TRANSCRIPT

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay, awesome. All right, everybody. I am super honored to be here with Jamie Davidson, one of the oh geez, the ballers, high stack. And man, this guy has made a killing on Amazon. And he has a couple of viewpoints that I honestly think changed my own business. And I really, I was lucky to get them to come on over here. And we’ll be sharing some crazy things. So, Jimmy, thanks for coming.

Jamie Davidson:

Aaron, appreciate the invite. Excited to be here.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Sweet! So officially, you are the largest seller that’s been on this podcast. Okay. Um, and if you want to, instead of coming from my mouth, if you could say just ballpark like, you know, your private label business, which, you know, you started with a couple of partners. What, what’s the revenue like that you’re seeing this year?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, so we are, I’ll give you a little background and space, we’re leaders in the literally the cell phone accessory space, started back in that really end the 2011 timeframe. So we primarily are in that space cell phone cases, a bunch of other related accessories. We’ve got a few other brands as well, too. But that’s, that’s the bulk of our business. But we hit the 100 million dollar mark two years ago. So you know, there’s different stages of the growth over the years, we got to 20 in the first couple years. And then we got to, we got about like 50 or 60, we kind of plateaued there for a few years, plus or minus, which is all right. And then and then and I’m sure we’ll probably get into it a little bit, but about three for about three years ago, now we really started building out our team or on the China side. And we’ve got a couple of 100 dedicated team members to our operation. So that helped us be able to launch and kind of get to that next plateau or I wouldn’t call it plateau. But the next spot that we’re at now and then we’re, you know, we’re working on growing even more. 

Aaron Cordovez: 

That’s amazing. So you said you have a couple 100 people in China?

Jamie Davidson:

Yes, yes. We’re up to about 250 employees in our offices over in Shenzhen. Wow. Now, so we had a smaller team there a while back, my partner, Jason, the year start blending together. But in what is it 2016 I think somebody that moved over to China with his wife for about two years, they’re back now but moved over there. So we have like a, we have some general managers basically in place over there. They’re all Chinese and oversee all our departments. So a lot of I’m here in Atlanta, Georgia, we have a warehouse here, along with my partner, Jason, but we have about 40 employees here, that’s including the warehouse. But the bulk of the team, we’ve moved a lot of it over there. So we used to have a bigger marketing team here. Now it’s over. There are logistics teams there. Our product development team is there. We have a large marketing team, you know, I said that already. But account management, everything we do some people use, you know, a lot of people use people from the Philippines or virtual assistants. We do that. But we have our own dedicated team here for that.

Aaron Cordovez: 

And is everybody in-house? There’s no remote or very small remote. nods brilliant. And of course, some people you have in-house, I definitely feel like there’s much more of a bonding and, and, you know, sometimes it’s not always possible. But you had some China connections, which is fantastic. And when you bring people on, are they trained at all? And by the way, guys, just you know, anything that Jamie’s saying pretty much like pay attention because, you know, you don’t get to 100 million just by accident, like anything this guy’s talking about. It’s something to pay attention to. So anyway, for me, I’m wondering, like, when you hire people, Are you hiring people? You’re poaching from Amazon companies, reports from Amazon itself? Are you getting people who are already trained? Are you just like, give me a smart person out of college or whatever? And I’ll train them.

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, that’s interesting. Interesting question. It’s one of the advantages of, of building the team in China. And again, there’s this does exist I know in the Philippines, most of us, especially China, is because there is such a community of people there that are experts at Amazon, or there’s millions of people we talk about, like if we need to hire a, a French, you know, like a native French speaking person to write Amazon listings. We can do that in less than a week in China.

Aaron Cordovez: 

In China speaking French?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, yeah. Because there’s, there’s a community of people that know, like literally, in other words, there is a community of people dedicated to managing listings globally, for all the different marketplaces. And so whatever you need, you can pretty much go and find and you know that’s one of the big differences. So we talked about that here in the US like, again, we’re here in Atlanta, Georgia. So if we’re hiring people for marketing, which we do we handle kind of our social media marketing more on the US side, just you know, with some of the the culture language. Yeah, so the influencer marketing type thing. So we have a team here, but, but over the years, when we’ve hired people, let’s say it’s been, you know, managing your pay per click or account listing whatever it is, we would do kind of what you describe, we would hire like a smart first with no experience because in Atlanta, there’s not really any, there’s very little, there’s not yeah, there’s not big companies that all have that you can poach from, you know, our guy, that man is our one of our first employees, which is, you know, now like nine years, 10 years ago, was a, we found him at the UPS Store, when we were bringing back down and bringing everything to ups. And, you know, he’s still with us now. But, you know, it’s along those lines here on the US side, on the China side, not always the case, sometimes it’s someone from a different industry, you know, not Amazon related, but it’s, it’s a much more, you know, traditional like you would in the US for a lot of other, you know, in the healthcare space, if you’re hiring someone to healthcare, you’re gonna find someone or nurse there. In China, you can find people with Amazon experiences the point. But, you know, here, it’s a lot more difficult for us in the US. You know, we definitely want to have people here in the US, but, you know, often we will hire someone will train them up in the marketing, let’s say, the marketing side of things, you know, we pay him a good chunk of money here. And you know, after two years, maybe, you know, he probably loses them, they go on to some other marketing firm or job.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Over here in the US, right, that that kind of positions can go really high salary, and maybe there’s less loyalty or do you know, why are you have you figured out a way to kind of, you know, have retention be higher? Or anything like that?

Jamie Davidson:

yeah, especially, we haven’t been, you know, it’s interesting, the marketing sides been tougher for us, we’ve had better retention more on our, you know, other functions, our logistics are good we, and we, of course, like accounting, finance, and, you know, the warehouse stuff, we’ve had longer runs. And I think the marketing, I found to be a little trickier, just because, as people, as you know, in these in these, whether it’s Amazon or related digital marketing, as people gain these skills, their their value, they, you know, their own perceived value in the marketplace, goes up. And so we’ve definitely had people leave here to go not necessarily Amazon jobs, what other kind of digital marketing jobs if they’re trained on that? So it’s a little trickier, just a different salary? The point, like I said, for what would it cost to pay someone in our, in our China team.

Aaron Cordovez: 

okay. And then in China, so again, I mean, you have a partner who, who is native Chinese, or Chinese, and that gives you an advantage to be able to build this team. But let’s say for me, I want to go and have a china team. And there’s all sorts of stories like, I mean, I know a guy who did this thing in China and whatever and a patent and it’s got stolen, there’s so much like craziness in China. And of course, some of it is a rumor, and some of it probably is true and whatnot. But how would someone like me, I want to open an office, like, Can I do it? And if so, what are the steps to do that?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, yeah. So it’s good question. I think, like you said it overall. I mean, it definitely helps with my partner, Jason, you know, help to just be in a native speaker. It’s interesting, it’s part of the reason why more people probably do stuff in the Philippines when they’re outsourcing teams, because, you know, it’s funny, a lot of people will say, Well, a lot of people in China speak English. And they do, like, obviously, you guys know, if you’re working with your manufacturer, they’re gonna have representatives that that are fluent in English. But like our team in China is not does not speak very much English

Aaron Cordovez:

Really? Ok Yeah. So as much as like a supplier where they’re like, they’re gonna write some emails, they’re probably doing Google Translate and things like that. 

