604: How to Make $3.2M/Year Reselling Products on Amazon

24:03So the worst possible way to talk to either a brand owner or a supplier of any sort is to say something along the lines of, hey, I'm Corey, I'm an Amazon seller. I want to buy some of your products. Can you send me over your pricing? That's the wrong way. Correct. That's the wrong way. 99 times, I'd even say 900 times out of a thousand, you're going to get either hung up on, they're going to say something very rude to you. Because listen, most of these brands are getting contacted by 50 people per week looking to do exactly what I just said. And they're sick of hearing it. And the reason that they don't like Amazon sellers is because Amazon sellers are notorious for being poor communicators, for not being serious business owners.

24:47Brand owners picture Amazon sellers as a guy in their basement looking to make a quick buck flipping products. right? So the way that we reframe that approach is by being very specific and telling them exactly what we want. So being specific and being concise. So instead of saying, Hey, Mike, I'm Corey, I'm an Amazon seller. I'd like to sell your products. Can you send me your pricing? I would do a little bit of upfront research before that call. I'm talking like two to three minutes, not 30 minutes. And all I want to know is, all right, when I talk to Mike, what products specifically do I want to buy?

25:21So that way I can show him I'm serious. So when I call up Mike, I say, Hey Mike, I'm Corey Gannon. I own a retail business. I know you get these calls every week, so I'll make it quick. I have three products specifically from your brand that I'm looking to purchase. I know the exact quantities that I want to buy and I have a price in mind that I'm willing to pay. So if we can come to an agreement on that price point, then I can get you a purchase order today. So would you mind sending me over your dealer application? Right? So you see how that's an entirely separate approach because in Mike's mind, when he hears that second approach, he's like, okay, well, this guy knows what he wants.

25:58He knows the quantity that he wants. Sounds like he's serious. He told me he can get me a PO today. Okay, maybe it's worth a shot. And that takes your chances from 1 % to now maybe 30 to 50%. Okay. Yeah. Significant improvement for sure. Yeah. Well, let's say you get a yes. And now you're on the hook to send over that purchase order. Like, what does that look like? If I'm a brand new seller, like, oh, shoot, like, I wasn't prepared for that. Now I got to figure out how to make this look official right away. The beautiful part of that approach is notice how I said, well, hey, if we can come to an agreement on pricing, quantity, those types of things, then I can get you an order.

26:35I'm not just saying, hey, I'm going to send you a purchase order, even if you're charging me retail price. That's not what I'm saying at all. So at that point, it becomes a conversation of, okay, let me fill out your application. Let me get a look at your pricing so that I can go back to my team. Or if you don't have a team, you could just say, I can go back to my workstation and put that order together for you. I'll have it over to you before the end of the day. And now let's say Mike sends you pricing that's just way out of whack. It's not going to work. It's not profitable. You know you can't place that order.

27:06That's when you start that negotiation process. That's when I would call Mike and say, hey, Mike, I just got your pricing. I appreciate you getting that over to me. unfortunately, based on the pricing that you guys are offering me, I'm just not going to be able to be competitive based on the pricing on Amazon that I'm seeing at the moment. So with that being said, do you guys offer any sort of quantity discounts? Is there a certain amount that I would need to buy in order to get, say, a 10 % off? That's when you start to dangle that carrot in front of him. Listen, Mike, I'd love to buy. I'm ready to buy.

27:41But at the current pricing, it just doesn't make sense. You see? How are you calculating the price that you need to get it at based on, you can see the public sales price on Amazon, but then you got to back out the stocking fees, all this other stuff that's going to eat into that margin. So talk to me about how you need to think about pricing and where you need to be at on the purchase side. The tool that I used to do that is called SellerAmp and it's just selleramp.com. The starting pricing is like$20 a month. So it's a super cheap tool. and what that is, it's also a Chrome extension. It'll essentially pops up a tool on the Amazon listing page where all I have to do is enter my buy cost into seller amp.

