Maximizing Amazon Sales, with Ashley Kinkead

In 2021, Amazon had over 40% of the US Ecommerce sales with the next closest competitor (Walmart) at 7%. Some Ecommerce entrepreneurs might look at the 40% number as disheartening. How can they be expected to compete when all of the e-commerce is dominated by that brand? Others might look at this statistic as an opportunity because you can actually sell your products on Amazon, and you don’t necessarily have to have an amazing website right away. There’s a cost, of course, as Amazon can take up to 30% of the revenue off the top. So how do we sort all this out? We bring on Amazon expert Ashley Kinkead.

Ashley Kinkead is the founder of Private Label Mastery and the host of the Private Label Mastery Podcast.

Today’s episode of Deal Closers is hosted by Izach Porter, brought to you by WebsiteClosers.com, and is produced by Earfluence.

Transcript

Ashley Kinkead: I think that’s kind of the amazing thing about Amazon, it’s so easy to focus on, you know, the big guys, the big $10 million sellers, but there’s so many hundreds of thousands of people making $5,000 a month or making $8,000 a month. So that’s really the beauty of Amazon. I think anybody can, or any eCommerce place can just jump in and get, be a part of it.

Izach Porter: You’re listening to the Deal Closers podcast, brought to you by websiteclosers.com, a show about how to build your e-commerce business to be profitable, scalable, and one day even sellable. I’m Isaac Porter and on the show today we have Ashley Kinkead, founder of Private Label Mastery and host of the Private Label Mastery Podcast.

Let’s talk about Amazon. In 2021, Amazon had over 40% of the US e-commerce sales with the next closest competitor as Walmart, who was at 7%. Some e-commerce entrepreneurs might look at the 40% number as disheartening. How can they be expected to compete when all of the e-commerce is dominated by that brand?

Others might look at this statistic as an opportunity because you can actually sell your products on Amazon, and you don’t necessarily have to have an amazing website right away. There’s a cost, of course, as Amazon can take up to 30% of the revenue off the top. So how do we sort all this out? Let’s bring an Amazon expert on, Ashley Kinkead, into the conversation. Hey Ashley, how’s it going?

Ashley: It’s going well, Isaac. Super excited to talk about the world of Amazon FBA today, so thanks for having me.

Izach: Yeah, thanks for being here. Just doing a little research about you before the show, you know, I checked out your LinkedIn and I was intrigued by your LinkedIn title. It says I left my job as a teacher in corporate marketing exec to start an Amazon business. So tell us about that, that journey. What’s the background of that story and how did that come to fruition for you?

Ashley: Well, I, thank you so much again for having me. I’m excited. Just a, an amazing opportunity to be here to share my story of, e-commerce journey. But yes, I never went into Amazon FBA with the intention of even starting a business. Much less exiting my business at some point. and that’s something I wanna teach about today, like ways you can kind of set yourself up from the beginning to exit your Amazon store instead of trying to figure it out, you know, years down the road.

But, I saw Amazon FBA as a vehicle to make some extra money, you know, kind of some side income. So, and I think that’s how a lot of people get into Amazon. You know, they sell some things around the house, they wanna get rid of some things. They don’t really go into it with the intention of, you know, creating a seven figure, eight figure company.

So, I used to be a substitute teacher. I mean, I have no business background whatsoever. No, you know, business degree. No one taught me how to structure a business correctly or anything like that. So, I started off in 2015 as an Amazon FBA seller, and I was just selling used books around the house.

I mean, the most bootstrapped way that you can start a business, right? You know, taking a book for a dollar and selling it for $10 on Amazon FBA. And I realized, wow, this is a, a really profitable but simple way to make some extra money. So, like a lot of your listeners, you know, I was making 500 a dollars a month, a thousand dollars a month in Amazon FBA sales, and Amazon was all I ever did.

I, I didn’t do any websites. I didn’t do any eBay. I really just loved Amazon because it was so easy. I mean, honestly, back then it was super, super easy to become an Amazon seller. And, you know, some, it was kind of the golden days of selling on Amazon. So anyone could be a seller, you could be in any category.

