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Business Fulfilled by Amazon – a conversation with entrepreneur Neil Twa
0 Playsin 8 hours
Build an e-commerce business on Amazon with Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA)
One night Neil Twa decided he needed to buy a product he had seen on a TV. But instead of being a consumer he decided to be a producer and create an improved version of that product. He then had to get his product in front of customers and eventually to them. The answer was a listing on Amazon and fulfilment by Amazon (FBA).
Now Neil is an entrepreneur with a stable of brands and products that are all sold and orders fulfilled by Amazon.
He is the founder of Voltage and a partner in Patriot Growth Capital.
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds Neil explains to host Michael Millward why selling on and fulfilling with Amazon is a great way to launch a business.
They discuss all things Fulfilment by Amazon, and
- How to identify existing demand
- The importance of research the market
- Why data is so important
- The three-year life cycle of an e-commerce business
- Expanding sales channels
- Exit strategies
Discover more about Neil and Michael at Abeceder.co.uk
Audience Offers – listings include links that may create a small commission for The Independent Minds
Neil’s book Almost Automated Income with FBA: Build a Profitable Lifestyle-Driven Amazon Business. Exit for Millions. Even Without Any Ecommerce Experience is available from Amazon.
The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr, because as the all-in-one podcasting platform, Zencastr really does make creating content so easy.
Travel – With discounted membership of the Ultimate Travel Club, you can travel anywhere at trade prices.
Fit For Work We recommend The Annual Health Test from York Test; a 39-health marker Annual Health Test conducted by an experienced phlebotomist with hospital standard tests carried out in a UKAS-accredited and CQC-compliant laboratory.
A secure Personal Wellness Hub provides easy-to-understand results and lifestyle guidance. Use our discount code MIND25.
Visit Three for information about business and personal telecom solutions from Three, and the special offers available when you quote my referral code WPFNUQHU.
Being a Guest
We recommend the podcasting guest training programmes available from Work Place Learning Centre.
If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests or if you have something interesting to say Matchmaker.fm is where great guests and great hosts are matched and great podcasts are hatched. Use our offer code MILW10 for a discount on membership.
We appreciate every like, download, and subscriber.
Thank you for listening.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Independent Minds'
00:00:05
Speaker
on zencastr Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abyssaida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Introducing Neil Twa
00:00:22
Speaker
I am your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. Today I'm going to find out about making money from Neil Twa, who has made a fortune by selling online through Fulfillment by Amazon.
Zencastr and Podcasting
00:00:38
Speaker
As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr. Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that really does make every stage of the podcast production process, including publishing and distribution, so easy.
00:00:57
Speaker
If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr, visit zencastr.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code, Abbasida. All the details are in the description.
Neil's Online Selling Success
00:01:09
Speaker
Now that I have told you how wonderful Zencastr is for making podcasts, we should make one. One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:22
Speaker
As with every episode of the Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Today, my guest Independent Mind is Neil Twarr.
00:01:34
Speaker
He has made a fortune by selling online via Amazon through a service called Fulfillment by Amazon. We'll find out more about that from Neil ah in our conversation.
00:01:45
Speaker
But Neil is based in Missouri. I hope I pronounced that correctly, which is one of those states between the East Coast and the West Coast. So I don't suppose he sees the sea very much, but it's the Old West.
00:01:59
Speaker
Now, it's not a place that
Travel Arrangements: Ultimate Travel Club
00:02:01
Speaker
I've ever been. But if I do visit, I will be making my travel arrangements with the Ultimate Travel Club because that is where I access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains and so many other travel-related purchases.
00:02:14
Speaker
You can access those same trade prices on travel by joining the Ultimate Travel Club. There is a link and a discount code in the description. Now that I've paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds and say, Hello
Neil Twa's Career Journey
00:02:30
Speaker
Neil. Hello, hello.
