Mastering Amazon FBA: Insider Secrets to E - commerce Success with Neil Twa

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to another exciting episode of the Make Each Click Count podcast. Today, we have a special guest who is an entrepreneur, consultant, and author with over 17 years of experience building successful businesses both online and offline. After leaving a senior role at IBM, he ventured into the e-commerce world, launching multiple personal brands and generating tens of millions of revenue. Alongside his partner, he has helped over 1000 businesses grow their consultancy and mentoring at voltage. Their innovative as seen on tv strategy and focus on five crucial breakthroughs have transformed countless Amazon FBA businesses into thriving direct to consumer brands. A big welcome to Neil Twa. Hi Neil.

Neil Twa:

Hi Andy. Thanks for having me here, sir.

Andy Splichal:

Thanks for coming on. Hey Neil, can you share a bit about your journey from a senior role at IBM to how you got involved in e commerce?

Neil Twa:

Yeah, I mean, I'll skip through the boring stuff as quick as I can so we can get into the meat of the conversation. But in simple terms, I'd always been in an entrepreneurial mindset. My uncle was an entrepreneur, but I got out of college and tried to figure out what the heck I was doing. So I actually ended up jumping out of college because the Internet came online and I wanted to do that. No one could teach me how to do it. In fact, in fact we were setting up the first computer labs in the bottom of the college. I'm going to date myself, but a lot of things have changed pretty fast and I wanted to do things where the Internet was really tough. So I ended up going out into the corporate world to gain that knowledge and information, always knowing that I would eventually slingshot myself past that.

Neil Twa:

And there became a point in time after my career in sprint when we launched the first mobile phones and went out to market, launched the first enterprise knowledge management system which led me into IBM. And then from IBM we were doing latent semantic search engines and artificial intelligence and creating knowledge management systems at the corporate enterprise level. I was also running a little side hustle business on the side doing game servers. So at night I played game servers, got pretty good at it, and built up a little company that was allowing people to voice talk like we are back in the day, because it wasn't built into the games. I had about 20,000 users on servers out of Texas, and they were using those codecs to basically voice chat while they were multiplayer online gaming. That's all built into the systems now. Everybody takes it for granted, but back then, that was kind of cutting edge stuff. I always wanted to get into that, and so I had actually bridged that gap and was ready to do it.

Neil Twa:

In 2007, IBM basically said, hey, we're moving your entire division to Argentina, or you can go find another job inside the company. And I'm like, well, that's my moment. So I jumped in June. I had gotten married in March to a very wonderful lady who I've been with for the last 19 years. And then we had our first pregnancy announcement later that year. So all in the same year, we left our job, we got pregnant, I got started a new business, and then she went on bed rest. And so, you know, all the things happened in the first year after starting my business that most people are afraid of when they think about doing this, and it happened to me. So I spent two to three years trying to figure out where I was going to fit into all of that.

Neil Twa:

In the offline, if you were a world at that time. And then management consulting is what I knew. I built up a practice, had ten management consultants that I was subcontracting or contracting out across the world to different projects. I actually made IBM a client and went back and got on projects with them. And then just in the area of learning and developing lead generation and lead flow and understanding how to build a business. And I use the Internet and learned a lot more about paid traffic and media and media, buying and gathering customers and cold traffic into warm traffic and turning them into customers. They figured out I was pretty good at it, actually. I was really good at the affiliate marketing side.

Neil Twa:

And once I had beat my head across 300 campaigns that didn't work until the 301st campaign actually fired off. I started making $100 a day, then $500 a day, then $1,000 a day, and I'm like, well, dang, this is like shooting fish in a barrel. Once I understood how you could do it. And that actually led me to the idea that not only could I affiliate the products, I should actually create the products. It's an evolution, if you think of the Usaki quadrants of growth. I went from the employee to self employed and I realized I was just trading more time for money in a nicer shell with more hours at higher pay. But I was still trading time for money to learning how to develop business and systems and then realizing I should actually own the end result, not just the middle side of it where I was at with the product and the business and actually create the product and the brand and control both sides of it. So in that process of developing it, I stumbled across Amazon in 2011.