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, but when you’re in the office with the 200 people, we probably have 200 plus people, I don’t interact with everybody. So there could be some more but let’s say, you know, I’d say there’s like 10 people that really speak English, you know, so there’s a lot that doesn’t just because everything in China, it’s not like they don’t need to operate in English. You know, so China has such a massive economy. So it’s not there are segments of the business that do like I said, manufacturers that need to work with, you know, people like us.

Aaron Cordovez: 

All of the manufacturing can be done in Chinese because everything’s in China. Right, then, you know, in terms of forecasting, inventory, freight, pretty much every freight forwarder I think has a china team. Do you know what I mean? So all the inventory, all the inbound stuff, Amazon, you can also translate to Chinese, can’t you? So like?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah. So yeah, it’s really, you know, it’s just not as it’s not that easy that way, but the end of the day, well, we did even with what we have in place. You know, we basically have general managers in place. We have one general manager. His American name’s Gary, who’s in charge, so he oversees the whole operation. Again, his English is Great, but it doesn’t matter. You know, that’s just more of me because my partner, again, they’re always speaking in Mandarin. But, you know, he can oversee the team. So, you know, to answer the question, I know a few people that have done it like, Brandon young, I know, Brandon and I talked a couple years ago when he was first looking to build a team. So he, I think he started a team out there with like, six people he was showing me when he was first doing it was…

Aaron Cordovez: 

Six people is a good start!

Jamie Davidson:

yeah, yeah, like an office with a small, you know, like a little office, and I think he’s grown. I haven’t talked to him lately. But I think, you know, he’s grown it a little bit. So, but I think his wife is Chinese, too, if I’m not mistaken. So, you know, I do think it helps if there’s, excuse me some connection, or whether you business partners, or somebody to do it, to see whether it’s the best case do because, like I said, it’s not the only way to do it, you could do it. You know, I’ve got you to know, my friend Dima, you know, he so you guys know, Dima is built? You know, he’s got people in Ukraine, right, because he’s Ukrainian. And I’ve got, you know, I’ve, I’ve had people in our program that are in Europe that, you know, again, have massive teams in the Philippines, do it. So I do think you need something I’m not sure off the top my head of the any legal, I don’t think I don’t know, the dynamic in terms of the partnership, whether you need someone to be like a citizen there or something. But, you know, as far as once you get going, you

Aaron Cordovez: 

You may need some legal stuff to open up a China office, right?

Jamie Davidson:

As far as the team, once you if you can break through that stuff, the teams over there, I tend to find are phenomenal. So they’re, when I say the teams are just the work ethic, the dedication, like them, how they handle things, it’s good, it’s, you know, they’re really, really reliable. And, you know, so if it’s something that makes sense for someone that scaling, then yeah, you know, the, and I said that the experience in the marketplace is amazing if you need to hire people. So, you know, those are all like real positives to be able to do it. But obviously, it’s not gonna make sense for everybody, but you know, someone’s there.

Aaron Cordovez: 

And then what positions Do you find that you really do want someone or a team, you know, in the US, right, for the like, English speaking? Right, you do have maybe 20% of your team or so in Georgia, whatnot?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, I mean, I would say the biggest thing we found was, as I started talking earlier, you know, the last we just started getting into more of the influencer marketing, probably the last, I guess, maybe three year, I think it’s been about three years now. You know, that was the one piece we found that we did not want to that we really couldn’t outsource to China, that was, you know, definitely gonna have more of a feel for it, we do have a process in place. So, you know, we, as much as we push stuff to China, when there is a, let’s say, a listing creation, you know, so the copy that goes everything, we do have a process that it flows through our team here in the US, and it’s a small team, but so they can look at it. Because, you know, from a language perspective, there’s always, you know, unless you’re truly a native speaker, there’s just, you know, of course, lots of little things that are a little bit off. So, you know, we try to have a check and balance there. But you know, so definitely, that’s marketing I’d say the, you know, even logistics you want to have to we do because we have a warehouse, and we also sell on a lot of platforms besides just Amazon. And so we do need people on both sides managing the logistics for us, you know, so that’s, that’s a big deal for us. Just logistics, but also even shipments too, because we’re, we’re shipping things directly. You know, we’re not Yeah, we’re not doing all FBA. So. So obviously, you need some, again, you don’t always need to have that capability yourself. You could have an in-country, you know, warehouse or third party to provide that for you. But in our case, you know, we have that in-house.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay, good. And then what are you mentioned other platforms? What are your top platforms right now? And then what percentage of your sales are Amazon?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, so our Amazon sales are probably about 90% of your total sales. Now, we do a lot on the internet, you know, within Amazon, we do US and International. So we’ve grown a lot internationally,  in the probably the last, last scan four years or so, you know, in Europe in some of these other marketplaces such as Japan we’ve put a lot of emphases internationally within Amazon last few years. So the other stuff we’ve, you know, again, not nearly as big as Amazon, but certainly Walmart. We do we do. I think we’re on about 30 other platforms. I know. We have a team that manages that’s a small team, but we use the Channel Advisor.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Do you use Channel Advisor? Do you like Channel Advisor

Jamie Davidson:

that’s usually people concerned about like the it’s a little bit pricey, I think, again, for us, it’s not our hasn’t been a huge focus for us. But it’s, you know, it seems it does good for us. We probably had more growth in our in, we probably put more in the bottom line focusing on our Amazon channels and international countries. But I think you know, Walmart’s grown a good amount for us. I know I wish I think it’s pretty good. Wow. If I may, I’m at the office right here. on the board, there’s like we have, there are always new ones coming up that I’m asking the team like, what is that? There are some international ones like Toby or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, there. We used to keep it What is it? I forget the name, so I have to see it on the board. But that’s awesome. Yeah, just because it makes sense for us. Because of the number of skews we have in the resellers that, you know, we can put people dedicated to that.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Hey if it’s 10 mil 10 to 15 mil or whatever, is not bad. 

Jamie Davidson:

it’s Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I would say right now, in terms of what I’m seeing is probably, you know, Walmart’s, you know, they’re trying to get their act together. And so, you know, as far as people out there, I think that’s a little bit more worth it than it was, you know, even a year or two ago, to put some time I know, you know, again, Wish is something I don’t have. I don’t consider myself an expert in that. But it seems like there’s been a little bit of traction with that platform for some people as well. You shipped from China for Wish, or we have stuff we have, you know, we ship stuff from our warehouse here.

Aaron Cordovez: 

You’re okay. Yep. Sweet, sweet. Okay, good. Well, I’ll find that 10% the big deal is the meat and potatoes, the Amazon deal. Yeah, there’s a, I do want to get into a little bit the international and like that, but there’s one thing which you said, I don’t even remember where but everyone come in her mouth. And I was like, Damn, this is I need to think more like this than probably that was maybe a year ago, year and a half ago. And you mentioned, um, look our company, like we’re not, quote unquote, Amazon sellers, right. So like, Hey, we’re professional Amazon sellers, the company is primarily and that the hat that you see yourself in most is where product development, right? product development is the key because that’s what your company does. And I, you know, was like, well, I need to take that approach on. And then tell me a little bit about that. Like, why do you believe that? And how does that manifest itself in your day-to-day?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, so it’s good. And, you know, I think it again, it will be surely I’m sure you have some perspective on it with your own, I know, you’ve had a lot of success, your own business, how you think about it, but the reason why we do so we first started off selling, like iPad cases early on in the process. So iPad cases, either they’re light, and they’re, you can sell them for a lot of money. So it’s like you think about, like, even the original ways, and I’m out here as much today, but you know, how do you get into Amazon, or why it’s a good opportunity. You hear stuff like that, oh, you know, you sell something that’s like you sell for a lot of money, or, you know, this, so those type of things…

Aaron Cordovez: 

You just pick something that’s there, you throw it on, and you’re gonna get rich!  

