The Tarryn Reeves Show

7,000 Sales a Minute: How to Tap Amazon’s River of Buyers

• Tarryn Reeves • Episode 72

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In this episode of The Tarryn Reeves Show, I’m joined by Neil Twa, CEO and Co-Founder of Voltage Holdings, a company that helps entrepreneurs launch, scale, and sell seven- and eight-figure e-commerce brands through Amazon FBA and multi-channel strategies.

Neil shares his fascinating journey from IBM executive to eight-figure Amazon seller, revealing the real systems, strategies, and mindset behind building sustainable, profitable online businesses.

We unpack everything from:

  • The rise (and fall) of drop shipping, and what works now


  • How to choose the right products to sell (without guessing)


  • Why tariffs and AI manufacturing are creating massive opportunities for U.S. sellers


  • The key to building brands that outlast trends


  • And why the smartest entrepreneurs are preparing for a new wave of e-commerce growth


Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting your e-commerce journey, this conversation is a masterclass in building real, scalable businesses, not side hustles.

Plus, Neil shares exclusive insights from his book The High Voltage Business Builder and a special offer for listeners: grab one of 10 free copies at VoltageDM.com/freebook using code TARRYN (while they last).

🎧 Tune in to learn how to:

  • Find high-margin products that actually sell
  • Build a brand that stands the test of time
  • Leverage Amazon FBA, Shopify, and TikTok for multi-channel success

Create freedom, family, and financial independence through smart business systems

Connect with Neil:

