Brett:

I’m excited about our next guest. He is the founder and CEO of Voltage Digital Marketing. He has been launching operating and growing private label e-commerce businesses for the last nine years. As of today, he and his clients have sold over $100 million in plus and physical products primarily through the Amazon FBA sales channel, he shares his blueprint for how to build an online business that can generate a passive six-figure income and just hold months while setting up the business from potentially for potentially millions in sales within 18 months. Please welcome to the show with me, Neil Twa. Neil, how are you doing?

Neil:

Good, Brett, thanks for having me on, man, it’s good to be here.

Brett:

Excited to get to know you a little bit better. Here on this show, and for our listeners getting snow for the first time, would you give us a little bit more about your story and your current focus?

Neil:

Give you a few minutes on that stuff that might be of interest. It’s not maybe applicable to my mom or whatever. I started in the e-commerce stuff. When I dropped out of college in my third year, I went to school on a full-ride music scholarship, but then realized I didn’t want to live in a van down by the river, I wanted to obviously increase my wealth, get my business going and do all kinds of stuff. Because of the timeframe that I was looking at. No one could literally teach me how to do international or e-commerce at that point in the world, because it was just getting started. I went out into the corporate world, pulled myself up by my bootstraps, got into management, and into senior management eventually got into sprint PCs is it launched which was really cool to watch the first mobile phone, go to market. They got picked up by IBM, it’s been almost five years at IBM building companies within companies that didn’t work on work on POS for less than a million dollars.

We worked in enterprise-level, financial, and big tech and customer service mobile areas, as well as e-commerce, set out on my own, and just got into management consulting. For a lot of high-end companies started building my own company up, got involved in more online marketing, around 2009 found had an aptitude for media buying. I got very good at driving traffic to other people’s businesses. I woke up one day and said, you know what I should be building my own products and businesses that way. I got involved in the physical e-commerce of space, which led me to find out that you could actually sell products on Amazon.com around 2010, and I was like, this is an amazing opportunity. nobody’s really taking good advantage of this yet. Let me see what we can do. Fast forward nine years later, we have a software team. Coaching and mentorship, we have a digital agency, we launched these businesses, we operate them for our clients, some of it even 100% passive for them, as well as exiting and acquiring brands now, through our portfolios brand, in which we literally build these companies for exit.

Brett:

We’re talking about building your business with the exit in mind, and this is Neil Twa. By the way, can learn more about Neil Twa at voltage D as in David M as, in Mary calm, it’s VoltageDM.com. But Neil, before we go there, I want to help our listeners and myself get to know you a little bit better. I want you to go back and I want you to put yourself in the high school days, maybe the university days, and if the younger Neil, and I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts in this life. Some people call them superpowers. Some people call them strengths, I believe the God-given gifts they’ve been given to us to be a blessing and help to others. I’m curious, what are the one or two gifts that you believe you were given? How does that help how you help and bless people today?

Neil:

In the end, one of the things I finally realized about building business and building opportunity, building wealth, and networking was it’s who you know, that gets you in and it’s what you know, that keeps you there. As well as your network even can do. You obviously have to know what you’re doing. I had learned through the school of hard knocks to learn how to kind of do networking. The fluidity of business for me is like a moving River. Because through high school and college I played music as I mentioned, I went to school on a music scholarship. I love jazz and classical specifically jazz is an improvisation and I found that business gave me the most flexibility to create and adapt and change and move when my business partner likes to joke now as I’m the guy that jumps off the cliff without a parachute, and he comes with me and after nine years he now learns to build the parachute on the way down, which isn’t his biggest comfort zone.

But it is my Change and adaptability reinventing myself through life through different business models for being in the oil and gas space and having patents for wireline technologies in the oil and gas space to ending up in high tech, then ending up back into e-commerce, which was my original love, and the reason why I even dropped out of college. You know, being flexible, accepting changes the normal process of life, these are been things that I have, I believe been gifted with to see the optimism and the possibilities of them not be to really differ by the difficulties, but overcome those objectives. With a positive mindset with a positive attitude and the realization that I can just keep shifting gears and changing directions and flowing with that river, as it’s changed on which has created a lot of opportunities for me.

Brett:

I think have changed flexible adaptability, I think of the honeybadger. A little bit right, and you can just put up. I a little bit honeybadger, and me too. That’s really cool. Thanks for sharing that. Now let’s dive into the number one Secret to Building your business with the exit in mind. When you’re coaching, consulting, even for yourself, what’s the number one way to make sure you’re keeping the exit in mind?

Neil:

At the end of the day, a profitable product, build a profitable brand and build a profitable company, and obviously a good profit and loss statement. It’s really understanding the customer solution, the number one thing is really putting yourself in the mind of someone else really stopping, as they say, to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes to really understand the solution that you’re trying to provide for that product that’s going to build a brand of solutions for a specific kind of person, or what we refer to as an avatar profile of a person, if you can really put yourself into that person’s needs and wants and desires, and really adapt what they’re doing and understand what solutions and things they’re trying to do through a product format.

