Unlocking Your Potential
w/ Jeff Lerner

Over the last 10 years, Jeff has built multiple successful online businesses that have generated over 8-figures in sales and has also founded a marketing agency that has been on the Inc 5000 list of fastest growing companies 2 years in a row. Jeff is well known in the online business community and has shown over 150,000 people how to build their own successful businesses and create a more awesome life using the power of the Internet.

In this episode, Jeff Lerner interviews Shaahin about just how he started his billion-dollar in revenue company from literally nothing. He highlighted that his difficult upbringing is one of the reasons he doesn't take no for an answer until he gets what he wants.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

amazon, companies, people, money, sell, called, buy, business, day, shaahin, supplement, book, big, platform, ecstasy, years, world, multiple, talking, create

SPEAKERS

Shaahin Cheyene, Jeff Lerner

Intro  00:00

You're now listening to hack and grow rich with Shaahin Cheyene, and his co host Bart Baggett, where we discuss hacking your way to success and the unconventional paths to unreasonable success with the people who've been there. And now the author of billion how I became king of the thrill pill cult, Shang Shan

Jeff Lerner  00:26

welcome everyone to another episode of unlock your potential. So excited to be here. Getting to have incredible conversations with incredible humans still a little bit in shock that I actually get to do this and call it work because it's what I would probably do anyways, even if I wasn't working. Today, we are joined by Shaahin, Cheyenne, incredible story incredible just twists and turns reads like a book, I can't wait to get into this one. If you're not familiar with Shaahin, his family immigrated here in 1978 from Iran and moved to LA 15 years old, he actually went out on his own and he invented and I remember this because I was like, just coming out of high school. And this was a big thing actually invented a, I don't know if we call it a drug because it was totally legal, a supplement, whatever you want to call it. Herbal ecstasy is what it was known. And ended up doing over a billion dollars in revenue as basically a teenager also went on to kind of pioneer the digital vaporization industry, what we now know as vapes, and also is a huge Amazon seller, that's a world I know a lot more about than the others, but a guy that is just, you know, jam packed with talents and twists and turns. And she and I'm so excited to have you on the show, man. Welcome.

Shaahin Cheyene  01:44

Thanks, Jeff. Good to be on.

Jeff Lerner  01:46

Yeah, so, so glad you're here. Crazy story. You know, I remember so. So I was really into, like, I, I was like a chubby kid, like I was a fat kid, you know, I got picked on a lot as a kid. And so then in middle school, when I guess when I was 13, so that would have been 1992. I discovered the gym and I started lifting weights and I got it I actually like had this like transformative summer where I came back to school and I wasn't a fat kid anymore. And I was actually amazed. Although I should also have been appalled at how much better life got just because I was fitter, not fatter, as you know, sad, sad state of affairs that we live in. And so all through the rest of high school, I was super into fitness. And this was like 90s when it wasn't nearly as popular as it is now. Right? Like I would read bodybuilding magazines, and I love lifting weights with my, my buddies, and we were always trying all the supplements. So we would go into the GNC C's and the supplement warehouses and stuff and we would buy and that was back, you know, there was like ephedrine and I don't even remember all the crazy stuff that they had. And, you know, we basically like get high. Like, we would get high on whatever we could find, you know, I say get high it was like, Oh, we're taking pre workout but you know, they'd stuff stuff. God knows what in the pre workouts back then. And so that's I just share that because like, that's my backstory like I've done a little bit of research on herbal ecstasy. I know I remember my Wong like they used to really really promote like that this had Marwan in it, like naturally occurring ephedra and stuff. And so I know about this sort of chemistry world coming at it from like, the the fitness angle in the early, you know, when fitness was really becoming mainstream like that. But like, how did you as a 15 year old kid, take these, you know, I guess chemicals and turn it into this, you know, basically like a legal party drug. Yeah, maybe you're probably tired of the story always starting there. But you probably also understand that like Inquiring minds want to know, so

Shaahin Cheyene  03:44

no great place to start. So for anybody who doesn't know I immigrated to this country with my family in the late 1970s. We were refugees came from a solid middle class family came here. Also getting my ass kicked all the time, because I was also chubby, and I didn't speak English, and I wasn't from this country, and learned some really hard life lessons along the way. But mainly, I think those types of lessons make a stronger I'm sure you know, you're an uber successful internet marketer, you're uber successful at being a content producer and all the work that you do. Probably a lot of that's attributed to you getting your ass kicked when you're not that anybody would ask for that. But that I'm sure as it did for me in you build resilience, build grit, build that ability to be able to say, You know what, you're not gonna fucking keep me down. I'm gonna rise up and live to the highest level of expectations that I have for myself, and then I'm going to go beyond that. Yeah. Amen. And that's the important thing about that. So fast forward to the time I'm 15 years old. Thinking to myself, dude, like I want to start making some money. I started looking around me I see fancy cars I see guys with a portion of the top down the beautiful brunette and the seat next to them. zooming down pch, to their beautiful house on the beach. I want that. How do I get that? Folks told me you got to be a doctor Shaahin the look at Mr. Tehrani. Next door, he is Dr. It is the most success you can have. I said, All right. How do I become a doctor? They said, Well, you know, glass Kim, we don't know. So I went there. And I looked at the dude. And to your credit, dude was fat wife was fat. Kids were fat, everybody was fat, because they never got out the house. He did not own his own time, he did not own this big house that he had. He did not own the car that he was driving. More importantly, Jeff, he did not own his hours. So I decided very quickly that whatever this man had, I did not want. I wanted that guy driving down Pacific Coast Highway in the Porsche with the beautiful girl and going to his beach house and working when he wanted to I wanted freedom. So I left home. And I started living in LA was going through a building boom. And at that time,

