285: The Wholesale Formula: The Superior Alternative to Retail Arbitrage and Private Labeling on Amazon with Dan Meadors

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert plank Show Episode 285, the wholesale formula, the superior alternative to retail arbitrage and private labeling on Amazon with Dan metters. Hey, everybody, and welcome back to the show. Our guest today is Dan mentors. And Dan started out selling on Amazon as a part time venture along with his lifelong friend Eric Lambert. And in less than five years, they took their initial $600 investment have generated more than $13 million in sales on Amazon. I think this is gonna be a fun story, a fun interview. Dan, how are things today?

Unknown Speaker 0:35 Fantastic, man, I'm happy to be on the show.

Robert Plank 0:37 Awesome. I'm happy as well and excited to hear about this cool story. So you're selling on on Amazon? And can you kind of kind of catch everyone up like this whole thing of like being an Amazon seller? Can you kind of explain to us like what that is? Exactly.

Speaker 2 0:52 Yeah, it was a it was actually a foreign concept to us. When we first heard about it. One of our friends, he, we were all worked at the same place. And he had art we live in Kentucky, I'm sure you guys can tell by my accent. But, you know, there, there's not a lot of high paying jobs in our area. And this guy had a six figure job, which is, you know, relatively unheard of up here. And he came in and turned in his resignation. And we had no idea Well, you know, what's going on, man? It's like, Are you moving or something? And he said, No, he was just gonna stop and sell full time on Amazon. And he kind of explained to us, like, what, you know, that was one of those things like you're selling what, what are you selling, and he was the guy that you know, just currently, I just shop in stores, and since stuff into Amazon. And so that was mind boggling to us. And that's kind of how we got started, as he told us a little bit about it. And that, you know, we started out shopping in stores. And it was, you know, we would just go to Walmart, and we'd find something that was more expensive on Amazon. And then we would buy, you know, as many as we could we take them home, we take them home, pack them up and ship them all out the FBA fulfillment centers. And it was it was unbelievable. Like, you look at these prices, and you're thinking like, you know, I'm buying something for $3. And then you see it on Amazon for 1499, you assume nobody's buying it. But whenever we sent that first shipment in, it was like magic. And, you know, we there was one little Disney Car we sent it and it was like it was shoe Todoroki was the little dudes name. And whenever we sent it in, we didn't expect, you know, we didn't expect we thought we might sell like, one a week or maybe never to be perfectly honest. And within the first 24 hours we sold, we sold like 30 of those things. And we were you know, we bought them for 299. And we're selling them for 1499. And, you know, that first six months was kind of like a wild ride. Because, you know, we were kind of learning what Amazon's like the capabilities of Amazon and how easy it was. And then once we learned that we actually we, you know, we both had pretty high paying jobs for the area too. But we left our jobs and started doing Amazon full time. And then, you know, that went on for another two years. And we you know, we were all just shot with it. We were shopping in stores every day and sending our stuff into Amazon. But it was I'll be honest with you, it was a lot of work. And it was one of those things. It's like, you know, I didn't quit a pretty awesome job to really just drive around. Labor. Right? Right. It's like I didn't want to just drive around in a giant fan, five days a week, and then be packing and shipping one day a week and spent one day at home. And so we started thinking about different kinds of models that would allow us to to not be on the road and not, you know, be more less manual labor. So we looked into like private label. And then that's there's really, it's really complicated. And there's a lot of I feel like there's a lot of liability with the model. And then we settled on wholesale, and that was in 20. I think it was 2015 or mid 2014 though as mid 2015, I believe whenever we switched to wholesale full time. And we finished that year at 1.2 8 million in sales. And that was, you know, that was you know, it wasn't real big improvement. Because we only switched like mid year to that model. But it was it was growing really fast. And then it's 2014 because in 2015 We did 3.8 million, and we were complete wholesale and and then 2016 We did right at seven drannit. 7 million. And you know I realize Wholesale is kind of like technobabble II and people may not understand what it is what it is, is we work with manufacturers and brand owners directly So like you think of a Nike shoe or something like that, and we purchase product directly with those brands, we try to establish relationships with them. And that's the products that, you know, that's the products we carry on Amazon.

