Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. One of the obvious aspects of financial freedom is interesting ways to earn your income, ideally in the best way possible that suits your lifestyle.

My guest today is Brad DeGraw. Brad is here to teach us a little bit about what he's doing. Brad, introduce yourself and share with us a little bit about your story. Thanks. I'm Brad DeGraw. I am a big fan of Amazon. In fact, I'm an Amazon nerd. I started with $100 and a Wi-Fi connection four years ago.

Through that time, I've been able to build a brand that sells seven figures a year. You're going to have to expand that because most of us think of Amazon as the corporate company that we're just actually buying from, but Amazon is much more than that. It's a trading platform, right?

Yeah, exactly. It's a third-party platform where people like you, me, even your audience members can go there and sell products. So third-party products, you can create your own brand. You can even resell existing products that you could find laying around the house or in the stores. What got you turned on to the idea?

You know, I got fired too many times. All good things come out of a firing, right? Yeah. I got fired way too many times and my brain was fried. I picked up a book that put out the idea that you could buy arbitrage. Basically, you could buy clearance inventory from retail stores and sell it for retail or sometimes even beyond retail.

That's how I was able to start with $100. I went to the stores and I bought the clearance merchandise right off the shelf, right through the front door, and I made six figures my first year. So you were physically packaging things up and shipping it out yourself, trundling boxes down to the post office, that type of thing?

Yes. In the beginning, I lived in a second-floor apartment, no garage, so I had to carry up 1,000 pounds of inventory every week and back down the stairs and into the car to the UPS store. It was rough in the beginning, but that's what hustled us. Is that opportunity still available today?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a great place to start. If someone wanted to get started with very little risk, you could buy known brands of products from Walgreens or Sam's Club, Costco, Walmart. You could start buying very low and selling high, ship it into Amazon's inventory, and then they ship it to the customers.

Many people perceive Amazon as a low-price leader, a good place to find deals. Why is this possible? If Amazon itself, shouldn't they be providing the products for cheaper? If Walmart can sell them out their front door for a discounted price, why can't Amazon? Amazon's really all about give it to me now.

It's instant gratification, quick delivery. They're not promoting themselves as the absolute best price. In many cases, people will pay a premium to not have just the product, but have the product delivered right to their door. There are people who don't go outside for health reasons, or maybe they're students.

They don't have a car. They don't have access to a Costco or a Sam's Club. There's tons of people. Maybe they live in Alaska or Hawaii, and the stores just aren't available. There's tons of people who will pay for products and the additional service and the warranty and the guarantees that Amazon provides.

I heard a friend of mine was down from New York City recently and was telling me that in the office building in New York City where he works, you basically just don't even want to try to leave the office in the mid-morning to mid-day simply because you're not going to get back in or out because the elevators are so full with all the Amazon delivery people doing same-day delivery service.

I just realized that this Amazon even the same-day delivery thing culture has completely passed me by. That was something that snuck up on me. I had no clue about that. It's an amazing game changer. Tell me what were the products that you started with? In the beginning, I did health and beauty products.

Even though I didn't wear lipstick and cosmetics, it was an interesting place to start because they're seasonal. The seasons change and the colors and the variations. I was able to jump in at the end of one season and the beginning of the next. Just because the seasons change doesn't mean that everyone wants to change with it.

People wanted those colors and styles that were now out of season. That's one easy place to start. Now we manufacture our products. I'm in love with pet products, parenting products, privacy products, sports and outdoor things. Those are great places to be because they're emotional. Anytime you can charge and connect with someone's emotions with a product, it's the best because you can charge a premium at that point.

Tell me about the arc of your business. What year was this that you started and what have been the changes and developments that you've made as time has gone by? We started in 2012. Like I said, I was fired too many times. I didn't have a lot of money or options.

I started with a Kindle Fire and a little personal MiFi connection. As I found that you can make money on buying low and selling high, I noticed other people were doing the same. When we're all selling the exact same product, there will be someone who wants to drop their price a little bit.

We call this price erosion. It's seeing who can make the least amount of money the fastest. So I wanted to do something different. I created bundles. So instead of selling a single product, I now sold a three-pack, which made me the only one selling the three-pack so I could keep my price steady and drive it higher.