All right, today I'm joined by Neil Twa who is the CEO co-founder of Voltage Holdings, a company specializing in launching, consulting, selling, and acquiring brands with a focus on the e-commerce channels such as Amazon, FBA, and multi-channel. He has more than 15 years of experience selling private label products on Amazon and his company. For over 17 years, Mr. Twa has been constructing businesses both online and offline after departing his senior IBM role. Since 2012, he's launched over five personal brands, generated tens of millions in revenues as eight figures sellers, and assisted in the growth of a thousand plus others through consulting, coaching, and mentoring alongside his partner, Reid, and their Voltage team. Welcome to the Tarryn Reeves Show, Neil. Thank you for having me on, appreciate that. It's an absolute pleasure. Now I have just learned for those of you listening, I just said to Neil, said, what does FBA stand for? Amazon FBA. And he said, fulfilled by Amazon. So I'm already learning amazing things from Neil here. Neil, let's jump into this amazing life that you've created for yourself because you do have a fascinating story. IBM to eight figure Amazon seller. Yep. now you're the CEO of Voltage Holdings, doing all of this while homesteading in the beautiful mountains of America. Tell us a bit about your journey and what kind of sparked your transition into the world of e-commerce. Well, I mean, long story short, yeah, IBM was part of the end of my corporate career where I never really wanted to end up in the first place. But as I taught myself programming and dropping out of high school, excuse me, dropping out of college, I was thinking too far forward. um I could have dropped out of high school, but I actually wanted to finish, which is awesome. I wanted to go be a military fighter pilot. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go to the Air Force. It's all I wanted to do. I didn't go for scholarships. you? I wanted to go Top Gun. And so I was on my path to do that, but I ended up getting rejected in my last semester of high school because I didn't fit in the cockpit. So the uh F-15E fighter was the one they were going to train us in. And they had me sit in there and put my helmet on. It's like, nope you don't, the cockpit will not close. You are too tall. Sorry. You can't fit. I'm like, well, dang it. That sucks. So I'm like, now what? And like, well, you can be an aviation mechanic. You can fly larger planes, you know, transports, you could do other stuff. And I'm like, I want to be a fighter pilot. Like, well, you can't do that. And like crap. So it was like, now what? So I backpedaled and got some scholarships and I played music since the fourth grade. So I went to audition and got work study and music scholarships that covered most of my education in a music degree at a liberal arts college in Iowa. So I jumped out of Oregon at 18. I just turned 18 in February, graduated in May and headed off to Iowa where I'd never been in my entire life uh into the cornfields and the liberal arts college to go get a music degree. Never really wanted to do that. So when the internet came online, uh, it saved me in year three, I was about 30 hours shy of a business, uh, management and computer science degree and decided to jump out. And in the process of doing that, I met a gentleman who was like, Hey, you should learn programming. He was an adjunct professor in the computer science department and was working at a company called Sprint in Kansas city. And he's like, well, I make like 60 bucks an hour. I'm like, well, that's what I want to do. And he's like, well, go teach yourself programming. Cause you're not going to learn what I'm doing at school. I was like, well, that's kind of weird. And so I was out. So I went and taught myself programming and I got a consulting gig installing computers and working on them. Cause I knew how to do that. And then I was teaching myself programming in the evening and eventually landed a programming job at a company that consulted with Sprint as it turns out. So I got that first, you know, checkbox. I got actually pretty good at it. It turns out good enough that when Sprint did a cattle call internally, cause they were launching a new business division called Sprint PCS, which was launching the personal communication services known as a mobile phone now. I was like, I'm all about that. So I threw my hat in the ring and by the luck has it probably God and divine intervention. Cause I'm a 21 year old know it all. I got into a startup, called Sprint mobile and Sprint PCS. And so I ended up being a part of a team where I was overseeing like 50,000 web pages of HTML and all this stuff. And I had like four or five other people reporting to me who were like 20 years older than me. Like they had just pulled everybody together who could be in there. Like, Hey, we think you know how to manage people. So here's your team. Okay, so I'm 19/21 by that time and I'm like managing a team of people in a startup company. So that was weird. And so I learned how to do it on the fly. Really discovering until you know that gets you there and it's what you know that keeps you there. So I would be staying up late figuring out how to make this work while doing the business of the day and trying not to get fired while I just tried to keep up with everything and learn as much as I could. And since we were over that component, there's about 2,500 reps that were hired. And there was only 5,000 of us that started that. in 2003-ish or so, 2003 or so when I left, IBM hired me out of that to say, hey, come do, you know, for us, what you're doing here, because the company had grown at that point, extremely large. The team had grown larger. The whole systems had grown larger. They went to, you know, 80,000 employees and 25,000 reps. I mean, it was a huge growth so fast, just explosive growth. And IBM said, to work for us. So they hand me an AMEX card. And it was funny because I still couldn't actually, Rent a car. I wasn't old enough. I had to get managerial permission to rent a car because I wasn't 25. So, um, I had to get permission to rent cars, which was ironic. So I'm doing business. I'm flying for IBM and I'm getting permission to rent cars. And so I have a laptop and a cell phone. I'm traveling around learning how to do business. And it was a very different way of doing business because of the flexibility of the consulting side and going to different projects and traveling a couple of times a week. Um, that was cool, but I left that in 2007, um, because we separated paths and I sort of didn't ever want to do the whole corporate route. I always wanted to be out on my own and I had a little side hustle thing, uh, called Killer Game Servers where I was basically building, uh, game servers in the background. We had about 20,000 people playing games on our systems. Um, when I was going to potentially retire, but you know, life has a funny way of doing things and you know, you wake up one day and you go meet your wife and find out that she's been sleeping with other guys on the internet. That sort of changes things, right? Kind of changes your trajectory just a little bit. And. So locked that business and got divorced and got, you know, figured out life again and met this entirely lovely lady who I was finally ready to meet, you two years after all of that. And, she and I decided to get married. IBM said goodbye. You know, I said, let's get married and then, you know, started a new company all in the same time. Mine was 18 years ago. Um, just that we're going to do life together, you know, let's do life together and see what happens. And we got pregnant on October. So once again, life had a much, all in the same year. so it was a quite an interesting time. Yes. And how old were you then, roundabout? was 27 when I met her, 28 when I met her and 32 when we got married. Yeah, yeah. So quite the whirlwind adventure and kind of really flipping the traditional path, even though you kind of kept getting thrown into that traditional path, which I think we all do. We all do. That's right. didn't really know exactly what plan I wanted to put in place yet. And until after IBM and it sort of came to its logical conclusion, well, number one, I didn't want to travel 300 days a year anymore. That was getting really old. And I was getting married and I want to establish a family. And then, well, we got pregnant within the first eight months. And I'm like, well, good. Family's on the way. She ran into some medical conditions we didn't know and discovered during the pregnancy, which made it extremely difficult. And she had. She has an RN BSN degree and was acting as a registered nurse. And we're like, well, we can, you know, live on your salary for a little bit. Well, that went away in December when she got put on bed rest. So then