Jamie Davidson:

Exactly, which is kind of the opposite of what we’re talking about here. You know, that’s like a, we’re, it’s almost like arbitrage we’re just finding opportunities to make money to sell stuff. And, and which is okay, and you can do that a little bit. And there are opportunities, and there’s always hot products do that with. But the problem with that, I think, is that it’s a, it’s not that sustainable compared to the competition. And if your mindset is around that, it’s just gonna be hard to really grow, you know, too big levels and be a reason because, you know, if you really think about what this does, you know, what we’re all doing is even though it’s like, Hey, we’re selling on Amazon, and it’s like, we’re running these businesses from computers, and it’s, you don’t always see the product at the end of the day, it’s a marketplace where, where there’s value being provided via the quality of the price via the efficiency of getting it, you know, the customer service, and, you know, that’s what you’re competing with, and just like any other business, and so if, if you, you know, you need that mindset, at least from our perspective, to you know, for us, we needed that perspective in order to push ourselves forward to be able to be sustainable and be around. Yes, we had some good time early on where we grew fast to that first period…

Aaron Cordovez: 

 2011 2012 at that point, like their markets almost empty, right?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, like us totally Wild West. Even for the first couple years and you think of things like black hat and all the techniques and and you know, the ways you rank product, all that stuff was like completely, you know, like, just once once any ourselves competitors, anyone’s figured out how this stuff works, then we were all doing that and Amazon, it took them a couple of years to catch up and so that’s just how the market was. But like that’s which is good. Then Amazon comes along and they kind of slap you on the wrist a bunch of times. And, you know, as we grew bigger those before shut down for a month. that’s a lot of money.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Did you get shut down for a month? Oh, yeah, what years? Was it a while ago?

Jamie Davidson:

We’ve been shut down for a month, multiple times. That was probably 2014 like from Thanksgiving to Christmas. We got shut down a couple of years ago for a month. Now, aren’t you big brand, we have two different brands. So we’ll get like one brand shut down and the other one would still be going on. But a couple of years ago, we got shut down for something, you know, like pretty minor in terms of reviews. So we’ve had to be more, you know, risk-averse, and more cautious around that. But still, you know, but, you know, so well, the point is, the more you know, the less of it became, you know, like, even though people still love talking about that, you know, what’s the hat? You know, what’s this half? What’s that hack?

Aaron Cordovez: 

How do you do the mini chat? How do you give away as many units How do you know which is fine, you

Jamie Davidson:

You want to know those tactics, in terms of the strategy of your company and everything else, like you got to have in place that you’re going to build some level of really quality products, that is going to make sense. And so for us, like if we were over in our offices, I was when I was over there did a little tour of the offices over there. But like our product, we have a product design team of you know, over 30 people, which would be the equivalent of these are these guys are would be the equivalent to us of hiring people from, you know, the best engineering schools in the US. I’m in Atlanta here. So like Georgia Tech, or, you know, Caltech or MIT. So, because it up, they’re on their monitors, they have these big design screens and 3d versions. And they’ve got you’ll see all these cell phone cases in there. They’re trying different styles, and they’re looking at the competition. They’re coming up with new innovative things they think are really cool. I think the market is going to respond to

Aaron Cordovez: 

Now 30 so that’s 30 people and they’re all like designers, or do you also have like, okay, your sourcing team as part of that, like finding suppliers and doing things like that? Are you’re purely 30 is 100% design r&d, they do nothing else?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, just design. Yeah, design our design already. So it’s a, you know, again, we have a few other brands too, so that can go into some other categories as well, too. But, you know, you think about, again, just talking about cell phone accessories, there’s a lot you can look at. 

Aaron Cordovez: 

And this is only a product designer, correct? This is not like your listing designer.

Jamie Davidson:

That is just design, we have a whole other team of like, you know, 50 people that are managing listings and accounts, and then we have the PP there is some overlap between like, that’s like the account management and PPC team, those guys kind of Amazon stuff. But the product side is, is very different than we have you know, a large logistics team in China, you know, about 20 people that are managing where everything’s going and you know, so that’s coordinating with.

Aaron Cordovez: 

So you got 10% of your people, right, because you’re at about 310% purely design, and you’re getting patents, I’m assuming Chinese patents, US patents, etc.

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, in some cases, in some cases where it makes sense. Yeah. In other cases, it’s just the right deal for you. Yes, it’s like clothing, almost you just go with it. And then it you’re gonna run with it for, you know, in our product. You I mean, in our category. You know, obviously the phone design is, you know, there’s always new time, New Year. Yeah. So there’s kind of a tail to the product, but which is good, because it’s constantly new, new things. But But, you know, just back to that fundamental question, again, I would say it doesn’t matter whether it’s cell phones, or whatever your priorities are, if you’re selling a ball, I think it’s important to you might be that, hey, you know, we want some really cool bright colors and cool things that, you know, in some ways, yeah, I think you have to have that mindset a little bit. Because, as I said earlier, otherwise, it’s kind of goes back to the v2 product, or that stuff is just, you know, you’re gonna get slaughtered, you’re trying to sell stuff without that mindset.

Aaron Cordovez: 

It goes back to the value, like, what are you doing? What is your job? What do you bring to the market, if you’re just trying to like, take a slice of a piece of a pie that’s there? Okay, there’s a bajillion other people but who is actually going to hire a team of 30 product designers, and also knows how to bring them to the market and sell them. Right. So that’s where your unique thing and you’ve been rewarded, obviously, by the market by customers, etc. And, I mean, it’s, it’s actually very impressive.

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, in our space, which is one of the most competitive out there. It’s also it’s a, it’s required, it’s almost, it’s required to survive because we have some really good competitors in the space and they’re sophisticated and smart and, and they do good things, but, you know, I know your friend. Some guys, David and Leah cups are friends of mine and you know, they’re just husband, wife, team, but I’ve heard you know, I think they sold their first business Amazon was a few years ago with the little baby business. And in their case it was it was like I remember Leah talking about like the the baby sheets, whatever seemed like they wanted like some cool like designs they want to buy, but they saw there was wasn’t really much in the marketplace, everything was pretty plain. And so they came up with some things called Ziggy baby, they had some funny little designs. And it really took hold, because it’s just something a little bit different. So it’s not like a genius nutcase and it has a bunch of designers, but they put some thought and some creative, you know, creative thought to it. And I think, you know, I think 90% of people are capable of that if they actually understand and if you don’t, you know, have that mindset, I just think I mean, you might get lucky, but I just think it’s you know, I think it’s like you said it’s just hard to really do a good job in this space. If that’s not part of your mindset.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Yeah, that’s brilliant. I love that love that.

Jamie Davidson:

So on your own business, is similar, right?  Do you guys put some thought to that?