Next up, once I learned how to create Amazon listings, I learned how to create traffic, drive traffic to the listing, make great images and copies so that we had better conversion. That means the people who see it are more interested in buying it. And then that evolved into actually designing our own products.

In the beginning, we did a Me Too product. It was a skinny pill called Garcinia Cambogia. Dr. Oz promoted this as a magic weight loss pill, and so we produced that. Eventually we learned that you had to do something that was unique in Me Too. I'm sorry, unique rather than a Me Too product.

It needed just a little bit of innovation rather than duplication. And that's how now we have a designer who will help us make products better. You can just simply look at any best-selling product on Amazon and read the one, two and three-star reviews. Those will tell you people's missed expectations.

And from there, you can fix it. Sometimes it's something simple you don't even need a designer for. Sometimes it's just packaging. You just change the packaging and the product gets to the people unbroken or in a better condition. Ted: And then you just hope that people start buying your product and then you get better reviews and so then Amazon suggests it as an alternative item?

Tell me about the actual buying process once you introduce a product. Dr. Oz: Absolutely. So once you have a product made, and you can make them here in the US or overseas, it doesn't matter where you make them, but once a product is made, we want to get reviews because the Internet's a scary place.

No one wants to be first. So we get reviews from bloggers. So we'll send our product for free out to people who have blogs. And then they'll take a look at the product. They'll do a video of how they open it and they'll share their experience. Since we make great products, it's easy to assume that we're going to get great reviews.

So we have bloggers not just put Amazon reviews up there, but they also blog about it all over the Internet, places we don't have time for. So this makes the product more appealing. Next up, we have great images, great copywriting. People do judge the book by its cover, so we have a great first image.

We run some paid traffic. So without making it super technical, Amazon has their own paid traffic platform. And you're talking nickels and dimes. It's the cheapest traffic you'll ever buy and it has a really great conversion rate. And from there, the momentum of a great product carries itself. How do you go – so you have an idea for a product.

How do you go through the process of actually getting it designed and built and manufactured? Sure. So once you've picked your market – a market is a group of people who are passionate about spending money on a specific problem, fantasy, and desire. Then you look at the products that they're already buying, what brands are already there.

We read the one, two, and three-star reviews and we find the flaw or the missed expectation. And many times, that's fixable. So it could be a dog collar that has cheap plastic buckles. Well, we could make it with higher quality plastic. Then we reach out to the manufacturers. There are great manufacturers here in the U.S.

as well as overseas. Alibaba is a good place to start if you've never done anything. Alibaba is an option, but you want to qualify the people. You don't want to just send money. If you send money without great communication, that money is gone. So communication is key. We have a quick, easy script for talking to manufacturers.

There's three things that you need to ask. Tell me if I'm being long-winded. Can I dive into those three things? That's all right. In a podcast, my audience loves it. Okay. I'll dive into the three things. So on your first conversation with your manufacturer, whether it's domestic or overseas, you need to ask three things.

And those three things are, "What's the best way to get you paid?" Because different places have different options. PayPal is not necessarily the easiest thing overseas. Even domestically, you don't normally pay people with PayPal. So it would be credit cards, wire transfer, things like that. The person you're talking to loves this because they make money when you give them money.

Otherwise, you're kind of wasting their time. So they'll give you better service when they understand you're a real customer. Number two is, "What is the turnaround time from the time I get you paid to the time you're ready to ship? How long does it take you to manufacture this type of product?" And the third thing is, "What's a realistic first order?" They may also call it the minimum order, a sample order, or an MOQ.

That's minimum order quantity. Now from there, you want to make sure they understand your design change. So what we do is we'll create a document. I'm from Missouri originally, so pictures do a lot for me. Especially if you're working with someone overseas, English probably isn't their first language. So I'll have a picture of the product with a little call-out saying, "Instead of lower quality plastic, make it a higher grade plastic or food grade silicone," or so on and so on.