28:21And it shows me my profit that's going to be left over after accounting for all of Amazon's fees. Oh, that's really cool. Okay. Yeah. So I can just take Mike's, if Mike gives me pricing, I can literally copy his price, paste it into seller amp and seller amp might say, well, Hey, you're going to lose$2 or Hey, hey, this is a$6 profit and you're at a 30 % ROI. Great. Hey, Mike, here's the purchase. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How many can I get? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah, that's super helpful. Is there a minimum either percentage margin or dollar margin that makes things interesting or makes things worthwhile for you?

28:54You'll hear a lot of debate on this, like among the Amazon seller community. You'll hear people say, well, I won't buy anything for less than a 30 % ROI or I've got to have a 15 % margin, right? So my opinion on profitability is I like to look at products from the lens of how much profit is this going to make me per month? Because when I look at monthly dollar profit instead of like ROI or margin, then that pretty much factors all of those things in. So if I know that I only buy products and I'm expecting to make, say,$250 in profit per month, then if I can do the math based on estimated sales times my dollar profit per unit, if that's greater than$250, then I buy it.

29:38If it's less than$250, I don't. Do you see what I mean? Are you estimating your monthly sales based on that? Well, Amazon publicly said it was selling 500 units a month, or you have to kind of divide that by the 10 sellers that are on that listing? You actually have to divide it by the number of, actually the number of competitive sellers on the listing. So that's a mistake that a lot of sellers make is they'll look at that listing and say, well, this listing selling 500 units a month, but there's 20 sellers on it. So I'm only going to sell, I don't do math publicly, but. Sure. A fraction of it.

30:11Yeah. Yeah, whatever that number is. But what people need to realize is that just because there's 20 sellers on that listing doesn't mean that all 20 sellers are getting an equal share of those sales, right? You want to be looking at competitive sellers. Now, competitive seller to me is any seller that is priced within 2 % of the buy box. And tools like SellerAmp will tell you the number of competitive sellers. So to use that same example, instead of dividing by just the 20 total sellers, of those 20, there might only be five that are competitive. So that way, instead of dividing 500 by 20, I'm dividing 500 by five.

30:49You see what I mean? Okay. And say, I can reasonably expect to sell a hundred of these. Exactly. Okay. Do you find that as more and more sellers get into the game, that there's a natural downward pressure on price as people start to freak out? I'm sitting on all this inventory. I just want to move it. And so one person undercuts the next guy I buy five cents and the next person undercuts that and you like see this race to the bottom. Listen, that definitely happens. And now that is going to be super common with arbitrage, right? When we talk online arbitrage or retail arbitrage, you hear all the horror stories of, well, I thought I was going to make a$30 profit and now I'm losing$5, right?

31:26So that very common in an arbitrage business, it happens in a wholesale business. But if you do your research properly, you really limit your downside. So another tool that we use, it's called Keepa. It'll basically show you the competition on that listing over time. So Keepa will show me the number of sellers on that listing. And as long as that level of competition is not like rapidly increasing, then I know that demand is going to be relatively the same. Supply is going to be relatively the same. Therefore, price is going to be relatively the same. Now, if I looked at Keepa and I say, well, okay, last week there was 10 sellers on this listing.

32:07now there's 15 sellers on that listing. Well, that means competition just went up by 50 % and price has got to come down. It's supply and demand at the end of the day. So without getting too much into the weeds, there are some pretty simple tools that we use to tell us with a pretty high level of estimation, whether that price is going to come down or whether it's going to be relatively steady. Is that the biggest risk that you see just like making a big order and having it be unprofitable or having the price kind of get cut out from under you? That is definitely going to be one of the bigger risks, especially for newer sellers.

