(Transcript continued from the Episode 156 show notes and audio podcast)
The second game we were in a different part of our pitching rotation. Those of you that are familiar with baseball know that you can’t pitch the same pitcher in two games, usually because that pitcher’s arm gets too tired. In the case of little kids, you don’t want to pitch them too much because it’s not good for the development of their arm, so we pitch a lot of pitchers.
They just had better pitching than us in the second game and we got rocked. In baseball you have these innings where nothing goes your way, it seems like the baseball has eyeballs and it can see where your players are standing, and it goes wherever they’re not standing. It was just one of those innings and we got rocked, they scored 15 or so runs on us in a single inning.
This depressed my 11-year-old baseball team, they don’t like to lose, which I think is great. They felt bad about losing, which is great. You want your 11-year-old baseball players to care about losing a baseball game, in the same way that in your business you want that drive to win.
We talked to these 11-year-olds after the game and overwhelmingly the sentiment of this team was not feeling sorry for themselves about how badly they lost, not about how it was unfair, or the umpires were unfair, or it was unfair that the other team had better players. They didn’t feel victimized by the game.
What they told us, as a coaching staff, was the opportunity that they saw to get better, because at the end of the day those were just other 11-year-old and 12-year-old kids that we were playing. If those 11-year-old and 12-year-old kids could play that well, my team felt that they should be able to play that well as well.
I wondered about all of you out there in your businesses, when you get into those situations where you don’t have the success that you expected to have, you don’t reach the goal that you expected to reach, you see other people that are having amazing success, what is your reaction? Are you feeling like a victim about how things are stacked against you in your business and how there’s just no way for you to compete because you don’t have the things that you need to be successful, or the deck is stacked against you? Are you seeing that competition or those people out there as validation that it’s possible for you to be successful?
I want to suggest to you that this kind of abundance mindset, that there are plenty of wins available in the case of baseball, there’s plenty of opportunities to win, there’s plenty of clients out there in the case of your internet business, there’s plenty of money out there for you to go after and for you to be successful, there’s an abundance of opportunity out there. The fact that people around you are successful, even when you’re not, means that there is a possibility, a way, a roadmap, a path, an opportunity for you to be successful in your business. That’s the mindset that I think this 11-year-old baseball team had. I wondered about using the same logic, this opportunity abundance logic, if 11-year-olds can have this kind of opportunity mindset, why don’t we have this opportunity mindset and this vision for how to win in our own businesses when we see people around us that are successful?
If you’ve fallen into this trap where you see other people online that are having success and you’re not having the success that you want to, and you have a victim mindset, or it depresses you, I want you to flip the script on that this week. I want you to see those examples as evidence that you too can be successful. I want you to find things, like my baseball team did, find examples of things that those people are doing better that you can rise up to that level.
I’ll give you one example. This baseball team that we were playing had one coach. When they were at bat, that coach was out coaching third base. They did not have a first base coach. They did not have a coach in the dugout. They had one coach for that entire team. That team was well disciplined, incredibly well behaved, they understood baseball, they were operating at a very high level. My team saw that, they saw that this team was essentially self-managed, and they want to get to that level where they are performing independently in the dugout and on the field. They saw that as evidence that they can do it.
What do you see that your competition is doing as evidence that you can do, and what are you going to do better this week?
That was case one, a really great story about some young baseball players that are doing it right. That brings me to case two, a little bit on the flip side of this. It’s something that I saw that just blows my mind. I don’t understand this mentality.
In the United States yesterday we had this mass testing of a new emergency alert system. For decades in the United States, if there was an emergency there is national emergency alert system where the Emergency Broadcast network puts a tone out onto all of the radio stations in the United States and you can get information out to everyone at once. The idea is if there’s a nuclear weapon inbound to the United States, or a tsunami warning, or whatever, they can get on the radio and say, “Crawl under your desk and hide, because a bad thing is happening,” or whatever they need to do to have mass communication all at once.
The problem with the old system is that no one is listening to FM radio anymore. That’s not totally true, but in this age of podcasting and cell phones, we don’t listen to FM radio in the same way that we did 20 years ago or 30 years ago. This is becoming less and less effective as a method to have mass communication to 300,000,000 people, which is a hard problem. So, the United States has developed this cell phone network where they can, at the press of a button, send a message to every cell phone in the United States and it’s uninterruptable. You can’t turn it off, you can’t opt out. If the President of the United States or the Federal Emergency Management Agency of the United States want to put a message on your cell phone, they can do that.
They tested it for the first time, at least to my knowledge, on a nationwide basis yesterday. Every cell phone in the United States went off at about 1:30 in the afternoon with a message that said, “This is a test of the Presidential Emergency Alert System.”
I think this is genius. As an engineer, my observation is it’s really hard to talk to 300,000,000 people. If you can reach some significant percentage of them, most of whom who are standing next to the rest of them, probably, then you can reach almost everyone in an entire country in a matter of minutes. That’s an amazing feat of communication. Good on you. That’s probably going to be useful someday. That’s my approach and I kind of moved on with my life.