And I'll make it impossible for them to misunderstand. And then we communicate back and forth so that they make their clear on what the design changes are. Does that make sense? Yeah. So are you just simply sending them the physical product that you bought on Amazon and said, "Hey, or in some cases you're not even sending them the product.

You're saying, 'I'm copying this.'" Yep. Sometimes we send the product and sometimes we just send the image. We'll almost always buy the product. It's nice to buy. If you're basing your product off another one, it's important to buy it. Not only do you have the product so you can feel it and test it, but you get the full customer experience.

So if they have product inserts with coupons that say, "Go to the retail store," that's important to know. Their packaging, everything you can learn, you can learn through a customer experience. Wow. How do you handle, what are the minimum orders? Because that's one of the challenges. You have a nice hook to open up.

"Hey, I started with $100 and a Wi-Fi connection." That's a nice hook to get the conversation started. But at the end of the day, you're not buying products from China through Alibaba for $100. You're going to be out some money to get these things manufactured. Yeah. So a realistic startup budget is anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 is realistic.

Half the products I've ever started have been for less than $1,000, soup to nuts. But yeah, your minimums can vary all over the place depending on what the product is and how complex it is. Sometimes you can get a minimum order of one unit over in China. They really want to hook you and do business with you.

But most of the time, a few hundred to maybe 500 is a realistic first order. So okay, so I've developed, I've seen a product and I've had an idea for how to improve it. I've read the reviews. I've done my research. I know we're glossing over a whole lot of work here.

Now I order my units. How many units of a product are you ordering with some of these things that you're doing and what are the next steps? The fewest I've ever ordered I think was a dozen. And the most I've ever ordered the first time was 6,000 pieces. So for me, there's a range.

A few hundred pieces is realistic up to maybe 500. Now they arrive. The first order I always have shipped to my house. So my neighbors hate it. Someone comes with a drop gate and a pallet shows up and it's a little awkward. But you cut open the box and you see, is this what we wanted?

Now ideally, you would have already had it inspected, especially if it's overseas. You can pay 100, 200 bucks and you have a third-party inspector go to the factory just to make sure the products are correct. They'll take pictures. They'll make sure the product's correct. So we get it in our house.

We double check it. We make sure the measurements are right, the thickness. Any change that we decided was important, we make sure that's complete. Make sure it's labeled properly. And then we ship it into Amazon. Amazon has great rates with UPS. It's like 75% discount. It's ridiculous. And so UPS will take all the boxes and pallets and ship them into Amazon's warehouse.

Amazon has warehouses all over the United States. So you ship it in there in bulk and then one by one, as the orders come in, they ship it to the customers in a little smiley face box. - And does Amazon charge you fees to hold it in the warehouse?

What if your product doesn't sell? - Well, yeah, there are fees in the warehouse. They're very, very low. They're lower than anywhere else I could find. So it's abnormally cheap to put the inventory in Amazon's warehouse. Plus, you don't want to turn your house into a warehouse. Next up, you do have to pay UPS to truck it from here to there.

There are transaction fees. When it's all said and done, you're about 25, 30% in overhead. By the time you do a transaction. So if you're selling a product for $30, 10 bucks of that went into overhead between Amazon's fees and shipping and storage, all the little nickels and dimes that add up.

So if you're doing a $30 product, you want to make sure you're profitable. You need to make that product somewhere between $5 and $10. Your landed cost. When you say landed cost, that's the cost of the product, the packaging, any sort of inserts and shipping into Amazon's warehouse needs to be between $5 and $10.

You've been doing this for four years now. Do you have any guess on how many products you've done this process with? It's been probably three, four dozen. And are all of them still for sale or have any of them passed through the life cycle where you've pulled them from the Amazon store page now?

You're a great interviewer. This is what nobody talks about is there's a bell curve. Everyone loves to talk about the top 20%, the 80/20, but the reality is it's 80/20 on both sides. So there's a bell curve. And if you hold your hand up in front of you, that's what your product mix looks like.

One out of five is a rock star. One out of five is a total dud. Every nickel you put into it is gone and you just wish you never thought of the idea. You wish you never touched it. That's okay. And then about three out of five times, it's a base hit or a double.