32:42Because listen, if you're a newer seller, you're going to make those mistakes. I mean, I still make those mistakes, right? Because some situations you just can't predict and it happens, which is why I always recommend if it's the first time you're buying a particular product or a particular brand, you want to place what I call a test order, right? So a test order is going to be anywhere from, let's say, one to two weeks worth of inventory. We know what one to two weeks worth of inventory is using that seller amp sales estimation tool that I mentioned. So instead of buying two months worth of product, I'm going to buy two weeks worth of product.

33:18And worst case scenario, absolute worst case, I might break even or lose a dollar or two per unit, not the end of the world. Best case, it sells well. Now I got to go back and buy more. Okay. More with Corey in just a moment, including how much of his$3.2 million in sales last year was actually profit and what new Amazon sellers should know about startup costs, licenses, and logistics right after this. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path? But one thing 100 % of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot.

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34:31Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle. Shopify.com slash side hustle. So of the 3.2 million from last year, like how much shakes out to the bottom line? Historically, our net margin in our business is like 4.8 % about their lifetime. So, but that being said, I have a virtual team. So I've got virtual assistants. We use prep centers to do all of our shipping and I'll handle all of our logistics. And the reason I bring this up is a large portion of our business is outsourced and there's costs associated with that.

35:14Yeah. And you're paying yourself. before. Exactly. So my personal salary is factored into our operating expenses. So with my salary included, we're at about a 4.8 % net margin. Now I did the math recently, if I were to not pay myself a salary, if I were just to keep that profit in the business, our net margin would be closer to about 8%. So a healthy wholesale business is operating in the five to 8 % net margin range, a wholesale business that's doing 10 % net is crushing it. And it's probably not very big because at scale, seven figures or multiple seven figures per year, you're going to be doing about five to 8 % net, assuming you're taking a good salary.

35:58Yeah. Now coming from like the online content business world where you're like, shoot, 80%, 90 % margin some months, I'm like, Ooh, five to 10, like that seems real thin. But to your point, it's like, well, it's less about that percentage than it is about the actual dollars at the end of the month. And as that grows, you're like, yeah, I would still, if I'm trading$100 for$105, like, okay, lather, rinse, repeat. If I could do that predictably and reliably, I'll do that all day. So that's really helpful to know and appreciate your transparency on all of that. Because I think that's, I think people will naturally be curious.

36:31It's easy to post a big revenue number, but what, you know, how much you actually making. So that's really cool. That's a reason too why people that are familiar with the Amazon space, they call them orange bars, right? Because in your Amazon seller app, it shows your sales in a graph format and those graphs are portrayed as orange bars. And so a very common skeptical thing that people say in the industry is, well, forget about the orange bars. What's your profit? And I agree with that completely, which is why you never really see me on my social media posting my revenue or my orange bars, because I've been around long enough to know that that means nothing, right?

37:07It's all about profit. What was shocking to me was the speed at which inventory turned. I approached retail arbitrage as kind of skeptical. In the era of big data, how does Walmart have profitable arbitrage products sitting on its shelves? Why wouldn't they just send it into Amazon? But sure enough, there they were. And within a day of hitting the warehouse, they were sold. And I was like, oh, you sold$120 something yesterday. I was like, really? That stuff must have just landed. And as soon as it hit, it was gone. I was like, dang, okay, this is real. Like it was really eyeopening from that standpoint, but that was orange bars.

37:43It's like, okay, well, you had to pay X for that inventory. So you minus out whatever the actual profit was on that. I wanted to ask about typical startup costs, like for this one to two weeks worth of inventory, test order, what's typical? What are you seeing for new wholesalers getting into it? My advice is going to be five to 10K and capital for inventory. Now, again, that's for inventory. So if you plan on buying a course or if you plan on any sort of information to kind of help you get started, that's going to be separate. Right. So five to 10 K for inventory. Now, with that said, you don't nor should you spend all of that money on one order or on one product or even with one supplier.