Neil Twa:

At that point, just kind of seeing that the juggernaut that it had become in the systems and processes they were putting in place and the billions they were putting into infrastructure, it was a good moment in time to say, hey, maybe I could sell products on there too, and realized that I could. I also realized that the technology underlying Amazon was fundamentally the technology we were building at Amazon back in 2000, excuse me, back in IBM back in the early two thousands. And I'm like, well, holy cow, I know all about this. So in the first two to three years, kind of used the system of demand capture that is, Amazon to put our products out there. And the first real brand we took off that had seven figures, I actually found it on an infomercial one night while I was feeding my daughter. And I was up at like three in the morning. I have four daughters at this point. This was the third daughter.

Neil Twa:

And there's this product on the television and I'm like, dang, I could sell one of those. And they're spending like a lot of money to put this on the television. So why can't I possibly.

Andy Splichal:

What was the product?

Neil Twa:

So it was a seatbelt product, a kid's toy to put through your seatbelt and so their head wouldn't fall over and it looked like an animal pet. And the brand that was advertising them was doing a good job of it. And so we built a clone brand, if you will. At that point, it was a me too product and I'll explain why you shouldn't do that as we go through this combo. But at that point we built what we call belt buddies, the competition to seat pets. And with belt buddies we put in a slight anime characterization which looked different than just a standard animal. We built a slightly larger pouch for the goods, for the kids to put it in. We better fitting, better materials and we charged more for it.

Neil Twa:

And so when we got it on Amazon, what the effect was, as soon as we stuck it on Amazon, we started to sell. And in eight weeks we went through 2000 units. We were capturing the demand that was coming off Amazon onto Amazon. And we simply got in front of it. We put our limits in the eliminate stand, you know, farther onto the traffic than even the brand that was trying to sell it on the direct to consumer channel on the television. And with that we learned about demand capture and Amazon and its ability to basically get people who were already wanting to buy. Now there's 150 million of them in buying mode with their credit cards at hand to capture the demand and interest that they've already created somewhere else. And that built brand after brand after brand.

Neil Twa:

So we created and demand capture and that product base went on to do very well. And that launched the first of the five brands that I'm part of as we continue to grow that out. So long story short, I got into the demand capture Amazon space of physical products, private label.

Andy Splichal:

So you got a very key point in that was how you differentiated that product from other products. How did you, I guess, first of all, how important is it? How big of differentiator do you need, how important is it and how did you decide how to differentiate it?

Neil Twa:

Great question. So it's extremely important that you brand differentiate. It's more important when you do it than if you do it at all. So some people think they don't necessarily need to do it. But let me explain a simple little three step process that anybody listening to this can follow along. First we have to get demand capture, which means we need to be able to sell the product. Sales fixes everything. That's step number one.

Neil Twa:

If you waited twelve months to come up with an idea and a business plan and decide if it's going to reach the market, I may have launched three or four versions of it already. To find out which one's most in demand. I would know the sales, know the process and be growing the business by the time you launched your first product. Okay? At that point, you and I are not the same in the world of competition. So customization of that product comes when I know I can sell it. So step two is when I determine that I can sell a product in the market comparable to another product. But in my brand, my time, my seller account and my space, I can sell that product and prove that I can. I will then customize the product away from the competitor.

Neil Twa:

I will innovate the product through customizations and changes and then I will launch an additional product line of 1000 units or more with my customization and differentiation and I will lead that and it will typically be the weaknesses of the other product. Okay, I will change the weaknesses of the other product. I will have customized and differentiated myself and then I will take those bullet points and put them forefront and center on everything about that product in the market for it. And I will speak right into the customer's problems. And once I do that, they're listening, they're engaged, they hear it, they understood it and may have felt like I was speaking into their head about things like how did they, how do they know that that's what my problem was? Well, I simply listened to the market. I tested that I could sell it, and then I customized and changed it and went to the market. Once I prove past 1000 units into step three, and that is to go beyond 1000 units and continue to product as long as it keeps looking good, I will be looking for design differences or utility differences to potentially move that into a patent or design utility. Even a notice of allowance on design gives me a competitive edge.

