How to Think Like the Top 1% of Amazon Sellers

[0:00]Most Amazon sellers don't fail because they work hard. They fail because they're thinking about this business the complete wrong way. After selling on Amazon for the past 6 years and building an Amazon business that has done over $40 million in sales, I've seen the same pattern over and over again. The sellers that are able to scale think completely different than the ones that struggle and end up quitting and staying in a 9-to-5 job. So, in this video, I'm going to be breaking down the mindset shifts that can take you from thinking like the bottom half to the top 1% of Amazon sellers. These are the same mindset shifts that allowed me to scale and the same ones that I see holding most new sellers back. If you get this part right, everything else becomes way easier. All right, let's get into it. So, one of the first things, and arguably one of the most important things that I don't see people do, is actually be able to think bigger. I remember back in 2020 when I first started, I had an extreme amount of limiting beliefs. I was making about 100k per year working for the New York City Department of Education, and at that time, I knew, living in New York, 100k was not going to get me to the lifestyle I wanted to get to. I was frustrated. And one of the biggest shifts that allowed me to start taking bigger bets and actually get into this business was meeting my partner, Shofy. At that time, Shofy was, I don't know if he's okay with me telling this, but I'm going to say it anyway. Shofy was making over 100k per month. [music] And simply by being around him and understanding the kind of money he was bringing in, what it allowed me to do is break this mental barrier that was keeping me stuck at 100k per month. I started believing that it was possible. >> [music] >> And one thing that I'm super adamant about is being in bigger rooms. Being around him allowed me to take some big swing, my whole little cojones, and get into business and start actually trying to make some more money, and change [music] the game. That year, we made 860k, but what limited us was >> [music] >> we started thinking that was a lot of money. The next thing we did was invest into a mentorship program with our mentors at the time who were doing eight figures per year. [music] And simply by being around them, it was not just the systems that we learned from them. It was actually just being around people making that much money that made us believe that it was possible. [music] Even today, what I think is the most important thing that I've done is back in 2024, I was extremely scared about scaling up another business. I was stuck at 50k a month and I was like, "Damn, man. I don't know how much further I could do this. I think I might quit." And I made an investment into a mentorship program around $4,000 a month and it felt really scary at that time. Even though we had the money, just saying, "Hey, I'm going to go drop $48,000 a year." felt a little uncomfortable. All right? I had invested like that before, but for whatever reason, I had a limiting belief. As soon as I got into that room, I started getting around in individuals who were doing multiple seven, eight figures in the [music] same business model. Getting around people doing $10 million a month and all of a sudden these limiting beliefs started to shift. At the end of the day, when you get into bigger rooms, when you get around people that are making, you know, more money than you, having a better life than you, at least how you describe it, what happens is you start believing it's possible. You start understanding that the people around you are just regular. They're nothing special. Well, some of them are. But, they're nothing special. So, you feel that you are closer to that goal than you really are. And what it allows you to do is accelerate growth. I'll tell you one last story about this and one that sticks with me all the way through. Remember back when we first were in our Amazon mentorship? At the time of us first joining into their $50,000 mentorship program, we were at an event with them in Vegas and there was a dude there who I met who we were walking around this trade show called ASD and we were talking, we were learning, etc. And at that time we were both speaking and we were both at around $300,000 per month. And I remember we were both like, "Hey, should we join a mentorship? Should we just do it to ourselves? We're making over $3 million a year. Like, what's the big deal? We could probably figure this out." And as I went back to New York, I talked to my business partner, Shaufin Tay, we made a decision to say, "You know what? Eff it. Let's take some money out of the bank account, 50k. Let's get into this program and let's see what happens." What that allowed us to do was go from 300k per month up to 1.2 million dollars per month in the next 12 months. We 4X the business. And I remember, I met that gentleman at an event in New Jersey. And I was he was talking to me and said, "Hey, man, how's business going?" I'm like, "Yeah, we're over a million dollars a month." He's like, "What?" I was like, "Yeah, man." He's like, "That quickly?" I was like, "Yeah." I was like, "How's business for you?" He was stuck at 300K per month still. He had not grown his business at all in the next 12 months while we had 4X it and made a whole lot more money. And as I spoke to him more, what I realized is he was in his comfort zone. We got to remember we are products of our environment. When we're around people, especially when you're making multiple, you know, six figures a month or even sometimes if you're making a few six figures a year, if you're around people or an environment where people make you feel like you're at the top of the mountain, you stop understanding there's another mountain to climb. I'm always a strong advocate for getting into bigger rooms. Sometimes it's paying for them. Sometimes it's just changing the environment. I just spent the past month in Miami. And when you're in Miami, you start feeling like a little small fish, right? Because everyone there, you know, not everyone, at least some people just show it, but a lot of people there make a ton of money. So, just being in that environment for the past month, going to Newport Beach, being around a lot of other wealthy people in December, what changes are reframe in my mind. Aggressively looking to scale one of our businesses to 20 million this year, other one to about 24 million this year, and this is all part of being in a bigger room, getting around people that make us feel like small fries. So, what I can stress, I wish I could stress it even more. If you want to get to the top 1% of anything, you have to start being around the