JIM COCKRUM'S CES CONFERENCE #IV 2016 Nashville, TN. Day 2: Jim Cockrum, Nathan Bailey, & Brett Bartlett Inventory Sourcing

Transcription

1 JIM COCKRUM'S CES CONFERENCE #IV 2016 Nashville, TN Day 2: Jim Cockrum, Nathan Bailey, & Brett Bartlett Inventory Sourcing [music] 00:06 Speaker 1: We wanna talk about probably the most important aspect of your business besides the people that you have relationships with and your customers, product sourcing. Did everybody here got a grip on product sourcing? You're the grand master of product sourcing? Neither am I. Good, but you know what? We have some good ideas, we wanna talk about it. We wanna brainstorm with you guys. We wanna answer some questions with you guys about what we do with product sourcing, what you do. If you have something you wanna talk about and share and bring to the table, or you want us to share, this is just gonna be an open conversation, a big Q&A about sourcing and where we go from here. Traditionally, and I'll be real quick here on this, but back when I started selling stuff in 1998 on ebay, the wholesale sourcing was how you did it. That was the only... And a lot of people now like, "Oh, whole sale sourcing. That's what I'm gonna do now. The new thing." No, it's been around forever, but there's a million different ways to source. In fact, Jeffrey Clark, if you're here... 01:11 S?: Right here. 01:12 S1: Okay. We have a course coming out that's gonna show you six different ways from Sunday, called 'Buy Local - Sell to the World', and there's a lot of different levels of sourcing. And what we wanna share with you is what we feel is going to be the future of product sourcing, but let's do this, Jim? We wanna start out with anybody who has product sourcing questions whatsoever, right? 01:37 Jim: Yeah, let's have a microphone ready to walk the room, and maybe... Steven, too. Steven? Could you... I'll have you do me a favor, you know that call that we did about two weeks ago with the three of us? Could you post that on the CES4 Facebook group and when you do the video editing, get that link from Steven so we can post it near this video as well. I think that's really gonna help you because we talked about this topic in depth for about 90 minutes, the three of us, a couple weeks ago. Product sourcing, the future of product sourcing, Amazon's changes and how it impacts these types of topics. So there's tons of information in our community about this. We did a great call couple weeks ago, how many of you guys... I thought it went really well. We got good feedback. How many of you guys have heard that call that the three of us did? Any of you heard that? So most of you haven't yet. We spent a lot of time on this topic and it's free, Steven's posting it on th CES4 Facebook group right now. It'll be posted near this video when it goes out because it just got inside of our heads, as far as the questions, "Oh, Amazon's changing. There's brand restrictions now." "Oh, I can't sell this anymore." "Oh, no, this is terrible." That's the game, guys. 10/22/16 Page 1 of 13

2 We've been teaching people how to sell physical products. That's the S up here in the CES. 02:50 Jim: We've been teaching that S model, Nathan and I specifically, and Brett as our number one success story ever in our community, we've been doing it for 14, 13 years. And I'll tell you this, there's one thing I can promise, the game is going to change every six to eight months. It's been that way for years. It's not a reset button if you're prepared, and this is why I talk multiple income streams. This is why I have these three models up here, and they complement each other, and you should be actively diversifying, but the game's gonna change every six to eight months. It's just part of it. And I remember being at ebay live, you were there with me, as one of the first places we actually met was at an ebay live event, Nathan and I, but I was going up to sellers who thought that what they were gonna do the rest of their lives... At this big ebay live, they'd have 20,000 30,000 people there, and they... I know a lot of you guys went. How many went to the big ebay live events? And you'd walk around and you'd see people with their name tags, there'd be this name tag hanging down and they'd have stars, and stripes, and tags, and things hanging out, like "Platinum power seller, star master, awesome universe seller." 04:02 Jim: Like, "This is what I do. This is what I'm gonna do the rest of my life," and they were selling their one or two widgets on ebay and they thought that's what they were gonna do. And the rules changed, competition came, they didn't diversify. They're now working at Denny's, probably. 04:19 Jim: You've got to diversify, guys. If you're waiting for that one magical product... We just had Mike Brown of Death Wish Coffee up here saying, "Yeah, my products get kicked off Amazon sometimes." What? Amazon could kick Mike Brown off of their site tomorrow. He'd be fine, but they don't care. Amazon doesn't care, stop thinking they do. They don't. They may be kind, but they don't need you as an individual seller, okay? As a community, they need us big time. Don't misunderstand me. They need us out there doing retail arbitrage, online arbitrage, finding all these products that they simply can't source themselves. They need that as a community. As an individual, single account, even if you're Mike Brown, with the huge success of his, if you're not here on the lesson loud and clear, guys, you need to be diversifying. I'm not saying that to scare anybody. The odds of you continuing successfully are very, very high. You're probably not gonna ever be on their radar, but if you are, it hurts, and there's no need for it to be a scary moment. If you have relationships and you're prepared to go in multiple directions, like Dan... Is Dan here yet? Dan? Where's Dan Hollings? Wave at me. He's here. I'm not sure if his in the room yet. He's presenting later. He gave us the PPP course. I know I'm doing a lot of talking. 