That’s the way we solve those on a basis of products, then you can double if you double your understanding of the customer, you will double your revenue. We really spend a lot of time putting ourselves into the market focus where we’ve gotten really good at reading with the market once as opposed to telling the market what at once. I think that comes from a bit of adaptability and flexibility in my past to really look at our customers. The number one ticket for us is really defining that really good customer avatar for us, it has to do with a bit of a solution-oriented nature. Let me give you an example. That means instead of, for example, looking at a customer base that says, I’m willing to wait for an hour and pay $300, to have that abscessed tooth taken care of from the dentist, we’re looking for the customer base that says, you know what, I want that out in 10 minutes, I’m willing to pay $500 for it.

That’s the solution that I’m looking for, and if you provide that level of solution, certain aspects of the business model workout, then a lot of people focus on the idea that if I don’t sell the $300 solution, I’m not going to have a mass-market appeal, which is actually kind of a stinking thing, and as I refer to it, the truth is there are just as many people buying the $500 solution as the $300 solution. Really, the secret is understanding that customer avatar really driving into the solutions, that they’re looking to solve what they’re really trying to solve, not you necessarily, which is typically a profit-oriented focus, but a solution-driven business model with products that actually made that solution.

Brett:

I like that you double your understanding of your client or customer and double your income, understand your avatar, making sure you’re providing a solution that they really want, not one that perhaps you think you need to provide Is that a fair summary?

Neil:

Fair summary, because that leads to a multi-product brand structure. With each product being profitable, that goes to market, a minimum profit requirement of that product to be accepted into the portfolio, it has to perform over a 90 day period under certain metrics and conditions that run into an annual run rate for that product. That’s our way of looking at it from a bit of it, as long as we’re fulfilling that customer need will meet those requirements. All of that obviously rolls into a good 12 you know, at 36 month run rate of growth your year to year growth, and of course, the increase of that portfolio and brand that gives it a good exit potential.

Brett:

That’s step number one, what’s step number two, to building your business with the exit in mind.

Neil:

Step number two is ensuring that you have good systems processes and an efficient game plan in place to repeat that model, it’s not so much that I get up to the plate, and to borrow a baseball analogy, except that I’m going to hit a home run every time that I get up to the plate. If you get in bed at 200 on average you’re going to be in the top 10%. It’s what I call the lottery mindset mentality. It’s this idea that if I step up to the plate in business, I’m going to hit a homerun and anything shy of that is not going to be acceptable. What we look at is diversification of the product line, even the brand line to lower the risk and increase and kind of widen the yes on the brand with our customers to ensure the stability of the business, and through that comes a process or a pipeline.

Which we have developed over years of doing these businesses and growing them and exiting them. It’s more of a predictable base. Again, the process and procedures and game plan are very important to building a standard operating procedure that can be repeatable, not just for us, but for our clients. It’s one thing to say I built a great store and I bought another great store and I bought another great business. It’s something else to say I have many clients, who have exceeded their own expectations even exceeded our expectations of following a simple methodology that we deployed, that they can take and replicate to scale.

Brett:

Got it. Systems, processes, procedures, building a consistent way to be able to diversify and apply that to perhaps different product lines, to diversify your income streams, and making that all just seem together. Is that a fair summary?

Neil:

That’s a fair summary.

Brett:

Pretty cool. I like that. All right. By the way, you can learn more about Neil Twa Voltage D as in David M, as in Mary.com, it’s VoltageDM.com. What’s step number three.

Neil:

Step number three is really understanding what the market will accept for the product and brand. Let’s take a look at kind of what’s an acceptable measure of business, for e-commerce companies. If you have a single channel of Amazon only what’s called fulfilled by Amazon or FBA, it’s a way for us to automate the procedures, the process of the end mile to the customer, for the products we choose, without us having to have a lot of operations, overhead or employees. That gives us the flexibility and freedom of building a model with a lot of upside of economies of scale, gives us operational independence. In many ways, those are all attractive qualities. The third thing is really to build that business that’s attractive to the buyer. All right has to have good upside potential, meaning that it has not been fully exposed to the market for the products and brands you’re serving.

Amazon, for example, is about 31% of the e-commerce sales market. The other 60 is 70 plus percent is out in the world of e-commerce, it could be major science, it could be QVC. It could be other components of radio, television, ads, etc. that that brand has not made itself a household name for yet. As we use the FBA channel, and we look forward, if it’s a single only channel, and we’re going to sell that, in the last 18 months, there’s been almost $7 billion deployed in buying only that Amazon FBA channel, there are about 62 plus aggregators now that are purchasing these and adding them to portfolios and brands, what others are using as wealth without Wall Street strategy. They’re purchasing these companies inside the aggregators and allowing you basically the aggregator to become the passive income opportunity for the investor.

We work in a process kind of similar to that by teaching people to understand how to build with the buyer in mind and the exit in mind so that everything is staged up from the very bottom of the foundation of business building. That business can be exited, that’s down to even the chart of accounts, the bookkeeping, the processes, the automation and components of that, as well as the ability to make it passive. For the person who’s running this company prior to actually exiting things, we actually can exit the client from the business prior to actually taking it to market, making it very attractive for the buyer who’s looking at this, now it has to at least have a seven-figure revenue and have a minimum of 20% net profit on it. If that’s the case, in that business, it’s a very good acquisition for many partners out there in the space.