38:25Let's say you're starting off with five K for inventory. Well, I'd love to see you spend five hundred dollars to a thousand dollars at a time. Right. So take that 5K, spread it out among, let's say, five different suppliers, five different purchase orders and let's say five to 10 products per order. You see what I mean? So you've got 5K spread over, let's say, 50 different products. So that way, because some inevitably won't do well, well, you cut the losers, you double down on the winners and then you find more winners. It's a very simple business at the end of the day. It's just a repetition game.

39:03And it's a game of how quickly can I make mistakes so that I can not make those mistakes in the future and move forward. Okay, so you get the pricing that looks good. You plugged it into the tool like, okay, I'm going to make my desired sales per unit and estimate this much per month. You send over the purchase order. Did they send the product to you? Did they send it directly to the Amazon warehouse? Where do you send the stuff? That is going to be the second half of the equation, right? The first half is going to be finding the supplier, finding the products. Second half is, well, now I got to get it to Amazon.

39:33There's two ways to actually sell on Amazon. There's FBM, which stands for fulfilled by merchant. And think of FBM as kind of how you would sell on eBay. If I have a product that I'm fulfilling by merchant, if a customer buys it from me, I'm packing up that individual product and I'm shipping it to that individual customer. That's like the eBay model. Now, you also have what's called FBA or fulfilled by Amazon, where I get all my inventory, right? I buy products and I ship all of them to Amazon upfront in bulk. Now, when Amazon receives them, that's when the customers have the ability to buy them from me.

40:12And when a customer buys a product from me, Amazon then fulfills each individual order to that customer. You see what I mean? So with FBA, we're doing all of our shipping upfront in bulk. Our FBA products qualify for Prime. Yes, you pay higher fees in exchange for that, but the customer, you see a higher conversion rate because it's Prime eligible and you only had to touch it once. You're not making trips to the post office. Exactly. So FBA is going to be a little more expensive in terms of fees, but significantly worth it, right? My business is 100 % FBA, but that doesn't answer your question of, well, how do I get these products to Amazon?

40:45So when I started my business, and this is how I recommend everybody else start, is I order from my supplier. My supplier ships to me. It's okay if I'm operating out of my garage. It's okay if I'm operating out of my basement. 90 % of suppliers won't care. You might need to let them know and say, hey, you're going to be shipping to a residential address, which might be a little bit of a shipping upcharge, but they don't care. So they ship it to your house or your basement or wherever you are. And like I said, you turn around, you throw them into boxes, you slap labels on the boxes, and you send them off to Amazon.

41:17Okay. Because they're going to want it probably sent to several different distribution centers. Yep. More than likely, Amazon's going to split that shipping up. Previously, before March 1st, most of our stuff would just go to one location. So it was easy. We could throw it in one box or one pallet or whatever and just send it to one place. But now Amazon is splitting stuff up, right? Amazon might tell me, well, hey, Corey, I know you used to send all your stuff to this one warehouse. Well, now we want you to send it to these four warehouses. So it's going to be four times the effort on my part, which sucks.

41:48But that's the name of the game. Amazon is constantly adapting. That change probably got a lot of people to quit, which means there's only more room for people that are going to roll with the punches and implement those changes. Fair. Yeah. You're playing in somebody else's sandbox. You got to deal with the rules changes as they come. Yep, exactly. Okay. So if you're starting out, it comes to you, you box it up, send it in to the different warehouses that tell you through sellercentral.amazon.com, set up your account over there where it needs to go. Do you need to do anything like labeling wise, like barcode wise?

42:20Or is it like it's coming, hopefully coming that way from the manufacturer, from the distributor? So you will be required to put basically an individual barcode on each individual unit. So if I buy, let's say a hundred units of a product from my supplier, when they get to me, I've got to put an individual label on each unit. So I'm going to have to put a hundred labels, right? And then I'm going to have to put them in a box. And then I'm just going to have to put a special box label on that box. So that way, Amazon knows when Amazon gets it in their fulfillment center, all they have to do is scan that label and they know exactly what's in that box.