Jeff Lerner  06:17

there you left home

Shaahin Cheyene  06:18

at 15. Right 15 ties, no friends, no family, nothing. And I started sleeping in these abandoned construction houses where there was all this construction going on. They built hundreds 1000s of units, but they were empty. So I would sneak in a night crash wake up in the morning. Soon I got involved in the electronic dance scene through the community college that I was hanging out at I wasn't a student, I couldn't afford the classes, but you get free food there, which was good side food and shelter taken care of. And I managed to get myself a girlfriend and a mentor who coached me the mentor coached me through getting involved in the rave scene, the electronic music scene, the dancing that was going up at the time, I began hanging out at the clubs, and I started to realize that there was only one person making money at these clubs, and it was the drug dealer. Nobody else made money. And secondly, the quality of drugs had gone down dramatically. One in particular ecstasy, MDMA, almost completely gone because it was coming from Europe. And they just say no campaign and the government had really cracked down on drugs coming in from England and Holland. So I take it Americans didn't really know how to make the stuff well. And with the import restrictions, meaning that, you know, the DEA had crackdown, these drug dealers didn't have any drugs to sell. So I thought to myself, Man, if I could make something that was legal, that was natural, that could fit that demand that's there in the market, I would do really well. And what I did was I like I said, I managed to get myself a girlfriend. Her dad was like some superintendent at some school district, very stuffy job three piece suit, he would leave through the front door, she would sneak me in through the back door and I'd be in the kitchen cooking up prototypes. I didn't have enough money to buy the machine to make capsules. So we would roll up the herbs by hand, we would cook them in the oven and one day after some time, we got a formula to work that works really well. So I found myself in the club, pitching it to one of the biggest drug dealers at the time one of the biggest ecstasy dealers. I was at the right place at the right time due to run out of drugs, he decided, agreed reluctantly to sell it just for the night. Turns out it was the most profitable thing he'd ever done with zero risk. expanded from one guy to 10 guys to 10,000 Guys, a lot of these small time drug dealers became legitimized. They became millionaires because of me, and picked up in brick and motar. Larry Flynt, The Hustler magazine started selling it through all the adult stores. We got it through all the new age bookstores. We got it out through 30,000 Plus stores in the country and outside of the country had offices in Tokyo and Paris and Berlin, all over the world. I wake up one day a few months after I've been sleeping on the beach, sleeping in these abandoned buildings, literally eating tortillas and ketchup and relish that you get from hotdog stands because that's all I could afford. At that time. I didn't really have any money. I wake up one day and I am a multimillionaire. I've got a collection of exotic cars. I have fallen asleep drooling on the passenger seat of my new Lamborghini. Not a good luck. I was only sleeping one or two hours in that day I had 200 employees. I walk into the office everybody is pale my secretary at the time pale like a ghost. She doesn't know how to break it to me. So what the hell is this? Why is it a circus here? Why is nobody working? Well, Sam Donaldson with Nightline. The great reporter is outside in the limousine waiting to interview me CNN, Montel Williams LA Times New York Times everybody wants to talk to me the news broke that we had surpassed a billion dollars in revenue. This is pre internet. This is pre social media. This is pre iPhone pre Silicon Valley. And here I am a high school dropout and I say dropout very loosely because I never even attended my first week of high school before I left, a more or less grade school dropout. No idea about business, no formal education, running a company where we just had a billion dollars in revenue coming through the door. I literally walked into my office with duffel bags filled with cash, most of our business was cash because we were making the stuff Jeff for 25 cents our cogs, and we were reselling it for $20. And I have production facility set up all over the world. And as quickly as we could produce it, we were selling it. And I I remember thinking to myself, Holy fuck. I don't know how much a billion dollars is, is it? 100 million 1000 million 50 million. I'm fucked. I have no idea how much a billion dollars is they're going to ask me it's going to discredit me. I'm a total imposter. I am fuck. And then everybody calmed me down that, you know, they, they somebody told me how much a billion dollars actually was. And then my next thought was fuck does this mean I have to get an accountant. Shit, that guy can actually count the money. And that was a big, rude awakening for me when I realized that accountants don't actually count the money. If it's in duffel bags, they don't do that. Which was very interesting. And that led to a very wild ride. That was herbal ecstasy. And by the way, I write about this in my book that just dropped called billion how I became king of the throat pill called, we just dropped the audio book on Audible. So anyone who's interested in hearing more about the story, check us out. We're available on Amazon and all the places when

Jeff Lerner  12:00

did when did that book drop? It just dropped. So I think last week

Shaahin Cheyene  12:03

the book came out. Okay, and then the audible book just dropped this week. So I know most entrepreneurs and business people who of course listening to your show, like listening to audiobooks because nobody fucking reads anymore except for me. I think I'm the last living person that fucking reads. So if you guys want

Jeff Lerner  12:18

there's actually two of us. Okay,

Shaahin Cheyene  12:20

nice nice. Come over for coffee but Yeah,

Jeff Lerner  12:23

seriously will sit there and not not talk to each other just read our books. What a crazy story and I mean, I I love first of all, I love that it like legit it was legal. Like you didn't you weren't like, I'm sure some people didn't love the idea that some punk high school dropout kid could make all this money doing this, you know, quote, sketchy thing, but at the end of the day, it's legal. It's not. I mean, I don't know it superficially doesn't seem like it's hurting anyone. I mean, no, people are gonna do party drugs, whether you're supplying them or not. And they can either do illegal stuff that is only channeled through the black market that's got God knows what in it. Yeah, they can do your thing that's actually manufactured aboveboard? Like,

Shaahin Cheyene  13:09

are you sure you didn't work for me?