Aaron Cordovez: 

We just got on a real, like a very strong design product design person, we do actually, we have like a patent we license we’ve filed for a couple of patents, we do work a lot of non-design parts right to make the product stand out. And to do something that no one else is doing. So we do have that team and our, our North sourcing team is about 20% of our staff on and it’s basically finding a new product. So a lot of times what is interesting is that there there are factories out there that are innovating, right, and maybe just never hit the market yet. So I mean, whether you have a team of you know, the 30 designers that just probably design or you as a consumer, you know what you want how you want a blanket with those things on it, you’re making something stand out, or even the factory might even have a product that will stand out, but nobody’s actually been able to sell it. So you can actually find innovative products as well, um, and work it that way. So we do a lot on, on standing out. And we also have a lot of kinds of meat too, but you take the meat to products, and you make something valuable for it. Right. And that kind of that’s huge. Right? So if you’re the first cellphone case, it has a baby Yoda like if you can license baby Yoda put on your cell phone case, you know what I mean?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Yep. So that’s creating value. So, yeah, the same thing. And again, you know, for the longest time, you know, we didn’t have the design team, so to speak, but even like, my partner, Jason, you know, we would get the iPhone or the iPad case, and it’d be like, I don’t like the way this fits, you’ll just make this little tweak here, or, or we sell some, say, pull up bars, you know, in the fitness space. And it’d be like, this is, you know, even the last couple years, like, let’s add some more, like, you know, we want this to be a little more stable here. You know, so there’s just like said, there’s this little design tweaks that you can upgrade that, you know, your next order with your manufacturers, I hey, let’s, I want this, you know, a little bit different here. So,

Aaron Cordovez: 

whatever you do, but don’t make it the exact same thing. You know what I mean? That’s so I agree with that. And, and, and the truth is, um, you know, we’re just on a marketplace, right? So if you were, if you go back, you know, 10 years, 20 years to Walmart, right. And like, you say, Oh, I know how to sell a Walmart, I know, the buyer will look down, even if you know the buyer, even if you can get in on the shelf. That doesn’t mean your job is done. Because if you actually create a product that people really want, I don’t know, Beanie Babies, right? People made, I made the Beanie Baby and that thing went crazier, whatever, whatever thing that you actually do, if you don’t, if you don’t do some sort of innovation, then you’re, you’re nowhere you’re just Hey, a guy on the guy who knows how to scream on the street. All you can do is get a little bit of attention, but you’re That’s it, you know? Um, so that product development thing. I think if people more people take that approach, they’ll see that not only will they make more money, right? But it’s actually fun to make products like, like, Damn, I made this thing I made this one thing no one else has. And I brought it to the market. And it’s like the Nike I don’t know if you read shoe dog right from the guy that made Nike, but yeah, he was doing shoe design do all this stuff. It’s like no dude is this is not a new idea. This is from before Amazon, from before ranking, like your job is to make something that people are going to love. So anyway, I think the first time I heard that was from you, and so we’re taking it to heart and, you know…

Jamie Davidson:

Good. It’s good. I think it’s proven out and he described it well because it is a marketplace. And the more especially as Amazon goes further and further, there’s again there’s plenty of tactics and hacks and everything else that you want to tweak and implement and execute but, you know, if you get that, that product side, right, right, everything else becomes so much easier. And I meet so many people. You know, whether it’s people that we’re helping through our coaching program.

Aaron Cordovez: 

You could you could talk about that, by the way, right? 

Jamie Davidson:

Just, you know, just talking to people, you know, the space or you know, you and I haven’t talked at length, but it’s, you know, it’s funny because the businesses are all different, right? So it’s like, yeah, we said AMC insiders is our coaching business, but we’ll have someone come aboard and it’s like, I had a guy called me last week, and he’s doing on a couple million a month, you know, so it’s like, he’s doing a couple million a month. They’ve been doing it just for a couple of years. And it’s something like in the, for the, like, haircare and the African American community and some accessories, you know, stuff that I know nothing about. But you know, they found the right niche. Yeah, a niche in the right relationship with the suppliers. And then he wants to help you know, about, like, he really doesn’t know how to rank his product or launch his product very well. But he’s doing like, really? there are a couple of people. I mean, there’s a lot that there because the power, you know that how powerful Amazon is, but there’s, there’s people that are in all different types of industries that are like, I’m not in that industry, I have no interest in being in that industry. But we can help them, you know, there’s but the same concepts, apply the fundamentals. And so, you know, I guess those are kind of extremes, where they’re, like, coming at it purely from the product side and the opportunity side, and then they’re just trying to figure out how to, you know, how to work, you know, how to leverage Amazon efficiently, and whether they should do FBA or fbm, or, or whatever. But it’s, you know, it’s just crazy to all the different things out there that you meet people with that are, you know, just kind of speaks to the opportunity, still of the platform, but you know, doesn’t matter what it is, it’s got to be something of, you know, that makes sense. And there’s some value being provided to the marketplace

Aaron Cordovez: 

Do you know the story of that brand? Like, did they get a following like farmers’ markets? Or like, some stores? Or how did it happen for them?

Jamie Davidson:

that one is a little different? I don’t think it’s not a true call like a true private label, I think there’s a distributor of the products. And these are coming, because, you know, we’re such pure private label, guys, for the most part, you know, our own stuff. So there are some other models out there that are, are interesting to me, that isn’t my expertise, but like, I think in their case, yeah, I think he’s got a relationship with a distributor, like maybe a company that’s a big distributor, he’s coming in and prove that he can move the product really well on e-commerce mostly on Amazon, they figured out how to tweak the model a little bit wherein their case, instead of purely FBA, they could set up some FBM. And, you know, so fill by merchant and get, get their margins, like, a good, good amount higher the bottom line, so it’s a, so there are some opportunities out there, I think, with some products, and some things that are good, that aren’t on Amazon, and some people that can help do it. So I think that’s what his case was, you know, and I met some other people again, just sometimes in the excel in the beauty space, we don’t do anything in that space, were maybe not quite that big, but you know, like, maybe a 5 million between five and 10 million, they’ve gotten pretty, pretty quickly. Again, without a ton of understanding exactly, you know, all the things they should be doing to optimize and how to, do you think so? Yeah, there’s, there’s a lot out there.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay. Good deal. And then, so is there, what are they like? foundational, right, like the foundation to this business, right? Obviously, the product is a big one, what you talked about, what do you think are the other foundational pieces that you really need to understand, you know, to be able to grow, and maybe not just grown to a million dollars a year, but like, you know, get to where you’re at? What are the pillars so to speak?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, so it’s interesting if I would even take a step back from, you know, within the business, you say, like, you know, the product, you know, you could go through all the fundamentals, right, you know, you Hey, good products, you need to have your figure out, right, the right balance of everything related to marketing with it, whether it’s, you know, within Amazon within PPC, whether it’s, you know, your techniques of whether using Facebook ads, or YouTube or, you know, off of Amazon marketing. So, there’s plenty of kind of tactics, you know, I’d say the step behind that, which I’d say if I were to take a look at the people that I know, in the Amazon world that has been successful versus those or not, and kind of look at, you know, what I think some of their common traits are, you know, and it goes really to other business, but it really shows yourself that Amazon is, you know, on the execution side, right. So, you know, I’ll call it entrepreneurship in general. So, you know, there are so many people that can understand the tactics can understand the concept of products, but they can’t put it together and execute it. That’s not as sexy as a topic talks about but the end of the day, like the habits you have that you come with day in, day out how you run your business, to me is like the number one thing. You know, my partner Jason sitting in the chair besides like, you know, it’s funny, we first started, he’s like, Hey, we can, we’re gonna do this, we can do this the American way, or the Chinese way we’re gonna do this the Chinese way. He’s like, he’s like, you know, which some cases means, like, you know, some of the blackhat stuff and, but also means like, you know, it’s gonna be relentless, and it’s just gonna be like, we’re gonna get, you know, we’re gonna get stuff done at, like a really fast pace. I take David and Leah, or Deema is like, the people that I know, in the space that I think I respect and see that you will, like you’ll see in their lives, they have like a lot of discipline in their, their day to day habits, how they go more so than people realize, like when you meet, like, Oh, this guy’s really cool guy. He’s nice, he’s fun. But if you really learn about them, you’ll see like, Oh, these guys are like, you know, Deimos, the 5:30am, you know, workout guy. And David is like, they’re really intense, and how they operate more so than you realize when you’re talking to him. So I think that fools a lot of people, if they’re at a conference, or they talk to people, like, Oh, these guys are nice guys, or they’re probably just like me, well, maybe. But you’ve got to be, you know, the ability to get stuff done to me is the number one. That’s, that’s not, it’s easier said than done. Because a lot of that’s like mindset and, and stuff that people, you know, struggle with, and it’s hard to really put down. But, you know, if you have that in place, like the guys that are coming to us that are already doing 5 million or 10 million a year in sales, I’m like, okay, I kind of know that they’re probably already, you know, they got their act together, right around that kind of stuff. yourself, right? And got into it, you got into certain points, by definition, it pretty much means, you know…