42:55And that box label, you literally just print from within your seller central account. So it's not like I I got to go like looking for that label. Okay. Are there any reseller licenses, regulatory requirements, ungating requirements? This is a big thing in online arbitrage, for example. I can't sell in this category unless I'm ungated. And to do that, I need three invoices across. It's like kind of this became kind of a pain to get that stuff done. And here you're like, no, I'm a legit have an invoice from a brand or from a distributor. Any other things on the upfront red tape side of things? The only things that you truly need to get started, like to actually place orders, is you need a business entity, right?

43:37Which for 99 % of people is going to be an LLC. I'm not an accountant. I'm not an attorney. I would verify that first. But more than likely, it's going to be an LLC. Once you have your LLC, you're going to get what's called an EIN number. And you can get that for free in 30 seconds on the IRS website. And now your EIN number, think of your EIN as the social security number for your business, right? That's all that is. And then you're going to open a business bank account, which you need an EIN number to do. And once you have those three things, you're good to go to start buying at wholesale from these B2B, business to business suppliers.

44:14There is one consideration as far as not paying sales tax on those purchases that you're making. So as a reseller, we don't pay sales tax because our customers, the end customer on Amazon is the one paying that sales tax. So in most states, now it varies state by state, you'll be required to register with your state's department of revenue as a retailer. And when you do that, you will get what is called, now it has a million different terms, but it's essentially a reseller certificate or some places call it a resale license, right? It has like five to 10 different names, but, and it varies by state, but you will get that document.

44:55You provide that document to your supplier before you buy. And when your supplier gets that document from you, they say, okay, Corey is licensed with the state as a reseller. His customer is going to pay the sales tax. So I don't need to charge him the sales tax. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And when you're at 5 % to 10 % margins, like sometimes a 5 % to 10 % state sales tax could completely erase that. Yeah, it's everything. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So that makes sense. So now we've got our first supplier. We placed our test order. We've shifted off to Amazon. Do we need to do anything? We're kind of piggybacking on an existing listing or to your point earlier about, well, as I gain more experience, my whole promise, hopefully down the road, is to help brands improve their sales on Amazon.

45:39Am I making any changes or improvements to the product listing pages? Am I setting up my own listing page? How does that stuff work? No. So that's the beauty of this model is we are tapping into existing demand for these brand name products that already exist on Amazon. Right. So like I said, there are, well, a lot of brands will not let you sell their products because they want you to bring some sort of value to the table. There are plenty of brands that don't care. Right. If you want to place an order, they will sell to you. And all you have to do is hop on their existing listings and start selling those products that people are already buying.

46:16So you don't have to spend a dime on ads. You don't have to create any listings. You don't have to do any marketing. You are piggybacking on that existing demand. Do you have edit access to those pages if you do want to make some improvements? You know, subjective, of course, in everyone's mind, like, hey, I made this better. There are some listings that you will have the ability to edit. And there are some listings that Amazon won't let you edit. Why that is, I couldn't tell you what that criteria looks like for what you can edit or what you can't edit, I couldn't tell you. Again, it's all based on like a backend algorithm that Amazon has.

46:52So there have been times where, for example, I'm looking to go sell a product, but maybe that listing is incorrect. Maybe the listing has it as a two pack when in reality, it's a three pack. So I try to go and edit that listing to correct it. And sometimes Amazon will reflect my edit. No problem. It shows up within 10 minutes. Other times, Amazon just will not take the edit and I can't get them to make the change. So in those cases, sometimes I can't sell the product. Okay. So once it's out of your hands and in the warehouse, it sounds like, okay, I'm just piggybacking on these existing listings, especially just starting out.

47:27That's it. Now I'm just going to let the algorithms hopefully work in my favor and I don't have to do any additional marketing or sales. Assuming you're selling FBA, which I highly recommend everybody do, when your products get to Amazon's warehouses, they'll check in. And when they check in, that's when you'll see them live for sale on your seller account. Now, from there, the name of the game once the products are in your account is just keeping your pricing competitive. Because like we said earlier, Amazon's main concern is getting customers the best possible price. In order to get sales, you've got to be priced competitively.