You make money, but maybe you had to trim the price so that you can move volume or you make money, but you had to hold your margins up and you're just not moving a lot of volume. And so it makes money, but you're not bragging about it. It's not going to get you retired, but you keep them around until you have something better to do with the money.

Right. So I'm glad you brought out just the distribution because as I was thinking about the marketplace, my next question was going to be – and I'll just go ahead and ask it. If you'd be willing, pick a product that was kind of the middle of the road, not one that you brag about or not one that was a total failure, but pick a product that was middle of the road, it was profitable, and describe what the product was, how you came up with the idea and how long the lifecycle went and frankly how much money you made on it.

And then kind of the actual story of it. Sure. Well, I already mentioned earlier Garcinia Cambogia. That's a great one to use as a case study. So what we did is we listened to Dr. Oz. If you haven't heard of him, he's a market maker. The writers of the show are fantastic.

So he goes out and recommends a specific product that can – health-related product that can change your life. So Garcinia Cambogia was the latest and greatest thing back in 2012. So what I did is I called suppliers. There are supplement suppliers all over. You can get supplements made in the U.S.

I highly recommend. If you're going to do supplements, you start in the U.S. And so our cost, our landed cost on the product was about $5 a bottle. So they had us order 96 units was our minimum order. So call it 100 for easy math. We were in this product for $500 product cost.

And I still had to pay a little bit of money for a label design, a little bit of money for shipping, and boom, I had a product for less than $1,000. Now my product cost was $5 a unit. We were selling this thing between $25 and $40 a unit.

So it was great markup, great margins, easy to replenish, and in a perfect world, people would take the product. They'd take a month's supply and order in three or four weeks. Now the unfortunate reality is a lot of people who are into weight loss products, they're into buying weight loss products rather than using weight loss products.

I had no idea going into this that that was a reality. So we would actually call the people up. "Hey, how are you enjoying the product? What is your customer experience like? Are you getting everything you expected and more?" And the reality is people weren't actually opening the bottles and taking the pills.

A third of the time, they never even opened the bottle. Now it's crazy for you and I that like to think we're logical people, but I was hoping to get reorders. And some of the people who even reordered, it's like, "Hey, this is your eighth purchase. You're telling me you still never opened the first bottle?" "No, I've been traveling and busy and excuse and excuse and excuse." "Well, do you want your money back?

We don't want to take your money until you're getting some value here." "No, no, no. Don't worry about it. I've just seen another commercial and I bought some more." So that's one of the experiences. You asked how much money we made. Over $100,000 in profit. At the time, I had a partner on that one who covered things like insurance and some of the other headaches that can be challenging.

And so my split on that was low six figures. And partnerships can be tough. That's not what the episode is about. But if you can avoid it, maybe you should avoid it because I end up giving him the entire business for nothing. So, obviously, if you guys collectively as a partnership entity, if collectively you profited $100,000 or in excess of that, then you reordered many times.

So once you had the first 100 – was 100 units – you're using a bottle as a unit or were you counting a box of bottles as a unit? "No. One unit would be like 60. Was it 60? I think it was 60 pills in a bottle." So you ordered once.

You sold out of the 100 and then after that, you gained some confidence with the market. More people were buying it and you made additional orders and started making larger orders. How did you get from – because 100 units at just say $40 a unit at the top end, that's $4,000 of gross revenue.

So tell me about the process through where you figured out how to order more and then when the market started dying off. So reordering is the easiest thing. Once you have a product made, your life gets so easy because reordering can simply be an email or a phone call and now you have more inventory.

So for me, I was fortunate. We had multiple suppliers and that's another tip for you. You don't need one supplier. You need like three because when your product takes off and everyone's buying it and your supplier is backordered, you'll pull out your hair. So make sure that you have multiple avenues for supply.

So you could just simply – what I did is I just called them. I had a local supplier here in Denver who made fantastic products. They always tested very high. And so I just called them, picked them up and dropped them right off at UPS same day. So if you're having to deal with a supplier that's not in the town that you live in, it'll be the same.

