Amazon Business Strategies For Self-Doubting Entrepreneurs

Self-doubt is the single biggest issue with businesspeople.

Being brought up with the “script” of going to school, getting good grades, getting into a good college or Uni, working hard and then getting a good degree, going into a good corporate graduate job earning mid 5 figures, slowly working your way up the corporate ladder, kissing a** and generally being tied directly to your job for your stuff. It’s consumerism gone mad…. But its 95% of the world.

Overcoming self-doubt and your mindset is the single biggest decision you will make in your life.

Before becoming “successful”, you need to have the right mindset. I’m not going to talk about this overly but check out secrets of the millionaire mind and Grant Cardone’s Millionaire Booklet. Those 2 will wake you up!

Once you’ve started on the personal belief trail you will start to see things differently. Instead of hanging around with your “downer” friends and listening to the “nay-sayers” you’ll find yourself randomly “bumping into” business people and making great connections. I say this from personal experience.

Before you have a successful business, you will need the success mindset. If you do not have that then you literally have a 1% chance at success.

Reverse Engineer for A Success Mindset

This article is all about Amazon businesses, that’s what I consult about and what I build personally. If you haven’t heard of an Amazon FBA style business I’ll break it down very quickly.

“An Amazon Business” – Is a business that sells its products (usually PLR products shipping from suppliers in China) on Amazon’s platform. Usually utilising the FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) channel, this is where Amazon stores, picks, packs and sends your product to your customers for a fee.
This takes a lot of the start-up costs and hassles out of starting a business. It also gives you a platform in which to start marketing.

But, let’s assume you have no idea about what to sell on Amazon? As a result, you are experiencing self-doubt. This is common, especially when you mix this with parents who want you to get a job, friends who earn minimum wage and family members who talk about not taking risks and just taking the slow lane to success.

But there are a few easy solutions, it involves working backwards and implementing a method based on your initial goals.

I talk to someone new every week about their goals, people who are in business, work at minimum wage and everyone in-between.

The primary issue I see is a lack of concrete goals.
I always get the answer: “I just want to happy” “I want a successful band” “I want more money”
And my personal favourite: “I want enough to get by comfortably.”

Whoever just wanted enough to get by? Is life just a time to “get by comfortably”? – But that’s a rant for another day.
Instead, we can build an incredible amount of confidence in an entrepreneur by starting with a huge goal, adding hard and smart work, working backwards and essentially reverse engineering success.

The example I’m going to run through in this article is directly related to starting a successful Amazon business.

1.) Define Your Massive Goals

Being happy, being rich, being successful is far too broad for goals. Instead, we need goals that are very specific to what we are trying to achieve. Oh and also read start with why as a way to get started.

Let’s say your goal is to earn $1,000,000 in profit per year from your business. That’s a pretty common goal for most start-up entrepreneurs. Let’s also state that we are going to do this through Amazon.com.

2.) Reverse Engineer Competition

At the moment we just have a goal, a dream almost, this is something that on its own is useful, but creating a financial (or other metric tracked) goal is a great first step.

Next, we need to reverse engineer whether it is possible on the platform we are talking about. In this case, this is Amazon. Luckily there is a funky tool called JungleScout that can help us estimate a competitor’s sales revenue for each product. This is great as we can see how “much” is needed to out-rank them on Amazon and launch a successful Amazon business of our own.

To start you will need to come up with some product ideas. This is a technical skill all on its own and one that I’m not going to talk about now, but this is something I recommend all entrepreneurs learn – AKA solving a problem (what business essentially is in a nutshell.)

Let’s assume you already have an idea and it’s toys for kids. After a lot of keyword research and searching on sites like Alibaba for suppliers you have an idea of the kind of products that have good margins, sell well and something that you think you could market very well.

It’s time to check the sales volumes – Remember we are working backwards here, we want all our competitors to be earning a lot of money already and all we are going to do is come into the market with a better product, better marketing and take their market share (easy in theory.) Search these keywords and install the JungleScout tool.

Let’s assume you want to rank in the top 10 for a specific keyword. We’d then take the average of the top 10 and note that down for each keyword/product type.

Hint: It’s likely going to take more than 1 product to make $1M a year in profit.

In the above example, we can see the average revenue of the top 10 results is about $25,000/Month. Next, we check the reviews, anything with 1000+ reviews is going to be very difficult to outrank, but we can also see a lot of products making a lot of sales with less than 100 reviews.

We can use this data and reverse engineer the profit margins. After Amazon fees, if we assume we have a 30% profit margin (I recommend being as accurate as possible with this reverse engineering)

$25,000/month x 12 x 30% = $90,000 profit per year.
So we still have $910,000 to go.

We would repeat the process looking for gaps in the market or weak competitors until our estimates equal our desired results.  It will likely be 10-20 products = $2.5M a year in revenue for roughly $1M per year in gross profit.

Remember the more products you have the more you reduce your risk but increase your energy/administration issues. I like to have about 10 products making $10,000 per month per product. That is a perfect model but of course, that’s not possible.

Once you have this you can start to work backwards.

3.) Work Backwards

Once you have your product ideas and millionaire maths done you can start to work backwards on how you are going to achieve this. This is essential and is where you will need to learn how to do everything from adding a product, marketing, financials, staff, tax, everything related to your business.
BUT, if you get this part right and break it down even further, your massive goal just becomes a set of tasks that are incredibly easy to implement.

The more detailed this part, the easier your tasks will become. The broader they are the more difficult the entire journey will be. Some people call this the business plan but I find those are just sh*t. This is a step by step process you shouldn’t share with anyone.

This should take into account every single element that needs to be complete from the specifics of “who is going to take product photography and how long do they take?” to: “How much can we invest in marketing for each product to spike best seller rank to gain organic rankings.”

This is one of the reasons why employees in a specific company who go out on their own after they quit/are fired are so successful because they can see what is going wrong with the business already and can fix these issues from the start.

4.) Build Into Tasks

Once you have your individual elements in place you need to break these even further into tasks. For example let’s say one of your elements is: “Build the Amazon listing for product 1” – That’s still pretty broad.

We need to dive into the systems and best practices behind this. AKA optimisation and copywriting. This task needs to be broken down further into specific elements and tasks that ANYONE could do….

People can probably see where I’m going now.

These tasks can then be outsourced if necessary as you’ve built guides and elements for each individual method, even as specific as writing a product title. No one said it would be easy.

Once you have this you should have a mammoth document (ideally time-lined) that will allow you to work through your business very quickly, without stopping or thinking.

All the thinking should be done in the first few stages. All problem solving, all objections, everything should be sorted from the day before you start a business. If you couldn’t get a 12-year-old to build your business it is too complicated.

Once you have gone from $1,000,000 per year in profit down into tasks as easy as “write a product title for XYZ product” – You will be incredibly, pleasantly surprised by the mindset shift in belief and confidence that will result.

Conclusion

If you have the wrong mindset you will not be successful. Learn the strategies and systems you need to build into your business but first ensure you have a success based mindset and you haven’t been programmed into the “script.”

If you have any questions feel free to post below, I’d be happy to answer.
Cheers,
Tom.