48:03Now, if you're brand new to Amazon, you've only got a couple of products that you're selling, it's going to be good practice for you to go into your account and make sure that you are always usually the lowest price, right? So you might have to manually go in and adjust your pricing every few hours or once a day or however often you are able to do that. And now once you have more than 10 active products, as my recommendation, once you have more than 10 active products, that's when you would get what's called a repricer. Okay, so a repricer is a software tool that constantly adjusts your pricing to be competitive, keeping you in the buy box and helping you get sales.

48:44Right. So that way I'm not having to log into my Amazon account every hour and adjust my price by a dollar. My repricer is doing it for me automatically while I sleep, at which point you are literally making sales. Like during this interview, we probably made 10 to 15 sales because my repricer has been adjusting my pricing and Amazon fulfilling my orders. You see? That's crazy. Just like the speed of turn. Yeah. What's kind of interesting is that that isn't built in to Amazon, like on Turo or Airbnb. It's all dynamic, algorithmically based pricing for these dates, these demand. It's kind of surprising that they don't...

49:23I imagine they do it for their own products, but maybe in Seller Central down the road, you'll set a price floor that you don't want to go below. And then otherwise, you authorize the algorithm to optimize this for you. I'm sure it's coming down the road. Well, actually, Amazon does have a built-in repricer that you can use within your seller central account. However, never, ever, ever do that. Because again, Amazon just wants you to make a sale at the lowest price. They don't know about your profit. They don't even know what you bought the product for. So if it was up to them, and this is what I've heard from people that have used their repricer, is they're going to slash your price and you're probably going to lose money.

50:00You really want to go with a third-party repricing tool. There are a bunch of great ones out there. the one we use is really high end. It's very expensive, but it's worth it. It pays for itself. So what tool is that? So the one that we use is called Seller Snap. Seller Snap is one of the highest end tools. It starts at 500 a month. So you got to be doing serious volume before that makes sense. Yeah. But Seller Snap gets us more sales at higher prices. So it pays for itself in our experimentation. It'll pay for itself like within four or five days a month. Now, There are some more entry-level tools.

50:37A great one is Aura, goaura.com. And Aura actually just this week launched, it's almost like a starter program. So normally I believe Aura is around 97 a month and they launched a lower tier version of their product that's$27 per month that you can only get if you're doing less than 10 ,000 a month in sales. So that's actually gonna be your best bet by far for a repricer as a new seller. because 27 a month, there's no other good repricer on the market for that price point. And Aura is really good. Cool. All right. So now we've come to the finish line. Our stuff is live on Amazon. We've got it dynamically repricing with this tool and we're making sales.

51:19And then hopefully they're profitable sales. And you go back to the same brand or the same distributor again to replenish, if that makes sense. And it's kind of lather, rinse, repeat to try and expand the product line. You tend to stay within a category or you kind of take the horse blinders off at a certain point and say, I'm product agnostic. I will go wherever there's margin. So that product agnostic approach was our approach for a long time. And now it works. There's going to be profitable products in every category on Amazon. However, we found we get a lot more traction a lot quicker when we specialize.

51:56So I'll give you an example. we do a lot of tools and automotive products. And it's so much easier for us to get a foot in the door with, let's say, a tool brand or a tool distributor, start doing some business with them, and then going to one of their competitors and saying, hey, we're doing business with XYZ. We're in your category. We know what type of products you carry. We know all about your business. We'd like to work with you as well. And it's such an easier conversation than if I'm Let's say I'm selling mainly tools, and then I call up a pet food brand, and I say, hey, we'd like to sell your products.