Jeff Lerner  13:11

That was probably save lives? Yeah, we did.

Shaahin Cheyene  13:14

And all the years we made herbal ecstasy, no matter how the media painted us. And we made a lot of money from the press, writing false stories about us a lot of money. It was very lucrative because they would come out and go 20 People diverted away from herbal ecstasy. And I'd be like, Cha Ching, because nobody ever got hurt from herbal ecstasy. So when those stories aired, my lawyers were full force and they were paying big settlements and doing big retraction. So it was not only free cash, it was free airtime. So we had a very lucrative business in capitalizing on the lies of the mainstream media at the time. It was great and eventually they they learned that they couldn't afford continuing to put that stuff out. But ultimately, and every single article that said Herbalife ever heard anybody was retracted. I've got multiple retractions from every media outlet you can imagine. That was retracted. No, it was, it was very safe. You know, look, I now tell people if you're taking any kind of supplement and consult with a doctor, I'm not a doctor, I've got the sophistication of a chimpanzee. You should not take health advice from me. But you know, consult your doctor but I believed at that time that it was it was very safe. So from there, government came after us. We had the mob come after us. I wrote about that in my book. At some point we had the Japanese mob trying to take over our company. It was a very interesting situation where I had to negotiate my way out to the creditor, my good friend Chris boss, the

Jeff Lerner  14:40

Japanese mob like I'm thinking I can't remember the name of the book I read. But it was all about like the triads, the Yakuza, Yakuza, like the really nasty, that's who you're talking about.

Shaahin Cheyene  14:53

That's what I'm talking about the one and only okay, they were very nice to me. I got nothing bad to say about them. They were very nice to me at the time, I think there were multiple families and we met with the head of one of the families and there was a big misunderstanding where they thought they were taking over the entire company. We only wanted them to sell one brand through some shell company that they had. So it was a, it was a big debacle back in those days. But it was very interesting. You know, when a mysterious man shows up at your office with a duffel bag with a million dollars cash and a private ticket to Tokyo, you might want to reconsider before you take it as the moral of that story. But I write about it again in the book billion how he became king of the throw pole call. So anybody who's interested in hearing the stories and how we turned what could have been catastrophic failure into success, check that out. From there. I went on to solving the problem of smoking people been smoking for 1000s of years, nobody had found a solution. I invented and developed portable digital vaporisation, which is the forerunner to all the vapes all the e cig technology that you see today, I wrote the book on it, I got several patents on it. That company went public, somewhat, somewhere around 2007. I exited just a little bit before that. And from there, I decided to go back into nootropics. And I decided to start building supplements because I'm a father as well, you know, you're a father. And we had our kid who's now eight years old, and I thought to myself, fuck, man, I gotta like, get on top of my game, because there's all these young guys coming into the game. And now I'm 46 I'm like, Man, back then I was, you know, I don't know. Lay 3030s I was thinking Dude, I gotta like really improve my mental functioning, my mental acuity, and I'm doing all the biohacking stuff. And I came up with this, this product acceleron Real supplement, most people don't know, supplements will list like 1000 ingredients just so they get SEO. You know, as a digital marketer, the most important thing is showing up in search. So they'll, they'll use a bunch of ingredients. But if you actually using a significant efficacious amount of any ingredient, it gets crazy expensive. So this of course, we got a brain formula to work the fucking works great, called Accelerate all focus plus to this day still for sale on Amazon. And it costs 120 bucks in those days, it's a lot cheaper now. And I decided, man, I want to sell this stuff. But how. And I started reading up on this Jeff Bezos character, I thought, Oh, interesting. Just a nerd Silicon Valley nerd, whatever. He's building this platform, but back then you could email him he would respond to you jeff@amazon.com You could call and a few phone calls. You could get ahold of the guy. He was accessible. He wasn't the richest guy in the world. In fact, when was this again? So this would be roughly around 2009. Okay. Yeah.

Jeff Lerner  17:41

Isn't that crazy that 12 years ago, you could still directly email him. That's not that long.