05:41 Jim: I'm gonna turn over to these guys in a second, but I wanna set the right tone for this. He has multiple Amazon accounts, I talked about it in my opening yesterday, guys, right? He has multiple Amazon accounts and they're all accounts that belong to his clients, and he put together the PPP course for us. It's free inside the Proven Amazon course. Just like Brett's PPI course, Proven Performance Inventory, that's free inside the Proven Amazon course. That is an incredible resource. Don't get stuck thinking, and I'm sorry if I feel like I'm beating you guys up a little bit, but it's for your own good. Don't get stuck thinking, "Hey I've figured out how to make it for the rest of my life on Amazon." You haven't, I promise, you haven't. You need to have multiple income streams. So now that I've depressed everybody who doesn't have multiple income streams, let's perk them up, man. And if you guys have questions, we're gonna have a microphone walking around the room too. I want you to be encouraged. This is the greatest business opportunity in the history of man, the 10/22/16 Page 2 of 13

3 greatest time to be alive as an entrepreneur. I stand by those statements and I also stand by you need multiple income streams, and it's never been easier. You could be launching new streams before you leave this event with the stuff you're learning here, alright? 06:51 Jim: So I'm gonna beat you up a little bit but I'm also gonna encourage you. And if I'm gonna be a leader in this community, it's my responsibility to challenge and push you, okay? So I hope you appreciate where this is coming from. But I'm not gonna let you just sit there and be that ebay seller who goes from platinum mega ultimate awesome to flipping burgers at Denny's. I'm not gonna let that be you. I won't. I refuse. I'm gonna beat you up every step of the way if you start to look like that guy, alright? Is that good? Is that okay? Wave at me if you still like me, alright? [applause] 07:24 S1: To expand on what you just said, Jim, Amazon is not the wheel of your business, it's just a spoke in your marketing wheel. Amazon is not all... It's where the traffic's going right now, it's where the best... It's the best place that you can be. It's probably... Aside from ebay, it's probably the most inexpensive and beneficial marketing tool or spoke in your marketing wheel, but think about it. Go all the way back to your product and then past your product to, who is your audience? That's where you should really start. But then start to fill in... Think of a wagon wheel and think of, "Okay, Amazon's a spoke in my marketing wheel. EBay's a spoke in my marketing wheel. Maybe a website is a spoke in my marketing wheel. Facebook is a spoke in my marketing wheel, YouTube." Think about all the things that you can add. If you go to alexa.com, alexa.com is a company owned by Amazon that ranks, "Who are the most popular and most visited websites," and they'll give you an Alexa ranking. You can actually get an extension in your browser to any website you go to to see where it ranks. And is that site a spoke in your marketing wheel? Could it be? How could we use it? How could we... Google's number one, right? Facebook's number two. YouTube's number three. Amazon's number four, right? Yahoo's number five. EBay is number seven. So knowing these spokes in your marketing wheel, and go all the way back to your audience and go, "Where's my audience going?" 08:53 S1: And then you start to realize... And that fear subsides that, "Wow, if I get restricted on that, I can still hammer it on 20 different ways from Sunday." It's so important for you guys to see outside of... Even outside of selling physical products. Diana Ratliff, I got to put you on blast here. What you do is amazing. How would you like this? How would you like to have a business that didn't require that you buy inventory? That you can make as much as you choose to. A very low overhead business that doesn't depend upon whether or not Amazon is in business... If Amazon went out of business tomorrow, what would you do? What's your exit strategy? What's your plan B? In any business, in any real business, I learned this and I've learned from some really, really top end people, always have an exit strategy, always have a plan B. Always have something that... Some people in the community like to call it a side hustle. But don't lose your focus. Focus on results. Stay laser-focused. And sit down with your business, pull out a sheet of paper, draw a big circle on that sheet of paper and a dot in the middle of it and start literally diagramming out your marketing wheel. 10:08 S1: "Where's my audience and what are the spokes in my marketing wheel that I build out," and then prioritize those spokes in your marketing wheel. Put a number value as to which ones you feel are the priority. Obviously Amazon should be number one, it's where the bio-traffic's going, but it's not the be all, end all of your business. And if you make it the be all, end all of your business, it's 10/22/16 Page 3 of 13

