Interview with Jim Cockrum & Brett...

ProvenSourcing.com p. 1

Interview with Jim Cockrum & Brett Bartlett

Jim Cockrum: Hi, this is Jim Cockrum. I'm going to be your host today. I've got my guest, Brett Bartlett. Between the two of us, just to get right to the point, we're going to talk about how to build an incredible team around yourself that helps you do one thing specifically. Now you can build teams to do all kinds of things in your business. But we're going to talk about one thing specifically today. That is finding profitable inventory that you can quickly flip on Amazon or eBay, or even Craigslist for that matter. Let's not leave out all the options. Basically, finding profitable inventory where you're not the one that's out there doing the shopping and the sourcing. You've got other people who are excited to do that for you. The reason that I'm interviewing Brett is that he is arguably my most successful student, slash, partner in this arena. He's been doing this for a while. He's built an incredible team himself. I just wanted to go through and interview him. We've never really had this discussion. We've kind of, in passing, both commented and observed and admired each other's business models. We thought if we kind of meshed the two together – we've both learned quite a bit from each other. We're at the point now where we both have some pretty incredible teams built that are doing these activities for us. So we're both very system-minded. The only little bit of history that I'm going to give you before I jump in and get Brett talking here is just to tell you who he is and why I've brought him onto this call out of all the other students and people that I've worked with. Brett is the guy – if you go back to the sales page at Proven Sourcing dot com, where this course is sold, where you probably purchased this audio – there's a story there, we're going to have a little video of how we met. But to give you a summary – Brett was leaving a comment on my blog one day, thanking me for helping him build a thousand dollar per day business. Someone else called him out and said, “There's no way that's actually true. I'll give you five thousand dollars if that's true, if you can prove it.” So, Brett set about proving it with screen shots. That guy quickly vanished and a new friendship budded between Brett and I. We've been working for a couple years together, observing each other's businesses, watching each other's businesses grow. He's been an integral part of helping the Proven Amazon Course become what it is, because of all the creative content that he's contributed to it. I want to bring your attention to one little ting: The Proven Amazon Course dot com course – don't forget that if you purchase the Proven Sourcing Course that you bought today, if you go to that Thank You page, or if you go to Proven Sourcing dot com, you can get a discount on it. Just keep that in mind. If you really get interested in these topics as we get started and you want to start at Level One and work your way into a great Amazon business, that's the way to go.

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Okay, so back to Brett. Jump forward, he just had five hundred dollars or so that he started with. He's now built an empire selling products on the Internet. And more important than introducing you to him and our business relationships and all that, I want to get into how does this stuff apply to you? Because you can certainly go back and research Brett. You can go back and research me. We're not going to spend a lot of time on that. But, wow! We've built some incredible businesses. That's what I want to talk about today. So, Brett, great having you, buddy. How are you doing today? Brett Bartlett: I'm really excited to talk about this. One thing that I wanted to touch on before we get into the meat of this content – you mentioned the Proven Amazon Course and you kind of...I love the way you mention things casually, Jim and you don't do a hard sell or anything like that. But I'm going to do my testimony on it real quick. I was the guy who worked super hard. Did a lot of different things. Specifically revolving around making money online. I'm telling you, I'm one of the hardest working guys you'll ever meet. None of them ever worked. By sheer grace, I think I Googled something and stumbled upon your Proven Amazon Course. Spent like the last bit of money I had for online education on it, saying, “If this doesn't work, I'm out. I'm done. This thing doesn't even work.” Your Proven Amazon Course changed my entire – not even my life, not even my family's life, but now families' lives. Because now I build teams and do all this different stuff. So the fruit that came from your Proven Amazon Course is just incredible. It's really because – oh my gosh, here's a crazy concept – you teach things that work. That are possible. Jim: Exactly. Brett: For anyone who is on the fence about it – I didn't have a million dollars to start with. I literally had four hundred dollars total. Like, to my name, to start this business. Now we're in a whole other realm that I never thought would be possible. So again, the Proven Amazon Course has just put me on an entire different trajectory. So thanks so much for making that available. Jim: That's great to hear. I can't really take a whole lot of credit. I've kind of been the facilitator. I've brought great guys like you and others. At this point, I would say we've had fifty different people contribute their unique ideas and content to the course. So it's just a collection of great ideas. For well under three hundred bucks, you can get a university level education on what it means to be wildly successful on – not just Amazon, because this translates over to eBay, to all kinds of other opportunities as well. Brett: Right. Jim: But it gets you that one crucial skill. I've been saying this for a few months. See if this rings true, I've said this to several folks: Once you've got that skill of finding a product that you can quickly sell for three, four, ten times the price you just paid – once you've got the skill of being able to do that an inch deep and a mile wide – you're not committed to one product line, for example. You can do it just about anywhere you look. You see dollar bills blowing around in the wind. Once you've got that skill, you're unstoppable! You simply can't be stopped. The