Robert Plank 5:14 Awesome. And so I gotta have to admit, like I hadn't heard of this whole selling thing up until now, like, I think I started the Amazon stuff sort of late, like, I started doing the retail arbitrage like maybe mid 2014 or so. And I thought it was like the silliest thing as well also, like a went into like the local Big Lots in town. And then there were like three people in the store who were like scanning their phones also. And I mean, like, sort of a small town here. And it was like, sort of weird. And I started sending those in. And I kind of experienced the same thing similar as you like, I was like, spending a day like, go into stores and loading up all the cards and taking them home and like counting stuff and peeling off all labels, and it got pretty old pretty quickly for me, and my business partner jumped in with the, with the private labeling stuff. But as you said, like there were a lot of steps, it was a lot of work. And so this wholesaling thing. So you you work with these brands and the manufacturers and you so do you like do you and your business partner, like just purchase these items outright? And then send them to Amazon? Or sort of or like, is it a matter of like, you're promised a certain number of sales, or what's kind of the agreement there.

Speaker 2 6:17 We, the first I mean, we actually purchase the items outright. And the first thing you'd realize whenever you get in, you know, one of the core dynamics or differences between private label and wholesale is that with with private label, you know, it is a fantastic model, creating your own brand is a powerful thing. And I'm not, you know, I don't want to be seem like this is negative towards private label. But there's a lot of work that goes into creating that brand. And that you're you know, you have to create demand, you have to drive demand, you have to drive traffic to your product. And it takes, you know, it takes up a fairly large amount of capital upfront to make a private label product successful. Whereas with Wholesale, what we're doing is we're looking for products that are already selling well. And then we weren't we reach out to those brands, and set up a set of a relationship with them. And one of the first things that we noticed, and it was kind of crazy, was it was like a biggest headache was whenever we were whenever we'd reach out to these brands be like, oh, yeah, we'd love to set up a relationship with you guys and sell your products on Amazon, they were like, you know, we really don't need any more people to sell our products on Amazon. It was like what, like, you don't want me to sell your product on Amazon. Like, this is an order for you like your you don't want money. And it was. So that was like perplexing at first where it is, you know, they just didn't like they didn't want our money. And so then we started thinking about it from the perspective of of how Amazon works. And you know, the way Amazon works is, it's like a sales pie. Like, effectively a product is going to get so many sales, regardless of how many people are on it. And unless those people are increasing the size of the pie, they're actually a detriment. So we started looking at it from the perspective of how we can help these brands get better and better, better placement on Amazon, more optimized listings that, you know, create better conversion and all this other like, you know, it's all relatively simple stuff once you start doing it. But it's, you know, nobody had, we didn't feel like there were a lot of people offering the service to brands. And that was what we, you know, we can't we started coming at it from the perspective of serve first, like we wanted to, you know, help our brands actually succeed on Amazon. And whenever we did that, it was daylight and dark. I mean, like now companies actually wanted to work with us. And, you know, once you do it for a company, like once you're able to help them out and help them get better performing on Amazon, like they want to work with you more that you get more discounts, and you get more, you know, there's all kinds of crazy little things that happen. And that's that's how our business evolved, you know, and went from, you know, 1.28 to 3.8, and then to seven. So it's, you know, it's just, we've really adopted a surfers mentality.

Robert Plank 9:04 Crazy. And so I'm really curious just about how you how you figure out like, what, what, which of these products to buy in wholesale, because you mentioned there that you look for products that are already selling well. But how do you know if a product is selling? Well, if it's not on Amazon, or if there's no sort of ranking to check for that.

Speaker 2 9:23 I mean, that's the only thing we use, we always start our product searches on Amazon. So like all of our product searches, you know, we're not trying to bring new products to Amazon. We, our specialty is taking an existing product and making it better. So all of our initial searches are done on Amazon and we use a tool called Jungle Scout. And Jungle Scout is it'll tell you how many times something sales in a month so it takes that like kind of, you know, awkward rank number where it's like, you know, something might be 4000 and health and personal care. And like nobody really knows what that means. Well Jungle Scout kind of gives us a gauge of You know, 4000 and health and personal care means that sells 345 times a month or something like that. And then we're able to, you know, once we have that data, we're all we have to do is figure out what percentage of those sales we're going to get. And then it's just it's like a portfolio. Like, once I add a product to a, you know, once I convinced that manufacturer to let me sell their product, I'm all I'm doing is, you know, let's say that thing sells 345 times a month. And there's, there's four other people that are really competing on that offer. Or, let's call it 400 times a month, that way, the math will be easy. Effectively, all I'm doing is selling 100 units of that product a month.