4 way risky. And one of the things that I learned about business, 'cause business is all about adversity and how you handle it and how you take it in. And in business, plan for the worst, but hope for the best. If you do that, you'll be just fine. 10:52 Brett: You know, it's funny when I... Well first off, when you're talking about sourcing, I think that there's so many different ways to source product. I don't know if you guys know this, but we still garage sale every weekend. Yeah, and people are like, "Woah, but aren't you like selling containers worth of stuff?" Yeah. But we're also garage selling because it's still the best margin that's out there. Dani Ackerman's in the crowd, she's like one of my heroes that I follow secretly and stalk online because she still teaches ebay and the different ways that... This low hanging fruit that's on people's driveways, and it's so true. It's still out there. Not too long ago, one of our team members went out, found this little R2D2, bought it for, I think like five bucks. It sold the next month for 1,200 on ebay. There's nothing I can do like that on Amazon. [chuckle] So guys, there's just way too many sourcing opportunities out there to kinda get stuck like, "Oh man, this one thing that I was doing isn't quite the same way it was before, therefore my business is done online. I love the idea of diversifying, I love the idea of little small wins when you start to add all those up over time. 12:09 Brett: Man, it's life-changing stuff. So I really, really encourage you guys, you hear these awesome stories of people making millions and millions of dollars from this one widget, but man, I like to go for that stuff that people think's really boring or maybe not as sexy. And then any day, I'll send our team out to peoples' driveways and the margins are just unbeatable. So don't forget about that small stuff, that low hanging fruit that might be down the street, at a thrift store. Don't forget that that could be the quickest hit to get your business going. That's how we went from $400 to actually having a budget to where we can buy some bigger stuff. 12:49 S1: And it's always gonna be there too. It's not going away. Like book selling. If you don't sell books on Amazon, do it, learn it, it's easy. 12:57 Jim: We have a panel coming coming up, that's what we're gonna talk about. And Brian Young is actually going to be releasing a course with us real soon about book selling as well. It could be a very inexpensive course. He's built a team, he's got a team going out, sourcing books, following his strategies, getting paid commission only, if I remember correctly. Are almost all commission and they run the business entirely. They're listing, they're finding, they're listing. They've got all kinds of creative sources. This is an easy business and guess what? I've yet to hear about a book seller on Amazon getting suspended. And if they did, they were let back on instantly. You don't get permanently suspended for selling used books guys; it's a great, profitable, niche market to be in. So I'm not sure, I'm getting feedback. Is there anything I could be doing better with this mic? Is that alright? I'm just hearing a little ringing. Okay, I'll just keep going. Looks like we got a question, is that Roger? 13:54 S?: I don't know how well you all know my wife and I, but we're probably two of the most neurotically risk-averse people in this group. So something that I don't think anybody's asked is while you guys are... You talk about success stories a lot and it be encouraging and all that. Could you talk to something that had worked for a while but just suddenly bottomed and failed miserably? 10/22/16 Page 4 of 13

5 14:23 Jim: Dude, how much time do you have? 14:24 S?: You're welcome. 14:27 Jim: Are you kidding me? I love that that makes us vulnerable too. I had someone comment this morning, they loved meeting Andrea 'cause it just... My wife, 'cause it just made me seem more human and I appreciate the horror behind that question. It's like, "All we ever see of you... " If all you know of somebody is social media, guys, you can get a pretty different picture from reality. Guess how many of us post what it looks like to get your family ready for Sunday morning church and everyone is beating each other up and Mom's still in her robe and we gotta leave in 20 minutes and someone just spilled milk on the floor and they post that on Facebook. No, no one posts that on Facebook. We like to post the bright, shinny stuff, like, "Oh, look at this big win. Look at this, I won here again. Look at how awesome I am over here." And that's why it's such a shallow platform. And I'm actually working on a concept right now, guys, a book. And I've got it mostly written, Steven's helped me get through it and it's gonna be... The topic is gonna be 'Leading with depth in shallow platforms or shallow waters' along those lines. For the very thing that you're talking about right now because if you're going to be a genuine leader, which we all are as business people, you've gotta have a vulnerability, you've gotta share the whole story, you've gotta build real relationships, which can only happen in face-to-face interactions like this. 15:40 Jim: So that's a great question to put these guys on the spot. I tried to sell vacuum cleaners door to door in college, guys. I lasted four days. They showed me the sales training video and it actually literally had... This is where, "Get your foot in the door," comes from, if you're not aware. The sales training said "If they start to close the door in the first 10 seconds, you just put your foot in the door" and I'm like, "Well I don't know if that's really me, I'll try." I failed miserably, I tried to sell pagers through a network marketing scheme out of San Fransisco that... I was in Indiana and I was licking envelopes and stuffing them and sending them out and mailing them out. And I was using Compuserve. How do you remember Compuserve, right? And I was sending them out, and then I had this massive downline and it was awesome and I never got a single check. 