we were zero income. So it was like, Hey, this is, you know, make it or break it. Do we keep going? And we're like, well, let's just keep going. You know, we're already sort of poor. Let's just figure this out. Let's just keep going. And I'm glad we did because it really inverted the idea that family was the major component of that. So it became part of my five F structure. We'll talk about, faith, family and friends, a big top end of that. And the faith to get out there and just do it and believe in myself and believe what I think I could do. And it took me about three years to of figure out how I was going to consult in business and stuff and learn how to get the right contracts and really get out of the employee mindset and really become a business owner mindset. We started to change things pretty quick. I got into physical products because it was a means to an end after doing the digital affiliate marketing world and not being able to control the offer, like where the product is and where it comes from. like, I got to control the other. half of this, and I wasn't sure what kind of digital product situation I would create. And for me, logically, it made sense to do it with a physical product. Like it just made sense. It was tangible. I could hold the product. I could see it. It, that made sense. I'm like, well, I got this virtual thing going on here with the interwebs and I got a physical product. How do I connect those two? When somebody said, Hey, look at Amazon, right? They just bought this company, which is a logistics, transport and freight company. They've rebranded it to call it FBA or fulfilled by Amazon. So they can move more of their books and products and open up past books and get into all physical products. Right. Which we know today is just inherently a normal part of Amazon. Back then it was like, how do they get just past books and get into all products? So they bought that company. Yep. It was a big part of an expansion. And so by 2012, um, it was like, Hey, I want to get into products and this is the, this is the mechanism. So we started to test physical products and I got hooked. I got hooked on it because systems and technology and playing with you know, latent semantic and machine language learning at IBM was one of the things I was doing. We were working on part of this super blue computer Watson at our arm on can learning about building systems of knowledge and management and, you know, generation of just in time information based on a person's profile, et cetera. A lot of what the large language models are doing today. We were doing back then that was cutting edge, you know, 20 years ago. What I see today is nothing compared to what's coming, which I think is fascinating because people certainly haven't grasped yet what this technology is really going to do. Not what they just see it doing now is early adoption is kicking in, right? Early adoption is still where we are with AI. I see what it could be in its full capacity. It both is amazing and scary at the same time. Really. everything with new advancements, right? We're going to talk about that. But first of all, I want to kind of discuss this digital products thing. I know that you've written an amazing book. I've bought a copy myself and you're really teaching people how to sell using Amazon fulfillment. These digital products, you're not, uh physical products, sorry, you're not making them yourself. Is that correct? Not personally, no. I mean we have contracted manufacturing companies that make it for us. And for those listening right now, they're probably hearing the words tariff a lot in the news. So we can kind of cover the fears, the pros and the cons of what that actually means in the marketplace. But having it manufactured for us out of other locations is one of the things we do for sure. I don't have a warehouse. I don't have manufacturers and Oompa Loompas pushing out product every day. uh I have, you know, contracted relationships with companies that do that for us. Amazing. Okay, so if somebody is a new seller, what is the biggest, like how do you figure out what to sell? Yeah, that's one of the greatest limiting beliefs of this business and it's actually one of the ones we've spent the better part of our time figuring out for ourselves and then by proxy just teaching other people what we figured out. And the question you know, what the heck do I sell is a big component of any service product digital or physical product world You just have to have a belief that I can sell something you have to get past your own limiting belief first. That if other people are making millions doing this, why can't I? And literally it comes down to taking the right steps of conditioning yourself to get out of consumerism like I was in the past and moving into a producer mentality, somebody who provides value to a market with a solution, a product, a service, et cetera. We found that it was much easier to move people in front of physical products when they already had some demand, some intent, some need that was already generated. And we simply offer them a version of ours to solve their needs, to solve their problems. And that makes it a lot easier to capture existing demand for giant market share that's already in the marketplace. We don't have to go out and digitally create demand. It exists. We simply just put a product and a brand in front of them and say, Hey, do you like this one? Or maybe you like that variation or what about this variation? And basically the sales and conversions are telling us where we take that product and brand line and where we focus and do what, you know, good, great says over here, which is hedgehog. down into the area of the brand in which we continue to add more value, where we continue to expand more of the same product and different packaging, kind of borrowing from Apple and other large brands. We just keep going wider in that packaging and then, you know, success becomes boring. But the first equation is to understand that, you know, everything around you that you've ever purchased is a possible product you can sell. To the caveat of tariffs today, we had much bigger problems in 2020 to 2023. than are being faced right now. But what we're seeing is so many people got a roll up of opportunity during the traffic and demand that was uh there from the digital community side when everybody went home. So that came up and created this little artificial bubble that people got to ride on for a bit. They got to ride on it for like the last two to three years, but they are not strong in business. They didn't build strong supply chains. They don't have a strong relationship behind them through experience and other hard times. So they're the first to fall. In the tariff scenario, right? The costs are falling. Their numbers do not add up. They don't understand or have the connections and ability to pivot in the marketplace to take an opportunity out of what appears, you know, it feels like a failure or a considerable problem that they can't solve. Man, they leveraged into certain areas of business too heavily, like say everything you sell comes from China, uh, and are now falling victim to the market. Okay. Market changes are the way that the world works. Whether it comes in through COVID or a president, it changes. Whether it comes from a real estate blue or a real estate fall, it changes. In other words, you can't say that any one particular person or situation is affecting that. You have to look at the entire aspect of business and realize that all business is nothing but a series of solving problems. This is just another problem we're solving. We solved the one in 20 and 23. And what that was was ridiculous price gouging in the shipping and logistics side. And we had 40 foot containers that went from 3900 to 25 grand in cost. And then they took six months to show up. And some of them were sitting off the ports of Los Angeles because there was so much waiting time. You couldn't even get them on shore. And that's happening now in a different way. They're simply not arriving because they're being held in other locations until the tariff thing comes out. Same problem, different, know, same outcome, different problem. And we're seeing the cost rise. Well, the cost rose, of course, during that time, because people were raising their prices because more people were buying. That's the last the city of supply and demand. It's economics, right? You can go grok that if you don't know what it means. So the end result is that we're dealing with similarities to that now. Why is this an opportunity for those who get involved? Because you've got about six months of pivotable point here to take advantage of the market, move product and opportunity in from other locations. And there's about six weeks, we think, roughly. of product left in the marketplace for