#619 - From War Stories to Amazon Strategies
36:14 Share

Today we've got a first time guest who's got some great stories such as how in the 1970s he spent 10 years straight on the battlefield in a war and then he tried different careers until discovering Amazon at a time when others his age might be considering retirement and now he's a six figure seller with over 40% profit margins. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

And today, we've got somebody who's here on the show for the first time, but he kind of reminds me of, not just because of the beard, but in America, we had for a while these commercials for Dos Equis Beer. And this guy was like the most interesting man on the planet or something was the catchphrase. And I think hearing just bits and pieces of Andy's life, he might qualify as the most interesting man in Amazon. So Andy, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Bradley. Now, we're going to go into your Amazon backstory and how you've been using Helium 10 and even listening to the original AM PM podcast for years. But when we were on that trip in Bali together, I would hear some of your stories. I was like, you know what? We've got to get him on the podcast to talk about it. So first of all, something I don't know, where were you born? So I was born in the old Rhodesia, which then became Zimbabwe.

And I was born in a wonderful time. I was born in a time before radios and telephones. We had two-way radios and we had like the shortwave radios and the lounge and that kind of stuff. I was actually born before television was there as well. But it was a good time and family and community were good. And like we didn't have any of the stuff that we've got today. So we used to spend most of our time playing outside and that kind of stuff.

And grew up in a really wonderful time with the bush and hunting and that sort of thing. And then in 1970, the war broke out. So the whole country basically went into a state of war. And, you know, one of the controversies around that was it was always seen as a white indigenous war, but it wasn't. You know, we had most of our troops were actually indigenous people.

And that war carried on for 10 years. So there was a lot of... By that time, you were already of age to be in the military? Absolutely. So when you got to 18, you went to the military, you know, 18, 19. So in 1970, I was actually 19 when, and at that stage, the war had already stepped up. So...

So, you know, we went, we were, we were flat out for, for 10 years. So for 10 years, you were on the battlefield. Absolutely. So we were either military or paramilitary. So we'd go in six weeks into the bush and then we'd come out for six weeks and go back for six weeks. But a lot of the time we never got out, you know, we'd go out for six weeks and then come back for two weeks and we'd go back out again and that sort of thing. And it was, it was a really a tough war.

I'm sure we could spend a whole hour talking about it, but what is the number one either craziest or most notable war story you have from those 10 years?

Well, I think, you know, one of the things is you get a belief in fact, you know. So, one day we were coming back, we'd gone down to get water and we were coming back from water. We used to move in quite small numbers and sticks and things like that. And we got ambushed by like 30 freedom fighters and like that ambush carried on for like 30 minutes. There were two of us versus 30 for like 30 minutes.

And they actually brought in, you know, this thing was, they were, they were rocketing us, they were motoring us the whole 10 yards. And this thing actually brought in troops from, from, from another unit, which came back down and actually put in stop groups. It was only five guys, but at the end of the day, they, they, they, it had, it had a good outcome. But one of the things was, is that, is that often you got into a situation that, that for a reason you didn't go out,

and that day something would happen to the guys you normally work with and things like that. So that gave me a very strong belief in faith. There's a reason why

why things happen in life. And that can save you from bad things or it can take you to bad things itself. So then 10 years of fighting and then what was the outcome and what was the next stage of your life? After the 10 years, we were actually going to go into a full scale, like a really hard battle and things like that. And then they cancelled it at the last minute. That was Operation Quartz. They cancelled it at the last minute. We were sitting on the back of the truck so we heard Mugabe got in.

we thought well we'll still give it a we'll still give it a chance but within two years there was so much witch hunting going on and that kind of stuff that i've been good at making bad decisions i decided to go to south africa and not go to australia there was a whole a whole lot of us sitting there saying like where are we gonna go we go to south africa we're gonna go to australia and i was one of the stupid guys who said like we've got to south africa so i went to south africa i went through the same well i wasn't involved in the war at that stage because i've now already started to push a bit of time but

But got caught up in the same sort of revolution attitude and atrocities and that kind of stuff. And then in 95, when the ANC came into power, I went to the Middle East. So I joined an Arab company, very hard to deal with the Arabs, but coming from a multicultural society.