You'll make a phone call, an email and they'll ship them either right to your house or right into Amazon's fulfillment center. And you want to reorder about the time you sell through half of your inventory. So if you buy 500 units, you want to sell through about 250 and then reach your supplier and say, "Hey, let's do some more." And the supplier's job is to upsell you.

"Hey, can we bump it to 1,000 units this time? I'll give you a little better price break or 2,000." Whatever you ordered before, assume that they're going to talk you into buying more. And that's okay. As long as you're on an upward trend, you're fine. Once your business kind of plateaus and it's steady – let's say you're doing 30 units a day and it's held that way for a month, two months, three months – that's probably your ceiling.

That's probably where it's going to plateau out. I like to hold between six weeks and three months' worth of inventory, more towards the fourth quarter and less in spring and summer. At this point in time, tell me about your operation. Do you have employees? Do you have staff? Do you have virtual staff?

How are you managing your business, your Amazon business presently? So we have workers overseas in the Philippines. They are fantastic. They're not technically speaking employees because there's a legal definition of what that is and they don't meet that – they don't check the box. So most of our team is in the Philippines.

They are fantastic. They log in and they work virtually. So they can buy traffic, write copy, fix listings. They can do all the technical online things that need done – reach out to suppliers, research inventory discrepancies. There's a fair amount of little things that add up to a small pile.

And then locally here in the United States, we have what we call associates and alliances. So the person who helps us with design, he's an engineer. We give him a split of the revenue. I have someone who helps us with paid traffic. And again, they get paid on performance.

So as we're profitable, it's profitable for them. As we're not profitable, then nobody's happy. Nobody's eating well. So they're not really employees either. They're more like revenue partners. Do you market your products outside of Amazon? You know, the next place to go beyond Amazon – Amazon's the easiest place.

Start with Amazon. But next up, you want to do your own website, probably a Shopify or BigCommerce. They're virtually the same. Shopify is the one we use. You can buy templates. And within an hour or at least one day, you can have your own website going. The challenge with that is just because you have the website doesn't mean anyone knows it's there.

You'll want to go ahead and start getting traffic to it. So yeah, you'll want to have – each brand you create, you'll want to have your own site for. And Shopify is the easiest way to do it. Have you successfully marketed any of your products outside of the Amazon channel to where a significant – where you've built a significant following of people searching you out because of that brand?

Or has everything been these similar products but slightly improved, marketed through Amazon? Most of it's coming through Amazon. And we're working on getting into brick-and-mortar stores now. So it'd be a huge accomplishment this year if we get into Target, Sam's Club, Costco. Those would be huge wins for us because those distribution channels can be even bigger than Amazon.

So the reason I'm kind of probing is I'm fascinated by the marketing end. And I'm also fascinated by ways to get into it simply and easily. Let me give a little bit of backstory. I've always been interested to watch how brands create their market where they just go and starting from nothing, they build this following.

The most striking example to me was I remember very clearly I was in high school when Under Armor came out and Under Armor came out and they launched with this big idea of – it was some kind of like Sunday night series on football. And somehow I wound up seeing a few of the episodes and it was – you saw these little Under Armor logos, UA logos everywhere.

And it was just incredible placement. But they were targeting it and they had kind of built this whole TV show basically as far as I could tell around the Under Armor brand. And that was essentially where it was launched. And today it's ubiquitous. And they took their idea and they completely developed it.

And I see people do this again and again and again where there is no brand and they create a brand out – they just create a brand from nothing. And that brand has certain attributes, has certain things whether it's the – what's the latest one? The Yeti coolers is one I've watched over the last couple of years.

You got these $300, $400 coolers that yes, they are a little bit better but they're also 20 times more expensive than many other coolers. But they built a whole brand out of them. There's – people want to be associated with it. And the challenge of that is I've always been daunted by the prospect of figuring out how to do that.

It requires a budget. It requires people who – integrated messaging, integrated marketing, et cetera. But what you're describing is the modern way to test products, get products out there, see what sells. And then on the back end, you can go ahead and transition from the single channel sales through Amazon to the larger brand where you can create more of that following where people are buying not just because this product fits the attributes but they're buying the brand which seems to be the way that many large consumer goods are sold.