the low to mid tier sellers who saw that last two to three years of opportunity or the Chinese sellers who are about to fall out of inventory in about six weeks or less. And at the time with this is being recorded, this is what we're experiencing right now. Now, by the time you hear this, this may have changed dramatically. Tariffs may be completely different. They're renegotiating it right now. We may be seeing that upswing already by the time you hear this podcast and you may have missed some window of opportunity. Just know that in every change and opportunity as those businesses fall down, as the Chinese sellers get out of the market, as certain requirements are being made that they don't like run drugs across the southern border, duh, or they don't have human trafficking or human collateral or slavery in their supply chain somewhere, which a lot of those do. If they are not lying about their manifest and shipping records and all the things that we have to keep our nose clean on that they have been violating for years, That has to be changed. So I'm OK with that because this is a different kind of change that has some bad ramifications, but has great upside. And if you're listening to this now, uh probably from the time I'm telling it now to the time this comes out, which will probably be shorter down the line, a lot of stuff is going to change. It's going to be changing. It's going be very different from the time you hear this to the time in which it's actually occurred. So for what I'm hearing is that you always have to have your finger on the pulse of the market and what's happening with global economics. and you must understand the fundamentals of business. If I sell a product, okay, and it is an average of say $30, $20 in retail price point, which is where a lot of Amazon sellers end up. And they end up fighting with Chinese and other saturation in that market where they simply can't win on cost, right? If you're that middleman brand owner, you need to be in a product placement position where your profits will allow you to fluctuate through hard times. And if I've got a 27 or $25 product on Amazon after their fees and cost, or I'm running on, Facebook with marketing and acquisition costs, AOVs, etcetera then I am going to find myself usually losing about 40 % to 45 % of that to either one of those channels before I make any money for my gross revenues. I've got to pay for those systems, right? You know, pay traffic on one side, Amazon's traffic on another. It's got a cost either way. Okay. It'll cost on eBay. It'll cost on Shopify. It always costs somewhere to generate a sale. So if I get down to the bottom line with all my fees and I'm only making $1.25 on that product, it doesn't make me more money next month if I sell an additional 1,000 units but don't increase my profitability. I've actually increased my cost and now I'm in the hole net. That's revenue is vanity. We call it revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash flow is king. Okay, cashflow will obviously be king because the money keeps coming in. As long as it's profitable, I can grow this concern. I don't run it by the seat of my pants. I go by the numbers. So for us, the product must be $50 to $500 in retail price point. It must maintain more than $12 in net profit per unit, preferably 25 or more. That is what sustained us through that terrible time for two to three years when cost and containers went through the roof. And a lot of sellers fell out of the market and we gained a lot of market share. We even launched brands during that timeframe and took advantage of that downturn and positioned ourselves into brands that are doing very well now. Right. And they're not just doing very well, they have enough profitability. They're sourced from other locations and they have secondary and tertiary supply chains. If the primary product is out of China. So we've done our diligence. We've been business owners. We thought ahead. We thought, where can we deal with, you know, this kind of thing? We got people in the street and, you know, In China, it goes down and make sure the manufacturing has no slave or human capital running in the background. There's no children there. It doesn't up the stream as much as we can tell. None of that's occurring for those particular warehouses we look at. And we've also been looking and doing a lot of stuff in India already and Vietnam is being opened. We got opportunities in Cambodia and Pakistan. There's stuff in Mexico. So, you know, a lot of these people that are getting trapped right now and a lot of the negative press we're hearing online and even people that are being pushed out into media, to kind of create this anti-opportunity, I'm going to call it because terrorists are an opportunity. If you don't understand that, go do your research. Don't trust me, just go do your research. Is an opportunity for everybody to get into a balanced situation where I can actually now, hopefully, in the next 12 months, start to position my products to be sold in other countries, not just to American public, but other countries where I can open up new marketplaces of opportunity where that capital comes back to America. Right now, if I buy an American product, nearly 100 % of it stays in America. If I buy a Chinese product, nearly 80 % of it goes offshore. So when you look at this opportunity for America to become stronger, it's also to open up the opportunity for me to sell my products in those other countries where I have legal support, where the country doesn't want to own 51 % of my business when I do that. And where I know that we can play fair in that market because right now it's very unfair, the way people have traded the United States and basically use this as a piggy bank. And then we can't go the other direction because tariffs stop all of our products from being exported. So this is an opportunity you should understand in business, right? Why? Again, things change as that is required to change as we see manufacturing in the United States capable of coming online within six to 12 months with trillions of dollars backing it. You're gonna see a lot of AI automated and machine and robotic. Manufacturing showing up. It's called dark manufacturing. Learn the term because it's coming extremely fast. They're complete manufacturing plants that run a 24 seven pump out products and don't even need power for the lights on. Right, they're ran by high level people who engineer and monitor them. But the entire platform run from end to end is done by AI and robotics. And it only takes about six to 12 months to turn up a warehouse in the United States that's been shuttered and doing nothing and make it a completely fully automated production center. So this is where we're gonna see America going like crazy and you know Apple's coming into India and out of China. So this is gonna change the way that works for us too. And just a lot of these things are moving quickly. I think I saw this morning 25,000 jobs for Ford or something are coming back on to American soil for jobs. So again, a lot of people are. Freaking out short-sighted, they didn't prepare, they weren't going by the numbers, they weren't looking at the right product types to sell at the right price points, and there's something gonna be affected by the market at the end of the day. Long answer, but true nonetheless. It is very true and just like everything in business, you do need to be aware of basic business practices and world economics because they affect us all whether you're doing Amazon or you know, publishing, whatever it is. based business. Yeah, it's, you know, the, the principles of economics and fundamentals of business don't stop in any one particular area. It's affected by every kind of business, whether you run a P and L and whether you do a product or a service or you're in real estate, it's just, it all has similar ramifications in the end. And a free market economy is survival of the fittest and and those who cannot maintain or supply the product or service will simply fall out of the market in condition of others. What we don't want is just all the leftovers being major corporations. We still need a middle market in America, you know, that has that opportunity. And for us fighting Chinese sellers that now are more than 60 % of the sellers on the platform for Amazon specifically, that's completely unfair. Some of the top products, you know, not just unfair, but there are legalities that are not being enforced that should stop that from occurring. There are terms of service on Amazon itself that they're breaking that are most likely being allowed to potentially be broken. And I can't do that or I'm forced off the platform. So there's a significantly unfair thing that has to change why middle market companies, one to 25 million in size are an opportunity for these