16:40 Jim: And I called their headquarters and talked to their CEO and come to find out, he was also the accountant and the main sales person and the sales support stuff and the guy shipping the boxes. And he was overwhelmed and shutting the doors, "Sorry, thanks for the hard work, keeping your money that you signed up. I can't afford to pay you that back because we're going bankrupt." So that's the entrepreneur's story, right? I've got a 1,000 of those, and these guys, too. I've given you a little time to think about it. Share some of your failures, guys. Dude, failing is what business is about. Like Jeff said it yesterday, "Dude, if you're not failing constantly, guess what? You're not trying hard enough." There it is. 17:20 Nathan: Yeah, failure is the leading cause of success. It really is. But yeah, for me, let me get real specific. I love your... Vacuums, dude? [chuckle] 10/22/16 Page 5 of 13

6 17:31 Nathan: MLM, really? 17:33 Jim: I was carrying vacuum cleaners up... It was... What was the company? Electrolux. 17:39 Nathan: Cool. 17:40 Jim: I lasted four days. I actually had an appointment set, and I think the lady was ready to buy one from me 'cause she felt sorry for me, and I quit that night because I just didn't feel right selling it to her. 17:50 Nathan: Way to see it through. 17:54 Nathan: Okay. So my background, I became obsessed with technology and computers in 1995, and that's when I built my first website with Microsoft... What was that software? They don't even have it anymore. FrontPage. I was gonna get rich quick, right? So what was cool is I learned what not to do, but I built websites, and back then, there wasn't an ebay, there wasn't any kind of an online real marketplace. Everybody was too scared to buy anything. But after about the fifth failure of building a website that, "Okay, I got a website. Okay, everybody," you sit there and you wait and you wait. But no, the reality is, what I did is, I found somebody who actually knew what they were doing, and we started a website called 'Meds By Mail', where we were teaching people that were seniors how to get their meds from Canada because it was way cheaper. And it was a $35 information course, and it started selling. It was like, "What are you doing? How are you doing this? What's going... " And this guy that mentored me, he showed me how to do it. But I came up with the idea, but he had all of the keys to the kingdom and he let me see a little bit behind the curtain, but not all the way because he had to keep himself in first count, and that's what caused the business to fail, was I didn't know enough about business to not put yourself in first count in your business. 19:28 Nathan: That means that when you're training your VAs, you're doing all these things, you're training people to do things, have some non-disclosure agreement in place, or have some terms. Lay out the terms of your business agreement with your partner way in advance, so that you know exactly what they can expect from you, and what you can expect from them. That was a big failure that I had. Leadership failure. See, I think leadership, if you wanna run a real business, if you don't have a background or know anything about leadership or how to leverage people, leverage their time, leverage their knowledge, leverage their resources, that could be a huge pitfall. And that's a history, but let's talk recently. I make bad buying decisions all the time. I'm the king of it. My wife, she'll tell you. [chuckle] But I make a lot of good buying decisions. Let's talk about a bad buying decision. I bought... Have you seen Elevation Masks? Real popular, right? Where you use 'em to work out, and you put this mask on, and it emulates working out at a high elevation. Didn't really do a background check on the source. Counterfeit. [chuckle] Put 'em on ebay, shut down. Anywhere, shut down. I've still got $1,500 in elevation masks that, hey, they work. They're counterfeit. If anyone wants one, come talk to me. 10/22/16 Page 6 of 13

7 20:44 Jim: I'll take a one. 20:45 Nathan: Real, real cheap. I'll send you one. 20:47 Jim: I want it free though. I'm not paying for it. 20:49 Nathan: Damn! 20:53 Nathan: Well you know what? I'd rather that than it taking up the space 'cause the space that it's taking up is costing me money. But that was a recent failure. Online arbitrage? Oh, I'm the king of making bad buying decisions, but that's how you learn how to make good buying decisions, so don't be afraid to fail because that's where you learn. 21:11 Jim: The cost of failure has never been lower, guys. Come on. Starting a business in the '70s, and we'll let Brett talk again. Dude, you gotta say more stuff 'cause Nathan, I know how to interrupt this guy. You need to learn this. [chuckle] Hey, if you're on a... If you're ever on a phone call with Nathan, the best thing... I'm gonna give this tip publicly, buddy. You say... As soon as you get on the phone with him, you say, "Dude, I've got like three minutes of battery left." And then when you feel like hanging up, you just hang up at any point after that, right? 21:43 Nathan: And an hour later, I'm like, "Thanks for plugging in your phone, Jim." [chuckle] 21:50 Jim: What was I gonna say? Sorry. 21:53 Nathan: Brett, tell us. Tell us about your failures. 21:55 Jim: Talk to us, Brett. 