Aaron Cordovez:

Right, you had some habits, you know, you didn’t just like launch a product and then go to the beach, you know… 

Jamie Davidson:

You’re not gonna look your way into that unless you’re like,  supercriminal or something. But even that, yeah, yeah, those guys. So, you know, I do, I do think that’s the biggest thing, but because if, if I laid out the, you know, every tactic and hack that we do, or that we think is out there that, you know, you can share them as well, too. And I gave that to somebody who’s not good at execution. And then we gave very little, you know, we just gave the bit bare fundamentals. I think, you know, the person that can get that, right. So, you know, I would, I would challenge you not to challenge but I would encourage people to think about those aspects for themselves, that understand, like the guys that are really doing well, on the business. It’s, it’s, I think that’s the number one differentiator, obviously, there are other factors are some luck involved, or some, you know, picking the right things and how to not, you know, how savvy Are you with business, you will navigate these things, but, you know, if not put this way, if you’re not up to that, you’re better off like having a, you know, having a traditional job. Because, you know in a traditional job, the habits are there put there for you, right, yeah, but nine, if you something’s not there, your boss is gonna come talk to you, you know, you’re you’re doing something else to court and be like, Hey, you know, where’s this thing I need, I need this design, you’re gonna get a bad performance review.

Aaron Cordovez:

So you have someone else trying to put those habits in for you, right? So like, you’re saying, it’s a really interesting point if you can’t establish your own habits and say, like that, I’m going to be at the office anyway. Right. And when I failed before, like, before I had success, I tried to when I first started trying to sell, you know, make business online, I had no good habits. I was on my computer, you know, playing video games, no joke, more than half the day of my working day. And like, Okay, I’m gonna cop I gotta go get a job, then I got a job. And then at the job, I’m there like, working consistently, to do a good job. Because for whatever reason, I felt bad about maybe slacking off on the job. But I was okay slacking off working for myself. So it’s interesting that when you get those habits put in for you, and like, Yeah, get a job, do fantastic at your job. Because if you could do a great job for someone else, and you put those habits in, well, when you go do it for yourself, then you’ll have it, you know, so it’s an interesting point, you know, if you don’t have the habits, don’t you know, don’t go work from home as a being entrepreneur and try to do all this stuff. Right? Because you’re probably going to fail.

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, yeah. As I said, it’s not something like you’re going to go watch a webinar to hear that or learn that because it sounds almost too fundamental, but it’s just what I’ve just seen it and it’s not just with Amazon, it’s I’d say as you describe, it’s really anything entrepreneurial related. And it’s uh you know, that’s just it’s tricky. It’s not really everyone’s not cut out for that but I like what you said to you can learn like, it sounds like you know, you did some stuff on you yourself because sometimes Yeah, you’re willing to take you to know, like I said, watching whether it’s video games or just you know, reading the news or whatever the case you can kill half a day, because there is not, you know, you don’t have that.

Aaron Cordovez:

There’s no pressure right. You have you’re by yourself like, we can When No, okay, yeah. So in terms of those habits, right, what are what do you do that you see that other people maybe don’t do? What kind of habits? Was the foundation for the company that you’ve, you know, built-in clarity had amazing success?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it differs a little bit, you know, when we built the, the in person stuff, we were like, let’s, even though we could do this stuff, remote, we like to try to bring people together. Together. And this is, so I have learned, I do feel like, you know, even my little is my home office, I’ll bring over one of our guys to work on stuff, when we’re in person together, sitting in a room, like in two hours, we get, you know, a lot of shit done in two hours. And, you know, probably as much as we get done apart sometimes, over, you know, six hours. So, yeah, so we have opportunities to bring people together. That’s great. I know, you know, it’s not always the case. It’s hard work, just so we do believe, you know, try to get people together. You know, personally, I try to, I’m pretty good about writing lists, like every night in terms of the next day, going through things during the day, I try not to figure out what I want to get done during the day. Because, you know, during the, it’s like a separate person I try to, you know, be my own boss. to direct me, this is what you’re going to do today. And then you’re during the day it’s about execution and trying to get things off the

Aaron Cordovez:

Interesting so so yeah, because you’re, you’re when you’re in the zone, you’re like, I’m doing this task, you’re not going to think about that stuff. So the night before, uh, you plan out tomorrow, I’m going to get these things on, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then you the next day, you don’t plan out you just follow that list. Yeah,

Jamie Davidson:

I tried to look at so I was a army officer way back in the day that back in college at a army at West Point, they would have us Yeah, they’re pretty good about it, we just had to write out your goals and put it up on your your academic goals, your military fitness goal. And then we had to write out our little plan. And so we always had the three by five cards. So I still use those the I use the my phone a lot with the notes section, but just physically writing things out. There is something I know there’s something mentally that helps out there. So I still like to put like pen to paper on our, on our tasks. You know, we use things like Asana and different things for is the planning, obviously, with your remote team and people in different things like, you know, if you have a virtual assistant over in the Philippines, whatever, or team in China will use WeChat and tools, but in terms of planning. You know, I definitely try to you know, you do it longer than that to obviously do your monthly planning we would, but you know, every night, I definitely have an idea for the next day. You know, we got to knock these things out. You know, today, I’m doing the podcast this time, but I’ve got a you know, I’m going to go to the warehouse, I’m gonna go beforehand. 

Aaron Cordovez:

And could you say like, okay, you write down your goals, this is my financial goals. This is, you know, maybe the goals and the family goals, you know, things like that. What is what are your financial goals or your business goals right now?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, so we have a couple of different ones. One is on the, you know, we have the Amazon business, of course, and then we have our AMC insiders, coaching business, the AMC insiders, coaching businesses, is there are some similarities, but it’s also I mean, you know, you have your software business as well, too. There are some similarities, but it’s also, you know, it’s very digital marketing. a lot of differences. Right. So it’s different skill sets, to learn, there’s different pain points. Because, you know, like, with Amazon, obviously, with Amazon, there’s all the traffic in the customers, when you’re doing your, you know, if you’re marketing your software or marketing, you know, your coaching business, whatever, or your, your group, it’s like, You’re in charge of that area of driving all that traffic and cultivating that. So, it’s, it’s different. So, so we have different business objectives, like on our coaching business, you know, hey, we’re going to, you know, hey, we’re gonna grow, you know, we’re growing 30% Plus, you know, typically is what we’re trying to grow at our business.