e-commerce platforms. And they have been pushed down in the last five, six years to not make it an opportunity for those who can't have the right capitalization to get this done. And the opportunity is still there for those who can capitalize it correctly. And that's probably the biggest takeaway from this. The opportunity to capitalize and risk now has never been a greater opportunity than I've ever seen it in the 20 years I've been in business. If you position yourself, if you're bold, if you step into the market, if you fix your supply chain opportunities right now, you're going to take over a huge amount of market share. And when it starts to slingshot back, because it's going to in about six to 12 months, you're going to be riding that wave into a lot of opportunity. Yeah, amazing. So how is this different to drop shipping? Because drop shipping was all the rage a couple of years ago and then I haven't really heard anything about it for a little while. Well, about 12 hours ago, it got killed with the de minimis rule. So de minimis rule at $800 per package shipped in is now gone. It can't be done legally. So with that, Shine, Temu drop shipping and the like is dead. It's over. You can't ship products under that measure. So product label, private labeling and only wholesaling are really the only two models left that will sustain the next steps. So with drop shipping, it was that opportunity to take that de minimis rule, and be allowed to ship single products in AliExpress them or drop ship them into other locations, drop ship on Amazon, which is actually against their terms of service uh and any other Shopify stores, et cetera. And the rise of Shine and Temu were because of that. But that's closed literally as of 12 hours ago from this. And 12 hours ago from this is May 2025 and it's done. So we're going to watch that change very dramatically across the landscape of e-commerce and products because those who can will pivot into private label. Should have been pivoting, six, 12, 18 months ago, at least I've been yelling about this for years. You cannot sustain that. When I saw the rise of it, I said, Hey guys, that's opportunistic. If you can't build a brand on the other side of the product selection from drop shipping, you're going to end up falling out of the market. You have to sustain some sort of brand connection with your customers or you will literally crush this opportunity. A lot of money can be made in a short term. That was great. But the businesses are done now. If they did not pivot a while back to private label, they simply can't meet that requirement anymore. Yep. So you always talk about building like a real sustainable business. And obviously that's the smart thing to do. Otherwise, what's the point? What are like the four key steps that you believe that every entrepreneur or business owner should follow to make that happen, to create that real sustainable business? Yeah. conditioning your mind to understand everything's a saleable possibility. You need to get it on a list and define where is the customer need and intent for that product. And that's, you know, step one is conditioning yourself to start looking at everything from a product perspective. And that takes time to condition. We call it the white car syndrome. If you've ever looked at the world and every once in a while you see something a dress, a car or something, you're like, then you see it again. Then you see it again. You're like, my gosh, I see these all over the place. Conscious was always taking that in, but your subconscious was not bringing it forward because it was hidden behind you. But then it switches whenever you start to identify or bring it into a conscious place. And then suddenly you see white cars everywhere. Something emotionally triggers that in your brain. And so you have to start going through the process of getting your brain into a place where it starts triggering it. So you start seeing these opportunities everywhere because there are millions of opportunities with products, right? We obviously go by the numbers, as I mentioned, to make sure they are have a profitable upside potential and opportunity. Okay, they got the profitability. You can sustain the business. You can pay yourself. You can pay others. You need to start it off with an LLC. You should never sell personally anywhere. You should always protect yourself. Put your general liability insurance in place. Run it like a real business by building a real business, having a separate bank account from your personal finances. uh Accounting for all that correctly down through your bookkeeping, et cetera. and make sure that you separate those two and make it a really, a real going concern. Do not treat it like a side hustle or a hobby business. If you started on the side and you intend to leave something or change something, that's fine, but treat it like a real business. Okay. I've got plenty of people like Adam and others who have done this. He's a full-time pharmacist and you know, have been able to do this while maintaining their full-time jobs and getting themselves towards a position where they can actually, you know, retire from that job within three months after their profitability now overtakes monthly what they were making. That's a great time for them to jump out. But the other thing about that process is to realize as you go through that and the numbers help you resolve the data, you have to remember something else. You don't marry your products. Okay. So it's very important people understand that when I say, go look at a product, like a physical product in actuality, what you're actually intending in today's world is to look at the customer need and the data demand for that product. We say, don't marry your products, steal somebody else's girlfriend instead. Right. There are lot of girlfriends out there. Okay. And with that, you need to understand what does the market want for this particular type of product and how can I provide that and what variation shape, size, color, type, et cetera, do they want from me? And I need to keep it defining that until I discover what it is. So I will never marry one of these products until I have at least five of those running in the marketplace that are all selling at that point. It's okay to marry the brand, not the products. Why? Because I'm selling data. Okay. We say selling data to an AI engine. Its job is to find the right customer, deliver it and support the customer. That's its job. My job again is to sell that data to the engine. So it believes what I am doing with my product meets a customer segmentation inside of it that is already meeting a customer need and demand already placed on it. No guessing. It's already there. There could be six other competitors already meeting that demand. I want to become the seventh person. And then eventually I want to become the number three and number two person. Right? So first I got to know that I can get into the top seven or six of those and become the seventh one. And then I can ultimately move myself into the number two position. So again, what ends up happening is people come and they say, well, I want to sell this kind of product or I think I should sell this kind of product. And I want to go after that. Wrong. What you need to do is come as a blank slate and say, I want to build a brand. Okay. I might want to build a brand around home and kitchen, and I don't care what's in the home and kitchen brand. I just want to make sure I figure out what it is they want from me and my home and kitchen brand. And I want to provide all of that to them. That's business. Right. So we take the emotional component out of it and we get down to the data driven aspect. Data driven aspects means I don't marry my product. I marry my brand. Right. Products have a life cycle. Okay. They'll come and they'll sort of go. You can probably name products from your childhood, just like I do that have come and gone, but brands have stayed on for a long time. Yeah. become iconic. They've become ever living, right? Some people will fight over them, like the New Balance guys versus the Android guys versus the iPhone guys versus the Toyota guys and the Lexus guys and the Honda guys. They all have their particular brands, but they can tell you all the different types of products that over time were either there or no longer there, right? Like the Chevy Nova, but you can say Chevrolet is still there, but the Nova is gone, right? The Pinto is gone, but Ford is still there. And so on and so on. So once we take that into mind, you realize I don't marry the product. I'm looking for the right data that meets the just in time amount of data and customer data and need intent of that algorithmic engine so it will, it will find the right person to connect in 30 seconds or less, which means once you learn how to do that, I can sell