21:56 Brett: So I have way more failures than I do successes, and I think I've touched on that a couple of times. I coined a term for myself, just so that it doesn't sound as bad when I talk to people, and that's that I fall forward. And so I fail and fail and fail, but I feel like, in that process at least, I'm moving forward. But to give you specific examples, and I like Jim's answer, like, "How much time do you have?" So I'm gonna just go through this, I'm missing some gaps in it, but I could literally talk about my failures all day long, for weeks. But really, my first entrepreneurial journey, I was so excited. I read The 4-Hour Work Week, I thought I was gonna create this thing that I could throw up online and then go retire in Fiji for the rest of my life. So anyways, there was this website that was gonna show people where two-for-one deals are at restaurants. That sounds good. Everybody's like, "I like two-for-one deals." The problem is restaurants don't like two-for-one deals, so I got all these people to a website, and I had no restaurants on there, so I lost every single penny. Didn't make a... Like literally not one piece of money came into that, so that shut down. Then I thought I wanted to be a children's book author. I made like $10, sold zero of them. 23:12 Brett: After that, I read how great... At that time, the iphone had just come out, so the gold rush was, "Hey, let's make some apps." And I tried to make a couple of apps, literally didn't sell one 10/22/16 Page 7 of 13

8 of them. And then, I don't know if you guys know this, but I accidentally... Like literally, I failed in buying Jim's course. I just Googled "How to sell on ebay" 'cause I had this pile of clothes that we were trying to sell and I literally... Those failures were before this. I had not made a dollar online, and I was just going, "Man, I really suck at this." And I had this pile of clothes and I'm like, "I hear people sell on ebay, and it seems so boring and lame, but I'm gonna try to sell these pile of clothes." I'm like, "How to sell on ebay." And I tried to find a course, I find Jim's PAC course, which I didn't read the fine print, I guess, is Proven Amazon Course, right? And I'm like, "Okay, I got this little bit of money, but I feel good about it. I'm gonna buy it." And then I started reading it and I'm like, "Proven Amazon Course." "Oh, man." [chuckle] And so then I'm like, "Okay, that's fine. I'll learn how to sell clothes on Amazon." And then I was restricted, and I couldn't sell clothes on Amazon. 24:35 Brett: And so then, I'm like, "Oh, dude. I just can't seem to make this work." And so... But the cool thing was that's when I discovered Jim, and that's when he actually... There was a course that actually taught you something that works. And so the pile of clothes sat there for years as I was learning how to do other things on Amazon, and that's when this snowball started to roll. But even then, learning how to buy, we went out and bought 20 different things at that time, one of them sold. But it was that one thing that sold that proved, "Hey, this actually works." And so it's just kind of learning how to take those small wins and grow them. And so anyone who's risk-averse, try something, and even if you completely fail, try to find that silver lining in it, man. I... [chuckle] People will be like, "Brett you're way too optimistic." But I do feel like that's helped me push through these just gigantic failures, and I fail all the time. But I will always find, "Hey, I learned this." Or out of these 20 things that didn't exactly work, we sold this one thing. How can we grow that? And that's proved over time to really help us expand much quicker. And that was... 25:49 Brett: Again, Proven Performance Inventory was developed from failure. So if you're a riskaverse, do Proven Performance Inventory because that is my work of going, "Look, I failed so many times in buying that here's a way to not fail as much as me. Please watch this." And it's available to all you guys here at PAC, so I think that's really cool. 26:12 Nathan: Awesome. Yeah, don't get discouraged. Don't throw in the towel. Don't give up. Don't quit ever, ever because there is fruition, you just gotta keep digging. You gotta keep digging. You know the whole story of the gold mine that the guy sold 'cause he wasn't making any money, didn't get any gold, and the guy that bought it dug for one foot and found the largest vein of gold in California history. 26:39 Jim: Yeah, and I'm a huge fan of persistence and I love that story, but guys, the risk have never been lower. We've got a question back there in just a second. The thing I was gonna say before I forgot what I was gonna say, and I made fun of Nathan for a minute. In the '70's, or even early '80's, or late '80's, if you wanted to start a business, guys, we were talking about... This is what business colleges still teach. "Well first, you get your business plan, and then you gather your investors, and you collect a bunch of money, and then you build a building, and hire your staff, and you start brainstorming products," and then you've spent... By this time, you've spent millions of dollars, and then you cross your fingers and you hope. You hope. Knowing that 80% of all small businesses fail in their first couple of years, you hope yours works. That's the old model. We don't live under that anymore. Now we live under a model where you can sit and listen to three guys talk 10/22/16 Page 8 of 13