Robert Plank 10:36 Okay, so just to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. So you go on Amazon, and you see that these products are already selling. So maybe if there's like a, I don't know, like a tennis racket or a water bottle or something. So that would be that, that that brand is selling, but then those but then the brand, have they have not listed the product on Amazon themselves. It's just on Amazon, just as a result of those third party sellers, like buying and doing the retail arbitrage.

Speaker 2 11:01 Correct. And that's the that's, that's actually what you said, right? There is, is part of the trick behind the magic, right. And it's, you know, most of those retail arbitrage sellers who like create those listings, don't do a great job at it. So it's like that products already doing pretty well, you know, let's say it's selling 400 times a month. But if you went in and you maybe made that title, a bit more descriptive. Maybe that product sells 600 times a month, and you've done something amazing for that brand, something that they will love and appreciate you for. And that's the trick behind the magic is it's all I'm doing is tweaking one thing and you know, that takes that may take us five minutes, but it's going to make that product convert better and see more traffic or, or whatever.

Robert Plank 11:45 Awesome. So you're not just blindly going in and seeing the hot seller and adding more fuel to the fire. You're saying, well, there's there's all this untapped stuff that I could just do and make the listing better and just fix a few things up. And then just that alone will will increase the rankings. And so I mean, how do you how do you even like discover these products in the first place? Because there's that Jungle Scout? And does that like just does that give you suggestions? Or do you have to know a product to look at it and see the number of sales? Or how do you narrow that part down?

Speaker 2 12:13 It's actually funny because it's, it's one of the weirdest thing I mean, our research methods, kind of like one of the weird more weird things you'll probably hear. And it's here's the thing is we don't try to compete on like, I'm not trying to compete on big giant brands like Nike, I don't sell Nike products. And it's because I can't help Nike, any of those changes I would make is not going to impact Nikes bottom line in to any level that they would find significant. But if what we're looking for is we're looking for smaller companies and more like niche brands. And those with those companies were able to, you know, if we, if we can make their product sell 200 times more a month, like, that's huge for them, that can be huge on their bottom line at the end of the year. So what we're looking for is medium to small size companies. And the way we find stuff like that is, is like searching, you know, you hear all these weird things. Throughout the day, you see something on Facebook, you're like, I wonder what that is. And, you know, it's like, for example, organic dog treat, or vegetarian dog treat, it's like I didn't know that existed. That's like a really powerful niche on Amazon. And it's, you know, you don't you don't walk into Walmart, or, or target and see organic or vegetarian dog treats, it's just something you don't see. So where are these people buying that product, they're buying it online. And that's a niche where I can, I can definitely serve them and I can definitely help improve their products. So it's every time we hear something strange, or something we've not really heard of before we just write it down. And then we'll do a search on Amazon and look around to just find, you know, one or two products that that look really good. And then we made research, you know, maybe we find out that it's there's another there's another related search term to it. And we'll just continue down that path of looking for products. So all of our product research happens on Amazon and you know, once we once you start doing this kind of stuff, and once you start understanding, like the kind of things that big box doesn't carry. And that niches that exist in this becomes like really easy. And you know, there was an adoption period for us. Like if you look at our in the first you know, two months of us doing this, like our research was so much slower. But now it's just you know, we're able to find hundreds of opportunities every single day.