There was no invoices or supplier relationships needed. So, I realized, wow, this is a, a really amazing vehicle, not just to make, you know, a thousand dollars or a few hundred bucks, but to actually make this my full-time job. And so that was originally my goal was to make some extra money. Then I started getting to, you know, five, 10, $20,000 a month in revenue really quickly.

And Amazon allowed me to scale in a way that I don’t think I could have done on a website. You know, I didn’t know how to get a shopping card. I didn’t know how to do Shopify, didn’t know anything about SEO or traffic or you know, anything like that. This was before ClickFunnels. This was before anyone can have a website kind of thing.

So, grew my business from zero, like truly bootstrapping it with a credit card up to over a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue the first year. And that was from book selling and retail arbitrage.

Izach: Okay, so the whole first year was arbitrage, and so, and so at some point you pivoted and started to introduce your own private label products. So how did you make that transition? And what was your first private label product?

Ashley: Great question. Well, I love to talk about private label just because that’s what we do and we’re really heavy in private label on Amazon now, but I realized at some point I was super tired. I mean, I had a huge team of people here in Dallas outsourcing and, you know, finding products and it was just exhausting.

I had like 15,000 skews on Amazon, so 15,000 different product list listed on Amazon. and I went from 15,000 down to 15 with private label brand. So just a total change of the business. I was really excited by private label cause I’m just kind of the creative type of person, you know, I like to think about how can I make a new product or how can I do that better?

And you know, for a lot of your listeners who maybe are doing arbitrage or are selling wholesale, I started to look at those products and think about how can I make them better than what’s already out there? How can I differentiate them? And that’s what I did. And I actually went into the health and beauty space.

My very first private label product was bath bombs, which was just a really simple replenishable little $8 product that you can sell en masse. They’re super, super profitable. You know when you’re going to private label route. So that was my first private label product was bath bombs. And I’ve actually taught a lot of people how to get into the bath soap space on Amazon, you know, e-commerce. So that was my first PL

Izach: Okay, cool. I, I love the bath bomb concept because it’s, it’s, it’s a consumable product, so you automatically get re repeating purchase rate built into it. So it was, that’s pretty good as a model. So you’ve done a lot more than bath bomb since, 2016, I guess. Have you ever failed with a product?

Ashley: Oh gosh. I’ve had more failures than successes. Like I’ve had more failed products than successful products on Amazon. I always like to emphasize that, man, I’ve had private label products that just got such horrible reviews. We launched a charcoal bath bomb a couple years ago that just tanked and we had to just destroy everything at Amazon FBA because my seller rating was just plummeting.

We were just getting horrible negative reviews on Amazon, and I don’t know if you know this, but you can’t do that on Amazon. If you want to maintain the buy box or maintain any kind of business. So that was hard. Last, you know, tens of thousands of dollars at that.

Izach: Did it make the water black?

Ashley: It did, it did. It made the water black and people, I’m like, Hello? It’s a charcoal bath bomb. You not know, not know this is gonna happen? Definitely pick some bad product ideas over the years, but I think as you go and you develop your knowledge as a private label seller you can learn how to think better and start to think about how the customer actually thinks.

But yeah, I’ve definitely made a lot of mistakes, but at this point I’m pretty good at sourcing and thinking about what our customers want and you know, really making those educated decisions. So, but yeah, lots of bad products over the years. Mm-hmm.

Izach: Well, I, I love talking to entrepreneurs and you know, my whole focus is, is e-commerce. I started selling on Amazon myself in 2017, and also have made a lot of mistakes. And I think one of the things that, as a common denominator, of successful entrepreneurs, they generally have a lot of failures along the way, but they keep moving forward and learning from those experiences. And in some cases even they’re good at kind of identifying failure quickly and then pivoting and moving on. 

So, you know, what were, what were some of the, the early hard lessons that you learned relative to product selection? 