Aaron Cordovez:

Yearly, monthly?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, we’re trying to monthly right now, like month over month, we’re trying to grow about 30% over Where’s not I mean, first, the, you know, the same month prior year.

Aaron Cordovez:

Okay, I’m gonna say 30% each month Damn, yeah.

Jamie Davidson:

Apples to apples. Yeah. So we’re not that good. Like your, your Amazon business is growing. Our big Amazon business gets, it differs a little bit because we almost break it down into different segments, because in some cases, frankly, if we could, you know, in the US and the certain market if we’re, if we even maintain our number, we’re like, we’re, that’s fine. Like, we don’t want to, we don’t want to be cannibal cannibalize ourselves, or, you know, we don’t want to lose market share. And then we have other segments of the business, we’re trying to grow really fast, like our international business, and get all together. So overall, you know, if we grow in a year, you know, 20% or more for us. You know, that’s definitely you know, nowadays, we’re definitely pretty satisfied with that.

Aaron Cordovez:

That’s huge. I mean, again, you had 20 mil 25 mil whatever that number is in a year. That’s more than like, probably 99.5% of every business on Amazon, that you’re adding to your business. So clear. I mean, 20% is fantastic

Jamie Davidson:

That’s, that’s good. But some of yours. I mean, we’ve had some years where, again, it was flat or smarter. And the last couple of years have been good. And then sometimes during the course of the year, it’s like, you know, this year, we were like, really did really well, for the first half of the year, you know, 40% growth. We had some hiccups in the last half. So it’s not always

Aaron Cordovez:

What hiccups? I know you mentioned earlier, too, when we’re talking about before, what kind of hiccups are the legal battle? pain?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, we’ve had a legal battle. We’ve had a, we’ve had just logistics. Yeah, there were challenges with the inventory limits at Amazon.

Aaron Cordovez:

Yeah, that was terrible.

Jamie Davidson:

Yes, that restrained our sales a lot, you know, in fourth grade, and that will get a little bit better here in 2021. Just because, you know, yeah, I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this. They’re selling mood, you know, awesome on the on-sale side, and in terms of demand for the product. But we were constrained in terms of our you know, how many how, how many units we could keep at Amazon, and how to balance it?

Aaron Cordovez:

Has that been effective? mostly for like, new skews? Do you have how many? How much of her like new skews are responsible for sales that year? Or is it mostly growth, just your existing skews? 

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah a lot of it new, the new stuffs big for us just because we have because the new iPhone product, right? So you know, iPhone 12, or a new galaxy, you know, so. So obviously, we sell a lot of stuff of the legacy for the x period of years, iPhone 1110, and so forth. But so that matters, but it’s not, it wasn’t just all new skews to we had some issues with existing skews and things where, you know, it’s like, they put a limit of 250 units on a skew and you’re like, come on, that’s like!

Aaron Cordovez:

Is it because something was out of stock for a while, and then you were bringing it back in? Because that’s what we experienced, right? If something like we sold so much and went out of stock. Now, when you’re putting it back in, then you have that 200 limiters.

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah. Was that and sometimes Amazon sometimes you’re just heirs with Amazon or just like you have, you know, it shouldn’t be the case. But they did Amazon. I know, for a lot of people in terms of their, you know, their, the inventory performance index. Yep, too. So, you know, they had it what it was, had to be over 500. and whatnot, lowering it for for 21. So I think a lot of that is just Amazon, you know, dealing with the pandemic and issues. And so, you know, I know ourselves and other top sellers. I know, you know, struggled like, Hey, we could have sold more. But you know, so I happens every year, that’s nothing new. There’s always some issue. You know, so But yeah, we’ve had, you know,

Aaron Cordovez:

The biggest The biggest challenge in the second quarter was there. Like, again, I don’t know if you want to get into a lawsuit or not. But was it a lawsuit? Was it just shut down to suspensions? The masons like?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, yeah, well, we had a suspect we had a suspension for something we had. That was stupid. So we also call that in the category we don’t go too far into it. But we had a brand shut down for a bit, but so we got it back up, as usual.

Aaron Cordovez:

I tell people, I’m like, Look, suspensions are all temporary, right? I know of one, maybe one person and it didn’t even actually throw it away that are permanently banned. Like you’ll get over it. Do you know what I mean? I gotta maybe, you know, you know, more people than me, I think in the space like, Do you know anybody that like permanently banned you’re screwed forever? Or is it just these you know, you’re banned for a month without

Jamie Davidson:

The only cases I know and they weren’t like people drive is more and more people are really have bad intentions when they get into Amazon. Like they’re trying to open the, you know, the, the 200 accounts to manipulate things and use it to rank so you know, those type of people, there’s like a bad actor. But if you’re not a bad, you know, if your intentions aren’t to be a bad actor, then yeah, it’s like, yeah, I mean, actually, I mean, we met with Amazon, we used to go to the CES conference every year in January. I think it was two years ago, we were there an Amazon I think they’d send a lot of their account managers and VPS they come meet with different you know, their big accounts and different we usually go to Seattle to go to meet their at their office, or sometimes once or twice a year, but then they come to see us we’re at a dinner with them. And one of the VPS You know, my partner, Jason says to him, he says, you know, if we followed all of your rules at Amazon, we would we would have no business. And the Amazon guys go, yeah, we know. So that’s just the reality of business.

Aaron Cordovez:

You’re serving the customer, I think that’s the bottom line. Are you serving the customer, right? Because, you know, if you’re doing some giveaway or this or whatever, like a lot of times, that doesn’t serve the customer, right? And it does have a negative impact and so Amazon they’re okay to shutdown the shutdown in person. But in some cases, you know, just recently, I know there was a trick where like, you have all caps in your title, people didn’t take you down, that was like new this year. Because the one style guide, Amazon says you can’t have all caps. And like, okay, that’s just dumb…

Jamie Davidson:

the Amazon service, this is where it’s similar to, even like I said, you know, running your, again, I don’t run a software business, but let’s say software coaching, or consulting business where you’re dealing with other platforms like Facebook, and you’re obviously on Instagram, and there’s Google, but like, you can write your people get their Ads account shut down on Facebook, they get their pages locked up, they get this, those are all things that are like really annoying. But you can work through them and find solutions around your Facebook ads account, you know, worst case, you can have someone else run, you know, run the ads,

Aaron Cordovez:

Snap, is that what happened this year?

Jamie Davidson:

That was not this year, there was some other there’s some other issue going on out there with. So we got it, we’ve had that plenty of times, that happens all the time, really. But that will you know, what happens there is so if someone thinks you have a, what those guys will do is they won’t go, Hey, you know, we have a patent on that design. So you can’t do it. They’ll say no, no, no, wait, because they want you to sell a lot of it first. So that they can then come in and, you know, negotiate, try to negotiate

Aaron Cordovez:

On that, I think your liability is limited, when you find out about it, then at that point, you have three times the damage on stuff. And before you know about it, there’s a much less liability, right?

Jamie Davidson:

But there’s also like negotiations for settlements, everything else. So as you get bigger, you deal with more legal stuff. And, again, over the years. as you grow, we, whatever, there’s, there are all sorts of stuff with business. You know, if you’re in a partnership with guys,  things can happen. So there’s, you know, different things, there’s, we had another partner, we have two big cell phone brands. One of them was a, they were about 5 million when we were like 15 20 million. And we did like an acquisition, they that partner came aboard, but that partner and of getting divorced. And the business was in the wife’s name, like his part of the business was in the wife’s name. And so, you know, there had to be, you know, an assessment of the business and audits and all this kind of stuff. So, Wow, those are

Aaron Cordovez:

It’s part of the game!