Shaahin Cheyene  17:45

Not that long ago, his wealth his his his big wealth is very new. People don't understand that. It's just we see him all the time on the news. Right. That said, I was like, You know what, let me put this up there open up. So we heard through the grapevine he's opened up the seller prop platform to third party sellers, to be able to sell whatever you want. So before you could only sell to Amazon, and they would resell it on their own platform. Now, anybody could sell on there, just like eBay, you can become a seller and sell whatever you want, within reason. So I thought, okay, cool. Let me list this on there took 15 minutes, didn't think much of that $120 supplement, went to sleep. Woke up the next morning, we had 1000s of orders. You know this from the digital marketing space. Like when you log in and you do something that works and you're like, Holy fuck, man, this is incredible. I woke up to 1000s of orders at 120 bucks. It's hundreds of 1000s of dollars for a product that I just come out with and just put out I said, Wait a second. This is it. This is the only game in town. Let me research a little bit more about Bezos. There's more to this guy than meets the eye. And when I did, I realized that this was not a chump. This was not just some nerd. This was a guy with very viable ideas to disrupt major markets, just like Piggly Wiggly back in the day, you know, right around the turn of the century. You'd have to go into a general store in this country. And you'd say, Hey, man, I want some groceries. He'd be like, great. What do you want? You'd be like bread, beer, and soda. He'd be like, Oh, okay, perfect. He put it in a bag. He tell you how much it was and you'd be out the door. No choice of brands. That's it. You can watch me no choice, the price you're getting that Piggly Wiggly comes around. This guy goes, here's what we gonna do. We're going to disrupt the entire industry. We're going to create these things called shelves. Boy, what the poker shelves. He's like, we're gonna build shelves, you're gonna put products in there. We're gonna have two or three brands of each product. So now we're creating a competitive landscape. We're gonna give the consumer carts, you're gonna go into the store with your cart, pick up whatever you want. And I've got this machine. What's that called? It's a register. What? Yeah, it's a register. We're gonna ring you up on the register and charge you for what you've picked out yourself. It's gonna be And shortly after he did that there were lines around the corner. There's that dude in the old balls, General Store sitting there like that in the old photos with his fist on his chin, wondering where the fuck all his business went? Why am I telling you that story? Because that's fucking Jeff Bezos man. That's what he was doing. Bezos was building this and I saw it. I thought, This guy's comes from a Wall Street pedigree. This guy is not a top. He's one of the smartest guys in the room. This guy has allegedly, I'll use allegedly, so don't get sued, sacked. Employees, the top people at Walmart, these other companies to start building this mega infrastructure. Why would he be doing this? If this was an experiment? This is not an experiment. This is how commerce will be conducted for the next 20 years. And who knows how much further. So I went all in. I said, You know what, I'm putting all my eggs in the Jeff Bezos basket. And I started hiring people, former employees of Amazon, I started learning everything I could about the business, and decided to become one of the top sellers on the platform. And we did it very successfully. And then fortune 50 fortune 500 companies started coming to us saying, hey, Shaahin, can you do this for us? We said they're like, we know how to do disruption marketing. We know how to run TV ads and burn through billions of dollars. But we don't understand this whole Amazon thing. How is it that a small brand with 10 grand in their pocket is overdoing one of our multimillion dollar legacy brands. So we started helping them out and showing them how to tell a different story, how to use the elements of influence to sell on the Amazon platform. And then what happened was inexplicable to me. People around me started going dude, like, you've had another success again and again, like how do I get into this? Like, how do I start selling on Amazon? So you know, you start an account and you do this? And we're doing it but we're not growing that fast? How did you do it? Can you help me as a Yeah, but you never gonna be able to afford me. So I invented a course called FBA seller course. And it's our Amazon mastery course where every day now I teach people I mentor people, I coach people, people starting from nothing. stay at home moms, people that have lost their jobs, people that are looking for a changing career, how to create predictable recurring revenue, foundational income, so they can live the kind of lifestyle that you and me life travel with our families have a great time. And while we're doing it, have this money coming in. So I teach people how to start Amazon businesses from scratch from next to nothing. I teach them how to find a product, how do you identify a product? How do you get reviews, and most importantly, how you tell that story that differentiates you from all those other companies out there. So you can come in, create your niche within Amazon, the world's largest e commerce platform, and then dominate that niche. And that's what keeps me busy these days, much like you, I like to travel with my family who go all over the world. And while we do it, we're making money.

Jeff Lerner  23:05

So then, I mean, that's a lot to unpack. I'm trying to decide where I even want to start. And I'm, I'm tempted to go right into the Amazon stuff. I mean, again, I we probably would need five interviews or more to get to everything because you just have such a rich story. But Amazon jumps out at me as a thing I would love to talk about it's it's something that you know, so my platform, we don't actually teach Amazon, but that's not an area that we've ventured into. And I get that I imagine you don't just I mean, you know, Walmart has kind of entered the game to in the last few years, and they have a platform that allows third party sellers now, do you do? Do you just do Amazon? Or do you also do Walmart and even eBay or anything else?

Shaahin Cheyene  23:52

Yeah, that's a great question. So I tell my students all the time, once you learn the fundamentals, you can take those fundamentals of influence of digital marketing influence, and apply it to any of the other platforms. I've got students now that are succeeding on Etsy, crushing it on Etsy. I've got students, they're crushing it on Walmart on eBay on Poshmark on all these different sites on Shopify, which is growing more and more every day, once you learn how to influence how to get that social proof, that reciprocity, that consistency, the scarcity, the likability, all these elements that Cal Dini writes about in his book Influence and his subsequent book pre suasion. And you know how to manufacture that how to craft that into a story that you tell where the guy lands on Amazon. Now, you're not just some chump, you are a decision architect. They arrived at your listing, because you brought them there, and when they get there and they see your product, and they click in less than 30 seconds, the Buy Now button because you've done such a compelling job. And they think that all of this was their idea and they Get on the phone and rave to their friends about the great product that they found and the awesome deal that they found. That's when you know you've done your job, right. And by the way, Jeff, for anybody who's who's watching or listening to a podcast, I do have a one hour course that's normally 200 bucks, I will offer that for free. Just so look, I, I've made my money. I've got my cars, we've traveled all over the world all the time we go first class, we've got our houses and the beach houses, we've got all that stuff. Now my goal in life is two things, one, to be a family man and to be a good father to my son and to encourage and coach him and to to impact as many people as I can to stop selling their fucking hours, the greatest injustice that's been done in the last 100 years to entrepreneurs, is this idea that you have to sell your hours to make money. And this is a doorway, this is a window to freedom for so many people. And I'm so fucking excited about getting people to start these businesses, you don't need any real money to do it. You can do it with limited time. But if you can get out there, and just take a little piece of this real estate that Jeff Bezos has put out there for you and buy real estate, I mean, an Amazon business, that's something that can grow in five years, 10 years time, to becoming legacy wealth for you even shorter timeframes. Now we've all heard about these Amazon aggregators, these companies that are buying these Amazon companies, and now my students are all absolutely giddy about the fact that there's been $16 billion, maybe more come out of Wall Street now to buy these Amazon companies. And they're trying to roll them all up and put them all into these public, public businesses where they'll be worth even more. So if you had when two years ago, I was telling people to get into Amazon, or five years ago, tell people to get into Amazon, and you created a business. And let's say you got that business to the point where you create a million dollars in revenue, you might now be sitting on a company that's worth 20 25 million, we saw one company go for $25 million, just the other day. So this is happening. And you can't win if you don't play. And my goal now is to get as many people excited about that as possible. I respond to every single email, I've got a great staff, I do GTD getting things done, thanks to David Allen. So if you want to email me, I'm dark possess@gmail.com. That's a private direct email, mentioned the show or mentioned Jeff. And we will give you the $200 course for free, no obligation, no credit card, you'll never hear from me again, if you don't want to hear from me. But get involved start an Amazon business get your wife, sister, cousin kid, everybody involved in this because now is the time where entrepreneurs changemakers like us need to be getting out there and staking our claim. It's like homesteading. This is the ground floor right now, sitting here, just post COVID 2021. We are ground floor right now for becoming an Amazon seller.