When I got back to Facebook, I was amazed at all of the people that were spending time taking that as a cue to complain about how they hate our President. I don’t want to get into politics on this show. I understand some people love this guy who is running the United States and some people really don’t. They were taking this opportunity to have a conspiracy theory about how this messaging system was just a ploy by our President to extend his influence and all of this stuff that people were wanting to talk about on Facebook.
My question is what in the world? First of all, why are these people so negative? Why is everything a problem? Why are they always focused on bringing other people around to their very negative point of view and increasing the total amount of negative energy in the world? Why are they like that? Why are they spending their time that way when they could be doing something productive?
I wondered about you guys. I wonder how many of you out there are taking time to complain about things that are well outside your sphere of your influence to bring people around you down to your level, to have a glass half empty point of view on things? Whether it’s this emergency management thing or the weather, or any other of a number of things that you really can’t control, how many of you are spending time doing that and don’t even realize it? Maybe you don’t even realize that part of your day is spent being negative about something that there is nothing you can do about, being a victim, spending time convincing yourself that you are being trodden upon by the world, that the man is out to get you, that the system is against you?
How many of you are feeling that way? If you are, and you haven’t really taken time to stop and think about it, or you didn’t realize it, I want you to stop that. It’s actually also okay with me if you stop watching so much news and learning all about things that you really can’t do anything about, all of the negative sensational imagery that the news is putting in your brain. I want you to stop doing that. I want you to focus on things that you can do, that you can control.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t pay attention to politics, but let’s pay attention to the part of politics that we can actually go do something about. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t stay informed about what’s going on in the world around you. I am saying that you shouldn’t obsess about all of the things that are happening that you can’t personally take action to change. I am saying that you should, in general, stop complaining and start doing something about the things in your life that you have control over.
If you’ve fallen into this kind of victim mentality about your business, I want you to recognize it. The first step is to recognize that you have a problem. I want you to change that energy into some positive energy that focuses on the stuff that you can do to make things better.
A lot of times I think we get negative about stuff, we fall into habits, we fall into groupthink about the kinds of behaviors that people have around us, and we start exhibiting that behavior, and it spills over into our business and keeps us from making progress.
My action for you on this is to do a little self-assessment this week. Are you being sucked down by events and things around you? If so, I want you to knock that off and start getting focused about the positive things, the positive change, the positive direction that you can affect in your business and your life so that you can move forward. This is a wakeup call for you. I want to challenge you to be better in that regard.
Last Night Listener Feedback
Last week in Episode 155 we talked about this business model of Amazon FBA Wholesale. We talked about the fact that you identify wholesale suppliers, you understand what they are able to sell you, and you look through those thousands of products to find products that you can buy from them and resell profitably on Amazon under the Amazon FBA program. If you didn’t get a chance to listen to that episode and that sounds interesting to you, you can find it here.
I got a question from listener Danny Mullen in the private Facebook group. Hi, Danny. If you haven’t joined the Late Night Internet Marketing Community on Facebook, it’s a small private Facebook group. You actually have to answer some trivia questions to get in. I’ll let you in if you’re a listener and not an evildoer, so you can hang out with us and ask questions.
The question that Danny asked was, “I’m listening to Episode 155. I have a question. Do you select the product that you think would work, or do you select a wholesaler first and then look for products?” This is a really good question. He goes on to say, “It seems like sometimes product selection is the easy place to get lost. How do you figure out what to sell?”
Danny is a smart guy, he asks really good questions. This is the thing that a lot of people ask when they’re talking about this business. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Where do these suppliers come from and how do you find them? Danny actually hit right on the head. There are two methods and he identified both of them.
The method that I used when I first started Amazon FBA Wholesale was to just go and look for wholesalers without regard to the products that they sell. I did kind of decide that I wanted to work in a sporting goods, outdoors, and home kind of niche. I mean niche very broadly, not a small niche of that. I mean anything that roughly fell into that category.
Generally, I chose that because those products sell well on Amazon and they are not gated on Amazon. This is something that we haven’t talked about very much, but there are some things that you have to have certain credentials to sell, or you have to have certain experience to sell, or you have to prove that you’re a legitimate retailer to sell.
For example, you can’t go sell diamond jewelry on Amazon unless you’re certified to do that. That’s a bad place to start your FBA business. On the other hand, if you want to sell blow up rafts for swimming pools on Amazon, no problem, you can do that right now. Anyone can do that. All you have to do is sign up for an account. There’s no gating or precertification required to do that.
That’s the kind of stuff that I went after, all kinds of sporting goods, outdoor, hunting and fishing equipment, and so forth, anything like that. That’s the kind of place that I started. Additionally, stuff for the home, everything from tools to pieces of decoration. All that kind of stuff, because it’s an easy place to get started on Amazon.
What I did and what I was taught to do was to go find suppliers without regard to the exact products that they sell. In general, a way to do that is to go find a tradeshow where wholesale distributors are actually attending and get the attendee list for those tradeshows.