00:02:31
Speaker
Thanks for having me on today. How are you doing? I'm wonderful. It's great. Great to have you here. You're probably one of my first millionaires as a guest, and going to find out how you've made that money and why is that you're you're now sharing that expertise with other people. But could we first start off?
00:02:48
Speaker
by you just explaining, well, your career, I suppose, and how you ended up being someone who sells online yeah via Amazon using FBA. Well, i keep it short and sweet. When I was 16, 17, playing with my friend's computer on AOL online and the in the message boards, I got kind of hooked, even though it was dial up and really slow. I was like, man, there's something to this. I went to college because i it was a fallback position. I actually wanted to go in the military and go fast. wanted to be a fighter pilot, but I got rejected. Too tall to fit in the cockpit. So that kind of sucked. you So I'm like, well wow now what I want to do. So I went to college on a music scholarship. I played classical and music jazz. I did it since the fourth grade. Trumpet.
00:03:25
Speaker
Went all state in Oregon, where I lived with my parents, and then went off to Iowa to go to college. Well, the internet came online. About three years into that, realization that I didn't want to live in a van down by the river. Might be cool today and super hip, but back then it was seen as a failure.
00:03:38
Speaker
So I'm like, oh, the internet. I really want this to be something that I could do. Although academia at that point had nothing to do. but set up computers and no programs, no tracks, no nothing, just learning on the fly while I was on the job, setting up the first machines that came into the computer lab.
00:03:55
Speaker
That just set me off and and I said, okay, I got to figure this out and ended up doing some consulting and ah contract work for some companies in Kansas ah City and and into Missouri.
Career Highlights at Sprint and IBM
00:04:06
Speaker
And I ended up landing a, my first full-time gig as a W2 employee at, in Sprint when they were launching the first mobile device in a new division called Sprint PCS, first mobile device in the market.
00:04:17
Speaker
ah That would have been 99 into 2000. And so what ended up happening then is that just exploded quickly. And that first five years that business was online as being the 5000th employee, it jumped to 80,000. So I got to see the inside growth and have a lot of inside opportunity. I was overseeing the knowledge and management website, 50,000 pages that we eventually turned it into a knowledge management system to help with the ah systems and the people and the launches and the 25,000 customer reps and 80,000 employees were using these systems to manage all their knowledge. And IBM came in and said, hey, that's super cool. We want to do that too. And they hired me out.
00:04:49
Speaker
And then I went on the credit card laptop lifestyle within IBM and traveled all over the place. The last year before I left 2006, I traveled almost 300 days that year. and So I was super done with traveling.
00:05:00
Speaker
wanted to get married, met this really great girl, got married to her in 2007 and seven and fired the fired the man, left the job and set out on my own. And since then, I've created a series of businesses, both offline and online um in the digital space, high tech, mobile, knowledge management space, and eventually got into the physical product world through digital marketing and really discovered my passion for physical products over just digital in around 2012 when I landed on Amazon. Had a fun time just flipping products and then realize, hey, I need to create some brands. I need to own the whole business. So I had ah you know products started ah being manufactured for me, got to our first seven figure brand and 2014, 15. And then as they say, the rest is history.
00:05:39
Speaker
Just fell in love with brand concept and physical products and have launched you know multiple brands. We're nine brands deep. We got three more coming online this year. We overarchingly have control of about 21 brands.
00:05:50
Speaker
And now we're into the first acquisitions of additional brands to round out our portfolio. And we're under a letter of intent to buy one of those first ones right now.
Understanding Amazon FBA
00:05:59
Speaker
Nice. Very nice.
00:06:01
Speaker
But, What is fulfillment by Amazon? Yeah, well that's a fun word, right? And it's simple terms fulfilled by Amazon just means, or FBA, that in simple terms, if you've ever had a product delivered to your doorstep by Amazon, that's what it means. When you go up from there, you know trucks that roll in and warehouses that ship, Amazon has this amazing logistics fulfillment system. They actually acquired it.