Jeff Lerner  28:10

Well, that first of all, thanks for the generous offer. I know that a lot of the audience is gonna take you up on that. That's really cool. I want to actually briefly touch on this, this Amazon aggregator thing you mentioned. And then I have questions about Amazon, in general, and the business model and the platform and such but so you mentioned these, these acquisition companies and for anybody that doesn't know that's something that I because I have a digital education company that's exploded in the last two years, I've actually been contacted by people that represent these they're called SPAC Special Purpose acquisition companies, which is like a bunch of money in a public entity that was created for the purpose of acquiring multiple smaller businesses in a certain category, rolling them all up aggregating and combining their their revenue and their their EBIT, da their earnings, and then being able to capitalize on an increase multiple based on the economy of scale of putting a bunch of these smaller entities together. And there's a lot of money if you can sell your profit into one of these structures. Again, it's something I've been contacted about, for anybody that get cares about these things. No worries. entres not planning to take advantage of it, we're gonna be fine standalone. But first for like, yeah, you're right. I mean, somebody make builds an Amazon business and maybe gets it to, you know, 2 million, or let's say, 5 million a year in top line, and maybe that's a million in EBIT, da. Like you mentioned a company that sold for 25. What was the the EBIT? Da multiple on that? Do you know, like, how much actual profit

Shaahin Cheyene  29:47

was over 20 times? It was over 20 times. So they were like, roughly a one

Jeff Lerner  29:51

to 1.5 million EBIT da and they sold for 25.

Shaahin Cheyene  29:54

Yeah, I'll tell you the stories. I'll tell you the story of what's happened with all this. Is this is this Something that you

Jeff Lerner  30:01

here's the thing I, my rule for my shows is I have the conversation I want to have. And if I've attracted the right people to my show, they'll want to listen to what I'm interested in. So yes, please.

Shaahin Cheyene  30:11

And otherwise fuck them, they can go somewhere else.

Jeff Lerner  30:15

Respectful fuck them. But yeah,

Shaahin Cheyene  30:18

gotcha gotcha, well as as respectful as we can be. So look, so this is what happened. So as, as Jeff was explaining, Amazon companies were frowned upon several years ago, they in fact, when you sell a business, you get a multiple of your EBITDA, which is your earnings after all your taxes and expenses, and all that well, or before I should say, so what what happened was, was people were coming in, buyers were coming in, and they'd be like, Look, you're only selling on Amazon, that's risky for us. If Amazon goes away, your business is fucked, you're gonna have to be scurrying around like a squirrel looking for a nut that doesn't exist, possibly. So we're only going to give you two times your earnings. So you're making a million bucks, we'll pay you 2 million for that company, and maybe half of it is going to be on four letter word Arnout. Which means that they'll pay you based on your, your predictions of where the company is going, and the representations that you're making at a later time. So they'll be like, we'll pay you out of the earnings of the money. A lot of people have become incredibly wealthy, buying companies with their own money, meaning buying the companies with the company's money and paying them out of that for the purchase of the company. That's a known strategy. I know, people that have become multimillionaires, one guy's become a billionaire doing that. Now, if you're one of these guys, who's got these Amazon companies, you might be like, Oh, fuck, well, I've worked this hard. You know, we got a million dollars a year that I'm bringing in EBITA, I'll sell it for 2 million, I'm tired of this shit, I'm gonna go if I can sit on an island to millions enough, I'm gonna go to Ecuador and sit somewhere, you know, or I'll go sit in Guatemala or whatever, some cheap place 2 million got me I'm covered for life. Those were the first people that sold shortly after people start realizing Wait a second, Amazon thing isn't going anywhere. In fact, it's getting bigger, and look at the share price, holy shit. And all these CPG brands want to get into this fucking Amazon game. And they don't know how quickest path is to buy a company and plug your products into it. So the competition got bigger. And the sellers, the people who started these companies got a little smarter, they said, You know what, fuck you, I'm not going to sell to you for two time multiple I went for. And then the more of these companies, the Spax and aggregators that were coming in, they start raising more millions and millions of dollars, they have to deploy to buy these companies. But the companies are holding out. They're not they're not selling anymore for the cheap price. They're like, we know what you saw as a weakness. Some years back is now a greatest strength. These aggregators, these facts are looking for Amazon only companies, they see it as a weakness if you're selling in brick and mortar. So they don't want diversification. They want just Amazon because they know your focus there. You're weighted heavy there. And that's where they want their win to be because that's the biggest game in town. And they know it's not going anywhere.