So that's why I'm so interested to think about how you could start easy, start cheap, see if your product has traction and then transition it to a much larger thing that can ultimately be either have a higher sales or ultimately be sold. Absolutely. In fact, if the listeners are taking notes, this is the one thing you must write down.

A market is a group of people who are passionate about spending money on a specific problem, fantasy, desire and then underline problem, fantasy, desire. That's what we build our business on. It has nothing to do with what's in the box. Yeah, our products are great. They're the best. But that's not why people buy them.

They buy them because they're scratching an itch. Remember the people who bought the weight loss pills? They bought the pills multiple times and never opened the bottle because we were selling them into that fantasy that they could eat whatever they wanted and their body would stay the same. When we did the testing, it's odd that no one really wanted to wear a bikini.

They just wanted the same body in a year from now while eating seven desserts. It wasn't actually about losing weight. It was about maintaining a fantasy that we can eat anything and there's no consequences. That was the fantasy. Amazing. I mean, use this to do good in the world.

This is powerful, powerful stuff. I'm laughing and I'm not going to join in on the critical bandwagon of being critical of people who buy weight loss supplements and don't use them because I've done it. It makes me feel guilty about having wasted the money when I think back and recognize the times that I did it.

But what often happens is in that situation, you buy the product because of the emotional appeal to the fact, "Well, I'm going to be this type of person. I'm going to be the kind of person that does it." In buying it, you satisfy that often. You satisfy that emotional idea that I'm the type of person who takes healthy green stuff or who takes these supplements and things like that.

But then when it actually comes in, the actual discipline of using them, well, that's hard work and you already got the feeling that you were looking for, the feeling of being that type of person. So you put the pills in the bottle. You put them in the cabinet or whatever and then guiltily over the next few years, after a few months, you finally cancel the auto order that they suckered you into and then guiltily you go ahead and use them up.

But because you feel guilty about it and you don't really like it and finally you just throw away the last bottle. It's a very sad thing and I can't be critical of other people because I've done it myself. Well, and this is something maybe a little closer to home for other folks who haven't is I'm a dad.

If you're a parent, you definitely have done this. I live in a fantasy that I'm the best dad in the world, that my kid has a better childhood than I've had, that I'm a better dad than my dad was. And every mom has the same fantasy and will spend unreasonable amounts of money to prove it.

So when my kid was an infant, I bought Your Baby Can Read and I paid $180 for these flash cards. I was happy and proud and nobody cared, but I spent it and I was happier at spending $180 rather than like $10. It wouldn't have filled that void, that feeling of I gotta do something.

I don't know what I'm doing as a parent. I think a lot of folks can relate to that. - Absolutely. So that's a really good example because I am very interested in infant and early childhood education. The founder of Your Baby Can Read, I really respect and admire him and I admire what they did with their product.

And I've read some of the other scientific work and also some of the other reviews, the people bashing the idea of early childhood education, et cetera. It's an interesting controversy. But I've always been interested in that and I've noticed that I think there's an opportunity there. I didn't buy Your Baby Can Read, but my wife and I, we made flashcards.

We followed the, loosely followed, followed as it needs to be understood very loosely, but the Doman method, there's one of the, a guy named Glenn Doman was one of the leaders in that area. And it's been a fascinating thing for me to watch with children. But the Your Baby Can Read story is interesting because he got into trouble, as I understand it, I guess with the FTC.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the case, but he got into trouble with people saying, "Hey, this is a ripoff. It doesn't work. You can't teach your baby to read." Are you familiar with any of the, as a consumer of that product and also as a product maker, have you followed any of that legal journey or that battle that went on with the Your Baby Can Read brand?

Very high level. And just so the audience knows, neither one of us are lawyers, so this shouldn't be considered legal advice, but it's a general best practice. You do want to watch what you say. You want to give people the emotion that they're looking for without being deceptive. We want to keep their expectations realistic, but their emotions high.