00:06:26
Speaker
Around 2008 or so, 2009, they acquired a logistics company to help them move off of just books and into any kind of physical product. They wanted to sell all things to anybody that was based on this model, right? And they wanted to do it in 30 seconds or less. So they got pretty close to to taking that on and at this point in in their game with 49% of the e-commerce market share going to Amazon in the United States.
00:06:49
Speaker
And so everything from package, customer support, the product movement and logistics are all handled by Amazon, which is amazing because I don't have to be out there shipping product, moving product. We deal with some returns and we test samples and we do have the ability to touch our products and in different ways. But the majority of the product goes into Amazon's warehouses where they help manage it and ship it and return it and do all the heavy lifting.
00:07:10
Speaker
Right. So it's it's outsourced distribution is fulfillment by Amazon. That's a great way of saying it, outsourced distribution. Yeah. Cool. And it's outsourced distribution to consumers, which is... Last mile. When you see the number of Amazon vans that pass my front door every day, and I only live in a little village. A lot. They're all over the place.
00:07:32
Speaker
I live in a rural country and they deliver stuff down here all know three or four times a week because of where we are. stuff shows up all the time. I have a big family. We have a homeschool family. We live on the 50 acres out here in the mountains of the Ozarks and and stuff is just easier to have shipped in. And now they got a big logistics facility about an hour from us. So sometimes stuff shows up the same day.
00:07:51
Speaker
Very nice. Very nice.
Launch and Success of Belt Buddies
00:07:53
Speaker
But tell me, what was the first brand that you launched then? Yeah, it was a cool brand. It actually got discovered and it was part of our process that eventually we we coined the as seen on TV ah process. And it evolved into what we call our five by five. But it started with me up one night. I have four daughters and i had them all with my wife, of course, in less than five years. So I had four kids under the age of five for a while. And it was crazy times. And no one was sleeping a lot, but I'm a night owl. And my wife, God bless her, taking care of these kids as we got along until the third child um was really tired. She just like crashed at nine or 10 o'clock at night. And I'm the late night. So I would stay up to 12, two, three in the morning, take care of anybody's bottle needs or troubles and put them back to bed. And so I'm up with my third daughter watching television, flipping through stupid infomercials, right?
00:08:38
Speaker
And up pops this thing for this um product called a seat pet. And it had a a dog and a penguin looking. was very cute and attached to the seat belt. And the kid could lay their head on it. And you could put your crowns in it. It was a cute, cuddly thing. And you know as they they loved it. They could take it with them when they're trips or cars or whatever. i'm like, man, I want to get one of those.
00:08:56
Speaker
And right before I thought about buying it, I stopped because I was still trying to condition my mind to change from consumerism to producer. And I thought, oh, wait, i I could probably sell one of those. So the next day when I woke up, finally, the epiphany hit me to you know talk to my partner and see, I think we have a couple ideas. We we came up with a couple of differentiators.
00:09:13
Speaker
And we said, you know what? I think we can do this. There's a lot of demand. They're obviously running infomercials. But on Amazon, they were not taking up very much market share at all. And they were the only product alike there. They variations, but nothing kind of like theirs. And so we made a variation of a brand called Belt Buddies.
00:09:29
Speaker
Okay. And we launched a 2000 unit test into the market. on a variation of of faces, colors, penguins, dogs, cats that had a bit of an anime feel to them. They weren't just like straight up dogs. We just innovated a little bit. We made the packaging a little better. We made the stitching a little harder. We made the material a little softer in the in the phone. We just made it a little bit different. not Not totally unique, just a little different. We innovated it, right?
00:09:54
Speaker
And we sold through those 2,000 units in eight weeks. They literally flew off themselves. And what we realized was we were capturing an existing demand on that platform for that product type that was being generated by people's interest on the platform and, of course, people's interest off the platform.
00:10:09
Speaker
When we realized the opportunity with Amazon was demand capture, we changed the entire strategy what we were after. And that caused that brand to blow up. um It was part of a brand we called Mother Approved, kind of like the good housekeeping seal. and so it was a Mother Approved product.