52:30And they say, okay, well, what do you guys normally sell? And I list a bunch of tool brands. They're going to be like, okay, that doesn't really make sense. It's way easier to specialize, at least at first, and then expand out from there if you want. All right. That makes sense. What's the biggest mistake over the last five plus years of doing this? So biggest mistake has just been lack of consistency. If I've learned anything in the last, I mean, May will be seven years of selling on Amazon. Our business does the best when we're consistently buying profitable inventory. So whenever we've taken our foot off the gas and saying like, oh, we can place that order next week or we'll follow up with that supplier next week, right?

53:12That's when things start to slow down and fall off. But when we're proactive, when we're on top of our game, when we're consistently ordering profitable inventory, that's when things continue to grow. And you mentioned having a couple of VAs helping out with this. Are they helping on that sourcing side doing the upfront product research and the initial outbound trying to reach a decision maker? They're doing all of that. So we've got an admin, Ralph, who does a lot of just the initial outreach. So Ralph will reach out to some of these suppliers and help us get accounts set up, which he's gotten pretty good at.

53:44And then once we have the account open, Criselda, who's my head of operation, she's based in the Philippines, means she then begins the sourcing process. She'll look at the brands they carry. She'll look at their pricing and basically present me with a curated list of basically, Hey, Corey, this brand has a hundred different products. I went through them and these are the five I think we should buy. Right? So then my job at that point is just to look at those five and give her the thumbs up, the thumbs down, or Hey, let's just change the quantity. Right? Cause she might've said, well, I think we should buy a hundred units.

54:16I might say, actually, I think we should buy 50. and this is why. Okay. As that initial test order. Yep. Gotcha. Once you have the systems in place, it seems repeatable and delegatable. So you can kind of put yourself in just that decision-making CEO role. Yeah, we're going to buy this. We're going to order this, or I'm going to develop or continue to try and maintain these supplier relationships and get to live the entrepreneur life that you set out to do at the very beginning. Anything else surprising along the way in the Amazon world or elsewhere along your journey? Yeah. So the biggest surprise was how long it really took to get traction in this business.

54:55Now, keep in mind, I started wholesale specifically back in 2019. There were a couple of people putting out content about wholesale specifically at the time. Now in 2024, there's so much content. So suffice it to say, I was having to learn a lot by trial and error. And I remember specifically year one of wholesale, I said to my dad, who was my business partner, I said, dad, I think we're going to do well over a million dollars in sales this first year. I think we're going to do X, Y, right. I had all these big projections for year one. Come to find out it took probably about three years to do what we thought we were going to do in year one.

55:31And there's a really good quote that I think back to a lot along the lines of you overestimate what you can accomplish in one year and you underestimate what you can accomplish in five years. And that has been pretty much my journey to a T. I thought year one, we were going to be here. Realistically, it took about three years and then come year five, which we're in year five of wholesale. I finally feel like things are starting to click. Yeah. There's huge value in sticking with one thing long enough to start to see the compound interest, compound effect of your efforts along the way. And it's like kind of a numbers game.

56:08You have to reach out to a hundred different suppliers to get maybe five phone calls to get maybe one yes. And then doing that over and over again and building systems around that. Like you mentioned, the consistency element of it, because it's like, well, once you have one, okay, you've proven the model. And now it's just a matter of stacking other products, other deals, other suppliers on top of that and going to town, multiplying your money, letting it compound, hopefully faster than other investment vehicles. Corey, this has been awesome. I've learned a ton. It's been a really long time since we talked anything Amazon wholesale related.

56:43So this has been really cool to kind of catch up and learn what's working now. But where are you taking this thing? Five years into it, what's next for you? My goal with the business, I want to be probably in that like five to$8 million per year revenue range with my team running the bulk of the operation. which they kind of already are. So just continuing to scale what it is that we're doing. And now I do. In fact, about a year ago, I started posting content very heavily on Twitter at first. Now LinkedIn and YouTube, my podcast, I've got all these different media outlets that I'm trying to grow as well, because I'm super passionate about this business.