Neil Twa:

Brand defensibility in the marketplace, on any channel, and specifically on Amazon. Through brand management, I can easily make sure that no one else comes in and takes my brand. If I get awarded the utility patent, I can then go in and force other competitors who may have similarities to my product to either get out of the market or pay a licensing fee because I am now the brand dominant patent holder. So with those simple three steps, it is when you do it, not if you do it. And it's a matter of testing sales. First, validating I can sell it at a larger amount with my customizations and product type, and then protecting and indemnifying my brand to ensure market competition will not overtake me in the years to come.

Andy Splichal:

Wow, that's a lot. How do you determine the competitor's weakness?

Neil Twa:

The market tells us. So if you think you can go out and do ten years of market research to determine the opportunity, you're wasting your time. The opportunity to move quickly and imperfectly is to go into a system like Amazon and just look at the three and four star reviews of any competitive product you think you want to sell. AI will now go in and even take that information and summarize it for you and give you the bullet points, best pros and cons of that particular product. Here's a simple thing you can do. Go to chat GTP and just ask it to write you a $1,000 or $1,000 1000 word product review of a specific product. Take the title from Amazon because it will already have that product in it, and just ask it to write you a pro and con review. And at the end summarize the best and worst points of that product, and then listen to it, read what it says, and then ask it to look at the reviews and tell you what are the best pros and cons of the reviews of that product for the article you're writing.

Neil Twa:

That little exercise very quickly will teach you exactly what people like and dislike about the product. Okay. And it will give you insights into things you can go take one, two and three differentiators and change it. Go to your manufacturer, customize and say, these are the three things I want you to change. Go to your bullet points listing copy and product and change it on the forefront as a feature and a benefit. It's actually relatively simple, isn't it?

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no chat. GPT has made it definitely easier.

Neil Twa:

Oh, AI has certainly made it easier. You could do that without it. Go do your own analysis. Longer time, but time, a lot longer time.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, that's going to be ours. How like somebody who's interested in launching a new product and getting into the Amazon space, you've shown how you could differentiate your, your product from a competitor. How do you determine which product line really vertical you.

Neil Twa:

Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

Where there might be opportunities.

Neil Twa:

So we fell on that long time ago and trying to figure out how to create that opportunity and systemize it, because in my history and of experience in the 17 years, I know that in time, if you give it enough time, you will find the differentiators, you will find it. A lot of people want to rush to the end, but they just, they don't give it enough time. And so when you look at it, we had time in market was one of our biggest factors to determine how to go from product to brand. Okay, so the real answer is in the brand and understanding what differentiates you away from products. Now, products have a life cycle. Products can become saturated or be saturated, but a brand will not. That's why there's ten different major fast food restaurants who sell hamburgers, because they're brand driven, not the product driven. If you understand the differentiators in that, then you realize that products can make you up to 100k, but brands make you a million or more.

Neil Twa:

So as we focus on brand, it's identifying the product types that go into that brand and simply selling people more of the same products. As those products have a life cycle, some will signal it in, some will go longer, and then others will simply give you an understanding of what the market wants from you to differentiate that product. They'll literally tell you, and the longer you're in the market, the easier it becomes to find. So the one of the ways we do that and develop that from product to brand was a process we call the green light process. So literally, yellow, red and green lights in a system that we developed, it was originally in spreadsheets, but now it's all in a software. And literally, we based our assumptions of good product after good product after bad product after bad product, and said, okay, if the good products meet these assumptions and data, then we have an 80% confidence going by the numbers that this product should sell in the market. It should sell well. And by putting it in the market, we're closing the 20% gap on things we don't know, which would be things like sales velocity and turnover, the inventory, and how much we're actually selling in competition.