people in the top 1% of their game. Because that's when you stop thinking about it like this like moonshot goal and you start normalizing in your head. This is what I see accelerate the growth. Now, the second thing, and this is what I feel like a new a lot of new sellers kind of struggle with, is not understanding that volume negates luck. See, the thing about it is what What see a lot of, especially new sellers get into the game, is they try to get everything perfect right off the bat, right? I just had a call with our coaching students yesterday, and as I went through all of our channels, what I was seeing is people are focused on the wrong crap. I heard one of our students say, "Man, I've been trying to set up my website for 2 weeks. I'm freaking stuck in a rut." I immediately messaged him like, "Dude, A, we could have helped you out with that. B, you could pay somebody on Fiverr like $40 and get the website out the way. But C, and most importantly, you are focused on the wrong things." At the end of the day, and this is what our coaching call yesterday was about, was the highest leverage task for you as a business owner in the Amazon space is keeping your pipeline full with new distributors and new brands. If your pipeline full, guess what? You have money on the table. Everything else is secondary. So, focusing on the highest priority task is super important. But understanding you don't want to be the person that's just like, "Man, if I don't get these next five emails right, the world's going to crumble. My next 100 emails right, the world's going to crumble." Absolutely not. We got to hit the ground running. We got to be okay with just taking some swings at bat and saying, "Hey, maybe these next 10 outreaches kind of suck and I don't get it right, but I got 10 more bats across the board. If I take 10 more free throws, I'm going to be a better free throw shooter than someone who took zero." So, what I hyper stressed on that call was A, pick the highest leverage task, always. Always know what the highest leverage task is. And 99% of the time, especially for new sellers, that's just getting more brand deals. And B, be okay with just understanding that the more you do something, the better you get at it. Like, [music] you can't come into the game and expect that, "Man, I'm going to be as good as someone that's been in the game for 6 years, 10 years, because I have that many more reps than you." And that's because I'm A-OK with just doing the work repetitively, making mistakes, and figuring out along the way. One of the biggest mindset shifts, I can't stress this enough, volume negates luck. [music] The more you do something, the better you get at it. And don't just think that if you mess up on the five next five 10 15 attempts, that the world is crumbling. No. There are over 400,000 different brands on Amazon right now. We have so many swings at bat that we can take, volume negates luck. Now, this goes into the third point, right? [music] Which is people who don't actually freaking do the math. What I see a lot of the times is after you've built momentum, you kind of understand your numbers, you understand after I do x amount of outreaches I can close x amount of deals, you can literally break it down to a science. In our business, our head of brand outreach, Nadia, we have broken it down to a science. For every 400 brands that she reached out to, we get five profitable brand direct [music] deals that we can close and that adds anywhere from 15 to 20K in weekly revenue to our business every single week. That's broken down to a science. So, what you want to do is after you swing in the bat this many times, just figure out, okay, for how much times do I do this do I actually get some more money across the board? What I see people screw up on this is they either fall into one bucket where I was talking to another lady and she [music] was so in her head. She was like, "Literally, I sourced 2,000 different brands." I'm like, [music] "Yeah, but did you reach out to any?" "No, no, no, no, no, I got to make sure that I No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." No, no, no, no, no. What you got to make sure is you start reaching out to them because you have 2,000 different opportunities in the bucket right now. Don't overanalyze. Get those 2,000 swings across the board and now you have hard data to understand what out for every output you do, what comes out the other side. It'll come down to a section of her life where she'll say, "Hey, for every 100 brands I reach out to, I get one profitable. So, I'm going to just do 100 outreaches over the next course of 3 to 5 days and I'm going to always have one brand coming in." But, be okay with actually doing the math, but you have to take the swings out there to get it done. The people that overanalyze, they freaking get stuck in a rut and they never grow. Whether that be, you know, investing to mentorship, whether that be starting a business, whether that be outreaching out to brands, whether that be just sending their orders in. They never take swings at bat, they completely overanalyze and they get scared of making any changes. On the other side of the spectrum, this is another thing that keeps people out of that top 1% is they go way too freaking hard and I know it sounds counterintuitive, but think about it like this. And let's say you have a $10,000 budget for inventory. You don't want to risk all $10,000 that you have into just one batch of inventory without doing test orders and keeping some capital in case doesn't work out. I made this mistake when I first started and it almost cost me just giving up on the business. I remember I had about 25k in my bank account when I first got started. I invested 2500. That was the correct move, right? A small 10% of my what I had, not everything. So to point if I'm making a mistake, I won't start crying. First order went well. I made about $800 in profit of that order. I was super excited. But what I started doing is moving a little too aggressively. Remember at one point I had so much money in inventory that I didn't have like a small rainy day fund. I remember when I made my like fourth orders in. First, I made two bad buys in a row. I had no guidance. I was just guessing. Once I invested into some a cheese dip and it was the wrong what you call a variation listed on Amazon. A little confusing, but either way, I just picked the wrong variation of the Amazon listing. Lost 5k on that order. We were eating cheese dip for like months in the office because of this mistake I made. It hurt. Right after that, I risked way too much capital. I had just made a mistake. I should have pulled back, reanalyzed, understood the mistake and make sure I don't make another one. Right after