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, the biggest thing, like I said, it goes, it kind of ties to that execution thing earlier, but in these businesses, you just have to have the ability to, to not get overwhelmed by problems, and understand that you have to keep solving the problems, that you keep solving enough problems. You know, it’s I had one person put it, you know, if you want to be a millionaire, you keep solving enough problems, and hopefully, eventually become a millionaire. If you can’t solve problems, can’t execute, then, you know, you’re probably not gonna, you’re not gonna get there. And you should. Yeah, that’s a good point. Because I was nothing, you know, not everyone can do it.

Aaron Cordovez:

Good point. Okay. And then quick question. This is a I wonder what different niches But typically, Amazon private label has pretty high margins on if you could share, like, Where’s the profit margin of your company?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, so the profit margin of our company is probably a little lower than, you know, what you hear someone else, say, but you know, typically, if we can be at 15% margins as a company, we’re, we’re, we’re in a good spot. I think a couple of years. We’ve had a couple of years, maybe a little bit, back in the early days, we were much higher. But you know, last seven years, we’ve had a couple of years, we were a little bit higher, we’ve had years we’ve been in the single digits, you know, like, six 7%, which isn’t necessarily a great year, but you know, also depends on what your objective is. Yeah, you may be trying to, you know, build out the team or invest so you’re willing to take it but obviously, just like your product when you get to like 10% or less. The problem, really is that you’re just you know, if you do 10% worse or 15% worse, then you’re losing money. So you want to be careful, but you know, we also have Have you no more infrastructure? You know, we have good size payroll and teams, everything else. But, you know, the Amazon business itself, when I see that are the Amazon, the margins of the business? You know, typically we’re, you know, we want to keep that at, you know, 20% or greater,

Aaron Cordovez:

Yeah, you may be trying to, you know, build out the team or invest so you’re willing to take it but obviously, just like your product when you get to like 10% or less. The problem, really is that you’re just you know, if you do 10% worse or 15% worse, then you’re losing money. So you want to be careful, but you know, we also have Have you no more infrastructure? You know, we have good size payroll and teams, everything else. But, you know, the Amazon business itself, when I see that is the Amazon, the margins of the business? You know, typically we’re, you know, we want to keep that at, you know, 20% or greater,

Jamie Davidson:

yeah, that’s kind of that’s a healthy number for us, like I said that we haven’t gotten there every year. And some years, we’ve had, you know, better years and other years, like I said, if you’ve had lower and, you know, we’ve had, like I said, just a few years back, we had, we were sued by the state of California for sales tax, and we were big Washington originally before they implemented so you don’t hear about these issues much now. But you know, back when it was like, you know, who’s responsible for the sales tax? And so, you know, we again, we had we settled with them knocked it out, moved on, we have a process in place, it’s not so it was just like that dug into our bottom line a little bit that year, but it’s but going forward, you know, was an issue.

Aaron Cordovez:

You guys are still there. Okay, so, you’ve made you’re clearly you’re a multimillionaire, making a ton of money and Amazon, and I don’t and all of a sudden, I don’t know, for me, it was all of a sudden, but you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna go show people how to how to sell on Amazon. You know, with mZ insiders, and I don’t know exactly your model, if you do the course I know. You have a course and coaching or whatnot. But what was the driving force? I mean, clearly, your squat to court set, right? Like you got millions of dollars, your company’s worth? Who knows? Maybe $100 million? Um, why go into this whole brand new thing? Where you’re starting from zero? What was the purpose behind doing it?

Jamie Davidson:

Yeah, so I would say, say a couple things. One, myself and my partners, we’ve, we’ve launched plenty of businesses, and not all of them are successful. So we’ve we’ve launched plenty things that have not worked out, we’ve launched product lines that have not worked out. My partner Jason was almost It was almost bored with the Amazon business, we were like 50 million, he was all about, like, we’re gonna launch this biotech company in China and get this huge via VAT, and we’re gonna sell it on the it’s gonna go public in China, and in 24 months, I think he lost like 5 million bucks on that, or something, you know, like, yeah, taking a little bit on that one, too. And so we don’t always do deals together, like sometimes different things. And I have some other Amazon deals or some other, you know, basically friends of mine that want to get involved. And so we’ve built some stuff there. But as far as this space, we just thought this was a, we saw the market, we were like, it was just we saw the kind of field popping up, we’re like, wow, these guys aren’t even like real sellers. You know, we just the nature of the industry, we know. So we’re like, oh, well, we actually have a real team we have, you know, we’re doing we say it’s not that we know everything, there’s a lot of different angles and products and someone can notice a certain hack that we do, but we’re like, no, this is a pretty interesting space. And I have a background before Amazon and like the for-profit education space and basically coaching and like test prep and things like that.

Aaron Cordovez:

What were you What were you coaching before teaching before?

Jamie Davidson:

So I was like a CEO of a language learning Company A few years back, I was a I was a chief operating officer of a a tutoring business that a national tutoring business that tutors like a lot of a lot of Asian American families. Like, you know, LSAT prep and, you know, like caliber, so that model I Anyways, we’re familiar with it. So I was like, we’re just naturally made sense for like, Hey, you know, do you think this could be a you know, we know the knowledge industry is really just like, the software space was interesting to us. We didn’t pursue that we’re, you know, the knowledge base is really sizable and also the service side just because, you know, people can that as far as our AMC insiders program, people can use our like our logistics team, we let people plug into some of our team in China and and go so you know, we’ve been trying to be responsible with it we haven’t like, you know, gone crazy with the marketing or try to grow it super fast. It’s more like let’s see what we think of the business and you know, we’ve done pretty well you know, you make some mistakes and like how to build a digital business and what you spend and what the return is just like everything else, so but I think we’ve, we we do enjoy it like to me actually The cool thing about it is we were kind of like in the industry, not too many people outside it’s not that uncommon Amazon, there’s a lot of people that really didn’t know us too well. My Chinese, you know, kind of within the Chinese world they have their buddies but like for me A lot of my closest people I know in the industry now I’ve been because of speaking at some of these events and getting out there. And, you know, guys like Deema, David, and you know, I met you at the event, it’s like, you get out there. And so that’s been valuable for us. And it actually has helped our Amazon business too. Because things like the, the digital marketing, or the influencer marketing approach, we started saying that kind of coincided, because we had to learn how to do that for, you know, the AMC insiders space. So, so yeah, we’ve enjoyed it. And for us, it’s too I think it’s been good. Because while we do get people that are like no experience that come with our AMC insiders program, we’ve had plenty of people that do like maybe a couple million a year or 5 million, but they’re, they don’t really have a lot of places they can go that are willing to do that. So So yeah, that’s really the background. And I you know, I do enjoy it. So it’s been, it’s been good. And, you know, we’ll see where it goes growth wise, how big will grow up? Okay, cool.