Neil Twa:

In literally the worst case possible, when the first product goes out to market, no reviews, no history, no data, brand new to the market. It's the worst selling condition ever. So we have to give it time to mature and get better and better. Either it starts to look better or it starts to look worse. If you go by the numbers in the green light process of determining profitability, growth and scale, then they will show you which product versus the other product. It will literally fall out in the numbers. And then the final answer, again, is to market test. Once you market test that product, which is just 100 units, and say you put both of those products in the market with 100 units, the answer will come from the data.

Neil Twa:

We call it going by the numbers. We need to maintain more than $12 in net profit per unit. We want products that are $50 to $200 in retail price point, and we want them to be at least at 35% cost of goods, or what are called landed cost of goods.

Andy Splichal:

Not to interrupt you. Why. Why these numbers? Where. Where did you get to the.

Neil Twa:

This is all the data from successful by, successful by, failed by, failed by, success. We've been to thousands of launches over the decade. Twelve years now, thousands of launches. So we have tons of statistical data setting in our database. And as we went through there and analyzed, the data just appeared. There are about four metrics we follow as the fundamental metrics, and as long as the product stays within that metric, it becomes part of a brand opportunity.

Andy Splichal:

Can you give us those four metrics again?

Neil Twa:

Yep. So it's literally for. Well, I'll use the Amazon world because people who are listening to this right now could go to Amazon and look at these numbers on the front of an Amazon listing. Okay. A bestseller ranking of 50 to 100,000. Okay. Lower than 50 just understand that you will sell more the closer you get to zero. But understand the heavy lifting.

Neil Twa:

Marketability and upside potential are there, but so are the costs. It's going to cost you a lot more to launch into products that are sub 10,000 BSR. It will cost you less to prove the market if your best seller ranking is on the product that you're targeting in the marketplace already is between 50,100 thousand BSR. Okay, when we go by the numbers, which is Amazon fees, referral fees, marketing costs, shipping cost, return cost, all the fees loading up, including PPC costs involved, I want a net profit, okay? Not gross profit or gross margin. Those are wrong numbers. So many people focus on net profit. What I keep on every unit sold at the end of the day, okay, of $12 minimum, I prefer it to be 24.

Andy Splichal:

So not a percentage, just dollar.

Neil Twa:

Twelve flat dollar percentages will come out of there. But I want people to understand a simple number, $12 or greater. Why? Because now I am going to be targeting products $30, 50 or more in retail price point. And I will actually have the ability to market those products at the PPC, inside of Amazon or other places and be able to acquire a customer and still do it profitably. Very important people with sub $20 products. We have a joke around here says friends don't lend. Friends sell sub $20 products on Amazon. Why? Because you're fighting over a dollar three and $5 in net profit per unit.

Neil Twa:

And after taxes and fees and other things the business has to expense, you're probably down to a dollar per unit. Ask me how I know because that's some of the first brands we launched. And as we continue to do the numbers, we said we need to get in a dollar 50 to dollar 200 retail price point. Now people are going to look at that and some of them are going to say, well, it's much more difficult, Neil, to sell more units of a 50 or 90 or $100 product than it is to sell a 20. And the answer is wrong. It's actually wrong. It's naive. It's what's called ignorance.

Neil Twa:

Okay? The truth is it's easier for me and takes the same amount of work and effort to launch a $99 product as it does to launch a $9 product, okay? The only thing in difference between you and me and somebody listening to this is the experience that tells me that because I've done it multiple times and it's no different than launching a nine or a 99, it takes the same amount of effort, same steps, same output cost, a little bit more money. So the barrier of entry is different. But that's also my opportunity cost because now I will rise out of what I call, and I was in it long time ago, ten years ago. Amazon's mosh pit, which is high revenues, high volumes, but not really high profitability. But here's the truth in that as a business owner, selling less units at higher profitable profitability is greater for the business than selling more units at lower profitability. It's simply in the numbers. Volume does not equate to more profit. If I sell 2000 units this month at $5 in profit and I sell 4000 units next month at $5 in profit, I have now gone in the hole.