Ashley: Great question Related to product selection, I think just go wide, not deep. I think that’s a pretty common ac, you know, saying in the Amazon seller community. I’ve always kind of followed that narrative, you know, my very first private label product, for example, I placed an order of 10 units, 10 units of a product and put it on Amazon just to see if it would sell.

You know, I’ve never, I never started off with a really big initial order. as far as product selection, I think, you know, so many sellers try to go like way too competitive on Amazon, like top 10 product category, you know, or 1%, you know, we’ll go all the way up to like 10%, you know, the top 10% of a category.

So there’s just a lot of gold up there. so going too competitive. I’ve definitely picked some products that were just too saturated on Amazon. As well as, just quality issues. I think in the beginning you don’t really understand how important like product quality is when you’re sourcing and finding manufacturers.

And as an Amazon seller, you know, maintaining your, your, your defect rate really, really low is like everything. So you know, quality issues, but mostly with product selection I think it just goes back to Isaac, like relying on data. We are very data driven. So every decision we make in our Amazon business is based on like as much facts as possible of what’s already selling on Amazon. 

So I guess, you know, just making decisions not based on data would be another mistake that I’ve made prior in sourcing.

Izach: Awesome. Alright, so, so your company is called Private Label Mastery. We’ve got, you know, we’ve got a wide variety of listeners on the show. Some of them are just thinking about getting into e-commerce. Some of them are extremely experienced. But for someone who’s maybe new to the space, can you talk about what private label means and then, kind of how you get somebody to the mastery point.

Ashley: Of course. Sure. So I always use a really simple analogy. If you walk down the aisle, the ketchup aisle, and there’s 50 bottles of ketchup, that’s a private label product, you know, ketchup, you read the ingredients. The same product on the, you know, the ingredients label 99%. It’s just a different label on the front.

You know, why does this one cost $5 and why is this one $3? It’s branding, its quality, it’s all these different things. So private label is essentially taking a product and making it your own, labeling it as your own product. It’s not going out and inventing something or getting an entirely new patent or coming up with an entirely new idea.

Although we do that on Amazon, we have patents and things like that, but it’s pretty simple. Selling a product that’s already existing, it’s probably already on Amazon, and labeling it as your own or creating a slightly differentiated product. That’s what private label is, and I think the mastery comes from today in 2022.

You know, when I started private label, it was a lot easier than it is today. Today, the, the barrier to entry is definitely higher on Amazon. you have to have those good relationships with suppliers or be willing to get them, and I think that today on our business, we really focus on like finding completely new products to sell on Amazon.

Like looking at completely untapped opportunities. You know, when you start going amazon.com and you search, for example, a certain kind of bath bomb, we wanna be the first one to the market. Or we wanna find products that aren’t even on Amazon and just come in and dominate page one of that search term.

So I think that’s really like how you master private label today, is thinking just a step beyond like the typical Amazon seller and really A, finding completely new opportunities on Amazon, or B, finding ways to, differentiate or improve what’s already there. It can be so slight, for example. We’ll do a color change or we’ll do a size difference.

You know, if it’s a 12-ounce bath product, we’ll do an 18-ounce bath product if we feel that that’s what customers would like to buy. we do a lot of multi-packs, we do a lot of bundles, we do a lot of, just competitive analysis. We, I love to read reviews on Amazon and see like what customers are saying and then of the top 10 products of a category and then just make a product based on what that customer said, like, we didn’t like it this way, we want a bigger one. So I think that’s the opportunity to truly master private label is kind of thinking a bit more advanced.

Izach: Gotcha. What kind of tools are you using? So, you know, I, I know personally I use, I have Jungle Scout and Helium 10. My perception is that over the years I’ve had to get much more sophisticated with my, the, the analysis that I do to before I pick a product. So like what, what are your thoughts around that?

Does that, does that work? Is, is the data more important now than it was and is there still space? Is there still a niche for a new seller to come in and find space in Amazon and be successful?