anything in a box to anybody in 30 seconds or less. I just need to make sure it's profitable. And there's a system moving behind that. We say in the Amazon world, there's also the TikTok shop algorithm, there's the Facebook meta algorithm, everything is ran by algorithms online now. And specifically for the Amazon algorithm, it is a uh organic based and PPC based algorithm. And it is looking for a customer intent outcome to serve a customer need on Amazon to give a product to that customer who already wanted it when they showed up to Amazon. All they needed to do with Amazon is find out, which one and will it still be here in two days and then click on the cart and go. Okay, so they already made a whole decision making process before they landed, which means this river of traffic is running 24/7, 365 all the time. It's 7,000 units a minute on average. It runs up to 9,000 a minute during the holiday period. That's per minute. Okay, it's a huge engine. And when you realize that that is going on, your job then as a brand builder is to become a direct response marketer. Mm-hmm. understands how to speak to that avatar, show them the right product they already wanted, answer the three questions they need to answer and get it in front of them. The traffic system behind that will naturally progress you farther into more people as your conversion rates meet that requirement. So as my data set becomes better, it will sell more products and deliver more products. So it's my job to make sure it has products to deliver so that it can keep up with the sales that I was pushing it to go for. And with that engine, it can go extremely fast. And most people are limiting that opportunity by saying, well, I want to make seven figures and I have a few thousand dollars and I'm going to get a few hundred products. No, it's not going to work like that. I'm sorry. You're going to have to capitalize the inventory for a physical product based business. And that's where this changes the risk to reward ratio for some people who might think, well, I want to do a purely digital because I can't invest in a physical product business. And you need to know that really a real business will spend 50 to a hundred thousand dollars in year one. getting to a place where it can reach a growth to profitable uh situation in year two and then move potentially into scale in years three, four and five. And that means you have to capitalize the inventory. So very simply, keep this straight. When the data says go, and I now have a better data presence, a higher conversions and even more profitability than my competitors on the Amazon channel to start, I need as much inventory as they have to keep up with them. Okay, which means I now have to capitalize that inventory higher and higher to get higher and higher in the market share. Otherwise the algorithm literally won't let me take over that demand. Okay. If a product sells 25,000 a year and I have to sell, you know, 1500 units a month to meet that demand or 2000 units a month to meet that demand. Well, if I put 2000 in the marketplace, it's not going to let me stock out because it knows that you need to sell 2000 a month. Well, I have 2000 total. It's gonna go, no, you won't run out. It'll literally hold you back. You could forcibly stock out, which is a very bad thing, but the algorithmic system itself is gonna hold you back. Why? Because your competitors probably have 10 or 20,000 units in stock and they can meet that 2,000 unit every month for the next two, three, four months. The algorithm knows that, so it's gonna go ahead and give it preferential treatment. So what's my opportunity when my numbers are dialed in? Capitalize the inventory. Once I capitalize that inventory and I now have 2000, 5000, 6000, 8000 units in my sales are going to exponentially increase. I've seen it go from 50,000 in one month to 150,000 in month two to 300,000 in month three per month. When these are capitalized, that's that wave of engine. It's in there. Once you're dialed in, you need to ride that wave. And not a lot of people understand that about this kind of business market. They don't see it that way. They hear the entrepreneurial, you know, hopium. mindset gurus dealing out all this penny change information and they don't actually understand what it takes to build a going concern like this. Just as an example, Daniel has a nearly $15 million your business running in less than five years. It took him a million dollar line of credit to make that happen over that five years. Okay. So he's drawn down on that credit number numerous times to level up his inventory to ride that wave till he could come up with 15 million revenue. But keep in mind, he's got about 23 % last check net profit. So that's a great business model by the fact that it's only him and about four other people running that. Right? So you can stay very lean with that infrastructure and opening Shopify or TikTok beyond Amazon, which you should do. All right. Create a trifecta, a three-leg business, okay. Multi-sales channels, not just Amazon. And Amazon can deliver those products. So if somebody orders something on a Shopify, Amazon can deliver it for us. If they order it on TikTok, Amazon can deliver. So once we have our logistics hub set up, we can now then create these other product businesses around it and use Amazon as basically a warehousing and logistics facility for us. So it creates that opportunity to move into omnichannels. And the last component, you know, beyond the river of traffic that you need to get in front of, which is a data-driven traffic, is what we call the platinum principle. And that is really understanding that when I build these businesses with the end in mind which is the exit in like five years, that they're worth more than that in any time during the business building phase. While I can toss off profits and make this business go and grow, the real opportunity is a brand that investors, private equity, individuals like myself and my groups want to buy. So everybody who works with me has an exit path trajectory to come back to us and say, want, you know, buy my company because I am both the beginning and the end. Can somebody start and get into this kind of a business model without any capital startup? Can they bootstrap it? You can bootstrap it, but with no capital startup, that's not possible. You need to order at least a hundred to 300 units of your test product. And that test product is not there to go profitable. It is to fix the question or the intent of sales fixes everything. Right. If I prove I can sell the product and I now have what's called a going concern in a business that is driving revenue, it is now my responsibility as the owner to make it profitable. Yes. Okay, which means I will have to capitalize more inventory called risk to reward ratio. Okay. To put the next 1000 units in there to move my test sales fixes everything product, which I now know I can sell no question to how fast can I sell it and how much profitability can I make? We call it our green light process that helps you determine that up to 12 months. So you can project forward what it would look like to move to a thousand units and then in a full container. so that you understand what it takes to make profit out of that in the 1,000 units or beyond. We call it a full product launch. So we do a marketing test, then we do a full product launch. There are abilities to flip products, retail, wholesale kind of stuff. Wholesale still takes a capitalization to do it. You can flip other people's products, but most of the systems now are not very positive about that. It ends up being places like eBay or Facebook Marketplace. Which is not great. It's very hard to do that kind of stuff on Amazon successfully with a lot of, without a lot of heavy lifting. And the output is you've basically built a job. They require somebody to flip those products somewhere and have some warehouse that manages it and, you know, moves them out. Ask me how I know I own 20,000 square foot warehouse one time. Uh, and I have 12 people, you know, shipping products every week. Um, that is not the easiest way to do this. The easiest way to do this is to take the hit upfront, learn how to build that private label business. and then watch as your time decreases, but your output grows with the brand, which means it goes beyond you. It runs 24 seven. It's providing intrinsic value into the marketplace. You're providing additional products and upside potential. And it does give you that upside potential of having a real lifestyle driven business. It doesn't require you to monitor it 24 seven. It doesn't require you to ship products from your house uh or do any logistics. It doesn't shop your way to wealth by traveling 10 hours a day to all the Walmarts and trying to figure out what you can do. There's nothing against the