Neil Twa:

When you do the numbers, the more units, logistical, freight cost and inventory cost override the profit you would have got from last month. You're simply selling more units. You're not making more money. So what would be better? What would sound better? 2000 units this month at $5 and 4000 units next month at $10 in profit per unit. People are focused on the wrong metrics. Okay. Fundamentals of business, you got to pay yourself, pay the money, pay the business, acquire customers. You can do that by having more profitability in your products.

Neil Twa:

Cool.

Andy Splichal:

How important, especially with Amazon, is advertising when you're launching a new product.

Neil Twa:

Yeah, about seven years or so ago, more organic was very easy. It was about 80% organic, 20%. And around 2015, 2017, Amazon started buying up basically a lot of Adwords engineers out of Google and they fundamentally spent two to four years changing the entire system to go from its original PPc structure to more of an Adwords like structure based on keywords. Okay. And that's all going to change. We'll talk about that in a minute. But they built that fundamental system to match similarities to the way a lot of people were buying traffic on adwords and YouTube because they were taking over and buying the largest amount of Adwords, YouTube traffic. So it made sense for them to align their engines with additional engines of traffic like Google and YouTube, which are the largest search engines in the world.

Neil Twa:

Which is why Amazon is one of the top search engines now in the world. The end result is it changed the unbalance. It imbalanced organic and PPC purchasing inside of Amazon down to about 50 50 right now. So you can still get about 50% of the listings organic, but you got to have about 50% of them on PPC now. So it is absolutely critical to the business you do that. And which means that some people are playing with a different strategy than we are. They're playing with the I can't spend more than 30% to 40% a cost in Amazon, which is called advertising cost of sale to acquire a customer and I'll spend 80 to 120 to acquire that customer. We're not playing the same game, okay? Because I know a rule that they don't or they're not willing to do, and that is he who acquires the customer wins.

Neil Twa:

So what metric is actually more important now that the balance is 50 50? It's what's called ta costs. Total advertising cost of sales and the customer lifetime value. When I'm playing with those numbers and you're still playing at the a cost level and we're competing in the market, we're not the same. Okay? That means I'm going to look for acquiring a customer over 90 days at a certain amount of value, knowing that my target, my target is based on what Amazon has told us, and that is a Prime member will spend up to $1,000 a year on prime. So if I'm a business person selling products in a market in which the buyers are consuming up to $1,000 a year, what does my CLTV look like? It's a pretty logical conclusion, right? It looks like $1,000 over twelve months. So how do I make that occur? I either sell one product at $1,000 to one person or I go backwards from there. I sell multiple products at multiple price points to the equivalency that one person touches my brand enough times in a year through subscribe and save or additional purchases of products in my brand until they equate to $1,000 in twelve months. That's your opportunity and that's also your opportunity cost.

Neil Twa:

So with search and PPC, it is now very critical to dial that in. But with my total advertising cost of sale, I now know that I can get 50 50, even up to 70 30 now on organic to PPC when you dial this number in correctly. So I can actually get a better return on my organic when I'm looking at ta costs. And for those who are wondering what that number looks like, it's between eight to 15%. Total advertising cost of sale should be between eight to 15%. That means between tacos, my tacos should be between eight to 15%.

Andy Splichal:

Let me ask you something. We're talking about total lifetime value of the customer. And that is one of the difficulties with Amazon compared to Google where you're driving them to your shopify store, is that a lot of times the brand loyalty is to Amazon and not to the company who's selling a product on Amazon. You had mentioned subscribe and save. What are some of the ways that you can get customers coming back to buy your products, opposed to going to Amazon and buying the competitors products?