I could actually work with those guys quite well. And I stayed with them for 10 years and I got recruited from there in 2005. What were you doing there? I was general manager of a construction and really mixed concrete and quarrying operation.

And in fact, before I left, they put me in charge of steam flooding of the occasional oil fields with Occidental, which I had, you know, mechanical, electromechanical, I didn't have much experience in, but they just said to me that working with Occidental, like I was probably the best option they had there, working with a US company out of Texas, Infab, in a joint venture with us.

So that was a very wonderful time in this alternative amount, a very, very wonderful time. And then I got recruited out in 2005. I got recruited by a major material supplier here in Australia, Borrell, and I came across to Borrell. It took a year to actually finalize how we were going to do this because it was already putting a bit of age on me. And I came across and I joined Borrell here in Australia in 2005, and this has been basically where my kids and family have grown up

you know, for the last 19 years. Now, what point did e-commerce come on your radar? Okay, so in 2020, I had a, I opened an Alibaba account still in Omaha.

And that was for commodity trading and trying to get cement in and things like that. So even though you had left there, you still like… No, I was still there. I was still there at that moment. I was still in a mine. I thought you said 2020. Sorry, no, 2000. Okay. You're testing me to see if I'm paying attention. Okay, that's good. I passed that test. All right. 2000. Sorry. Say 2000 before I left a mine, actually.

I started an Alibaba account and we were trying to sort out cementing ports and commodities. I didn't even know Alibaba was around in those days. That was when they just started. They just started in 2000. They just started in 2000.

And then I started on Amazon in 2017. There was a guy, Adam Hudson, here in Australia, who went and told people, like, you can sell anything on Amazon, you'll become rich. And I think you've seen Adam before. He's got a smile which is like this wide, hundreds of teeth. And he was convincing everybody that this was the greatest thing since bubble gum. He actually got 10,000 people joined his group. So absolutely massive.

- What was your first product? So 2017, what was your first product? - So I actually launched in 2018 with my brother-in-law in Oman. So he was still in Oman. He was still in Oman. I went over there to catch up with him and we launched our first product, which was a key folder and it was doing really well. Then he got hit with a patent.

And they closed him down. And he wasn't quick enough on his feet, and they closed him down. And he actually never went back into Amazon again. And then I launched. Originally, my first plan to launch was in sort of early to mid-2019. And then my supplier, one of my products had to be stainless steel and top corrosion resistant for a million environment. And after all the samples were made and everything else, he said, I can't do it.

I'm going to do it in mild steel because you're not a big enough customer and I don't want to be changing materials. And a thousand things said, well, we can't work together. And I put a request for quote out, an RFQ, and a trading company came back to me and they said to me, look, we are a manufacturer. We can make this. I said, you're not a manufacturer, but you know what? I really need a good partner in China that I can work with.

And this is something, Guangxi, which is so, so important. I built a relationship with those guys and we've been manufacturing together for the last four years with absolutely no problems and really, really good. And then you went on a separate account, like this is just by yourself now without your brother-in-law? Yeah, no, I went without my brother-in-law. I gave him the idea for the first one. I said to him, do you want to join Venture? He said, no, I want to do it on my own. I said, okay, do it.

do it on your own. So that was quite probably quite fortunate for me. Yeah, there you go. What was your best year of sales in the last, looks like you've been selling for six years? 140,000. Four years. Which year was that? That was last year. This year I'll- Oh, so you started getting better. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, in 2021, so I started in 2020. In 21, I started my very strong relationship with Tim Jordan.

And that was in the days of Centurion League. And I followed his and your idea of blue ocean, not going over the top, not putting yourself into heavy debt and going in and making good margins with what Tim called the Cessna ideas. Go for smaller products and just go in a comfort zone, make yourself a good set of money and things like that.