And that's where things kind of spun out of control. Right. And that was, so where I was going with it was just to talk about legal liability and if you've faced any problems with that so far and then ideas for protecting yourself. Because in that, now again, I'm not an attorney nor did I review in depth any of the materials, but in looking at it and studying the founder, at the time I looked into it very briefly, I could be wrong.

But I never saw anything that I felt was based upon reading some of the books and some of the stuff behind the scenes. I never saw anything that I felt was actually – he wasn't – I didn't see any fraud that was committed. I didn't see any unreasonable stuff that was done.

I saw that I think people misunderstood what your baby reading actually meant. Your one-year-old reading does not mean that you can hand them the constitution and expect them to articulate the importance of the Tenth Amendment and how we should be employing and applying the Tenth Amendment in today's world to curb the growth of government federal power.

That is not what you can expect. But your baby can read and the curriculum was effective. So I was interested to see how there was such a distinction between what people were expecting and then the legal liabilities that came from it versus what the founder actually knew. The founder seemed to be doing a good job creating a product that if properly used and properly understood was effective.

Go ahead. Michael Munger (00:36:30): I agree with you totally. My son is now nine and he's reading Moby Dick for fun. The program did a great job. But yes, it's possible to oversell things. It's possible for people to point their finger at you and say, "My life is ruined and it's all your fault," especially if you're going to do something that goes in or on the body with the intent of making changes.

That's where liability can come from. And so now we stay away from products that are ingestibles because you do want to have yourself covered. That's why there's liability insurance. You can get product liability insurance. You can get business liability insurance. And again, I'm not an insurance agent, but you should probably talk to an insurance agent and have them upsell you into an umbrella policy.

Umbrella policy means anything we forgot to buy insurance on, you're covered. So insurance is great, especially if you have to use it knock on wood. We haven't had to use anything in our business associated with the product side. Real estate-wise, that's a different story. - All right, Brad, let's talk lifestyle.

When you started saying find a product and copy it, it made me think of the famous excerpt from Tim Ferriss' Four-Hour Workweek. I remember I was an early finder of that book. So I've watched the whole phenomenon develop. I found it one day just bumbling around in a bookstore and then it was about a month or two later it started showing up, or about a month later, it started showing up on every blog, every mention, et cetera, and I've seen so many people go through it.

Well, in that book, he, the author Tim Ferriss, famously uses the idea of a four-hour workweek and he talks about how that can be created with, using his terminology, the creation of a muse, an income muse, M-U-S-E. The idea is you can have this business that runs itself. In the book, which has since been updated, he discussed doing it with custom shirts, like French sailor shirts, if my memory is correct, and he identified that you find the market, you create the supplier, you buy the ads.

At that time, he wasn't focusing on Amazon. He was focusing on Google AdWords, but same thing. Then you get a drop shipper, et cetera, and then you sit back and you collect the profits while you sip Mai Tais on the beach in Columbia and basically get rich. I would assume you're familiar with that concept.

The challenge is I want to hear what your workweek is actually like and I don't want the fluffy sales letter approach. I want to know what your actual workweek is like with building these businesses and what you actually do and how much time was required in the beginning of getting them, finding the virtual staff members in the Philippines and people.

I want to hear about the actual business. Yeah, absolutely. I live a fairly simple life. I'm walking distance to my kid's school. That starts the day, five days a week. I walk my kid to school. I walk back and I think. I take a half-hour shower because that's where my great ideas come from, is just a steaming shower.

Do you have that product? I have it on my Amazon wish list to take notes in the shower. Do you have one of those? I actually have one of those. Okay. Yeah. I even made one that's huge because I ran out of room so I just bought some Plexiglas and put it in the shower.

It's amazing at the creativity that happens there because the phone's not ringing, you're not checking email. The whole world leaves you alone when you're in the restroom. I spend time there and just get started with the day. I have a great breakfast. My wife makes steak and French toast and I'm feeling it.

Actually, most of the time, five days a week, I try to go sugar-free. No carbs, nothing that turns into sugar. I have steak and eggs. The weekend, we go crazy. Then I talk to the team. About 10 a.m., we have a team meeting. It's super late in the Philippines but that's good because their kids are asleep.

