Just so you guys know you don't have to spend any money to start an Amazon business. To launch your business on amazon we teach you how to get reviews, how to get your product rank, how to find a product. The number one problem that people have on amazon, they're like dude I want to sell on amazon. I see everyone's making money. I hear the stories. I watch the videos but I just don't have a product and I tell people that's the best place to be. Just so you guys know you don't have to spend any money to start an Amazon business, to launch your business on Amazon. We teach you how to get reviews, how to get your product ranked how to.

I don't think electric cars should be categorized in the same category as cars. I think they are an appliance. When you drive a Tesla, that thing is so scary fast and so perfect and so smooth you go into the compartment but what it lacks in my opinion I'm probably gonna get hate mail. A lot of people hate me for this. But it lacks soul, it lacks the soul of having that clutch, it lacks that imperfection that comes from years of like up engineering from like Italian guys and Germany that are like you know they're greasing the things. These are appliances made by tech companies that are perfect at doing what they do. They are surgical. Their speed is you know uncomparable. So what you're facing now is an industry that is facing a crisis and being disrupted by an appliance and I think that's

If the risk is diversified you're selling in brick and mortar, you're selling on eBay, Etsy, Walmart you're you've got your distribution, people are buying directly from you on your website excuse me if those things are happening, then the risk is more diversified and the value of your company is generally higher.

So you have this money being pumped in from wall street billions of dollars that need to be deployed. I learned from the many companies that I've had and from raising several rounds of investment and various companies that I've had that investors don't like money sitting around. Once they invest in you, they want that money to go to work like little soldiers marching off to war. They want to deploy.

And the one thing that I learned Bart from all of this and I think this is going to answer your question is that the markets are not based on much more than one thing and that element is human emotion. The markets are moved by emotion and they are not reasonable or logical. If they were reasonable or logical we would all figure it out. We would be like Jim Simmons who runs renaissance funds, who's one of the most intelligent guys I've ever heard of, who's got a fund that allegedly you know has never failed and made money year after year and you know he's one of the masters of quant trading. If you're not one of those guys and there's maybe a handful of those guys on the planet.

I always tell people to look, if you can take cash off the table as much cash as you can get, my recommendation for amazon sellers is, if you get aggregators or if you get into a position where you can create a bidding war bidding frenzy like happens with a lot of our companies and brands that we sell.

In the article we read yes, they may have a little more experience in creative or SEO or branding than we do, and then yes you're probably better customer service but they run you know 500 checklists of things to cover within a company. So in many cases mom and pop, you can do it better you know. My dad's an entrepreneur and I always saw him struggle with once he had four or five employees. He just didn't do it. He never grew past that like he wanted mass control versus delegation and systems and being able to scale a company which is what it takes to go from 1 to 10 million and then 10 million to 100 and a lot of these companies they're looking at the minimum of a million dollars in revenue, you know. Minimum because otherwise, it's not worth all the paperwork to try and do it. So you're right, a lot of companies don't make a million dollars a year and I know if you don't own a company that sounds like a heck of a lot of money.

Think what's exciting about this conversation of aggregators is before this became a thing where the stock market was pushing money saying go buy companies and roll them up, you had to go find a suitor. You had to go find a similar company, a bigger company in your niche and say hey, look I got a soap your biggest soap seller. Let's buy my company.

I was strategic if I was Procter & Gamble or Johnson and Johnson. I'd be like hey, why do I want to wait for these aggregators to pick up these companies. For me to just come in and either A has another big behemoth come and compete with me that's got more brands and more successful than us. Why don't we go in and instead of offering them 10, I know the aggregators are offering a 10 time earning multiple why don't we just offer 15 and take any significant brands off the table now. What if that were to happen, wouldn't that be interesting? Where would that take the market?