Robert Plank 14:36 Awesome. Yeah. And I imagine once you do it a few times you kind of get get an eye for any any kind of say, Okay, well, these veggie dog treats this is something I should be pursuing or not and so, I mean, is there any sort of like sort of like checklists or criteria go down because I imagine that you might have researched some of these products but then when she dug a little deeper you felt you realize that you know, maybe like the the profit margins and Not good enough or something like that sort of rules it out. So is there sort of like a checklist or like things you look out for

Speaker 2 15:06 initially is, it's like, first off, you don't know, you're never going to know the profit margin until you contact the company and get their price sheet. But you can save yourself a lot of time, like, one of the things that we're looking for is that Amazon does not sell the product. And it's because Amazon doesn't share, share sales the same way that third party sellers like it, basically, if me and yours sharing a product on a, you know, on a listing, I'll get 50, roughly 50% of the sales and you'll get roughly 50% of the sales. Now, when Amazon's on that same listing, they're going to get about 100% of the sale. So it's really hard to, even if they do share, it's not equitably, so it's very hard to build your business around products that Amazon carries. And then the second part is, we look for products that aren't private labeled. And it's like, you know, for example, you built your product to sell on Amazon, like you built your product with a retailer first mindset. So I'm not going to really be able to offer you much like hey, you know, you're you're doing all that optimization yourself, you're doing all the things that that you need to do to make your product successful, and I just don't feel like they're gonna help you. So it's, that's one of the one of the key criteria that we're looking for, is that, you know, we can actually help the brand or trying to trying to work with and then the last thing is that the product is got, I got into it and forgot what the third criteria was, hang on just one second. Oh, that the product actually got got lost right there, the product actually sells well. And what we're looking for there is, you know, we like products that we can sell a minimum of like 50 or 60 times a month. And what that does is that basically, when a product sales and sales, well, that means there's demand for it. And it's like, it doesn't have to be a consumable product that somebody you know, like toothpaste or something where you buy every single month. But if there's, if there's existing demand for that product, then that's something where you can, you know, you're always going to be able to sell it, like if prices dropped, or something like that, you know, like, God forbid, the prices drop, and you're not making any money. But at least you're not stuck with product. And that's what I love is we've never gotten stuck with a product, it's like, you know, we've had to sell something that, you know, like the worst case scenario scenario for us is selling something at like a 10% loss. Like, that's the worst case, and then I just never buy it again. But if it's something you know, with, with most of our products, like what happens is, we buy them, we sell them and make you know, 25 30% ROI. And we do it month after month after month. And we're not having to reinvest time and energy into those products, like all we did was make them as make them convert better. And we can do very well. And then after that, it's just it's effectively like a piece of our portfolio.

Robert Plank 17:57 Awesome, and then just runs on autopilot. And and what I like about what sort of sort of caught my attention there is that you said that, so for some of these, these products that you sell, sometimes you're only looking for 50 or 60 sales a month and so so it's not like you say, Well, unless I can sell 100 a day, it's not worth it. And so I'm curious about like, what's the sort of like, like average, like transaction on your end? Like how many? Like, how big of a buy are you looking for? Or how many, like sales per month? Are you looking for on average?

Speaker 2 18:29 No, I mean, for us, like we order we order everything we order we order in a monthly volume. So it's, you know, basically, I place a place in order for a month's worth. And that way, if the product changes, or something changes about it, like I don't have way too much inventory, I don't have to buy like six months or eight months worth of inventory. Because everything we buy is domestic too. So I can just place a reorder, and it takes me five minutes. So whenever we, you know, our average order size is probably our average order size now is much bigger than it used to be. Whenever we first started, our average order size was probably like six or 700 bucks. But now it's you know, it's probably like $2,000 on average. And that's, that's you know, bear in mind that's like two or three years in. So that's that's another thing I love about wholesale is like you can really get started, you know, with you can get started with five, five or $600 like a lot of minimum orders or $250. And that gives you a few products that you can just buy and and start selling and see some see some success with the kind of like, give you that proof of concept.

Robert Plank 19:35 Awesome. And that sounds to me like an even another thing that makes it better than private labeling. So you don't have to throw in like a couple grand at that. And I really like how you said it's just monthly volume. So it's not like you're buying a ton and doing a bunch of shipping to get it sent into Amazon and then getting stuck with those long term storage fees. It's just every single like month after month or so that's pretty cool. And so to sort of, to sort of like solidify I this this kind of idea in everyone's minds, including mine, can you kind of walk us through like a case study of yours where you kind of kind of went and you found this brand you you contacted the supplier, and then set this up and kind of did all that, can you kind of walk us through like the steps usually take and maybe even like, an example of some steps you can take?