And this, of course, is exactly what you taught on Project X. This is exactly what you taught on the Maldives honeymoon. And this is one of the greatest things that we've got out there is, you know, people, gurus today, so-called gurus today are pushing it.

Get yourself a million dollar business. Get yourself deep in debt. Fight in the blood. Get in the shark waters and everything else. And then sell it for a 7X. You know, well, guess what? That's gone. And some people manage it. But if they haven't got really strong business acumen, at some stage they go into a very high risk profile. And I've seen a lot of those guys like skyrocket and come down. So I actually joined Helium 10.

A week before you did SSP1. Oh, yeah. Now you're episode 600 and I'm not sure what this is. 615, 616 or something like that is what it's going to be. And so you were a week before my very first episode. Okay. And I remember your very first episode with Manny. Yep. And the handover and that kind of stuff. And during that period, I was spending an hour traveling to work and an hour traveling home.

And I used to spend that hour listening to one episode and I used to spend it traveling home listening to another one. And when I got to the end of them, I start all over again, listening to them all over again. So that was my travel time was on. So this was before you even launched your first product then? No, this was just after. So I launched in 2020. Just after, okay.

And this was in 2021. Now you're going back to your sales. Like what kind of profit margins do you have? So I'm sitting like 45%. Oh, good grief. Even now? Even now, even now still, even now. So that's after PPC, after shipping and all that stuff. Absolutely. So because I'm in a good niche, my PPC costs are really low. So I sit normally with PPC costs around 11, 12%. And that's a cost.

which brings me back to tackles of around about six or 7%, because I'm happy to actually get that real estate, pay a little bit extra to have sponsored where I could actually just running organic. So I run sponsored organic. I'm not really worried about the predator effect or anything like that. I'm just happy that I can keep it like that. And I can still retain 28, 30% of market share

in all the time and in really good times when it's a fishing product, say, this season up, in very good times, then I'll push that up to like 50-55% and things like that. And I'm looking at doing some influencer stuff as well to try and see if I can push that up. Want to check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon? Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result have the actual search keyword in the title.

You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool, X-Ray. More than 1 million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray. h10.me/xray.

so i always my daily routine is i get on to helium 10 every evening at five o'clock my time which is midnight your time and i go through and i check my sales and i check how i'm doing in terms of my of my p l which i use your p l in there you know and i have a look once a week i go into into keyword tracker i'm not the keyword track into market tracker and i see where i'm sitting in the market

Yeah. And then the other thing, which I always used to do, and I dropped it for four months and it caused me a lot of pain, was I would go into my main keywords, see what's happening on there. Where am I sitting in terms of my main keywords? Who else is in there? What's going on? So that's your absolute footprint of what the customers see.

So you can, you know, that really tells you exactly what's going on. And I didn't do that for a couple of months. So we came through normally Christmas time. We're at the slow part. We start coming up in January, February. January, February was a bit slow. March was still a bit slow. I was like, what's going on here? I got on there and I found somebody had gone in there. Now, one of the issues that I had, I got closed down. My brother-in-law got closed down on a patent. I got, I put a provisional patent in and I checked for patents when I did my product.

There was a patent in process and I got closed down as well. But I spoke to the owner of the patent. I tried to get the lawyers involved during COVID. Couldn't find, couldn't get the lawyers to help me. Got hold of the owner of the patent. I said, like, what are we going to do? He said, give me $35,000. So I'm not going to give you $35,000. I'll give you a dollar a unit. He said, okay, cool. So I made a royalty agreement with him.