Neil Twa:

Well, it's actually pretty simple because customers will be driven to Amazon, clearly, because it is now a demand capture platform, almost exclusively TikTok shop, social media, commerce, Instagram, Facebook, shorts on YouTube, and all these outside audience conversation topics have become demand creation. Okay, so they're spilling over even 30% of ads now. By the latest summary I saw from television is spilling over to Amazon, even if it doesn't say Amazon at all in the product, right, they're coming to Amazon. So when you track it back, what you're actually looking for, of course, is product searches and brand searches tied to you in the search results. As people are looking for you, they're searching for you. If you find that same search and keyword search on the results and TikTok people are searching in different ways to find your brand, which means you are becoming more and more brand driven in the eyes of the customer. Subscribe and save is simply a way in which Amazon gives them the mechanism by which they can buy more of the products they like from you more often to one month, three months, six months, whatever it is. And through packaging and material goods, we can elevate the value of that through the material goods.

Neil Twa:

Many sellers at the lower end just use the basic boxes, the basic packaging. We don't, we'll upgrade the boxes and the packaging. We can create higher perceived value the product by going with the iPhone packaging style on our products than going with just basic boxes that have Chinese stickers on the side of them because that's how they were originally shipped. So creating that brand perception and value, creating flyers, creating information beyond the click and beyond the sale, including follow ups that give them information about how to use the product and use it correctly and getting the name of the product in their mind as many times as possible. Which also means, just to be very clear, we are omnichannel. While we may start and test a brand on Amazon, we will get it on TikTok shops or Shopify or QVC or multiple channels or wherever else. We can do it through wholesale and distribution to give it an entire wide audience of omnichannel. We just, we prefer to start on Amazon because we're capturing the demand.

Neil Twa:

If I can capture the demand of the audience, I know what exists. And as I mentioned, sales fixes everything. Then I can take that out to other locations and validate it in other marketplaces, and that will create more brand awareness as I do that.

Andy Splichal:

So you had mentioned that changes you could see coming soon to the Amazon platform.

Neil Twa:

There's a big one coming, probably the largest I've been since I've been on the platform. They developed that, what's called the a nine engine in the background. They used to have all kinds of white papers and all this stuff on it, and they took it away like six, seven years ago, scrubbed all of it off of their website for whatever reason. But it was the algorithmic learning engine in the background, what's called a latent semantic engine. It's been building and compiling petabytes and terabytes and zettabytes of information for a long time, enough to be filling a large language model with enough data to start doing predictive and analytical search and being able to prove it. They did a test here a few months ago. They launched a portion and they call it Cosmo. There's a white paper out there.

Neil Twa:

I put it on my sub stack on voltage DM for the substack. You guys can go check that out. But basically it went through the detailed analysis of what occurred through that white paper. And what they discovered was Cosmo, the updated large language AI model, outperformed the current AI model in just a 10% test, to the tune of about 0.7% increase in CTR. Now this is how like a lot, .7 but in the amount of transactions they're running, 8600 a minute right now. It was a substantial test. It equated to about 4.9 billion in additional revenues, just on 10% test with Cosmo. So they're going to be running Cosmo at some point across the entire system.

Neil Twa:

That's not known when it's just known that it is coming. What does it mean for sellers, what does it mean for keywords? It fundamentally changes the way the system looks and predicts based on buyer intent, buyer interaction, even down to what you're watching on prime Twitch stream, Freebie and other models, where it's consuming data across those other analytic engines and that audience conversation format, and then driving that back and analyzing data for customer demand and doing it all in real time. They very large language model running on probably supercomputers, maybe even quantum, I don't know. It's very, very deep mind kind of stuff. Something I was working on similar to that at the Armont Glads in Watson. When I was at IBM. We were working on a section of big blue doing predictive analytics and human machine language learning and determining product for inbound call centers to determine how accurate they could be when the customer called before the customer even knew what they were going to ask. And we were about 40% accurate.

