is making sure that you don't run out of inventory. So the beautiful thing is the suppliers and the manufacturers, they're making the products and shipping them directly to Amazon. We're not touching any products. And then Amazon already has these clients and customers coming to Amazon, typing in keywords to find your products with buying intent.

20:02So it can be passive. I would say realistically a timeframe, like if you really go all in and maybe you have another job while you're doing this, or you can devote several hours a day to doing this, one year to maybe a year and a half would be a good timeframe to be able to scale this to six to seven figures and have it fully automated through the systems and the employees. So I want to focus on one single mistake, that you see other people do all too often that you can help Fire Nation avoid. Give us one mistake. Oh man, that's tough because I've made so many that cost so much money. I would say if I had to choose on one, and to make this simple, because I feel that complexity is the thief of completion or conversion, right?

20:51The more difficult you make this thing called business or success or Amazon, whatever you call it, the more difficult it's going to be to be successful. There's only two ways that you can fail, not starting and giving up. Everybody gets amped up. Everybody has the fire and the desire to get started. But then when they hit adversity, they hit any obstacle, they lose a little bit of money. Someone questions them. They make a mistake. They want to give up. So as cliche and as boring as this sounds, whatever it is that you choose to start, just do not give up because all of these businesses, they work.

21:23For instance, Amazon wasn't this mystery business that made me a millionaire. It did make me a millionaire, but the thing that truly made me a millionaire was taking action and not giving up. So it's impossible for you not to get results if you start and you do not give up. Now, the key is every mistake that you make or anything that you go through, any turmoil or any mistake or anything, adversity that you're going through that makes you want to give up, document it and rectify it as fast as humanly possible. Studying some of the wealthiest people alive, some of the billionaires and reading their autobiographies, they all have these cultures within their organizations and companies.

21:58And it's fail fast, fail forward, fail often. Because failure is not a true failure unless you continue to make the same mistakes. Failures are absolutely lessons. And when you take that lesson and you implement what you've learned as fast as humanly possible, it's impossible for you not to keep moving throughout the chapters or the levels towards a higher success. If Fire Nation wanted to connect with you, wanted to learn more about you and what you have going on, what is your call to action for Fire Nation today? Yeah, all across social media, it's just my name, Joshua Crisp. We have the largest library of videos on Amazon FBA, nothing for sale on my YouTube channel, just Joshua Crisp.

22:40And if you want to connect with me personally, I'm most active on Instagram at officialjoshuacrisp. Fire Nation, you're the average. of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JC and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Joshua in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Joshua, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side. Appreciate it, John. Thanks a lot, man. Hey, Fire Nation, And a huge thank you to our sponsors and Joshua for sponsoring today's episode.

23:19And Fire Nation, what can 3 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? Well, my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Online Marketing Made Easy podcast, hosted by Amy Porterfield, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with a focus on online business, including digital courses, list building content and more.

24:07Online Marketing Made Easy breaks down big ideas and strategies into actionable step-by-step processes. A recent episode that will help you get more results with a whole lot less stress is on four ways to avoid burnout. Listen to Online Marketing Made Easy wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free trading where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.