Back in August of 2016, I decided to get serious about building a profitable business reselling brand name products on Amazon and today we achieved a milestone that I’m extremely proud of; we made the 2019 Inc 5000 list of the most successful companies in America.

Simply making the list would have been a thrill, but to achieve a ranking of 254 with a 3 year growth rate of 1,693% was absolutely awesome and I am extremely proud of my wife (our COO) and our team of dedicated employees and virtual assistants.

Why Sell on Amazon?

In August of 2016, just after interviewing Dan Meadors on my podcast, I realized that reselling brand name products on Amazon was an extremely appealing business model.

Why did I like it so much?

Three words: steady cash flow

In my opinion, one of the greatest things about selling on Amazon is that you make sales 24×7 and in doing so, we get to generate a profit, every. single. day.

For example, here’s how our numbers looked from yesterday (Aug 13 2019).

With our current overhead, our total expenses for one day is approximately $500….which means that our net profit yesterday was $1355.95.

Not bad for a tiny company run by a single employee and a handful of virtual assistants!

Better still is the fact the Amazon sends us our money every two weeks just like clockwork.

They are never late, and the money is electronically deposited into our bank account.

Compare that to my old business (a marketing agency and before that an IT service provider) – at any given point in time, our accounts receivable was over $100,000!

That means that on any given day, $100,000 of my money was still sitting in someone else’s bank account – and as a result, I would have to tap into my line of credit and pay my bank interest, just to get access to the working capital that my customers owed me.

With Amazon, collecting past due receivables simply is not a part of our business!

How Did We Grow So Fast?

There are a lot of people that attempt to sell products on Amazon, and sadly, many of them don’t ever achieve this level of success; though…for the record, there are plenty of larger companies whose revenue is substantially larger than ours.

In our case, the key to our rapid growth comes down to a few key things:

1. I was obsessed with creating documented business processes (called Standard Operating Procedures, or SOPs) for absolutely every part of our business right from day one.
2. From day one I was equally obsessed with delegating virtually every part of day-to-day operations to employees and virtual assistants – and thanks to all our SOPs, this was actually pretty easy for me to do.
3. We put a significant amount of time an energy into differentiating our business from the competition.
4. I got really good at explaining to brands why they needed to work with us and how we could help them to solve their problems on Amazon, and improve their performance overall.

Here’s a video of me explaining how I normally try to convince a brand to begin working with my company.

Opportunities for the Future

Amazon has radically reshaped the retail landscape and they are likely going to continue to do so for some time.

Just take a look at the following charts that show Amazon’s growth in both their prime members and their revenue and profits.

As you can see, their numbers are pretty amazing.

A wise man once told me that entrepreneurs are like surfers, and in order to be a really great surfer, you need to ride a really big wave.

Amazon is a HUGE wave! So big, in fact, that even an average “surfer” is going to look pretty damn good!

In order to be a really great surfer, you need to ride a really big wave.

Is It Easy to Make a Living Selling On Amazon?

In looking at our success, combined with the charts above, one could easily conclude that making a living (and getting rich) selling consumer products on Amazon is easy.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is simple (conceptually), but it is definitely not easy….and that is where having all of our systems in place has played such a critical role.

The reality is that it has never been more competitive to find profitable products to resell – and finding them requires that sellers crunch a lot of data.

Without our systems and the overseas workers that we have crunching data, achieving the success that we have would be substantially more difficult, if not impossible.

Systems have become so critical to our success that as a result of a talk that I gave at a conference a few years ago (explaining how we succeeded on Amazon), I now also own a software company that close to 1000 other Amazon sellers rely on to run their businesses as well.

Note: the software company allows anyone in any industry to rapidly create and share their Standard Operating Procedures. It is not just only for Amazon sellers.

How to Get Started

If you are interested in learning more about getting started on Amazon, or you are already selling on Amazon and would like access to some of the tools we sell, I encourage you to check out our resources page. On this page you will find links to our free training webinars, as well as the products that we sell to other Amazon sellers.