Ashley: At Private Label Mastery, we do use Helium 10. We love it. It’s really one of our favorite software tools for product research. We also have our own internal in-house. Product research tool that we use with all of our students, that kind of speeds up the product research process, still using Amazon’s api.

But I think it’s really about, yes it is. You do have to find that opportunity. You know, we don’t just look at the same exact products as everyone else. At Helium 10, we try to make a little bit more advanced decisions. We like to track a product for seven days to see its daily sales velocity and its conversion rates.

Conversion rates are everything on Amazon. I’ve even seen, you know, products having like 50% conversions. So it’s all about, data and collecting data over time. You know, we wanna see, I like consistent products that sell year-round. They’re not seasonal, they’re not q4, they’re like real evergreen products that just sell every single day, you know, at least five units a day.

And we love consumable products in our business too. So it’s really about, you know, data. But Helium 10 is great. I’ll even just look at Amazon, you know, look on Amazon without a software tool and just, I can just see really quickly opportunities based on best seller’s rank, based on keywords, based on reviews. But yeah, we use Helium 10. It’s really great.

Izach: And so if, if, if someone’s taking your class or you’re, you’re working with them maybe on a consulting basis, are you helping them with product selection and coming up with those ideas for them to launch?

Ashley: Yes, we, we do that in Yeah, absolutely fully. We have over 50,000 private label products on Amazon right now, so we work with thousands of sellers around the world from, you know, lots of new folks who are just kind of getting to that 5,000 a month in revenue mark, all the way up to multimillion dollar private label sellers.

So we help folks with every aspect of it, the product selection, the research, the backend maintenance of their accounts, the supplier relationships, the product selection. So we really see it as a cohesive thing. You know, so many people come into Amazon, Isaac and think, well, I just need help finding the product.

Usually there’s a lot more they actually need help with, with like, thinking like a business owner, you know, taxes, you know, how do I set up my entities and things like that. So we try to look at the whole cohesive approach of someone’s private label business. But yeah, product selection is key. You know, I think it’s super important.

And if you can really just kind of nail down that skill, then you can be successful on Amazon as long as you stick with it. And like I mentioned all my, you know, bad products earlier, you don’t give up with one bad product and you’re willing to just stick with it. You know, all the most successful Amazon sellers I’ve seen over the year at Isaac were super consistent.

You know, they show up every month, you know, they’ve been going at this for years, you know, they don’t give up. You know, they’re always willing to learn new things and kind of go with things. So I think those are the qualities, you know, in 2022 that just really help you be an Amazon seller.

Izach: I guess a follow-on question around the work you’re doing at, at Private Label Mastery. If someone is an existing Amazon seller, maybe they’ve got a, a, a product and you know they’re doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in, in revenue, can you help them with scaling and do you provide like management services for their Amazon account? Can you kind of help an existing seller from where they’re at and grow?

Ashley: Absolutely. We have lots of folks come in, you know, every day who already have an existing six or seven figure Amazon business, and typically the first step is we kind of do an audit. We always audit an Amazon store. There’s so many things that usually need to be fixed from settings to keywords to photos, to fulfillment settings, to things like that.

Lately we’re seeing a lot of folks coming in who just really don’t understand Amazon, or are using, fulfillment by merchant. And so we usually, typically will put them on FBA or they don’t have the buy box. They don’t understand like how to get the buy box on Amazon. So yes, we do help folks come in with pretty good size businesses.

Typically, what we’ll do is fix their existing products as best as we can get them selling. Sometimes we’ll just sell through and just start over with a new ASIN. and then generally we’ll start with what we call a private label mastery product, meaning following our specific protocols, our specific systems for sourcing as well as suppliers that we help them to match with.

So it’s always better if someone comes in kind of green and doesn’t really invested a lot of money or made a lot of mistakes. It’s just easier to get off the ground that WAY.

Izach: Yeah. So, you wrote a book. I don’t know how. Recently it was, but it’s Million Dollar E-com Secrets. I, I looked it up, I downloaded it on, on Kindle, of course, on Amazon. I think you; you have a chapter in there about the bath bombs and, and kind of how you started that. And there was a quote at the beginning that said, what I have done is not as important as who I am becoming.