Aaron Cordovez:

So, so essentially, if I can capture that, so you already were in the space of basically teaching right in, you knew a little bit about it, and you said, Hey, now we know Amazon, why don’t we go into there? And of course, it couldn’t be huge, right? I mean, if you look at university and whatnot, like the sort of market share, is trillions of dollars or whatnot, like, yeah, hundreds of I mean, it’s humongous learning. And you’re like, Well, why don’t we just teach people something valuable? You know, you’ve seen probably other courses where maybe didn’t deliver or whatnot, and, or you, you, you thought you could do a little bit better? And he said, hey, let’s go. Let’s do it. Yeah,

Jamie Davidson:

right. You have integrity, we’re straightforward. We’re not going to promise the world. That’s the tricky part is the space is that, you know, there are a lot of people that like, you know, that are really aggressive that I think are really full of it. So that’s probably, you know, we’re not to that extent, like, again, I’m not an expert in space, but you know, like in that space right now, you know, I say the hot thing I’ve seen a lot the past year is the Amazon automation. A lot of people pushing that stuff. Right. Okay.

Aaron Cordovez:

You must be more familiar with me. I see that and I see like, 100% 1,000% scam? Yeah. I mean, there is no, I’m on automation. It’s like, dude if I could make you a business that runs itself and makes even 1000s? Not even not, not 10s, or hundreds of 1000s? Why would I do that all day for myself? Have you seen these automation? Like, are any? Is any of it legit at all? Or you don’t? I haven’t logged in?

Jamie Davidson:

I’m sure some people the balance it trying to make it a little bit legit. Because my guess is I’ve seen like those that have like wholesale businesses, that maybe they try to tap people into their wholesale business and go, yeah, you’re gonna get looked at, but what I have a hard time believing and they position it as like an investment. Oh, you have $50,000 and you want, you know, instead of the stock market getting you 10% we’re gonna get you I don’t know what they pry up 20%. But, of course, there’s risk. I just I have a hard time believing any of those quote unquote investors are going to be pleased with their decision two years from now and year from now. And so is it,

Aaron Cordovez:

People that have like invested in it, and they come to you like a year later, Hey, I got this automation. Do you know anybody who put money into they’re not yet mentioned, I

Jamie Davidson:

I feel like it’s been the past year that I really see that marketed heavily. And so I feel like a lot of people are gonna waste a lot of money on that. And I know, you know, people that are pitching this and selling it, they’re savvy that they’re going to try to create like, like non-disclosures and you can’t talk to people about it, and blah, blah, blah. But you know, I think it’s like, saying your action, the same thing. To me. It’s like, it’s nothing wrong with having like an investment there are people are investments in real estate.

Aaron Cordovez:

if you’re going to buy a piece of the company, for example, to put money into a business, right?

Jamie Davidson:

yeah, but which is fine, but to like, go out and position this Amazon business as if it’s that just you know, feels, so it feels wrong? Yeah. So, you know, in some ways, I’ve we’re not as you know, we’re not as good as Mark Turner, like, we’re not going to, we’re not going to stoop to that level. So and we’re not going to market like that. And so some places that this industry can be tough because people will gravitate towards.

Aaron Cordovez:

A lot of lottery tickets sell more than anything, right? Like, lottery tickets people go cuz you, you know, are you gonna make money? No, like, absolutely not gonna make money. So, as you said, people will gravitate to like, wow, I just put 10,000 and I’m set, you know, where I can put you know, anyway, so

Jamie Davidson:

No, exactly. So you have a YouTube too, if people get on, you know, all this fake guru and all like this money making stuff out there. It’s like, well, people watch it. So there’s a lot of demand for this kind of garbage. Yes. But, you know, but that’s not so you know, it’s like, Hey, we’re not gonna we’re not going to be competitive. So the industry requires that then yeah, then we probably, you know, that’s that’s not really our fair niche. But for those that are like, hey, realize that you know, these bit like you do, the businesses are not easy or hard. They’re looking for people that are right fit to help them that have experience and that’s not everybody. So, you know, for us, those type of people that find out that are you know, not looking for the Lamborghini videos. Yeah, but just want kind of this straight talk, then, you know, we’re good, we’re good fit to help those guys.

Aaron Cordovez:

What’s interesting is, you know, like Russell Brunson, he talks about like the dream customer and, and I know you follow Russell, you kind of Click Funnels and whatnot. And like, he’s like, Look, go find where your dream customers are, because it’s not going to be that YouTube Lamborghini video, but maybe it’s a person who’s finished college and like, how do I make side money after finishing college? Because I can’t make any money, then maybe when they search that, hey, do good habits, make a product line? All those things. We talked about the thing your courses build about? How do I provide value in the product? How do I build a team that’s actually workable, and you follow those lines? And that could be a huge help. And if you find that gym customer and they follow you, they’re gonna make money, which is, it’s kind of counterintuitive, because although you don’t promise you’re gonna make money. Like, that’s how you will make money, you know? Yeah,

Jamie Davidson:

No, it’s, it’s an issue world because I think people are mostly confused. But most people are just trying to, like the Amazon space, is that legitimate is not legitimate, is it? It’s like, people successful or not. But yeah, but it’s like, you know, you meet people like yourself and other people. We know, like, hey, they’re successful. Yes. I won’t rehash what I said earlier. But those people, I think there’s some common traits and commonality around legitimately what it takes to be successful. And then there is, you know, there’s a lot of like, just noise in an industry of promises and stuff that pull a lot of people in that aren’t real, you know, cut out to do it. But if they, you know, if you’re cut out to get after it, and you understand, and you can learn, you’ll see that there’s, you know, there’s a lot of pretty successful people in the space.

Aaron Cordovez:

Absolutely. And that’s why like, Don’t ask, is it legit? Why don’t you ask the question? How do I make it in Amazon? And if someone does have that question, of course, you guys are on the podcast. I have tons of free stuff here. And if you have any more interest in getting started on Amazon, you do have stuff for beginners, right? And the insiders calm yeah.

Jamie Davidson:

So AMCinsiders.org is that’s got like the training workshop and check it out. And, or if anyone has them on like Instagram or Facebook, anyone can just direct message me.

Aaron Cordovez:

It’s no problem either. That’s, I’m telling you, you want to talk to a multimillionaire 100 million dollar company guy, Jamie Davidson? Is that your handle on Instagram? Yeah, I think it’s like Jamie Davidson, AMC, or something like that. Yeah, check it out. I mean, guys, where do you get an invitation to message a guy directly get an answer that kind of big status monitor right there. So anyway, I appreciate I mean, we when we went along in the interview, so I apologize a little bit, but you know, always a pleasure to speak with him. And you lay down some of this information that people do need to hear, right, it’s not all the Lamborghinis it’s just putting in the work. And if there’s one takeaway that you would take for somebody who’s already on Amazon, you know, just as final words, what would you like to communicate? Yeah, I

Jamie Davidson:

I would say kind of talks to the last topic a little bit, I would definitely encourage you to find, you know, find people out there that you can learn from find people that don’t necessarily need a coach or coaching program, but just surround yourself. If you can get to an event in person, or you know, you can even pull, pull some guys together that you think are similar to you and get together and, and do some stuff. Because, as I said, my own experience, you know, our path, which, you know, there’s a lot to be taken from it. But, you know, every time I see different people and Aaron, if you and I spent and a couple of hours ago, I guarantee there’d be a bunch of stuff that both of us do that are different, like, Oh, we could totally do that. Right? And vice versa. So, you know, I would just encourage you guys in space, you know, don’t keep your head down in the, in sand, so to speak, and, you know, kind of always be learning and there’s always new stuff, right? Amazon’s rolling out new stuff. And, you know, just always, you know, we always are trying different things and just encourage you to do that.

Aaron Cordovez:

Brilliant. Awesome, man. Thanks so much for being on the show. And see you next time. Awesome.

Jamie Davidson:

Thanks, Aaron.