And off the back of that royalty agreement, I had the protection from his patent. Later on, he actually sold me that whole patent and his trademarks and everything else. And we carried on in different directions. But it was great friends. So then is that why...

you've been kind of you're immune to kind of like you know what other people have to deal with with a million uh you know sellers and you know factories from china all trying to sell the same thing is because you're in a patented uh kind of niche where they couldn't be selling your products even if they wanted to yeah so so what happened with this guy that that was on there i got onto him and i said to him guy you've got 48 hours to take your product out

Or I'm going to take you down. 48 hours went past, nothing happened. I got onto Amazon. This is my patent number. This is the infringement. Amazon took him down within 48 hours. So then I was watching and I saw him selling on AliExpress. So this was a little bit of a long bow to pull. What I did is I put an AliExpress order from the US to him and said, you know what? You're doing it again and I'll take you down on Alibaba.

And as I say, it was a bit of a long boat to pull because he was selling it in China. So someone from the US bought it. It would be a fight item by item. But he said, okay. And he took it down. And then what I did is I bought all his stock off him for like 50% of what I would normally be paying for it.

So I actually picked up all that stock. So I don't pay a lot for my stock because of the relationship I've got with a trading company in China. And I mean, like these guys go the distance. I can get on them and say, listen, I need you guys to back me 2000 units this week.

And they'll get wobbly at the knees about it, but they'll pack it and they'll get it out and they'll ship it out. And I know there's not much money in what they're charging me because I pay them such a little amount of it. But, you know, that relationship is so important. And IP...

is really going to get so critical because with Amazon's new prophecy about bringing Chinese sellers in on this Fulfilled by China prophecy, it's going to be massive. So people say to me, look, it doesn't matter. It's $20. Well, guess what? That $20 product is what people here are selling for $100, $140.

because they're taking us out. They're taking out the fulfillment costs out. They're taking everything out. Yeah. Interesting. So that's going to be a massive thing. I'm very curious how that's going to –

you know, play out. You know, I, a lot of the information that's out there is just kind of like second, third hand information, not many things or not anything confirmed by Amazon yet, but you know, some things don't make sense. Like, you know, some one news articles like, Oh yeah, uh, sofas, they have to be $20. There's no such thing as a $20 sofa. So, so obviously some of these informations are a little bit wrong, but I'm very curious as to how it's going to play out. And then now, you know, with, with, um,

political climate in the United States, what's going to happen as far as more tariffs or is there going to be something where companies are going to take that loophole where they can ship to the US directly? Is that going to be taken away or subsidized by the Chinese government? Who knows what the future is going to hold, but like you said, pretty much if you've got a patent on your stuff, you're kind of immune to some of this stuff.

Last year, we're talking like $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 of profit for you. Is this your main income now? Are you still working outside of Amazon or you consider yourself retired outside of Amazon or what's your monetary situation? I'm still doing some consulting.

on the civil engineering side of stuff. So I do a bit of that. But it's nothing major. But, you know, the thing with it is that Amazon side of things, you know, gives me the ability to travel. So, you know, it gives me the chance to go to Singapore, go to China, go to India with Migla, you know, China with Stephen Selighoff and that kind of stuff and really to keep growing and, you know,

and keep growing that knowledge base. It's so, so important. So for you, Amazon wasn't necessarily, hey, I need to be able to quit everything else I do and just rely on Amazon income. It was kind of like, hey, I need some extra income to be able to do things like traveling. And it sounds like it's worked out for you from that goal in. Very well. Very, very well. Very well.

And, you know, it's helped me as well because we built a great community here in Australia. All of these things keep graying stuff out. I met you in Bali, although I knew you already, but you didn't know me. One of the guys I worked with in Amman, he was very, very high politically and he was a sheikh.

within the system and a customer came to me and said I know Adil Shafari and I contacted Adil and I said you know this guy he said Andy there's like 4 million people know Adil Shafari but Adil Shafari only knows 100 people so don't worry about it you know what I mean but I knew you but you didn't know me until Bali and then we spent time together at Bali and

and I flew through to come and see you in Sydney because I couldn't let that opportunity That was so awesome that I could see you in person in your home or your now home country Yeah Sometimes it's funny because I see people when I meet them and I see them everywhere but where their home is you know like we'll meet I mean there's nothing wrong with that you know but it was nice to see you in Australia there apart from having a patent

Uh, it's not like you're, you're still getting, it's not like, oh, that's going to guarantee anybody 40%, uh, pro, uh, you know, profit margin. There's obviously things that you're, you're doing that you think maybe are unique or that, that help you keep that, that edge, be it on your listing optimization, your, your, your keywords, the way you manage your PPC, your branding. I'm not sure. Um, so, so what do you, what else can you attribute your Amazon success to aside from obviously the IP and patent things?