So I, I thought that was a cool kind of inspirational quote that could apply to a, a lot of sellers who maybe have struggled with, with some of the, the products they’ve selected, but still want to, you know, press on and, and turn it into something much bigger. They feel that that passionate drive, that kind of the entrepreneurial drive to, you know, continue moving forward.

And you know, is that philosophy something that just resonates with you personally and kind of how, how did you start to think like that?

Ashley: Well, I, you know, I think entrepreneurship, Isaac is like one of the best self-development exercises someone could ever do. I mean, I don’t have kids, but I think it has to be up there with having kids, you know, truly just challenging yourself. Calling you out daily, forcing you to be better or you don’t, or you can’t do it.

So for me, it’s definitely about the development that you get to have along this journey. Yeah, making money’s great, making millions of dollars, great. but at the end of the day, I think, who you become along the journey is just as important as whatever you earn or whatever kind of successes you achieve.

And, I’ve just seen entrepreneurship change my life, you know, over the last couple years. Really just completely changed my whole perspective on things. So yeah, it’s an amazing exercise and, I would just encourage anyone out there who’s maybe not at my level or wants to get to this level, like, stick with it.

Stick with it, you know, don’t give up. get help. Like get, you know, get help. If you’re not, if you’re not where your business wants to be, there’s so many people out there, whether or not you work with us is fine. there’s so many Amazon courses and e-commerce mentors who have done it and paved the way and, you know, built that six or seven figure business, like get help, come up with a plan and, you know, really focus, really focus on one e-commerce business.

One reason I think I’ve had success is like, first of all, my first business was Amazon. That was all. That was all I did for five years. I focused 3000% on my goals with that. Then I exited it and then I started PLM. This is all I do. You know, I’ve got that laser focus on one business. You know, a lot of e-commerce business owners, Isaac, are kind of have that shiny object syndrome where they have the website, the, you know, all these different things.

So I would just encourage your, you know, folks to just build something special. One thing, get it going before you, you know, start something else.

Izach: Yeah. so you mentioned that you exited your, your first business. So how many exits have you had and can you talk a little bit about the process of, you know, growing a business and then ultimately selling it?

Ashley: Sure. It was very complicated. It took about a year and a half and I exited it for six figures, which I was really pleased with my first private label brand. And it definitely wasn’t something that I expected, but I found an outside, you know, company. And today we actually have exited, I believe, hundreds of Amazon stores, not mine, but with our clients.

So, Amazon businesses are really hot commodities. It’s kind of amazing, like how many of our clients with really small, simple businesses get offers to exit out of them with Amazon. in my experience, they usually don’t take them. It’s my knowledge. I don’t typically do that and I, I’m not in our team, the person that manages that.

But it’s amazing what. You know, a really simple product-built op up can actually sell for on Amazon these days. So lots of folks getting offers, lots of folks choosing to exit. But for me it was kind of a, when I exited my business, it was a strategic decision. I didn’t want to continue to run it.

It was taking up a lot of my time and I was starting Private Label Mastery and so, I just wanted to transition out and be able to do something else. And, it was hard. It was definitely challenging. I had a lot of help. I had an accountant helping me. I had my, my pro, my CPA advising me along that process.

So, I would definitely encourage your listeners to like, look at their options. it’s my understanding, you know, you typically wanna be in business for at least a year to get an exit these days. you wanna have a pretty good, you know, really good structure. There’s so much that what goes into selling a business now, you have to have the email list.

You need to have a really clear organization chart. You need to have, you know, everything that you can prove to someone that why do they wanna purchase your business? And so I think that’s what important to think about.

Izach: Yeah. And of course that’s what you know at websiteclosers.com, that’s what we focus and specialize on and, and, and really kind of helping sellers prepare all those details and get ready to take the company to market and then create a competitive environment so they’re maximizing the value and the structure of their, of their business at their exit is kind of where we come into play.