Jeff Lerner  33:14

And Spax have charters that dictate they can only acquire companies that fit certain parameters. So yep, so if that's their charter, then they have to find companies to buy or else they default on their commitments to their their investors.

Shaahin Cheyene  33:28

That's right. For anybody who's taken investment, you know that the last thing investors want is for the money to be sitting in the bank, it's a kiss of death. I've taken investment before in the past, and it's you know, you will never get an angry or call, you would be better off losing the money than having it in bank too long. Right. So what happens so the prices keep going up, you had a two time multiple amounts for time. Now it's six time now it's eight time now you got a company that's offering Tesla's to anybody who's bringing up deals, you've got these guys doing lobster and steak dinners for people who to butter them up to get them to sell their companies. And eventually, we are now seeing billions of dollars, almost, I think 16 billion plus, if I'm not mistaken, I was just talking to a reporter at TechCrunch. About this. We're talking to somebody over at CNBC about this as well, that, you know, there's this money coming in it's billions of dollars, but guess what? It's getting harder and harder to sell on Amazon. Why? Because Amazon has restricted their most valuable thing which is reviews. You notice all the products that are on there have 30,000 20,000 reviews, new products, a lot less because it's a lot harder to get reviews. Amazon tried to clear all bad reviews, meaning all fake reviews, but what they did is they took out a bunch of the real reviews while they're doing that because their algorithm isn't perfect. And by doing that they shut down the ability of a lot of well meaning people who weren't doing anything wrong, weren't leaving fake reviews to ever leave. Reviews again. So it has become increasingly harder to get reviews, it has become increasingly harder to get a seller account going, we teach people how to do it every day. And it's not the thing that should dissuade you. But it just means that you have to put more work into succeeding on Amazon. So to get from that zero $2 million point where these guys can acquire you for a significant amount of money is taking longer, but they're getting the money faster, $16 billion, one company alone raised over a billion dollars, According to TechCrunch, and a bunch of these other companies. So now, these guys are sitting on this money, take out a deploy, and it can't sit in the bank, they can't sit on it forever. There aren't that many companies out there that have grown because remember, if you're at a million dollars EBIT, da, now, you likely didn't start that a year ago, you likely started that two or more years ago. So now they're looking back at companies that have these metrics and looking to buy them and there's fewer and fewer, what's that do supply and demand is bringing the value of these companies up. And we're seeing things like this one company sale, which I can't talk about the name of the company, or any of the details, because it's under NDA, but we're talking about a 20 time plus multiple, we're not just talking double digit multiples, on selling these companies we're talking about way more than that, if they want to get a hold of a crown jewel, they want to get a hold of the company like matcha DNA, one of our brands, that's crushing it on Amazon, one of the top tea companies, they're acceleron, one of the top brain supplements on Amazon, you want to get your hands on a company like that, that's grandfathered in, that's got sales, that's got the fanatic fan base, all that stuff, you're going to be paying for it. And not only that, you're going to have competition. So these companies are now come in and they're going okay, we're gonna give you double digit multiples. Plus, to put us above the last Spy Who Came in trying to buy these companies, we're gonna also give you a piece of the back end, we're going to give you an urn out based on our projections or your projections of the company. So there's never been a better time to be an Amazon seller. And, guys, it's not gonna slow down for a while. So now is the time to get in there and and put your stake on the ground and get that beachfront piece of real estate that you can claim for free. Now, it's not going to be the case in five years or two years time.

Jeff Lerner  37:22

You know, it's really very similar to, you know, like, being a real estate developer, you go, you know, you buy a piece of land, you have a vision for it, you put in all the sweat equity you build, you know, let's say you buy a plot, and you build a small 20, home residential community on it, you know, and whatever you don't know, well, in that case, you'd sell it. But you know, somehow my point is, maybe residential is not the best example. Let's say it's commercial, you build out a tear, you know, an area, you do ground leases, or you build the suit, whatever. And at a certain point, you go, alright, this is a going concern, it's got a couple years of performance, I'm going to flip it to a private equity group or a real estate investment trust or something, and I'm going to go do my next deal. Right. So and that's really the model you're describing, you're just talking about, we use this term all the time really digital real estate instead of physical real estate. Yeah. So and it makes a lot of sense. And it's interesting, because I was gonna ask you questions based on the chatter I hear around Amazon about how it actually has gotten harder to get, let you know, to get, you know, you hear about accounts getting closed, it's harder to get reviews, they used to just be able to do mass product giveaways, and get 1000s of positive reviews, you know, for giving away free product, you can't do that anymore. I've heard these, but I've heard these, you know, sort of warnings or reasons not to do Amazon. But what you're saying is the fact that it's a higher bar now means there actually are fewer people entering it, it's harder to do so once you do get traction because there's this demand to find good Amazon third party sellers, you have a secondary market basically waiting to make you rich if you're willing to do the work.