Speaker 2 20:19 Sure. One of the products that we we worked with early was a company called Scratch labs. And once they sell a nutrition, drink for bike riders, you know, it's one of those, like, electrolyte style drinks. And whenever we, whenever we started working with them, like their product is already doing pretty well. It's selling, you know, probably four or 500 times a month. And whenever we started with that product, we noticed some key key components that were, I guess, I guess you're actually want me to go before that. Right. Like, you want me to talk about how we found the car you want? How do you want me to go here? Yeah,

Robert Plank 20:59 I mean, I mean, if it's not too lengthy, yeah, I'm interested in and sort of what thought process led you to that. Okay.

Speaker 2 21:07 So one of the first products that you know, a product I can, I can give you a pretty good little detailed idea about what we did was we started looking for things related to the bike riding niche. And, you know, the bike riding niche is one of those things, it's pretty wide, like most people think of, you know, if I say bike riding, they're thinking of like a bicycle, but they're not thinking of components that will go along with it. So we were looking for, in basically like, energy chews to keep your mouth wet. Like when you're riding bikes, we were looking for things that, you know, prevents you from being thirsty bike chains, and that kind of stuff. And we came across a product called Scratch labs. And Scratch is an inert, it's basically like a an energy drink that replenishes your electrolytes. And the product was, you know, definitely, there were it was selling well, but it could do better. It's one of those things where, you know, it had like, one picture, and, you know, the picture wasn't very good. And it had, you know, the title was kind of lacking. And then you look at the listing, and there's just all these little, like, small things you can fix. And we got to end and, you know, we started with that product and started working with it. And whenever we, one of the first things we did is we got them to give us, you know, here's the thing about it, it's like, you know, most people are like, No, I'm not a professional photographer, we aren't either, like, we actually don't have a photographer on staff. But most of these brands, like if you reach out to them, and you ask them for pictures, like they had pictures of their own products, so we asked them for updated pictures, we got all their updated pictures on the listing, we changed the title to be, you know, a little more vibrant, we added some length to the bullet points. And that product, you know, is selling like four or 500 times a month, it went up to where it started, started selling about 1000 times a month. And we were selling about, I think it was less than three other people. And it's like, you know, did it help those other sellers? Absolutely, like, absolutely help them. But it really helped that brand. So like, you know, realistically, we were selling about 250 50 of that one product every single month. And that one product, I think we made about $6 on on every unit we sold. So I mean, do that math, it's like, uh, you know, that's a once a month for one product, we're making $1,500 a month. Awesome. And it's like, granted, we were sharing sales, but, you know, I didn't have to pay. Like, that's the thing is, like, you know, with private label, you keep your own pie box, right. And it's like, that's, that's attractive. But you also have to make that pie box irrelevant. It's like, we didn't really have to do anything, I didn't have to spend a ton of ad money, I didn't have to do any kind of like giveaways or anything like that, like, you know, effectively everything I did was basically was organic. And, you know, it probably took us that probably took us about an hour's worth of time. And then we you know, for over a year, we made we made about $1,500 a month from that product. So I mean, look at that, in terms of it's like we made $18,000 from that one hours worth of work. And a five minute phone call every month. I mean crazy.

Robert Plank 24:18 Yeah, I mean, if there's a way to, to make 18 grand from every one hour work, I mean, it's like how many hours would you put in like as many as possible. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 24:28 And that's that's a concept we did. It's kind of funny that you say that because it's like and you know, so me and Eric were doing this all over ourselves. And it was like you know, it's the same thing is we're now that we have these systems like you know it's not everything we do is not time based anymore because like that hour you saw the hour and it paid dividends exponentially. And it's like we just need to be able to do more hours like if we could just do more hours. Like we can make you know our incomes pretty pretty unlimited. Um, so what we did is we hired a couple of couple of employees, and our employees, you know, we had to train them and stuff like that. But now me and Eric, like, on our business, we probably work about, combined probably about 10 to 15 hours, every month, or a week rather, and it's, you know, you know, 1010 hours worth of work, and but our employees, that's the thing about wholesale, and that's what I love about it is, it's, you know, there's, it's just systems, all it is, is like, if this, you know, you know, if a product meets this criteria column, if it doesn't, don't, don't do it. And then once they call them, again, it's like, if it makes this profitability criteria, go ahead and place an order placed in place in order for this many units. And it's like, you know, we're base our units on him are projected sell through. So it's like, the once we taught them those systems, it's like, you know, all it is, is, is just a point of scaling.