Neil Twa:

That was more than 17 years ago. These systems have come a long way. In fact, what we're seeing is just tip of the iceberg to what's really actually working behind the scenes. So this Cosmo rollout is going to fundamentally change the way the listings work. It's going to mean that historical data does not necessarily account for future rankability. It means that products that were established for a long time, you're wondering, why is this terrible listing still sitting out here crushing it? And I can't seem to break their metrics because the last metric you can't break is history. Right. They've just been there longer than you.

Neil Twa:

Right. The ability for the engine to now determine predictability and social commerce trends can then allow you to break that and be able to get past that metric and past that seller with history by better defined metrics of audience and conversation. And it won't just be keyword defined, it'll be all buyer intent and defined, which is going to really be fascinating to watch how that pulls out. So it'll meet you where you are just in time. If you're selling an outdoor gear product and you happen to be watching a show on Freebie that's talking about outdoor phishing, it's only going to serve you fishing and outdoor ads, not every ad like it does right now. It's going to be very buyer intent and specific, fundamentally changing the way the engine develops, which means some people are going to get left behind, people who are not engineering listings copy and content for Cosmo right now, which our entire client base is working on to get very clear on how we will stay on top and actually gain organic ranking when this occurs, where others, I think, are not paying attention enough to what's going to change and they're simply going to watch their listings fall off.

Andy Splichal:

You know, that was going to be my next question. Should people be excited about this change coming or nervous?

Neil Twa:

They should be. They should not be afraid of it if they know the opportunities that it will gain as it changes in the marketplace, if they are not prepared for it, then they will be victimized by it by like every major change that people are not paying attention to. I hate Amazon. Why did they change this? I can't understand. Well, you go back and there's a roadmap for like, you know, nine months ahead of this that showed you that they were making these changes. You just got to stay in some of the details and be aware of it when this one comes out. I'm excited about it. We're prepared for it.

Andy Splichal:

So tell us a bit more about what services that voltage offers and how you can support Amazon FBA sellers.

Neil Twa:

So we do it on a number of different ways, slightly maybe different than you've heard. We don't have a course in a program. We have a consultation. We're a management consulting firm. So we do one on 112 month engagements with our clients to either launch, grow, profit or scale or even prepare for an exit brands in their marketplace. We work with DTC brands doing 30 million or more in sales who really don't do very well in the Amazon channel. And we've helped them open that channel, find that money, capture that demand that we're missing. And I grow them up very quickly which helps prepare them for a larger exit.

Neil Twa:

We've taken people who are brand new and launched them into new brands alongside with us. We have a done with you program called Business Builders. It is a twelve month one on one consultation. I only take about five to seven people into that because I'm very busy in the things that we do because we are also in mergers and acquisitions. We're in the exiting of these business also acquiring them. And so we're kind of like a mini aggregator, but we take you from beginning to end, if you will. And we've been doing this since before the aggregators came along and they kind of blew that whole side of the market wide open. And I thought man that's crazy.

Neil Twa:

This is not necessarily going to work very well. They're not very operationally controlled and that's actually how it worked out. As they have consolidated and capitulated and many of them gone bankrupt, they simply were not operationally controlled. We're very operationally focused. So again we launch, grow, scale these we acquire and exit them, Amazon, FBA and beyond. So we're omnichannel. And the way that we do that voltage will look with our clients to acquire them as a first right of refusal after they reach a certain level of sales and we call our buy box for these purchases and take them to our PE groups or acquire them within our brand so that we can control them. So we're kind of beginning to end, if you will.

Andy Splichal:

So who out there, if they're listening, should look you up and get in contact with you?