that, I made another mistake. I bought this It was like a like a white like a almost like a medical Lysol wipe. And it was brand new to Amazon. It didn't have a lot of sales history, about a month, but the numbers looked so good that I went balls to the wall. I invested 15k into that. First order went good. I reinvested every single thing back into it. Boom, I took a 15k loss right there and it almost wiped me out because I was playing ball too big. I think an important thing to understand as you grow in your business is risk management, right? It It affects your mental state and of course your finances when you put every single thing that you have into something. So, I like people that have a bigger budget and take a small part of the pie and just relax and invest at a small amount and scale up. Yesterday on that same call, I had one of our students say, "Hey, I got 50k to go. I want to put 50k in my first order." I was like, said, what if for whatever reason something just goes a little wrong in that 50k? Do you have anything left?" He said, "No." I said, "Yeah, we're not going to do that, dude. You're going to put 5 to 10k in your first order. No more than that." He said, "Man, I'm going to scale so quick so slow." And I'm like, "Okay, well, if it takes you another 2 3 months to scale, but you have a lot more certainty, wouldn't that help you sleep better at night? You, your spouse, your family." He said, "Yeah." I said, "We're going to scale this business, no doubt. But your first order, we're not going to put everything in your life savings 401k on the line. That is not going to make you a good business owner. You're going to be operating at a point of fear. So, risk mitigation, especially for new business owners, is super important and what separates people at the top 1%. I will not invest the whole house on anything right now. I will take some bigger swings at bat when I have some confidence, but at the end of [music] the day, we cannot bet the whole house because what it doesn't allow us to do is operate in a state of stoicism, calm, and calculated. [music] We operate in a state of fear and panic when we make those big decisions for most people. Some people can handle it, but most people honestly cannot. And the last thing, which I think is arguably the most important, where [music] at the end of the day, right, you want to always think about how you are not going to be a solopreneur. And all that means is at the end of the day, you want to outsource. I remember we just had a speaker come to one of our Doer Workshop. [music] He's a gentleman, he does over $7 million per year. He did it last year. He has two staff members. That just blew my mind cuz we have a lot more staff members than that. But, regardless of if you have two, five, 10, 15, or one, at the end of the day, outsourcing is what allows you for time freedom. The top 1%, we understand that we can only make a certain amount of decisions in the day. If we're the one filling out emails, right, the one filling out the new brand direct forms, the ones contacting the brands, the one creating the reorders, the one tracking our profitability, the ones doing everything under the sun, we have generally just gave ourselves another job. We want to outsource. Either outsource something that you're not that good at, or something you don't like doing. This is the leverage you want to create after you understand the full business. Now, you can't start off here. Don't try to outsource too early. Understand the full road map. Understand how the full business works, and then figure out where what you can outsource. One of the first things I outsourced was just responding to buy and sell messages. When people messaged me, that was just busy work. Next thing I outsourced was some was somebody just to fill out the actual forms to open accounts, right? It was busy work, right? Then I started outsourcing the person actually doing my reorders and tracking my numbers. Busy work, right? I would always take things one at a time off the plate until I got to a point where all I was doing in the business was communicating with brands that people have put on my desk. Eventually, I let go of that vine and hired someone for that. But, that took a little bit of time. But, at the end of the day, always think about it this way. We want to outsource. Majority of people I speak to are getting into this business or another business to get time and money freedom, right? The money freedom you're going to get in a business because for most businesses there's no cap on how much income you can make, [music] but the time freedom is what allows you to act like a actual CEO. I love when I can just wake up in the morning and I have three to five decisions to make. That's [music] it. The plate is light as hell, right? If I have too much stuff to do, I will not be operating at a high frequency. So, I can't stress this enough. Create leverage. You can use AI. You can outsource to AI or actual humans. But, either way, always think about how do I remove myself from the business. So, if I'm on vacation with family, we can still bring in some damn money. It is not solely dependent on me to put food on the table, right? [music] Plus, at the end of the day, I think it's pretty cool when you can actually get people jobs and actually affect their life and be in well, some control into kind of livelihood that they want by creating these infrastructures for them. I really like that as well. So, that's how the top 1% of Amazon sellers think. None of this is flashy, but the mindset is what separates the people that actually build something for successful from the people who actually just burn out from making a ton of bad mistakes. Those are the people just chasing shortcuts. If you want to go deeper and find out the exact systems that we've used to do over $40 in sales on Amazon, click the first link in the description to register for a completely free live training. I break down everything step-by-step, how to get approved with real authorized brands and suppliers, to how to build a business that can actually scale without you. If this video was helpful, make sure you subscribe. I put out videos every week breaking down what's actually working right now and answering some of the toughest questions for you new sellers out there. If you have any other questions, make sure to drop in the comments. I read all of them and make sure I can give you all the things I wish I knew back in 2020 when I was first getting started and there was no resources out there at all. And if it's something that I see continuously pop up, I'll make sure to make a long-form video like this one for it on YouTube so you get a more in-depth answer. I'll see you in the next one and I hope this helped.