side hustle. At all. started that way a long time ago, right? I needed after a bankruptcy because you know, we all make mistakes and I made a stupid mistake of being way too leveraged into a business too far that forced me into a business bankruptcy. So I'm not immune to this folks. Ha everything has not been successful for me in my life. And when I had $269 in my bank account, I'm like, huh, I better figure this out. Cause I have kids and a wife who's with our fourth daughter. And I'm like, well, I got to get this working. So I flipped products for profit to figure that out. But once I eventually realized, you know, that was an engine and a temporary machine, and it was good for that temporary moment. The real opportunity had become later on realizing the power of a brand and how that literally runs 24 seven doesn't require maintenance on it. I can have an operator that's been trained in my system and has spent a year or two working with us, managing seven, you know, businesses managing two or three multi seven figure businesses because of systems and automations and AI and processes now. We don't have to take on a huge amount of effort to make these grow once they're up and running. Yep. Can you give us a bit of a case study from one of your favorite clients or brands that you've helped develop? Can you take us through the journey that they went through? a few, I'll try to keep them concise. I mean just literally today, Tad, Tad Wicker in our group came forward. Um, and Tad was a guy who has been a real estate guy and done that most of his entire life, but realized a few years ago, I need to kind of find another way to get out of the real estate world. as that was becoming a troublesome thing, started his brand, just hit his first 10,000 a month in revenue badge today. Um, so he's really starting to crank on his business, which is awesome. Um, so we're super excited for him because he literally is in his sixties and figure this thing out, got his product launched, running his PPC. You know, now he's hitting the next level of metrics. He's capitalizing and looking for a line of credit to get him lifted to the next level. He's doing a lot of things right, which is super awesome. Well I can't tell you what his brand is because he's behind an NDA. I can tell you that he is in the home niche. Yep. For me, I can tell you some of the products we have or products we've directly related to, what we're doing, but For the clients and stuff, I'm behind an NDA for their purposes. I can tell you top level niches like Daniel is in the home and bedding space. Matt was in the essential oils and goods space. There's a number of people in the home and kitchen and outdoors, some of the areas we specialize in. I got people in the beauty side and skincare space that are doing really well. For us, well is 18 to 30 % net profit, just so we're clear. Revenues are awesome. But it really gets down to how much do I keep. So we really focus on the product that maintain, you know, 18 to 25 % net profit margins at the bottom line, and then look for those opportunities to meet the customer needs that really grow in scale. For existing businesses, David, David LeBond came to me and he had a business. He was doing about 30,000 a month on Amazon. He took a course, got going, was about six months into it and decided that he either needed to get our help or he was going to quit. It was costing him more than 30,000 a month to make it run. He just couldn't figure out what he was missing. in his business and what he was missing with Amazon and why he couldn't unlock the traffic. He didn't understand the customer need, the intent. He didn't understand what the algorithm was doing. He was basically fighting with it. And so many sellers do this. They fight with the Amazon algorithm and they don't understand that they're not giving it what it wants. They're literally hindering their growth and ability. And I've had this conversation with a lot of sellers who are already on Amazon and they don't believe me, right? They don't, they don't believe me because they don't understand. And they think we've heard it all. There's nothing new you can tell me. You know I listened to all the gurus and my sales went on past 30,000. Well, he reached a point where he was willing to listen and I kind of cracked through that little space. And I said, here are the things we're going to do for the next five months. A hundred thousand a month in five months is what he moved to. He's in 18 months, he's following our processes and unlocking the real traffic mechanisms he was missing and stopped fighting with the system and actually came in line with it. He's at 610,000 a month as of this month on Amazon. Yeah, with his products about 18 months later. So I'm grateful that he listened because now he has a business that's 6 million a year and he's on his way to 10 million a year. And we're already in talks to acquire his business. So I'm excited about that. As he comes to an acquisition, he was willing to listen to what others didn't. They think they understand Amazon's algorithm, but they don't. Part of my understanding comes from information we gathered with Amazon before they took it off the web, which was a long time ago and my own background in programming latent and semantic engines and the way the knowledge engine works. But now, more importantly, how it's actually transitioning. It's actually transitioning. very dramatically. Yeah, amazing. Well, it sounds like you are really supporting a lot of people to create these amazing lifestyle businesses. What is something Neil that we haven't discussed on this podcast yet that we should have? Well, I think, you know, there is a particular aptitude with e-commerce and it has to do with mostly, take it, everybody takes a DISC assessment profile, a DISC. Okay. DISC assessment. Go look it up if you guys don't know what it is. It covers four quadrants of a particular personality type. It's not how they feel. It's how they intend to act or have act in a business relationship in the past. And it kind of gauges their understanding and aptitude of business. And it also is whether or not they have a higher level of conscientious state. Whether they can be trainable or they have a, a standard in a place in which they can operate and be consistent in their life, whether or not they have more like an influencer attitude or where their dominant structure fits in their life or their walk in business. And we typically, I want to see a particular type of profile come out of that because it doesn't fit everybody to run an e-commerce business. Um, I'm typically looking for those who have had some experience in business, even though they didn't read, you know, do an e-commerce company. They understand enough about business that they have made some success in their business. Could be a high income earner. I've got dentists and doctors and lawyers, and I got high school dropouts and stay at home moms and dads that run other companies and all kinds of stuff. Um, franchise owners and others, people in real estate or brokering or in that kind of world. And they typically have some success in those other ventures already. So they kind of understand the fundamentals of business. They don't understand it in the e-commerce terms, but they got enough about business that this isn't sort of new to them. What they don't understand is the, you know, the work it takes daily, weekly, monthly to outline a first traffic channel like Amazon, a first marketplace like that. And we help them train into that so they can understand the business and fundamental growth. So what it means in essence is that, you know, not everybody is a great fit for Ecom, but if they are aptitude wise related to even engineering backgrounds and stuff, not highly technical, so they don't think they're smart enough. That they can think their way out of this situation, or they think there's another way to do it. They're smart enough to know that they need a process kind of like David. And they want to walk that process and they're willing to follow a second until they figure out what's going on. And then their dominant brain kicks in and they kind of do it their own way, which is what I hope they will do. And really I'm looking for those people because they have the greatest aptitude to success in this business model. And they become great operators. And in my business builders group, as they rise up, we do a hand call every once in a while and say, Hey, who's, know, who's got past six, seven figures. Who's you know, interested in doing some other things with us, you know, partnerships, joint ventures and being an operator and this kind of stuff. And so our operators that run our brands are going to help us run the acquired brands we're working on right now are, are being raised up out of my CEO, you know, owner