Robert Plank 25:59 Awesome. And so speaking of scaling, I mean, have you had any sort of difficulties with growing the business like with, you know, with bringing on, like, you know, bringing on those employees or doing more volume or with, like, getting into some of these gated categories, and he sort of struggles like that?

Speaker 2 26:14 Well, I mean, as far as, like, our, our struggles are a bit different. I mean, then, you know, as far as gated categories, like, you know, one of the people, you know, one of the things about like getting into a gated category is that you buy your products from the manufacturer, and you could give invoices like that. So I mean, we can get into any category we want. So that part's like easy. But as far as like struggles, it's more just like, you know, as you're growing, and as you increase your volume, like we we, if we had to do it all over again, we would have definitely outsourced our prep to like a fulfillment center, to one of the prep centers. But those didn't exist, when we started, we already had like a warehouse and stuff. And it's more or less just creating systems that allow you to process more inventory. And one of the things that most people think is like, you know, I'll just hire more people. That's not how it works. Like, you know, every person you hire beyond the first is, as less, it's kind of like less effective. So you have to create systems to be able to catch them up faster. And, you know, is like one of the one of the things we ran into last year is, we were really trying to jam before quarter four, we were trying to get a lot of product in, and we increased our buying and stuff like that, we were still picking up new lines. And what we did is we created a log jam of product in our warehouse. Effectively, these guys were working through it as fast as they could, but you know, it's just too much stuff. And it kind of you know, it hurt our cash flow a bit. And it's just one of those things where we had to really go back and, and look at what caused the problem. And our systems weren't scaled, to keep up with our kids to keep up with our growth. So we put a lot of focus on that this year. And then like we're looking at new systems to outsource a lot of our prep and ship to prep centers now. And that way we can, we can always maintain the amount of we can basically track our capacity internally, and then everything else is just handled by prep centers.

Robert Plank 28:14 Awesome. And, and as you're explaining this, and I'm explaining this throughout this whole call, I really like your your mindset of like, well, you know, here's the problems we came up against. So I need to have a system to tackle that, or, you know, we have like this one part of the system isn't good. So we need to improve that. So I really liked that sort of that sort of mindset, where a lot of people might have, you know, given up or said, Oh, this is like so much work that you're thinking is more along the lines of, well, I'm sort of almost on on track, I'm sort of almost on target, but what about the system could be improved, and not just, you know, throw more bodies at it not just hired more people, but sort of, you know, fix up that system? It's sort of along those lines? What what do you guys have planned next? Or is there anything sort of on the horizon? That's a sort of new and cutting edge? And has you excited anything like that?

Speaker 2 28:59 I mean, as far as you know, as far as our business goes, it's, we realize that our value is not in is not necessarily in selling products, our value is in better serving our manufacturers. So we've really committed a lot of energy to that, like we've really committed a lot of energy to developing, you know, to being more effective at working with them and helping them achieve achieve their goals in the Amazon platform. So it's like we've kind of adopted a mindset now of where, you know, we're less of a retailer and more of a brand specialist with to help brands improve on Amazon. And with that mindset, we've what we're doing is is we're trying to develop even closer relationships, and it's resulted you know it because it doesn't start, I don't think you ever start with exclusives. But we've gotten so good at Being able to deliver real value and real placement, that we've been offered several exclusives. And so that's kind of one of the ways we're transitioning our business is we're trying to develop even closer relationships with all the companies we work with.

Robert Plank 30:13 Awesome. So working your way up and doing that by, by getting really, really good at just one thing. So I want to make sure that, you know, everybody who heard your story today and heard about all these cool things that you both of you are doing, can you kind of tell us about your websites? And if someone like listen to what you had to say, and they got, you know, super energized and pumped up? Where should they go to sort of find out what there is to know about this whole wholesaling thing?