We have team meetings five days a week. I just talk about what's going on in the business because I don't actually do the day-to-day operations. I want to talk to the people who do and that's the Filipinos. They tell me what's going on, what's working, what's not working. We brainstorm.

We sing karaoke. We laugh. We joke. They're more than just workers. We're in charge of helping them get a better lifestyle. It's a different cultural experience than you may find with most U.S. workers. That normally goes for about an hour. I'll do a call like this or some mentoring.

I have some people I'm helping with their brands. I'm also part of some small groups where we launch products together. We split the equity and the brand and the cash flow. One of them I call the band. It's an engineer and a traffic person. We're able to just merge our talents into just an unbeatable stack.

Then in the afternoon, I pick up my kid from school. Again, I just walk up the hill, grab him, come home. We hang out. We do kid stuff, dinner, jump back online, goof off, research more product opportunities or brands. I'm a dork. I can't turn it off. I'm addicted.

Then call it a day, watch a movie or something. It's simple, kind of boring. We travel a bit. I just got back from Arizona. I took my wife to the Grand Canyon. She's never seen that. We went to Sedona and it was fantastic. We go to Thailand in October for a couple of weeks every year.

Just simple things but rewarding things. >> So when you were building the staff, tell me about how you actually found and developed your Filipino team. >> Well, yeah. I'll tell you the real story. It's nice to have a glamorous thing. It wasn't glamour. It was actually a little bit stressful.

I bought a few pallets of inventory and it was supposed to be retail condition. It was supposed to be just new. It's called shelf pulls. Maybe the manufacturer changed the color of the box and so they have a new model. So I bought a few pallets of inventory that was supposed to be retail ready.

When I got it, there were no boxes or everything was crushed. It wasn't fit for Amazon but it was something we could do on eBay. The problem is I don't know anything about eBay other than people have lower standards of product presentation. So I hired someone in the Philippines.

I said, "If you can do eBay listings, I'll keep you busy." And what would take me like three, four hours to do a listing, he was able to jam out 100 listings a day. And I said, "This is great. If you can keep learning more things, I'd love you to do more things." And so we do screen sharing and I'd show him more tips and more tricks and more day-to-day tasks.

And now we call that the fire watcher document. So every day there are things that you have to do to make sure if there is a fire, we put it out when it's small. And the team just grew. My needs grew. The team's developed. And we have training five days a week.

I'm the godfather of their kids. When they need something, they come to me and say, "Hey, I want to go get my MBA." Great. Go have fun. Let's try to keep the work going. If you need anything, let's rely on the other team members to kind of pick up slack.

And it's just kind of one big harmonious unit. Do you feel like this is the type of business that somebody could do part-time? Yeah. That's the best way to start is part-time. So if you have a job or if you have tons of other obligations, I'd recommend starting part-time.

Take it as though you'd take a college class. Put a few hours a week into it, a couple nights a week. And before you know it, you have something that's financially rewarding enough, emotionally rewarding enough to pour more into it. It's an amazing world we live in. Amazing world we live in.

Anything that I haven't asked you about that you think would be of interest to my audience before we get to kind of your websites and contact info and all that? Sure. I'm going to pretend you asked the question, "What's the most important decision you've ever made?" Brad, what's the most important decision that you've ever made?

Picking an amazing spouse. I think if you do that one thing right, everything else in life becomes easier and more rewarding. And if that's not working out for you, find a way to make that relationship work. That's the thing, because this is someone that you spend all your time with, awake and asleep.

Make sure that you pour your consciousness into having an amazing spouse. Invest in that person more than you invest in anything else. Invest in your spouse. Amen. That's the word of my gospel. Brad, tell us about your websites, your services, offerings, courses, etc. Anything that you'd like to plug here?

So yeah, our site is called amazonsherpa.com. Reach out to us if you need some help, if you want to get some help getting started, or if you feel like you're started and maybe on the wrong track. Just sign up for our newsletter. We have weekly tips, strategies, updates, stories.

And if you need something, we can jump on a call for like 20 minutes and just get you on the right track. Thanks for coming on, man. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance. If you're interested in building financial freedom for yourself and your family, please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode.

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