00:10:23
Speaker
And it did very well. And that led us to additional brands and and capturing additional market share.
Importance of Marketing and Data
00:10:28
Speaker
When we just started to look at the market differently, and we looked for what demand could we capture and innovate against, and then turn it into a brand leader.
00:10:36
Speaker
So... Although we talked we started off talking about how Amazon provides you with the outsourced logistics distribution service, yes that's not the main part of what what it is that you're actually involved in at all. Yes, sir. That's the almost automated income side, right? Because but literally when that product goes into their warehouses, I don't touch the product anymore. it gets shipped. It gets customer supported. It even gets returned and dealt with over there. So once I understand managerial wise, how that's working, how to track it, monitor it, use AI and other systems to keep it moving just in time, that is a smaller amount of the effort than the real work that's done in a physical product based business model. And that is the marketing.
00:11:18
Speaker
That is the understanding of the narrative, the branding and the customer that you're approaching, what it is they want to buy. And we have a saying in our company that everybody says over and over and over again, and that is sales fixes everything.
00:11:30
Speaker
Sales fixes everything. So the primary component is making these profitable and ensuring that we sell them to the right customer need. So an awful lot of what you're doing then is research.
00:11:44
Speaker
Marketing is research and um making sure that the research that you have done can then be applied to make sure that the information about your product reaches the person who is most likely to buy it.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yes, because it's all data driven and the systems of data have grown immensely since my first days at Sprint and then through IBM as we were working on latent semantic search engines, search based
AI in Product Profitability and Strategy
00:12:11
Speaker
engines, knowledge management systems and just in time information ah that was driven by intelligent engines that has ah since evolved into greater what is you know AI now. or intelligence that's able to look through you know petabytes and zettabytes of information very quickly and disseminate outcomes or responses very fast. And then it's using that to generate videos, content, and other types of virality.
00:12:34
Speaker
Amazon's using it for you know capture of all of that content and creation that's happening on the greater interwebs. And it's used it in its system. And these interfaces now allow us the ability to take data that we used from experience and now back it against data that Amazon's actually giving us with real values, real sales, real values, real customer needs. And we built an AI intelligent engine we call Cayman.
00:12:57
Speaker
And that Cayman data engine now tells us exactly what the customer needs are and what products are being fulfilled by the $638 billion. dollars If you could just imagine Bezos came to you and said, Neil, sell this product.
00:13:09
Speaker
in this type, in this market, and you're going to have success with it, would you do it? Probably, yes. Yeah, you give it a shot, right? Yes. Yep, and that's what we built was an AI engine that we use inside of our platform that determines which product we should sell. It is all data and intelligence driven, and we simply make the decision on which one is the most profitable for long-term opportunity for us that meets our criteria, and what we call our green
Building a Profitable Online Business
00:13:32
Speaker
light process. Is it green, yellow, or red? If it green lights to the manufacturing of the product and has a 12-month projected profitability goal, we test it.
00:13:41
Speaker
It's all about shifting the product, but you shift the product when you understand the customer Yes, because what happens when you order online, Michael? Do you have the product in your hand? Are you buying the product that's in your hand that you know? Are you buying the intent and outcome of the product when it shows up? I think what you're buying is the latter. It's almost, I would almost describe it as you're buying the promise. That's right. Of what the description, the images. You absolutely are.
00:14:08
Speaker
Have told you the product is and what it will do. You have a belief or a belief oriented outcome that that product will make you faster, smarter, way less, way more. so make them more attractive, feel fulfill some emotion, fulfill some physical tasks. So the product for us is just the exchange of the median, okay? a currency median exchange of a physical product for what they order.
00:14:30
Speaker
When it shows up, The second thing we really focus on, not the first thing, the second thing is in creating a great product. We want them to be impressed by what they got. We want them to open it and go, wow.
00:14:40
Speaker
And eventually we want them to leave us a positive review. So we have to create a great functional product that doesn't break in five minutes and isn't some cheap Chinese piece of crap. But really the focus of that is just to make sure that we deliver on the expectation.