operator, uh, venture. So I raised them up and then we partner with them and they already know how to run the business. They've been successful at doing it their own. And then we start up a new brand or run a new brand together. and that's one of the ways that I've been able to train people up and not do employees. So. In the end, I set myself up for kind of a triple win with them, which is really get them into a position to become an owner operator of an e-commerce company and learn how to do it. And then set themselves up for other opportunities within this space, either acquiring businesses or if they want to look with us for acquisition, we become the exit partner. So we do that launch, scale, and exit component of this that gives them that run right all the way through to the end. Amazing. So for anyone listening or watching today, who's on the fence about kind of starting their own brand or jumping into this kind of a business, what would you say to them? Take and expect that if it if you think it's going to take five hours a week, it's probably closer to 20. If you think it's going to be five thousand or ten thousand, double and triple that and really look at the opportunity that as I deploy capital into the marketplace as an investor or an owner operator, I have to look at when is the return of that business come back and compare to other ways I could spend that money, right? Either I could hold it, put it in a five percent interest account. I could invest it in real estate that might mature in seven to ten years. I can put it in the stock market. I can put it otherwise. Or I can put it in an inventory that has an asset allocation that where I might spend 10, 25,000, $50,000 in inventory, it's actually worth 100 to $300,000 when I sell it in the open market. So as I take money out and deploy it into inventory, I'm deploying it to that upside potential. As that product sells, I can then redeploy that capital back to the brand and grow it even faster. I can cashflow that and I can build an asset, an asset that becomes a saleable asset in the end. As opposed to just letting it set and someone else managing it. If you have the idea that it's something you want to manage, this is a good path for you. If you don't want to just leave it in wall street and say, well, good luck with that. Uh, and you want some control over its destiny or maybe your destiny for opportunities to help, we have a lot of families with kids involved in this who are looking at generational opportunities to bring their kids and families into this. They want to change because there may be 10, 20 years, maybe five years away from retiring. And they're like, I don't want to do the rest of this again. And it's not a legacy I want to hand to my family. So I want to do something we can do together, something that I can see myself doing later on. And I see those people, you know, stepping away from curtain things, practices and other things to do this because they're just kind of done in the minutia of all that they did well at it. They're just kind of done with it. Right. And they've been literally looking at ecom for a while now and just haven't figured out, you know, what's the difference between a course and a mentor. And most of them are smart enough to figure that out. Yeah. end up with us and they realize, okay, I'm to spend 50 to a hundred K in year one to get this business off the ground. I'm going to redeploy my profits to get it going faster in this economic engine so that by year two and three, I can really see this thing juggernaut into a real opportunity and train them to become part of what I call the 8%. Those are those who make it in years four and five, 92 % of people in failing business in years four and five. I want them to have the first three years of fundamentals of business opportunity and upside so they can sustain growth. and they can sustain that years four or five, they become part of the 8%, which gives them an asset they can sell. So those kind of folks, if it makes any sense to listen to this and talk to me, you can go check me out on my website, grab the book. There's 10 free copies, I guess we're giving out today, which is awesome. Cool. I'll pop those links in the show notes, but it's voltagedm.com/freebook and your code is TARRYN all in capitals, but there's only 10. So jump on that. Yeah. Grab a copy. That is going to go through the strategy. I have a podcast called the High Voltage Business Builder podcast, the individuals, there are 15 of them, they were interviewed in those chapters, all experts in different areas supporting the e-commerce business model or wealth without wall street or wealth preservation around business and growing. And it is a strategy guide, not a tactical implementation. A lot of people get mistaken by that. I you to understand why it is a strategy guide. Um, there are plenty of ways to implement tactics and playbooks in different ways. Not everyone truly understands the strategy of a business growth model from years three, four, and five. And that's what's outlined along with case studies and support and resources to really help you understand what it takes to become a real business builder that creates an opportunity, a real upside for your family. These businesses can exit for millions later on when done correctly. And that's a huge opportunity for those who do it the right way. Yeah, absolutely. Now, Neil, we have a tradition on this podcast called The Book Drop, and we want to know what book has impacted you either personally or professionally. Well, let's go with one, although I mean, I would selfishly love to know the thousands because there will be, but let's pick one. OK, so I have to I have to go with the Bible. Why? Because in the five F's that I mentioned earlier, they start with faith, right? I would not be walking here today without faith. I don't believe in coincidences, not in my universe. There's nothing such as a randomness. know, faith has been a huge component of our willingness to get out of that safety boat of the corporate world and say, we're going to do this together. We're going to do it as a family. We're going to keep going. That's been a huge component. And then there's proverbs and there's You know, Ecclesiastes, there's the songs of Solomon. There's so much wisdom to be gained and what to do to present yourself in abundance with your mind and to harden and strengthen your heart against the things that come after you so that you know who the real family and friends are that should be with you on this process. And sometimes you find the friends are more family than the family. in certain ways and you need to find that group and that consortium. Cause if you were like me and you really know that this is something you want to do and you want to hang on to it, you don't want to change that you need that support around you. And you're going to find that not everybody's willing to support you. Um, which really gets down to understanding that if you do it correctly, the finances will be there. If you put purpose and value ahead of profits, then the finances will come because the profits will be family, friends, other things, not just the money. The money is only one part of a profitable system when it comes to this. And the last part is the freedom, right? Um, the freedom that that book has given me to be this guy, to raise my family, to homeschool them, to be a part of this community we have here. And the relationship I have with all of my clients is to extol that everybody has the freedom. It may not feel like it's close to you. Like sometimes money doesn't feel close. but we know it's out there. It's just not right near us right now. It's like, how do I get to that money? Freedom can feel that way to you as well, whether you're locked into a job or you're coming home, listening to this podcast, or you don't feel like you have the freedoms, the actuality you do and an abundance mindset thinker starts to realize that they have all those opportunities. Yes, they come with challenges. Yes, they come with conditions. Yes, they may come with hardships because you choose to change things. You choose to change them. They usually will. But the opportunity cost of the freedom is probably greater than anything. And I feel more free now than I ever have. What a wonderful situation to be in and possible for everybody. Neil, thank you so much. Freedom from everything, freedom of choice. That's the ultimate freedom to me, freedom of choice. Beautiful. Neil, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and all of your kind of strategies behind the scenes there with us today. It's been an absolute pleasure. I have learned a lot. Thank you for having me on. been an honor and I appreciate you letting me answer in my own long-winded way. It's a pleasure, the art of storytelling. Thank you, Neil. Thank you.