57:17And I do enjoy talking about it and teaching people about how it works. So really growing the content side of my business as well is going to be a big focus of mine moving forward. Absolutely. That's the Amazon Wholesale Podcast. You find that on wherever fine podcasts are sold. Corey's also got a new book out, The Five Pillars of Amazon Wholesale, which you can find on Amazon, of course. CoreyGanim.com is where you can find him. You can find the podcast and the book over there. We'll link that up in the show notes. Make sure to join his newsletter to get notified of the upcoming wholesale challenge that he runs two or three times a year to get people off the sidelines.

57:54and into the game. I wanted to ask before we ramp up, your team is running most of this stuff. You're creating the content. Is that where the bulk of the time is going today? It's kind of like on the public facing, I'm going to become the guy that teaches you how to do wholesale side of things. Content creation definitely takes the bulk of my time these days. However, in the wholesale business itself, I really try to be focused on the stuff that moves the needle, right? So those tasks that move the needle in my actual wholesale business are supplier relations, right? So just basically calling up my suppliers and making sure they still like me.

58:26Right. And then it's approving purchase orders. What is that call? Like just, Hey, every quarter I set a reminder to just, Hey Mike, just checking in, making sure we're still good. Seriously. Like that's it. Not every quarter, more like once every 10 days or every two weeks. Right. Sometimes it's a text and just say, Hey, how you doing? And sometimes it's a call. Sometimes it's a, like, for example, this weekend, I'm going to a trade show and I'm going to be hanging out with two of our biggest vendors there. So just stay on top of mind, just doing the little things, the blocking and tackling that's required to maintain the business.

58:58And then, like I said, approving purchase orders, because we make our money when we buy, is going to be the biggest needle mover for me. So making sure I'm spending my time in the Amazon business doing those two tasks mainly. That's right. You make your money on the buy side. That's some old school Warren Buffett right there. You're a value investor. I'm just investing in product, baby. So coreganim.com, check him out over there. Make sure to grab the book as well. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle patient. Be consistent. This doesn't just apply to an Amazon business, but the business in general, figure out what those one or two things are that really move the needle in your business.

59:33Like I just mentioned with mine, figure out what those things are, set a goal for like daily or weekly actions and hit them every day or every week for weeks, months, and years. Focus on those tasks that move the needle, do it consistently for three to five years and you'll be astonished at what can happen in that period of time. Yeah, it's funny. A friend of mine had posted this saying, you know, if you want to achieve financial independence in 20 years, invest in low cost index funds. If you want to achieve financial independence in 10 years, invest in real estate. If you want to achieve financial independence in five years, you got to start this business.

1:00:09How do you accelerate it? And I think there's a lot of truth to that. Notes for me, number one, start with that toe dip, right? Make sure this is something that you're interested in. Maybe you can learn seller central through retail arbitrage, through online arbitrage, just kind of familiarize yourself with Amazon, with how that works. Do the numbers game, this outreach. Like if you call 10 people and you get hung up on like, okay, did you call a hundred? Did you call 500? Like there's a certain aspect of persistence here that I think is going to be required. And again, starting with a level of risk that you're comfortable with and then multiplying that money.

1:00:45I think that's a really exciting way to do it. Like you talked at the very top of the show, Hey, 5 ,000 can turn into six, six can turn into 7 ,200, right? Lather, rinse, repeat, and scale up the business from there. Because once you get the systems in place, I think it could turn into something significant as Corey has shown us. So again, if you're new to the show, I want to invite you to grab your personalized playlist of the side hustles you're most interested in to generate yours. All you have to do is go to hustle.show, answer a few short multiple choice questions, and then you can add those curated episodes to your device.

1:01:17You'll learn what works and you can go forth out into the world and make some more money. Thousands of listeners have already claimed theirs. There's no reason you shouldn't be next. Again, that's hustle.show. Big thanks to Corey for sharing his insight. Thank you so much for tuning in and thanks for supporting the advertisers that help make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thanks again for supporting the advertisers that support the show. It really does make a difference. That is it for me.

1:01:48If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off a text message. Hey, you got to check this out until next time. Let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.