00:14:53
Speaker
So their outcome is what they get from that product, whatever it is. So that's not really what we focus on. at first We focus on the data intelligence of what a customer wants from us and how to make it profitable. So it becomes a profitable going concern that can pay us, reduce our time involvement, but give us upside potential in that business all the way through to an exit.
00:15:14
Speaker
It all sounds, i'm not well, I'm not sure, to be honest, whether it all sounds very simple or extremely complicated. And I can imagine people want say, we need to play this again. We need to play this again. i need as many loads as a platform. Yeah, well, let's simplify it, okay? It's find a product, manufacture a product,
Amazon's E-commerce Dominance
00:15:33
Speaker
sell a product. That's all it There's your simplification. What you've also done, though, is taken all that you've learned over the last years that you've been doing this and put it into a book called, you know, Almost Automated Income with FBA, Build a Profitable Lifestyle Driven Amazon Business, Exit for Millions, Even Without Any E-Commerce Experience. So that sounds like that is really the how-to guide to do this successfully. Yeah.
00:15:59
Speaker
Yeah, it really goes through um chapters adapted from my my podcast interview featuring successful voltage clients, various operators in the e-commerce space. It has topics covering strategic elements of e-commerce and Amazon ah for you know people to get to more of a business ownership professional seller status.
00:16:16
Speaker
um So the takeaways have bullet points, case studies, fundamentals behind it. breaking down the profitable path to getting there, how to talk about growth and funding, about scaling the business, about maximizing your exit value.
00:16:30
Speaker
and then there's all kinds of resources around the business model and mentorship. It really is ah a strategic guide to understanding how to build a profitable, exitable business. It's not a tactical guide. Like how do you open an account? How do you push buttons? Because at the end of the day, the simplification understanding of this is Those who understand the business of e-commerce and how a sales channel like Amazon will create this e-commerce machine to move into multiple or omni sales channels is the purpose of an e-commerce business. Not the channel specific so many people talk about like Amazon FBA, but the understanding of building an e-commerce company and managing it profitably.
00:17:09
Speaker
Yes. Amazon is just like the high street, main street. It's the shopping mall. It's 49% of all American consumer goods online now. So it is a juggernaut engine. It is 200 million prime buyers buying 8,900 units a minute.
00:17:24
Speaker
That's a lot. It's a lot. It's a grand machine. And it's a miracle the dang thing even works.
00:17:32
Speaker
It really is. I look at the thing and I've watched it grow ah the years before I got involved and the years I got involved as a seller. And I go, good night. This thing has turned into a logistical insanity. It's the sixth largest logistics company in the world.
00:17:44
Speaker
And it's very much focused on logistics that is business to consumer, which then creates the opportunity for someone to set up a business and make money by selling one of the world's biggest
Long-term Growth Strategies with Data
00:17:58
Speaker
high streets. Starting in the biggest location with the most consumers in the largest demographic audience in America. So we niche on down into that first channel.
00:18:06
Speaker
And then from there, you determine what demand is for that product, what brand opportunity you can create amount demand for that product, and then simply expand on that. Repeat what is possible and expand across that product line until you reach other channel opportunities, retail, your own direct website, other mechanisms, TikTok shops, whatever other channels your audience is setting on, you need to reach out to them eventually and start to build the foundation of of customer acquisition on those other channels. But make no mistake, if you're an aspiring entrepreneur who's listening to this wondering, should I or could I ever sell in the physical product business world, Amazon FBA allows you an opportunity to fix one of the major problems most new people in business face, and that is getting customers to see their product and acquire it.
00:18:50
Speaker
And if you're going to sell the physical product online, go to the place that the largest market share, fastest demographics, demand is created already and find out if you can sell that product. Find out if there is a market for your product.