You’d be amazed. Well, I didn’t really understand this, maybe you won’t be amazed if you’ve done this before. I was amazed at the number and size of these tradeshows in the United States. That’s where I was focused, but I think this is generally true all throughout the world. These suppliers go, they buy booths, or they rent booths, and they find customers that way. It’s lead generation for these companies. They go to these tradeshows and people interested in buying products walk the aisles of these tradeshows and talk to these distributors.
You can find lists of attendees, or you can actually go to these tradeshows. You can actually visit them, if you want to. That’s not something that I’ve ever done, but you can actually go to a tradeshow, go booth to booth and talk to these suppliers. Let them know, “I want to sell your stuff. Can I have a list of the things that you sell with your pricing?” They’ll talk to you and tell you what you need to do to get that.
Similarly, if you find a distributor online, you can actually go to that distributor, contact them by email or call them up on the phone to say, “I’m an online retailer and I would like a list of the things that you sell.” I would like the opportunity to give you money and buy your stuff is basically what you’re saying.
In many cases, they will send you that list. In some cases, they will ask you for some additional information, like can you prove that you’re a real business, which is easy to do. Then they’ll send you this list of things that are available for you to sell.
Sometimes that list of things that they sell is thousands or tens of thousands of products. Usually, the lists that are super useful are going to have a UPC code, so that you can look up the item on Amazon, the price that you need to pay in order to buy it, and some information about the supplier SKU number and stuff like that, so you can figure out whether or not it’s profitable for you to purchase and resell on Amazon.
That’s the way that I’ve mostly been doing it, to answer Danny’s question, is just finding a supplier first. You could also do it the other way, what is often referred to in the industry as reverse wholesale sourcing, where you actually find a product somehow – you identify a product in any old way that you want – and you try to figure out what the wholesaler is.
Let’s say you’re walking through the sporting goods store and you see some fantastic thing that you know you would like to be able to sell. Let’s say you see something that I actually have sold quite a bit of in fishing season this year, a fly-tying kit for fly fisherman. It’s a very nice kit. You look at it and you see who the manufacturer is and you think, “I wonder if I could sell this product on Amazon.” This one single product.
You’re in the store, you have your cell phone, you take a picture of that product, take a picture of the UPC code. You come home and start Googling that product, figuring out how to get a hold of the manufacturer. You call the manufacturer and say, “I’d like to buy this product.”
A lot of times what they will say, either on their website or in their email reply to you, is either you can buy from them directly or, more likely, you can buy from these authorized distributors. That list of authorized distributors that they will give you is actually a list of wholesalers.
Now you’re looking for one product. The Amazon FBA Wholesale business isn’t really about selling one product, it’s about selling thousands of whatever products are profitable, sort of without regard to what they are. It’s really just a numbers game. Why are you focused on one product? The reason is when you contact that wholesale distributor you can say something like, “I was talking to XYZ Manufacturer, and they suggested that I contact you regarding purchasing their products.”
That’s a really nice way to start an introduction to a wholesale distributor. “I was talking to the manufacturer and they said you were an authorized distributor of their products. I’m interested in buying. How can I do that? Please send me a list of all the stuff that you sell.”
Now you’ve gone from this one product, you used this one product, the fly-tying kit that you saw in the sporting goods store in this example, and you went to find a distributor of that one product, but it turns out that distributor will always have hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of other products that they’re also willing to sell you. At that point, you would ask for the whole list and you could get the list that way. That is called reverse wholesale sourcing.
So, the answer to Danny’s question is you can do it either way.
You can go get yourself a list of distributors by looking for tradeshows in the industry that you want to look at, by visiting those tradeshows, there are online publications that list wholesalers, you can do Google searches for wholesalers. There are lots of ways to just randomly find wholesalers in a market and there are many publications online that tell you how to do this. Or you can do reverse wholesaling and find a product and then trace it back to its wholesale source.
Either way, what you’re going to end up with is a relationship with a wholesaler that is going to provide you with a list of products that you can then analyze to find the profitable products that you can sell on Amazon.
Danny, thank you for asking one of the most frequently asked questions about Amazon FBA Wholesale. That’s a homerun for you. Thank you very much. I hope that’s helpful to all of you, if you’re thinking about this Amazon wholesale business, to demystify where your suppliers will come from.
Wrapping Things Up…
That wraps it up for this week. I hope that you’ve had a fantastic week. I hope that you will take some action based on some of the things in this episode, particularly with regard to the mindset stuff. I hope you’ll pause for just a moment this week and do a little self-reflection. This is really useful.
I hope you’ll take some action to understand whether or not you’ve got some of this negative mindset, either regarding a lack of abundance or focusing on things that you can’t control, and you’ll start to make some changes with regard to that in your life, in your relationships, and in your business. That will help you grow as a person and it will help you grow your business.
I also hope that if you’re interested in exploring this Amazon FBA business that you will consider these wholesalers and maybe go out to try and find one. It’s pretty interesting. If you have more questions about that, you can go ask them in the Late Night Internet Marketing Facebook Group and I’ll be happy to answer them there. Maybe you’ll end up getting mentioned on the show, if that’s exciting to you.
Until next week…