Well, I think, you know, the most important thing is your community. So you've got people that you can lean into. You've got people you can ask. You've got people that you can get together. We have every three months I organize a long lunch here in Brisbane. We get a number of people come to that long lunch. Now, the good part about that is only people that are willing to be connect and are willing to actually do the right thing, those are the people that will come. So you don't get flybys.

You get people that are committed that will do that sort of thing. So that to me was pretty critical. The other thing was the big killer is PPC. If you don't understand PPC, the same as if you don't understand finances, you're actually going to get headed to a very tough place very quickly.

Because it can, it can absolutely take, you know, we used to say in the old days, they used to say 30% for you, 30% for the supplier, and 30% for Amazon. Well, what it really turned into is 30% for Amazon, 30% for PPC, 30% for the supplier, nothing for you.

So you have to be able to understand that and understand short-term pain might be long-term gain, et cetera. So PPC, critical, really critical area. And I think that's going to get tougher. You know, the Chinese in the beginning were not that good at their listings, but a couple of things have happened.

The one is they started to drift to using American agencies to build their listings together. And there was a definite step change on that. And then the second thing is now with AI,

they've actually stepping it up on AI as well. And they've got access to everything. And their agencies now are getting pretty good at pushing those listings together. So that's no longer a massive advantage that we always had before. Are you doing other platforms other than Amazon USA? I know, are you doing other Amazons or Walmarts or TikTok? I know a lot of these you can't, even if you're a foreigner, but I'm not sure if you've found any ways to sell on some of these other platforms.

Well, these are projects which I've got to go back into. As they loosen up, I think it's going to get easier. TikTok shop, of course, is regional unless you are Chinese, in which case it's international. So because they don't really have a region to sell, they're selling out of these. So TikTok shop, I think, is going to be something which is going to probably be good going into the future. Australia, because it's a small market, is very, very hard.

especially if you're niched. If you're selling something like Pampers or something like that, you could probably do pretty well at it. But if you're something small, niche, specialized, pretty difficult to do on that. I'm looking at getting myself smarter in terms of Shopify.

Because I think going into the future, we do need to be able to diversify. So get smart on Shopify and then build another brand around Shopify. Are you selling in Australian marketplaces at all? I tried selling in the Australian marketplace in 21 and it didn't work. And I'm trying again now in 24. But I'm going to have to go hard on influencer marketing because one of the issues we've got here in Australia is my product is something which

um, you know, AA in US like fishermen don't like it. Fisheries here like it, fishermen don't like it. So it's going to get into it, should find something down the line. And so, so I'll have to do it through influencer marketing and things like that. But I mean, the US has been really good to me. Australia has been a little bit dry. So,

So we'll see how we go. But I've also got to go and diversify and do more stuff. Yeah, that was my next question is how many SKUs are you selling now? And do you have a cadence of you try and launch a new one a year or you haven't launched one in a while? I'm only selling three at the moment because I didn't need it. But I think I've got it now that I need to go wider.

But, you know, the good part about it is like, you know, my family sort of look at me and my Amazon business as being like, you know, it's a kind of drug dealer or something like that, you know. You know, one of these intrepid years, you know, what are these guys up to? It's like this, you know, like it's not quite as bad as that. But they don't watch what I'm doing or follow what I'm doing or anything else, you know. But if I, as the Australians say, if I fell off the perch tomorrow,

The family would not end up losing the family home or anything. All that would happen is my inventory in China would be like scrap. And it's not a massive amount of money. So I need to go wider, but I need to follow that same process and that same principle.