00:19:02
Speaker
If there's a market. Well, and don't guess, right? If you choose from a data or analytics in my software, it'll tell you exactly what the market is, what the customer need is, and how many people are purchasing it every year. But Amazon's own data, along with our intelligence and our processes developed into that, we choose a product. manufacturer validates it and we test market and find out how close to the audience are we.
00:19:23
Speaker
And once we say, yeah, we're there, the data all proves we got it right. Then I'll order a thousand units of that product and move more capital, time, energy, and attention into that product. Now, when you talk about products, your first product was a a toys, basically mother approved. Yeah. A plush toy doll for kids in the car. Yep. Yep.
00:19:42
Speaker
And, but you've got other yeah businesses, other products. Oh yeah. And you talked about how you've so got this portfolio and I'm imagining that, you've not stayed in that one area of like the toys? No, no, and not particularly. That business we ended up selling and we ended up focusing on the home and kitchen space, but we also have stuff in the outdoor space. We have stuff ah in the, um gosh, I got all kinds of stuff. My brain kind of jumbles up what we have. um But we have a number of products typically within the range of $50 to $500 in retail
Business Growth Challenges
00:20:19
Speaker
price point that meet specific data criteria and profitability requirements. And then it's less about the product, as we as we've kind of talked about here, and it is more about what is that demand and how do I serve that audience. My passion is to serve an audience who's passionate about the product and its outcome. Yeah. You see, that's the thing.
00:20:37
Speaker
i think when lots of people will think about, oh, I'll set up a shop and I'll sell online. And they think about whichever different channel they're going to be starting on. And Amazon, like you say, is one of the best because it's the biggest, et cetera, et cetera.
00:20:51
Speaker
But they're thinking about something that they are interested in, a product that they would buy themselves. Yes. And product maybe even that they can make. Yes. But yeah, so don't come with that expectation. Come with, you know you don't have an idea. And what you want to do is discover how to get in front of the right idea that's in demand and simply say, how much of that demand can I capture now and in the next year and in the next year? With this economic engine, very clearly and and to be succinct, it has a three year growth lifecycle with Amazon.
00:21:19
Speaker
Why? Year one is your building year. It's the trust year. It's building a new brand and an existing brand system like Amazon. And then real growth comes in year two. Time and market is important. Amazon's own systems mature the product and marketing for you because it's a big economic engine and they do a whole lot of marketing for you, right?
00:21:38
Speaker
and And that matures in growth to the potential scale of years three through five. I tell everybody who listens, this is a five-year plan and I want you to become part of the 8%. okay The 8% are people whose businesses survive years four and five.
00:21:53
Speaker
92% of businesses fail in years four and five. Why? The first three years, they have not been trained on the fundamentals of business first, then the tactics and strategies of a sales channel, and then once again, the fundamentals of growth in a business. To go from one to five million is a process-driven, system-oriented business.
00:22:10
Speaker
deal of opening a brand products and the product line for your customers from five to 10 million and above the number one risk in the company's growth is the owner. Yes. Yeah, I can see that. So all sorts of, the owner starts to lose interest because they've achieved what they wanted to achieve or they, they get out older, all sorts of various different things.
00:22:32
Speaker
It could be risk ah reversion. Their risk reward ratio reached the top half of the of where they're willing to go. The next level of deployment of capital to the business is what is usually the difference between 5 million and 10 million. And their risk reward ratio simply reaches a terminating statement. It is what it is and I'm okay where I'm at.
00:22:51
Speaker
Yes, which is then when it's time to sell. Move on. That's usually when they see a good time to sell. The more ambitious top 10% of the folks who do this will say, hey, I am just on a run now. I'm going to start opening additional channels. I can see where I'll be at in the next two, three years. I'm going after that next risk reward ratio level. I'm okay with that. And they're going to see those types of 5, 10, 15, $20 million your business is coming out of it.
00:23:15
Speaker
what's the What's the next sort of step? You've written this book. It covers in more detail from a strategic point of view, all the things that you're talking about here. But what's the next sort of thing that you're going to be involved in?