Speaker 2 30:38 Yeah, absolutely. We have our website is the wholesale formula.com. And, you know, that's what we do there is we talk about some of the strategies we use, we have a blog that, you know, we regularly update with some with cool new strategies and try to really help people because, honestly, I love this opportunity. It's changed my life, like I went from being a person that, you know, traditionally that had a job, and it was basically had to do, you know, I had to build my life around that job, to being able to kind of do what I want, like, you know, now if we, you know, it's funny, like, I post a little picture on Facebook the other day of my wife, literally called ladies, like on a Wednesday, and she's like, Hey, you want to take it, you want to go down to, to Gatlinburg for like two or three days? Yeah, absolutely just got up and left. Like, you know, that's, it was one of those things like, are my kids being able to experience that and stuff like that I want to be able to pass them along to so, you know, that's, that's one of the things that our website is there for. And I got something cool for your audience, like if they want to check it out, it's a kind of how to get started with wholesale on Amazon. On our website, it's if you go to the wholesale formula slash guide, like that, we have a walkthrough of exactly what we do, and kind of like, how we do it. All right,

Robert Plank 32:01 cool. So so everyone should go to the wholesale formula.com/guide and get that. And the other thing is out of curiosity, if, um, if a brand wants your guys's help to sort of get their stuff out there is that is that a thing you do? Like if brands come to you? Or do you only approach those brands?

Speaker 2 32:20 Oh, we hit reached, like we actually reached out to all the time. And it's, it's, you know, as you get better at it, that's one of the things that you start to see is like people, they realize, like, Hey, man, like this Amazon stuffs pretty, you know, it's pretty time consuming for us. And we really want to concentrate on other areas of our business, you know, maybe it's like some sort of global distribution or getting into brick and mortar mortar or something like that. And they need somebody to do that, like, you know, just this past week, we've been contacted by four different companies wanting us to carry their products. And so yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's one of those things as you improve at something like this, opportunities continue to open up for you.

Robert Plank 33:02 Awesome. And so if someone is one of those brands, is there an easy way for them to get in touch with you? Yeah,

Speaker 2 33:06 absolutely reach out to us at Dan at wholesale formula.com. And I'll send that over to our buying team, and they'll take a look at it. And if it's if it's a great fit, they'll definitely reach out. And if it's not, I'll we still contact people back and we'll tell them, you know, it's not a fit for what we're looking for right now. But we can offer it to our students. And, you know, we've done that successfully, we've, because some of our students, you know, their their businesses in a different place. And it might be a better fit for them. And, and they, you know, they'll be able to serve, they'll be able to serve in the same kind of capacity that we would it just makes more sense for them.

Robert Plank 33:41 Awesome. Cool. So yeah, you're right, it can't hurt to just reach out and sort of see what's waiting for people to put those feelers out there. So if you're a brand and you want to get more reach with Amazon, or you want to get reached with Amazon in general, then contact Dan by emailing Dan at the wholesale formula.com and everyone else go to the wholesale formula.com forge slash guide to get the wholesale one on one report a little known business model with a us to build a multimillion dollar company with only $600 and great stuff. And then in general, go to the wholesale formula.com So lots of cool stuff today. I mean, there's there's concrete stuff like with Amazon, but also in general, just that whole entrepreneurial story of like starting in one place building to like the next logical step and going to the next thing so lots of cool stuff. I had fun. I had lots of insights myself. So thanks, Dan, for stopping by and sharing your really amazing story with us.

Speaker 2 34:33 Absolutely, man, I've really appreciate it. It's been a fun show. Like it's, it's one of those shows where it's like, as I can tell you're a real entrepreneur like you understand it and you understand like what people go through so it's absolutely a blast.

Robert Plank 34:47 Awesome. It was a blast to listen to you and get sort of that motivational pick me up. So thanks for stopping by the show.

Unknown Speaker 34:52 Alright, thanks again, Robert. We

Robert Plank 34:54 really appreciate you listening to today's episode of the Robert plank show some Subscribe to us on iTunes and rate and review us at Robert plank.com/itunes