9 on stage and brainstorm about product sourcing, and launch a new income stream while you're sitting there with your smartphone open, and test a few ideas. You should be coming up with some PPI keyword, sitting here and like, "Oh, I need to test that one too." And you're popping these little ideas out there. 27:41 Jim: It's kinda like growing an list. "What's the best way to grow an list?" There's a thousand ways to grow an list. It's like sometimes people come to me and they'll say, "Well, once you got an audience, how do you monetize that?" There's a thousand ways you can monetize that, there's a thousand solutions to all of these questions. The one enemy you have is that nagging voice in your head that says, "Well, Denny's is paying $24 an hour now for wait staff, so maybe we can just fall back on that because none of this is working. And I guess I'm just gonna... I'll just go get a real... I did get a college degree after all so maybe I'll just put out some resumes." That nagging voice, get rid of it. You don't need it. There are... As I say all the time. Guys, there's $100 bills blowing around in the wind out there. I look out my window, that's what I see. Over this crowd, I can visualize it. There's so much opportunity. We need entrepreneurs who will say boldly, "I'm gonna be an entrepreneur five years from now, 10 years from now, and 50 years from now. If my family doesn't like it, I'm sorry. If some of my friends think I'm nuts, that's okay. That's who I am, that's what I am. And the internet is the greatest tool in history of man. So I get annoyed with excuses sometimes. 28:52 Jim: I'm not the kind of guy you wanna come and complain to, and bring you little excuses. No. Because there's a thousand solutions every time. If you're gonna bring me a problem, bring me 10 solutions at the same time. I beat my team up all the time. Don't come complaining to me because this is such easy stuff we're doing when you look at in comparison to every other entrepreneurs who's lived before us, starting about 15 years ago. We've got it easy. There, I said it. We do. We do. This stuff is relatively so simple compared to the mountains they've had to climb. Yeah, Kat, give us some questions. 29:27 Nathan: Great question, though, by the way. 29:29 Jim: Yeah. Thanks, Randy. 29:31 S?: Hey guys. 29:32 Jim: Barrington, Macintosh. Give him a hand from Jamaica. 29:38 S?: Thanks, guys. Nate, question, for persons just starting, we're talking about sourcing profitable inventory. Let's say that they have a limited budget, what's a good time, you would say, "Okay, should I go wide on this or should I go deep?" I wanted to kinda get some answers on that. What's a good time to either go wide on it or go deep on a particular product if you're working with a budget? 30:03 Brett: Yeah, I feel pretty comfortable answering that question. In my opinion, when we're talking about building a safe, balanced sourcing adventure, I think that you should always focus on going wide. And then when something shows it's a pattern of growth, a predictable pattern of growth, then that's when you can allocate a budget towards it. I think going wide at first is much better and safer because you're able to learn a wide array of products and how they perform and the ups and downs of them. You're able to balance your, basically, portfolio of products out much 10/22/16 Page 9 of 13

10 quicker. And, in my opinion, you're able to, when you're ready, grow much faster because you'll see... 31:00 Brett: Let's say you get... You go wide with 100 or 1,000 products, well out of those, maybe five of them are showing a lot of potential growth. If you had just focused on one thing and tried to stuff it down people's throat, I think your potential for growth is very limited. So I like to go very... A mile wide, inch deep. And we still do that, and we have items that sell millions of dollars and I am always saying, "What are we adding? What's a new product line that we're adding this way out?" Because I just... I'm kind of with Jim, I think that if you're just like, "Oh, this one product is gonna be there forever on this marketplace," I think you are telling the worst lie. You're lying to yourself on that. And so I really, really recommend, guys, enjoy going wide on your product lines. I think it's an awesome story you get to see in it. 31:47 Jim: There's never a good time to decide, "Well, I'm done going wide. It's time to go deep." There's... That point will never come. It won't happen. It hasn't even happened for Mike Brown, right? If you're paying attention. He's still going wide, dude. He's doing comic books, right. He's got merchandise and mugs and caps. And I think he's going to be a consultant soon. How many businesses around the world would fly Mike in to talk for a day about business strategy and pay him a ton of money? He hasn't done any of it yet. Every time I talk to him, I'm like, "Dude, be a consultant. You've got to be a consultant. Tell your story." And you may be thinking, "Well, I'm not that level yet myself. I don't... " If you're in this room right now, you are qualified. I can deputize you right now, I'm tapping you on both shoulders. You are an online selling expert. Be proud of it, call yourself that, and do it. So if we're talking inch wide, mile deep, all this... No. Diversify like this. We're actually sitting out of order a little bit. I'm the E guy, you're the C guy, Brett's the S Guy. But this is my business. I specialize, but I'm doing all of it at the same time. If I've got a selling question, I'm gonna go to Brett. He's done more selling than me at this point. 33:00 Jim: I taught him how to get started and he passed me. I helped shaped Nathan on how to coach and what I wanted a coaching program to look like, and he took the ball and ran with it. And he coaches way more people than I do now, but this is all my business. So I am answering a very intense question. You may feel like I'm avoiding the question. "What products, how, when do I go deep?" I'm saying "Go a mile wide on all of it, guys. Be thinking this way all the time." Not just on products, but about everything. So when you wanna talk to me about just product sourcing, I'm not gonna talk to you about just product sourcing because as you're going wide and you're adding these products, something's gonna drop. You're gonna build a relationship with the company that makes these widgets, and you say, "You know what? Instead of me just sourcing this widget, I'm gonna partner with this company." 