Supporting Veterans with Patriot Growth Capital
00:23:27
Speaker
So right now I am part of an initiative. It's a second half of this initiative. The first half was raising a portfolio-based fund ah to go out and solicit 50 to 100 million in acquisitions for private label businesses in physical products across Amazon and other channels.
00:23:45
Speaker
That initiative I stopped in 2021 when the Amazon aggregator market became um billionaireized to the point where they were buying anything and everything at 40% above actual cost. And it became the numbers that literally became unusable.
00:24:00
Speaker
So with the Performa no longer working, we backed it down and we didn't complete that initiative. But a few years later, a more purpose and value driven initiative presented itself. This initiative. initiative is around a company called Patriot Growth Capital. And what Patriot Growth has actually done and then opened their capital division with us was to help 16,000 veterans in the US last year ah through help, support, family support, mentoring, business mentoring.
00:24:26
Speaker
ah dealing with PTSD and other things and giving them an opportunity to present more skills and traits to lift them up or and out of the military or to help them after they've left the military. And it's really oriented towards stopping the suicides, giving people purpose in their life, something to go and do and be purposeful in. And so with that, we found purpose in that conversation. And the partners and I had conversations in over 18 months with We launched an initiative and a capitalization to go out and acquire the first five companies on our way to acquiring what we hopefully will be 50 million companies in five years is kind of our overarching, big, hairy, audacious goal. We are now in the stages of acquiring and have a letter of intent to acquire our first company. It does about 11 million a year in e-commerce sales.
00:25:09
Speaker
And as we roll those forward, operators from the community will be able to apply to become an operator in that business. They will be trained by us to come to their 10,000 hours of mastering the business. And after five years, they have an opportunity to acquire the business away from us. We're even putting in a line item to build up a little fund that can be used for the operator when the time comes for them to acquire. they'll have a lift up, creating a generational wealth opportunity for their family. So you're turning veterans into entrepreneurs.
00:25:40
Speaker
That's it. And we're training them over five years to run their own business. Sounds great. Really very good. I hope you're very successful with that. Thank you, sir. Perhaps something we need to think about as well in the United Kingdom. I think it's ah an initiative of purpose and value. I like it much more than just the profit aspects. It now pulls in additional profit aspects of faith and family and friends.
00:26:00
Speaker
ah While finances are a part of that, it also gives the opportunity for freedom. And that's kind of what we're all shooting for, isn't it? Very much so. Very much so. Can you just remind people about the title of the book that you've written as well, please? Yeah.
00:26:11
Speaker
Yes, it's called Almost Automated Income with FBA, and it is tied to building a profitable lifestyle-driven business, possibly exiting for millions, and even doing it without any e-commerce experience as you're trained into the operations.
00:26:24
Speaker
That's brilliant. And the name of this fund that you are supporting as well? Yes, a Patriot Growth Capital. You can go to patriotgrowthcapital.com and check it out. Yeah, we'll put all of the details in the description. Thank
Advice on Taking Action and Opportunities
00:26:36
Speaker
you. But for the moment, you know Neil, i have really enjoyed this conversation. i have learned a lot and thank you sir you've inspired me a little bit as well. But thank you very much today. It's been fantastic. Well, thank you for having me on, Michael. And I appreciate it. The last thing I would just say for anybody listening, and as anybody should understand, is I tell my own children, imperfect action is better than no action at all. So remember that your opportunity begins at the end of your excuses.
00:27:02
Speaker
That is true. The opportunity begins at the end of your excuses. That is very good. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir, for having me on. It's been an honor. Pleasure.
00:27:13
Speaker
I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Neil Twat, who is on a mission to help veterans become entrepreneurs. You can find out more about both of us at abbasida.co.uk.
00:27:31
Speaker
I am sure that you will have enjoyed this episode of the Independent Minds as much as Neil and I have enjoyed making it. Please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere.
00:27:43
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abusida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think.
00:27:55
Speaker
Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.