Getting back to your business now. So what are the, maybe like the three most common mistakes that you see e-commerce business owners making?

Ashley: Hmm. There’s, there’s a lot specifically with Amazon, I would say like the number one thing is just not regarding the rules when you’re starting and, you know, coming in and just like kicking yourself in the foot before you’ve even gotten started yet, you do need to like, Understand the rules of the platform that you’re selling on.

You know, you can’t have multiple Amazon accounts. You know, the privilege to sell somewhere like Amazon or eBay is worth millions of dollars. So we always try to be ethical in our business dealings, you know, we just respect the opportunity to sell on Amazon as a long-term play. So, that would be one thing we see. 

I think, not thinking long term. You know, when I started my Amazon business, it kind of felt like a cash grab for a long time. Oh, well, you know, where am I gonna be next month? Or where, where am I gonna be the next day? Especially with your, you know, the Deal Closer is really thinking about how am I ever gonna exit this?

I heard a really great quote at a conference a couple weeks ago. He said, you’re gonna exit your business someday. You know, someday you’re gonna exit your business. Whether or not you want to. So you always will. So I think thinking about like having a long-term vision, you know, where your business is gonna be in five years, or 10 years or 20 years. 

Having a mission, a vision, a value statement, I don’t think most Amazon sellers do something like that. You know, I didn’t have that. when I was selling on Amazon, but it really makes all the difference in being able to, you know, attract people to wanna come work at your company, to wanna be a part of your brand. So I wish that, you know, I wish more people would think about that way with their Amazon business, just the long-term aspects of it. And also, you know, what your mission is, like, why you create your products or why you create your brand.

Izach: Awesome. Those are great points. I think one of the things that we’ve seen in the M and A market, in particular over the last six months, you know, some of the, some of the aggregator, buyers have slowed down quite a bit. And so there’s a big focus on quality and there’s a major focus on, on brand and, you know, who, who’s your, who’s your customer avatar? What does this brand mean to the consumers? 

And so I think all the things that you mentioned, you know, having. Kind of some of those like blocking and tackling things like having a, a mission statement and a vision statement, and being able to clearly identify who your consumers are. Those do add value at the exit process because it helps define why your brand exists, right?

Ashley: Right.

Izach: Yeah. Amazons really based on an algorithm, right? So like the, the search results are algorithmic. How do you navigate that? You know, you don’t have control over the algorithm, so, and it, and it constantly changes and evolves. So how do you kind of stay at the front end of that and make sure that the decisions you’re making are relevant, you know, today in might be different than what it was last week.

Ashley: Hmm. Well, there’s a lot of things. You know, always optimizing. We’re always optimizing everything we do in our Amazon businesses, so it can be simple as, you know, split testing. We do a lot of split testing, you know, seeing what works best with keywords, with titles, with photos. It’s really amazing.

Sometimes the, the simplest change with an Amazon listing can triple yourselves. It’s, it’s crazy. So it can be simply a shift of words in a title. it could be adding some really volume rich keywords in the back end. Photos are everything. You know, we, we typically will do like complete photo cleanses with our clients, Amazon stores, just really making sure they convert really, really well.

So, and most of us, you know, in our, in PLM, we have multiple private label products, like we really believe in differentiation. I’ve never only had one product. an Anthony who works at our team, I think he has like 14 private label products in his store. Robert has eight or nine. so it’s really just a matter of kind of having, you know, different, your hands in a couple different cookie jars, so to speak. Because if one product, you know, goes outta stock right now, there’s a lot of supplier issues, a lot of backlogs that we’re ex, you know, we’re experiencing in our businesses. That way you always kind of have different faucets going.

It’s a matter of, always adjusting, always finding those new opportunities to enter the market. And then maintaining your listings as well as possible with those daily adjustments. There’s so many softwares out there. We use Helium 10. we use Splitly. we use our own softwares to, to manage and maintain and keep that going.