Shaahin Cheyene  39:00

That is true. You know, it's it's interesting. I live here in Venice Beach, California. I'm a big fan of beachfront real estate. Some somebody I met a long time ago told me Hey, you know, I said, you know, like, you're you're really wealthy is when I had no money. I said, What's the secret to wealth? And he said, you know, for me, it's a it's a lot of things. It's all about good stuff. But at the end of the day, where you want to put your wealth is beachfront real estate because they're just not creating more of it. And eventually, if you putting your money in beachfront real estate you do well, so I spent a lot of years after I made money buying beachfront real estate. Now I own a bunch of it. I owned a beautiful property right on Malibu celebrity row. And there's a term in beachfront real estate where they tell you it's it's grandfathered in, and it can it can never be replicated. So there's these guys so one level is buying a piece of land and building on it very expensive on the beach. But there's another thing where there are these properties that are just crazy. They were built for 50 years ago, and they can never be duplicated, again, never built like that again. Because back then the rules were different when they built those houses. So those properties are worth two times three times 10 times whatever someone's willing to pay, because there's only so many of them that were built 50 years ago. And similarly, I draw the corollary to our business now on Amazon, is that these old companies, these legacy companies on Amazon are the real legacy brands. And it doesn't matter if they're paying 10x or 20x. Look, if you're Unilever, if your Procter and Gamble Johnson, and Johnson, Pfizer, any of these big companies, and I just use these names as an example. So please don't anybody sue me. And you come in, and you buy one of these Amazon companies. So let's say, because now what we're seeing is strategics. Coming in, and, and grabbing these companies sneaking these companies away from the aggregators by offering well, before they were like, Oh, we don't know, it's just Amazon. Now they're coming in, they're like, you know, what the aggregator offered him 10x, let's just offer him 15 And take it from under them. Because the aggregator is not going to go that high. If you are one of these big companies, and you come in and let's say you pay 20x, like the example we showed you earlier for one of these companies, and you realize that value 30 times 40 times 50 times just in your share value. Or if you're about to go IPO and you get a crown jewel brand like that. And it you know, let's say you drop 20 million on that. But once the IPO happens, that brings in 100 million in added value. You're the one that's laughing, you're laughing all the way to the bank with a deal like that. That's why those kinds of transactions make sense. And we're gonna see more and more of that everyone's focused on Bitcoin right now. People are like, Oh my God, you know, it's gonna go to 100,000 it's gonna go to a million watch Amazon companies and watch what they go for. We are just in the ground floor. And man, they're not building new companies two years ago anymore. So the the supply of them is getting shorter and shorter, and the value of those companies is getting higher and higher. So now is two years ago, start your fucking Amazon company. That's what I tell people to do. And and by the way, I don't know if I get my email again. It's dark possess@gmail.com DRKZ s s@gmail.com. mentioned the name of the show or Jeff Lerner Lennar? How do you pronounce your last name

Jeff Lerner  42:35

learner?

Shaahin Cheyene  42:36

learner? I love that. So just put Jeff learner on the subject heading and I will give you the $200 One hour course for free.

Jeff Lerner  42:47

That's why you should listen to this show folks get amazing offers like that. Yeah, so so just to be clear, just to kind of put a fine point on it. You think that right now is an ideal time to start an Amazon business? Because although it's gonna maybe be harder than it was five years ago, it's gonna be worth 10 times more than it was five years ago, to push through and make it work. And you still think that somebody could get it a viable Amazon business going within a couple years or a year or two? What do you think is the time horizon?

Shaahin Cheyene  43:21

You didn't have I've had people make a viable business in 90 days. In order to get it sales worthy, you are going to need one or two years at least. But we know one thing, we don't know, if you're going to succeed or fail, the majority of people fail, mainly because they don't try. The majority of people who try also fail not as much, but at least they tried. What we do know is that if you don't quit, if you have grit, if you have resilience, well, we've talked about, and you use a proven system, one that never fails, your chances will be a lot better. And that's what we teach, you know, and the fact is, entrepreneurs have a tendency to want to work in a vacuum. People are like, Oh man, I've got this great thing. I'm gonna try to figure it out by myself. And then they end up fucking up over and over again. And they're like, shit, man, I can't figure it out. Sometimes they make it sometimes they don't. But the ones that succeed are the ones that are like, You know what, let me create a mastermind or join a mastermind, our course includes a mastermind. Let me get a mentor. Let me find somebody who is where I want to be. And I will influence them to coach me to get to where I want to be. If you follow that principle, that direction, it becomes a lot harder for you to fail and when you fail, that failure just brings you a little bit closer to success. Eventually you break through eventually you make it and that's the trick to all this stuff. There's no hack to hard work. You have to get out there. and do the fucking work, you have to seek failure, you have to go out there and go, Okay, I'm going to do it intelligently. But let me try. And I know I'm going to fail. I'll fail a little bit, but I'm going to learn from that, and then I'll tweak it a little bit, and then I'll tweak it a little bit, I'll fail a little bit less and a little bit less, until one day, I'm succeeding over and over and over again. And you've got that predictable, recurring revenue, and you can walk into your job and give your boss a middle finger and tell him to fuck off. Because you now have a few money. And that's, that's the ultimate freedom. We talk about freedom, being able to do what you want, with who you want, when you want, and how you want. And until you have that you don't have freedom, you're that fat fucking dude, with a fat fucking wife, the fat fucking kids in the in the house that the bank owns. And you it doesn't matter how much money you have, you don't have that freedom. You don't have that lightness of existence. And by the way, guys, I say all this with a sense of humor. I say it to be taken lightly. So please don't

Jeff Lerner  46:01

think I don't think you're allowed to do that anymore. I think in today's world, they'll cancel you for making jokes. So that's okay. I'm

Shaahin Cheyene  46:06

okay being I'm okay. being canceled is much like you, I feel that the the right people who are inspired, can actually sense the energy of the message that I'm sending out and and take that to heart rather than white