The thing which worries me is friends of mine have been on the seven-figure mission and then suddenly for some reason their product has started to fail either because of Chinese competitors, because of Amazon issues, because of tariffs, because of shipping issues and that kind of stuff. And they stuck with like half a million dollars worth of inventory overseas that they're up to their eyeballs in debt with and things like that. And the whole thing is just coming down in flames. Yeah.

So, you know, I've got to thank you and Kevin King, Tim Jordan, Project X, Freedom Ticket, best in the world. Absolutely amazing. Honestly, such a, you know, such a great opportunity. Such a great opportunity. People say to me like, oh, you know, we don't want to get Helium 10. Why did we do Dollar Dive? Why did we? You know what? If you're starting in Amazon, you can get the startup pack and you can do Freedom Ticket. I did Freedom Ticket. It cost me $1,000.

That's right. In those days, it was $1,000. Absolutely. And I was worth it. It was worth it. It was worth $1,000. Absolutely. I would pay that. I'd pay that 100 times again just to get that knowledge because that was the only one that came in that gave you from bottom to top. Most of the gurus were saying, buy anything, put it on there and pay me. Yeah. So really, really so good. And I mean like even yourself, your SSP update, I think about two weeks ago or three weeks ago,

Honeymoon again, Maldives honeymoon update, Project X, 5K. These are stuff which is thing. You got to keep up to date and you got to keep growing. If you don't do that,

You've got to be dead in the water because things are changing so quickly. And when you play an Amazon sandpit, they can chuck you out of there and send you to sit in the corner very quickly. It takes a long time. Even Brandon Young got closed out for about three or four weeks and he was absolutely wetting himself that he was never going to get it back up and going again.

Amazon can shut anybody down. They don't care. That's a $30 million player a year. I mean, you look at some of the stuff that got taken down with the review story. There were 100 million, 200 million players out of China that got closed down. What's your favorite Helium 10 tool? I know you like a lot of them. So I've got my daily stuff, but the one, so my daily stuff is around profits and market tracker.

But the one tool which really has been outstanding for me over the four years is Cerebro. I love Cerebro. It's just such a good tool. You tie that back in with Blackbox and you've got a very, very strong opportunity to find stuff. You know, guys like Data Dive and those kind of things will tell you how to verify a product in red water. But

What they don't tell you is how do you find that product. So that's where Helium 10 really comes into its own and Cerebro tied in with Black Box really, really counts so much. But I use it. I use my Helium 10 every day, five o'clock, six o'clock in the evening.

I sit down, I go in there and I see what's happening with my products and things like that. And it tells me and the alerts tell me, man, there's somebody around there selling your stuff or you've lost the buy box or something has happened, you know, and also follow up.

i don't know i don't know where the follow-up is still going but i still i'm still using it and i've been using it for four years and it gets me good reviews and and and and and and and that's that's really great you know you've got you're keeping up to date in terms of ai both on helium 10 and in your in your podcasts and things like that so

So, you know, people have said to me, why don't I go to Jungle Scout, et cetera. This is a non-negotiable for me in my life to stay with H-Team because- - A smart man. - We've been together all these years and I don't see any reason to break a good relationship. - All right, so what's the future looking like for you? You know, you mentioned, hey, you've seen the need to maybe expand your product line. What else are some of your goals that you haven't achieved yet? - The main thing is to go wide, but also go deeper. So I need to expand my products

And I also need to look at different markets that I've got a stop group if anything does happen on Amazon. So that's really where I need to go in terms of my Amazon business. All right. Well, next year, let's try and get you on towards the end of the year and see if you were able to launch any products and how wide you were able to go and see what's cooking. And then anybody who's out there at any of these events that Andy goes to, pull them aside.