33:48 Jim: Did you hear that I read yesterday from James? He was sending in a truckload of product from a company. Instead of putting it into his own account, he had a 50/50 relationship and he's setting this guy up with his Amazon account. So now he's diversified. This is all within just a couple months of coming into our community, thanks to a gift of Rosemary giving him the course for free, and he's out there doing this stuff. It's not rocket science, guys. You just need a little confidence. 34:16 Nathan: Just a real, real quick answer to that, Barrington. I do small tests. I test it small, go wide, go wide, get some consistent numbers, and look at a average sales rank. You're going back as far as you can go on a certain product. And I don't just look at what the sales rank is and the price 10/22/16 Page 10 of 13

11 history on Amazon, I'm gonna go on ebay and I'm gonna look at the completed listing search in the sold listing and I'm gonna find the top three competitors in the top three marketplaces. Not even just on ebay, I'm gonna take a look at all the other multichannels like Etsy, Newegg, even Jet. I just moved in Jet. On any of these other marketplaces. "Who are the players? Who's... " And I wanna... I wanna find out, "Who's the audience and why does this... " The back story of why a product sells. And until I know all of that data, and I've tested it, and I know, "Okay, if I buy this, and based on my numbers and what I've sold in this small test that I've done, I'll know what a three-month's supply is," right? And once I can really, really prove it out, what that three-month supply is and how long it's gonna take to sell out of that, I'd like to buy in three-month increments. If I can buy enough to buy three months' worth, that's about as deep as I'll go in a product. It'll take three months to sell out of it. 35:38 Nathan: So that's... There's three different models that I use. I go off with a short tail, a medium tail, and a long tail, and I always find that people who are wanting to go the short tail. What's quick turnaround, quick turnaround? The quick turnaround items, the short tail, is probably gonna be their smallest margin, and your medium tail gets a little bit better, and your long tail is your best margin. And so if you have a combination of short tail, medium tail, and long tail products in your account, and then you really have a strong, solid understanding of that product, who the players are in the game that you're competing with, and you really have a strong knowledge of your audience, then I'll go in a little bit deeper. But I'm still conservative about that, I'm still trying to go a mile wide, an inch deep on that because I see so many people going, "Okay, I'm gonna private label a product 5,000, $8,000 into this product, and six-months later I've sold three." And you can't market your way out of one product. You just can't work your way out of it. 36:33 Jim: We've heard from so many people who went with that model and they've got a garage full of widgets they can't sell now, and that was the first thing they did. It's so frustrating to me, for that to be the starting point. It kills me to hear from people like that because we won't let you do that in our community. We just won't. We will not send you down that road. Let me ask a question on behalf of the newbies in the room, a question for the panel. I'll take a shot at answering it, but I want you guys to answer too. And if you have a question, just raise your hand after this as well. We wanna hit some. We got 15 minutes. Kat's ready with one. Let me just... We'll get that one in a second 'cause I think this is gonna hit 30% of our audience. "I'm new. I haven't successfully sourced anything yet. What do I source? Help me out. I just wanna get some wins," right? We hear that all the time. That's what you were hoping to hear, I'm thinking, a lot of you. "Somebody help me source something. I wanna make some money." Okay, we've got about 50 great answers to that question. They're all... If you go into the Proven Amazon course, the sourcing section is the fattest section of the course, and there are so many ideas in there, and all of them are something that a newbie could take a stab at. But let's just... What would be your top three answers to that? Let's just kind of go through the line. 37:48 Brett: Yeah. Mine are super-quick. Honestly, I would go to thrift stores, I would go to garage sales, I would buy things on sale online, try to sell them on ebay or Amazon. I think those lowhanging fruit things are always gonna be there 'cause simply what you're doing is taking it from one marketplace to another. And that's where I would start if... And the reason I say that is that's where I started and when you have a limited budget and you're just looking for that quick, quick win to start to snowball that cash, that's what I would recommend doing because you'll see that turn starting to happen. And so I actually... It would be so easy to sell you on this glorified version of, "Hey, private label this product and you'll be making millions," right? But I actually say, "Look. Humble yourself 10/22/16 Page 11 of 13