Jeff Lerner  46:23

of f you money. I mean, you call them. You can't cancel after you money. Because I mean, look at it. Look at Chappelle, he's like, Oh, you're gonna cancel me. Great. I'll go on tour and cancel all of you like, because he doesn't care, because he's freaking comedy. He Comedy Central couldn't buy him for $100 million. What how is somebody on Twitter gonna tear him apart? You know, like, and I totally with you and I pick, I certainly pick up your your tone, even if and I suspect everyone else does, too. We have a pretty cool show a pretty cool audience on this show. Our audience is very on the level and they can appreciate, look, you know, entrepreneurship is raw, it's gritty, it's messy, it's dirty, it's human, it bleeds, it sweats, it cries, it has all the bodily fluids. And, and we don't pull it, we don't pull punches. And we don't equivocate about that here, like, if you want, you know, the mainstream news is happy to deliver you this manicured and curated view of life, that's bullshit, and everybody listens to it. And that's why they're all exactly like you're describing, they're all living in houses that the bank owns, because they bought in to a system that, you know, my No my might have questionably made sense. 50 years ago definitely doesn't now that's I'm about to publish a book called escaping the broken system. I mean, by the way, you and I could talk for hours, because we're totally ideologically aligned. And I'm at the same point as you like, I just want to be a good dad and a good husband, and help, you know, lead millions of people to the promised land. And hopefully, some of those millions of people will actually take action and, and build their, their, you know, they're their own whatever fiefdom in the in the Promised Land. And that's all that's, that's why we do what we do. So this is the man, this is incredible. I got to ask, since you live in Venice, I'm sure you're familiar with. There's a little row of houses in Santa Monica, just if you jog up the beach, come out of Venice in Santa Monica. And that's the row of houses that are pretty well known from the Grand Theft Auto game. Oh, yeah. You have a little GTA house. Right, right. Yeah. So every summer my family and I, we rent what we call the GTA house, we rent it for a week. I take a bunch of kids down there, and we hang out. So that's I'm guessing that's what a few miles from you.

Shaahin Cheyene  48:39

Yeah. Is it the one with all the flowers on it, and it's white, and it's right on the beach.

Jeff Lerner  48:43

It's right on the beach. But the one we rent is I know the white one with all the flowers. It's down a little bit more. It's one of the three storey ones very vertical. And it's it's orange painted kind of a burnt orange color.

Shaahin Cheyene  48:55

Okay, yeah, things have changed this COVID. So a lot of paintings going on. But yeah, I'm

Jeff Lerner  48:59

sure that my point is next time I'm down that we jog down the beach to Venice all the time. So I must do it. I might get a workout. Let's get the kids together. We were talking before the show. Or maybe it was maybe as after we hit record that you and I are like two of the only people that actually read books anymore. So we can meet up and read a book or something. But we'll do this has been amazing. I know technically, we're actually over time. So I have to wrap it up. But I hope we can do this. Again. This has been so cool. And I'm so intrigued by you know, hearing I really appreciate I just want to say this, you know for the for the audience out there. You got you may not have done as much digging on the concept of Amazon businesses as I have because as you know, I own an educational platform for all different types of entrepreneurial businesses. I'm super, you know, if something's good, I want to I want to have it in my ecosystem. And the reason I've stayed away from Amazon is because I have found a lot of too good to be true kind of overhyped, you know, people, people that are really, you know, selling it from a place of hype and, and kind of vacuous pro over promising almost like guarantees of success, which is never good. And any business that tries to remove all risk from the conversation is probably too sketchy. And then on the flip side, I have people going, Oh, Amazon, new Nate, and they kind of dump all the negative, you're actually the first person I've talked to who has a ton of experience and expertise on Amazon, that's actually speaking to both sides, you're very matter of factly talking about the challenges talking about the risks talking about the fact that it's not as easy the changes that it's a dynamic environment. It's not what it was years ago, but you're also nobody's explained to me why that actually for the gritty person, that the true entrepreneur that that will actually lean into that and do the the work that it demands, that actually creates opportunity for that person. And nobody's painted that picture for me to date. So you're actually the first person that has me going, Okay, now, I understand why maybe I should have Amazon in my world because even though it's not as easy as it was five years ago, ultimately, what we're all about in my world is teaching people how to build real generational wealth. And I if you're building a business that already has a secondary market, you can exit into now you've got my attention. Yeah, I just appreciate that. I just want to say that.

Shaahin Cheyene  51:32

I appreciate you man. Thank you so much, Jeff. I appreciate that. For anybody who's watching if you're interested in the course is FBA seller course.com. FBA standing for fulfillment by Amazon. Get us through there. My website Shaahin Shan comm. We also have a podcast which I was telling you about which we should get you on at some point called Hack and Grow Rich. Check us out on Instagram, on YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, Apple podcasts anywhere podcasts are found. And if you want to reach out to me again, guys, reach out to me directly get the course for free is dark zess@gmail.com That's dar Ks. ZS s@gmail.com. Jeff, I really appreciate you having me on man.

Jeff Lerner  52:15

Yeah, this has been so much fun. It's it's mutual. Thank you so much. And of course, to all you viewers and listeners out there. Thank you. You are the best part of this show. You're wide do what I do every day. I'm so grateful that I get to make a living and make a life doing this. I will see you on the next episode everyone. Take care

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Hi, my name is Shaahin Cheyene and I help individuals and owners transform average sales into extraordinary income using my predictable sales system that never fails. Whether you have zero online sales, want to start on Amazon, or have products that just need a push, I can show you how to do it. If you're interested in getting more sales with predictability, watch my FREE CASE STUDY Now!

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