way the world is changing...I just saw statistics – and we'll get into some specifics here in a minute that will get you excited, Brett. I don't know if you are aware of this or not. Maybe I'll have you take a stab at a number here. See what number comes to mind: Let's compare all retail shopping in the United States. What percentage of that pie is happening online, would you estimate? Have you heard that statistic? Brett: Yes, based on the trajectory that online shopping is going, like we're at the tip of the iceberg right now as far as the opportunity that's going to be out there. Jim: It is this skyrocketing line that has reached the massive peak of...six percent. Brett: That's right! Jim: Right now, if you combine every online venue, Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target, every online purchase made last year, it was about six percent of all retail. And that has been on this insane trajectory upward. It's this hockey stick of upward progress. But we're only at six percent and the number's only going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. So those of us who know how to take that stuff that's floating around out there that's sitting on shelves getting dusty that people really do want and get it in front of them where they can just click a mouse button and then have it on their porch, we're the ones that have the best career opportunity in the world. It's one of only three business models that I teach. I'm very excited about it and you're one of my premier students. So let's talk about how you went from where I see so many of my students right now and that is, some of them have a very good living. Some of them are making a hundred thousand dollars a month doing what I'm about to describe. That's what they're putting in the bank. They're putting that in the bank doing what I'm about to describe. They and maybe their wife get in the car most days, drive around, scan for product, find a lot of profitable product – they know what they're doing – they bring it home, they box it up, they sell it on eBay or they send it in to Amazon and they make a great living doing it! That beats any real job you could ever have. But I'm here to tell you, even if you are at that level, you've not yet arrived. Brett, describe to me how many boxes you shipped in the last month. How much shopping you've done in the last month. How may times have you gotten in your car and scanned product, driven around and hit the sales? What's your routine like? Brett: The answer to all those questions is zero. I don't say that to give the misconception that I sit on a beach and never work at all anymore, but the best thing for my business right now is that I work on my business, not in my business. That is really, really hard to do. I can say that personally. It is super hard for a guy like me who never made any money online, to all of a sudden I have success and now I have to hand over my baby, or different parts of it and trust someone else to do what I was doing. That was a really, really hard concept for me. I went through a lot of good and bad days in the process. Now I can tell you, there is no way I would ever, ever, ever go back to being a one man show. Ever. Most of my days consist of - I oversee most of my staff over a Google docs spreadsheet,



and maybe a couple of phone calls. That's literally the majority of my job. That’s what I do on a daily basis. Jim: So you use Google docs to communicate with your team. If people aren't aware, Google offers a free service. I use it as well. The calendar can be synced with as many people as you like. The documents can be shared with whoever you want to show. We like Basecamp ourselves for slightly more complex projects. Basecamp you have to pay for. You can Google Basecamp and find it pretty easily. It creates to-do lists for different people on your team and such. Basically what you're saying is, you communicate with different people on your team using free online tools and keep track of their activities. I want to hear a little bit about your team. I know that you're not the one going out and shopping, but give us some numbers. How much product are your guys buying? Any numbers you're not comfortable sharing, you don't have to, of course. But paint us a picture here. How many people are involved? What kind of volume are you doing? We're talking eBay, Amazon, I think you said you are doing some Craigslist too even, right? Last time I heard? Brett: Yeah, yeah. I'll pepper through. The thing that I want to make really clear: Unless you believe in building something bigger than yourself – you have to buy in to this. People will hear everything that I'm doing and they'll try to think they can do it all. But that's the wrong mentality. It's, how can I bring others in on a team basis to get this done? So when I pepper through that, I want everyone listening to think of it from that perspective. I don't want them to think that, “Oh I can do that and I can do that and I can do that.” Think about, who do you know that might be a good fit for that? Jim: Right. Great point. We'll hit some of that too. I'll make sure people don't leave this thinking, “Well, I've got fifty things to go do.” No, you've got one thing to do and that's build a team. Start building a team now. Brett: Right. So here's what we're selling. We have obviously eBay. And just so everyone knows, I totally suck at eBay. If you were to say, “Brett, list this on eBay and put in all the details,” my eBay business would probably never break a thousand dollars a month. Jim: Can I let you in on a secret, before you proceed? I'm known to a lot of people – like I'll meet someone and they'll say, “Oh hey, you're the eBay dude!” I'll be in an airport: “You're That eBay guy!” I'm known as “That eBay Guy” to a lot of people. I'm called exactly that phrase because I had a great selling book ten years ago that was primarily about eBay and it's transitioned into so much more. It's been years since I've listed anything myself on eBay. Now my business sells stuff on eBay every day. But I couldn't – I don't even – I had to email my mom the other day to ask her for our eBay ID! I have no idea what my eBay ID and password is for my eBay account! I used to say I check the numbers monthly. I don't even do that anymore! I just know that it's running, it's going. I let someone else handle it. Yeah, it's a huge part of my business, but I'm managing my business, not working in it day to day. Go ahead with your point. I just had to add mine.