So there’s not really a, for a magic formula to staying on page one. We do a lot of pay per click. You know, I don’t know how much pay per click you’re typically seeing with your folks, but typically most of our businesses are like 40 to 50% pay per click driven our products.

Izach: Yeah, I don’t know what an, what an average would be from the clients I’m working with, but that sounds directionally correct at least. you know, I think PPC is a major traffic driver for anyone who’s trying to scale on Amazon.

Ashley: Correct.

Izach: So what’s a, what’s a couple of success stories you can share with us, from you, from the, your clients or the folks you’ve worked with?

Ashley: Oh my goodness. You know, we’ve had, so we primarily work with women. We work with a lot of women, private label sellers on Amazon, cause I’m a female. we’ve had women come in from corporate America and build, you know, seven figure private label brands on Amazon and then exit them. we’ve had women come in from, you know, doing five or $10,000 a month, Becky, and now she’s at $700,000 a month in private label sales. Took her three years to get there. There’s things like that. 

So, there’s just countless stories, but you know, what’s interesting to me is most people are really excited just to make 10 or, you know, 10 or $20,000 a month in revenue in a business. Not everyone has to have a million-dollar business. so gosh, we’ve just had so many amazing private label product launches that we’ve been a part of over the years, so it’s hard to quantify those success stories. But I love to hear of just, you know, A mom who we used to be a stay-at-home mom and now she’s supporting her family, or now she’s going on a vacation, or now she’s able to, you know, put her son in private school.

Just those little things like that, I think that’s kind of the amazing thing about Amazon, it’s so easy to focus on, you know, the big guys, the big $10 million sellers, but there’s so many hundreds of thousands of people making $5,000 a month or making $8,000 a month. So that’s really the beauty of Amazon. I think anybody can, or any eCommerce place can just jump in and get, be a part of it.

So,

Izach: Awesome. Yeah, I, I love those stories too. I, I get to work with a lot of Amazon sellers also, and I do love the founders that kind of started it up and grown it. And then, you know what, what I see is if someone’s scaled their business quickly on, on Amazon, one of the things you have to do is buy inventory.

So in, in a lot, a lot of cases, they make most of their money when they exit or they feel they’ve actually created the value before they’ve exited through the growth of the business, but they’ve reinvested those that cash a lot of times into, into scaling the inventory. And so then they, they realize that they’ve created something worth, you know, some millions of dollars and they have this big liquidity event and then they, they often are interested in like rolling part of that back in and doing it again. 

And I, I love those stories cuz it’s just, it’s really fun to, it’s, it’s fun to see people succeed like that and to kind of help them, you know, execute on it and be part of it. And I think, you know, the work you’re doing with Private Label Mastery is, is really, really cool work, really important for a lot of sellers to have access to experience and the, the tools and, and kind of the support that, that you’re providing. How can our listeners connect with you, Ashley?

Ashley: Sure. Well, they can grab a free copy of my book. they can go to ashleykinkead.com/welcome and they can download a copy of my book. I talk extensively about some of my private label products I’ve launched on Amazon. In that book, you can also head to my podcast. I’ve got the Private Label Mastery podcast.

We have over 130 episodes now, mostly focused on private labeling on Amazon. Really just the entire Amazon journey from start to finish. So my podcast and my book are, are two great resources as well as, you know, check out YouTube. Gosh, there are so many incredible resources to learn how to do private label on YouTube as well.

We’ve got a little, a little YouTube channel over there, but, my book and podcast would be the best places to go. Isaac.

Izach: All right. That was Ashley Kinkead. You can find her at ashleyKinkead.com/welcome. Or on Instagram where she’s ashleynkinkead. That’s K I N K E A D.

Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of the Deal Closers podcast, brought to you by websiteclosers.com. If you like the show, be sure to rate us, write a review and press the follow button, share it with your network.

Of course, if you’re looking for help selling your e-commerce business, be sure to visit websiteclosers.com. This episode was edited and produced by Earfluence. I’m Isaac Porter, follow me on LinkedIn, and we’ll see you next time on the Deal Closers Podcast.