Neil Twa:

Well, I mean if you're running an established brand and you don't have a dynamically driven Amazon businesses capturing those. That's one way we can help you if you're looking to get started, if you're a high income earner, entrepreneur, solopreneur, business owner who wants to establish a brand, take the online opportunity, build some time back with your family, buy some time back with your family and grow it. But you've been looking for a way to do that. Maybe you've been looking at franchises or other models and you've been curious about e commerce. You know, this is a five to six figure deployment in the first year to really go hard into the market the way we do it. And then we will have them apply and see if that's a good fit to make sure that this is a great opportunity for them and for us. Because I'm building with their end in mind for every person that comes in. So I'm only looking for the people who really want to build in three to five years and understand the business exit is the opportunity, what we call the platinum principle, and then help them take that through all the way to an exit.

Neil Twa:

That's my goal. So people who really understand the scope of business is important and have some fundamentals, even if they don't understand e commerce, they do understand business to some degree and then want to know how to actually make the ecommerce channel work for them.

Andy Splichal:

And what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Neil Twa:

So a short last name. It is TWA, not an acronym, not a PhD, MBA. So you can google me, google voltage, or you can go to voltagedm.com and check it out. I got a free training you can unlock that goes through these fundamentals of the way we do it and qualifies those who are interested. And we have a free mind map that shows you how to do it as well as other trainings that you can go take and learn how to do it on your own. I disclose pretty much everything in there because I want the only most interested and serious go getters who have decided they want to build a business.

Andy Splichal:

So I see a lot of books behind you and I mean, that's one of my things is I'm big into books. I guess if you had to recommend one of those books off the shelf to somebody just starting out in business, which one would you go to?

Neil Twa:

So I'm actually going to skip mine, but it is beginners because I don't want to be self promoting grand izing, but there is good to great with Jim Collinse. While some of the case studies are a little bit out of date. The main focus and importance in understanding who you are as a business owner is a very, very well orchestrated and very well documented strategy that he outlines through those case studies. So you can kind of understand the mindset and framework of a business operator and an owner and someone who can become a business owner and an investor and move through the quadrants. It's very important. So good to great definitely takes you and helps you understand the people aspect, who stays on the bus and who has to get off and how you can find your vertical and then hedgehog into it and really lock into what it is you're good at and stay in your lane and do the things you're good at. I found out what I was good at before and I've kind of just turned off all the things that maybe shiny object and I have just stayed very vertically focused in brand building and business now buying and selling in brands and that's what I do and I've stayed very focused on it. So good to great by Jim Collins is a great read for new business people.

Andy Splichal:

Well, you know, this has been a great episode. You've dropped so much information. I think this is one of those that people could listen to a couple times and pick something new up.

Neil Twa:

That's wonderful.

Andy Splichal:

You know, we're out of time, but before we go, is there anything else that you would like to add before we wrap it up today?

Neil Twa:

I think in simple terms, I would just say to you what I've said to manys before, and that is many other people. Youre, you know, opportunity begins at the end of your excuses, right? If you want to do something, if you want to find out if you're going to do it, don't be afraid to execute imperfectly because you're never going to fully learn what it is or whether or not you're good at it unless you try it out. Don't be afraid to try. Fail up. Don't fail out. Okay? Don't quit because the opportunity will present itself in time. And that's a mindset of a marathon versus a sprinter. And business is a marathon and we solve problems every day.

Neil Twa:

And if you don't like solving problems in business, you know, business probably isn't for you. Go. Go get a job. That's cool. Stay there. Everybody has their place, that's fine, no hate. But at the end, you won't rise to the goals that you set, but you may fall victim to them instead. And the systems that you put in place.

Neil Twa:

And typically it's all systems in your mind, and you just have to overcome that. And there's so much opportunity when you can finally break through it.

Andy Splichal:

Great. Well, thanks for joining us today, Neil.

Neil Twa:

Thanks, Annie. Appreciate it.

Andy Splichal:

For listeners. Remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcast and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information on connecting with Neil, you'll find the notes in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast Resource center, available at podcast Dot make each ClickCount.com dot we have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and include each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any of the services discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.