So I was looking through these and so there's a lot of brokers around the country you get on their email list and I'm just like which one of these can we take on amazon because most of these are crap businesses that I wouldn't want to own. I'm sorry that they built them for 20 years and they're going to go down the tubes but it's good because I was able to look at the earnings, look at the language, start understanding how people buy and sell businesses and that's not an area that I was familiar with more than three years ago. So that's something very interesting which helps you understand you're building an asset whether it's a house or whether it's a product and you make it sell that asset and walk away That to me is exciting about the amazon platform.

They could fail because they get pulled off the platform for violating service. There's a lot of great stories of 10-20000 a day and they just get canceled, just like what happened 15 years ago with the search engines. I knew people getting checks for five and ten thousand dollars from AdSense and all of a sudden they changed the algorithms panda slap in SEO terms and those checks stopped. So so I mean one small change or one small violation could end the business. That's probably how most of them lose because it doesn't cost anything to stay there. You just may not be number one and your sales will decrease.

The fact is that on amazon they want you to know very carefully very, keenly that you are playing in the big boy sandbox. That sandbox is not yours, it is theirs and they will not hesitate to slap you with a suspension if you violate their terms of service or even if you don't. Maybe you have a competitor that doesn't like you, maybe somebody wants to take up your market share, this happens all the time on Amazon and they will slap you with a fake copyright infringement.

So the people who are seeking to start a business to sell it, generally don't succeed. The people who never think about selling a business will have a rude awakening when it comes time to sell their business and what they can get for it. With that said, you want to be somewhere in the middle.

The most important thing is being visible. So to be visible what we call ranking, you show up on that first page. When you search for I don't know uh pie cutters and go on to that first page of amazon when you click through, there are about 10 or 20 items on that page. That is golden real estate. There might be 2000 products, there might be 20000 products, but whoever is on that first page has it. Whoever's got the number one listing that's gold. So amazon discovered hey, I know how we're going to get up there. It's going to catch 21 catch 22 English not so good. Um, so whichever catch it is and what they did was they designed their algorithm so that the more sales you have the higher you rank.

So whatever service business you're in or product business those reviews show up and they're probably not on your platform. I have hundreds of reviews on Shaheen, on my computer but they're not necessarily on amazon, on google maps, or each website because I don't own all those platforms. I have to go dig them up, put them in a graphic, put a photograph on them, put them in an email like we're talking about 20 years worth of reviews.

So learning the subtleties and nuances and the cultural differences wherever you're at is super important. Similarly, you know if you're going to be negotiating with gangbangers there's a culture there. If you're going to be negotiating with corporate business people, there's a culture there.

Everything is possible. I truly believe that not just as a meme but somebody said if you believe you can or if you believe you can't you're right and so a lot of that comes down to mindset and the better question maybe is the mindset still possible and the answer is of course yes. Things change with time.

And if you are equipped to move with that change you will do well but if you are not then the world will pass you by. So you have to be ready and willing to move with the changes, move with the flow you know. I am a student of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So I've been taking Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for almost five years now and it's one of the interesting things when you get on the map. It's a grappling art Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for anybody who hasn't heard of it. Once you get on the map you might have a plan. Okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to get the guy in this position, I'm going to do that but your opponent might be doing something completely different. You have no control over what the opponent's going to do and that changes the entire game.

Are you planning on going out there and making it be like a casino like hey, I'm gonna throw you know chips on these numbers, and if it hits my number's great, if not then I guess this wasn't meant for me, or are you gonna go out there and no matter what it takes, get that win? You're going to make that nail go through that piece of wood. If you're going to use a hammer, a sledgehammer, a shotgun, your wrist whatever it is, don't use your wrist but a rock whatever it is that nail is going to go through.

And that's the mindset you want to be in. You want to be like you know what I'm I don't know what it's going to take but I'm adaptable. I know that the world is changing and I know that everything changes. Combat is a changeable environment. As Bruce Lee said, be like water. Why did he say be like water? Well, because water takes the shape of whatever it's in. It's unclear what water is going to be poured in, but if it gets poured in a vase then it takes the shape of the vase. If it gets spilled on the rock it goes around the rock. If it hits the soil, it gets absorbed in the soil, and if you can master that the world's your oyster.