12 to walk up to someone's driveway and be like, 'Hey. I'll buy that for 50 cents, man.'" And go sell it for 40 on ebay. Take the time to make the listing, everything like that. You can do that with your hustle. That would be my recommendation. 38:56 Nathan: He's right. It's the lowest entry level of risk and I do it... To this day, I didn't start out thinking that that was what I would love, but I love it, man. I love messing with people. I'll show up at your driveway and go, "Your junk is by far the best junk I've ever seen. I'll buy it all." And you get those people laughing and giggling and then they become your friend, and then they're like, "You can just have that." And then I start pulling the American Pickers bundle trick on him where, "Okay, that vintage clock radio with tubes in it, that's a $350 piece right there. I'm gonna distract him over there by that Fischer Price record player that they'll sell for 10 bucks, but still I got it for a dollar. "Tell you what, this Fischer Price thing, this is killer. I had this when I was a kid. Tell you what, I'll buy this, but throw in that clock radio. Tell you what, five bucks for that." "Okay, sure," when they're in the heat of the moment. They don't know what it's worth. So the highest profit margin would be yard sales, estate sales. 40:00 Nathan: Jeffery Clark and I have a course coming out very soon called 'Buy Local - Sell To The World'. Now, not only that, but running ads in your area for products. I'm not gonna give away the product, and some of you in here have made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of something that Jim shared back in 2009, and it still works killer. We teach it exclusively to coaching clients, run an ad that says cash paid for your... We've done it with guitars, cash paid for your guitars and amplifiers and musical instruments, cash paid for your old electronics or dead tech or cash paid for your running ads. You would be amazed. If you know a little something about something, you can really turn the hobby into a really profitable business. 40:44 Nathan: Not only that, but going back to books, I never make less than 500% ROI on books. 500%, I never make less. You know what? If I buy a book for a dollar and sell it for 10, my minimum net profit is generally $5 when it's all said and done, right? Now, compound that by going out and working your tail off and going to all the thrift stores and yard sales. The yard sale, books you can get like crazy. But we had our books up to about 4,500 books on Amazon, making about 80 to 100 bucks a day on work we did months ago, just coming in residual. And it's foundational. I would recommend it, even if you're an experienced seller. If you put all your eggs into certain baskets, go back and build some of these foundational strategies that you can always go back to. Look at your business as a table and how many legs do you have under your table that are holding that table up, that... You're not on a foundation of sand. Someone came along and kicked out a leg from underneath your table, would your table still be standing? Right? 41:45 Nathan: So yeah, these things that people don't... They overlook, it just... There's so much money on the table. My friend Jeff Clark over here, this 'Buy Local, Sell To The World' course that we did, I... Jeff, I got to tell you, I think it's some of the best training that I've ever been involved with in... It's incredible. Let's get this question. Sorry for being long-winded. 42:10 S?: Hi. First of all, my name is Nica. I'm really excited to be here. This has been a question I've been wondering for a while. I'm really interested in the PPI, but I know it takes a while to get it started. What do you do to help with your income while you're doing it? Do you do RA or do you just let it build up? 42:34 Brett: So my mentor, my father-in-law, Scott, taught me if something works... So you named 10/22/16 Page 12 of 13

13 off a couple different things. Your question basically is if some things are more long term, some things are more short term, some things take longer to develop, some things take shorter to develop. And I think one of the biggest lessons he taught me, and he always challenged me with this, "Are you bouncing or are you bolting?" And bouncing is not good. So here is bouncing, and Jim touched on this a little bit, that shiny object syndrome. And that's when someone goes, "Okay, RA works, retail arbitrage. Walking into Target, selling it on Amazon. But Brett's talking about PPI, so I'm gonna stop retail arbitrage and go do PPI." That's crazy because you're making... Let's just throw a number out there. Let's say you can make... I would be surprised at any budget if a person can't make between... Or steadily $3,000 a month in retail arbitrage. Why not pay someone $1500 a month to sustain that, and then you can go focus on PPI and build that out? But that $1,500 is locked in now. Does that make sense? To answer your question, those short-term things that we're talking about, focus on those, systemize them, bring someone into it, bolt that on. Then when you go over to PPI, those things are going. 44:02 Brett: But... And that's why I love the fact that we get to talk about this loading and free stuff. That was one of the biggest lessons that my father-in-law taught me because I was a bouncer. I was like, "Dude, this guy's now talking about being able to make $100,000 a month. I'm only making 20 over here, so I'm gonna dump this thing and go for this thing." That's crazy. So many people... And that's why I love to talk about a team. So many people wanna be a part of the story, give them the opportunity to do that. That's what Jim teaches too. So I just really encourage you, if something works, even if it's $100 a month... 10/22/16 Page 13 of 13