buy him a drink and ask for some war stories or some other stories in his interesting life or just ask him about his Amazon business and as you can see he's happy to share his knowledge. It's been a good life. It hasn't been a good life in terms of lots of money but it's been a very interesting life to actually go from that stage before calculators

before mobile phones, the time of party lines where you had eight phones in a line and you pick up the phone and seven other people pick it up and listen to your conversation because they got nothing better to do. Being able to go to Buffalo and things like that. That sort of thing is absolutely magic. And to go through that whole change of life that we sit with now with AI. Those days are no longer when there's a lot... I mean, we are definitely in a different world. I mean, you never would have thought about...

what's happening with AI and all these other things in those days when you didn't even use a regular telephone. So you've come a long way. And no GPS, there's nothing like that. So any other tips or strategies that you can share with our listeners out there? I just want to say to people, you are the biggest asset in your business, so always invest in yourself. It doesn't matter. The rest of it, you could lose it. But that knowledge and that experience...

will keep you going into your next venture. It's never, ever lost. At 63 years of age, I did a master's degree and my wife said to me, like, are you pissed? You know, why do you want to do this at this stage of your life? And I said, I'm doing it because I gave the opportunity to other youngsters that were working for me.

and they wouldn't take it and they said well like it's fine for you see like it's fine for me so i'll do it and i threw i threw nearly two years of life away in actual fact doing that master's degree when people were thinking of retiring at that point in time but always invest in yourself always remember the day you stop growing is the day you start dying so always remember that

Keep up to date on AI in terms of service. Grow and nurture your community because these are the guys that will get you out of the cactus and will be your support line. There's a saying, you're only as good as the average of your five peers. And there's also a saying,

I believe it's a Chinese saying, but that might be also an urban legend. But there was a saying that if you want to travel fast, travel alone. But if you want to travel far, travel together. I actually heard that that was a South African phrase. So there you go. It might be. And Amazon is a serious person. Don't go there thinking that you can. My son said to me, I want to do Amazon, so you've got to just tell me how to win. I said, no.

You've got to learn how to win. You can't just step into Amazon and win. And that's something which has caused so many things wrong. And always remember, as the CEO or the owner of your company, you have to act as a CEO and use those dynamics. And the other big thing, dealing with suppliers and other businesses, the Chinese are as frightened of us falling off the park as

As we are of them. They're worried about us paying 30%, manufacturing all this stuff, and you've just gone away and you're not around. They need also to have that trust and confidence. So once you're going, once your business is established, et cetera, one of the first things you need to do, go over to China, break bread with these guys, establish that relationship.

and make sure that you don't try and go over there and act like you're a salesman for the guy or someone low. Kings talk to kings. As Stephen Selikoff says, go there and negotiate on a top level. When they have Guangxi with you and they have the confidence in you, guess what? Your price goes down and your payment terms, even more critical, your payment terms extend. When your payment terms extend, your cash flow extends.

and that is the basis of any business absolutely you know i i i would i went to china with steven and that was the most amazing trip ever and you know we learned so much and i was thinking i'm going over to this like another africa type sort of operation i got over there and i found out how sharp these guys are what beautiful people well i knew from the training company that i worked with for like four years these guys will do anything you know even when i had problems and i had

you know like IP issues and things like that these guys would go the distance for me they would investigate for me they would do anything for me but the relationship is critical whether it's in India where it's an American supplier whether it's a Chinese supplier or anything else it's critical. Guangxi is the word the Chinese use for business relationship and always remember that Guangxi is stronger from Chinese to Chinese but we as foreigners

can also establish that relationship. Sure. But we have to treat them with respect as partners. And it's amazing. And always remember, last one, Serious Seller Podcast, Bradley Sutton.

Keep up to date. That's advice right there. I love it. I love it. Well, now you're a part of it. Something that helps you and now you're a part of it and helping others. Others listening on their commutes to work right now, learning from your experience. So it's come full circle. Well, you know, it's strange that because, I mean, we sit in that situation where I used to go to work and it's like, these guys are so knowledgeable and they're so important and everything else. And we've come that full circle. Very humbling.

I love it. All right. Well, thank you so much, Andy. We wish you the best and we'll be seeing you soon. Awesome. Take care, Bradley. See you soon, brother. Take care.