Brett: Yeah. Well having those transparencies should give everyone listening a boost of confidence, right? Instead of the reverse. Because if you already know what you're doing – like think about how quickly you can build out a team and a system, if I don't know what I'm doing and I can do it, right? So we're selling on eBay. We sell on Amazon. We sell on Craigslist. We actually do our own sales, like sidewalk sales now. We have our own wholesale business. I'm just going through the big, mega-hitters in our cash flow. I'm not going to go through every little revenue stream. Then our big emerging one, we've actually gotten into a mobile clothing business that I absolutely love. I can tell you it's women's clothing. You can imagine my input on a women's clothing business is not very much. Jim: Completely irrelevant. Brett: Right. It's having the right systems and team in place for it to run. So that's just where...oh, and of course, teaching people how to do this stuff and membership communities, everything like that, too. Jim: All those other income streams – we're just talking about one of your many, many income streams. Maybe we'll put that video on the Thank You page where you're listening to this report, if you go back to that page, there's a video that Brett made, I think it was made a couple months ago when you had nine income streams. I'm sure it's grown since then. You've truly embraced – and let me just give you a pat on the back, because most of my students never embrace the concept of multiple income streams. They think they've arrived, but they never really get to the point where they are just managing multiple streams and they are putting good people in place to run each of those businesses for them. And you're doing that. I want to commend you for that. But I want to keep us focused on how did you build a team to source your product? Because that's where I want to hit the nail on the head today. You've created all kinds of great streams. I'll throw that video on there for people to enjoy. It talks about all the other streams that you've created outside of this one. Brett: Right. I can focus on one really specific that's a low-hanging fruit that I think everyone, in some capacity, can do. One of the coolest things when I started selling on Amazon through the Proven Amazon Course – I do live in Southern California, which means the weather year round is pretty good. One thing that happens every Saturday, year round, is garage sales. When I initially started, it was, “I'm going to get up early and go to garage sales.” Some days were really good, some days weren't good. Because I was by myself. It was me. I could only cover so much ground by myself. Even if I was the fastest and the earliest, there's a ceiling. You cannot pass that ceiling. So I said, “What if we had other people doing the garage saleing on the weekend? What if there was a team of people to go out and garage sale?” That was really my first shot at saying, “What happens when I multiply my knowledge and myself times two, times three, times four, times five? Then eventually now we're, times ten, times twenty. Just based on that one model alone. I saw, “Hey, this model works. I can pay someone ten to fifteen dollars an hour” – most of our people make twenty dollars plus an hour, because we have a commission



structure for them. But it was seeing that opportunity and believing that I could build something bigger than myself. All I did was I literally wrote a quick spreadsheet that they have to clock in their start time, their end time and how much product they brought back. That was it. And I was kind of off to the races from that standpoint. So really it could be garage sales, it could be thrift stores. Anything that has a low cost of goods against it, you can get someone. Couponing, right? If you can do it, someone else can do it. I'm sorry, no one listening to this is a rocket scientist and it can't be figured out. If you can do it, that means you can train someone else to do it. Jim: Hey, here's three questions. I guarantee you, everyone listening to this call has a few questions floating around in their head right now. Rather than me trying to remember them as we go through them one at a time, I'm just going to fire them all three at you and we'll go through them then. One of them is, how do you keep these people from competing with you? The other is, how are you incenting them? What kind of profit structure do you have? And the third is, where did you find these people? I know there's other questions that people are going to have as well, but I didn't want to go too far before I hit the question. And people are going to feel like I just read their minds. How did I do that? Well, I've been talking to a lot of people for a long time about these concepts. Those three questions come up very frequently, one of those three. There's a few others that come up a lot, too. But trust me, there's great answers to every possible question you have right now. And none of the answers are complicated. Brett: Right. Jim: What you're going to find yourself doing is kicking yourself for not starting to do this sooner. I know of – and I won't name the name, but it's a name most people on this call will recognize – of people who are just gurus and they still put their own tape on their own boxes and they still ship the stuff out themselves. And every time I talk to them, I'm like, “What are you doing? Your time is worth thousands of dollars an hour and you're spending time putting tape on boxes. You might as well be cutting your lawn with scissors.” It's the same good use of your time. Okay, so let's hit those three questions. Let's see if I can remember the questions: Where did you find these people? How do you give them incentive? How do you keep them from competing with you? Let's hit those. Brett: Yeah. I'll start with the competing one first, because that's the shortest answer. When you build a team...First, I always say it's a team. I never say, “Come work FOR me.” Like an underling. Like I'm a Supreme Being. Jim: That's beautiful. Partners. Find partners. Brett: Exactly. Because people can smell when you're using them. You can't hide it. Be very, very transparent. First off, I truly treat people better than I would treat myself in that scenario. Meaning, most of the people make a good amount of money and they have no reason to ever leave my team. Because they're saying, “What's the benefit?” When someone can look



at the structure of what you've built and say, “What's the benefit of me leaving?” And they don't have an answer, that's when you know you've built the right system. Now if you're just riding someone like a workhorse, and you're riding them to the ground and using them, you're right, they will leave. And they'll probably leave disheartened and they'll probably want to go against you. I can tell you Jim, do you know how many defectors I've had in the build-out process? Jim: You've been doing it what, about a year and a half now? And no one's left. Brett: Yeah. Zero. Zero leaving. The whole concept is, the second they come in, it's very clear that I have their best interests before my own. You have to be sincere about it. You have to truly care. Because what you're really doing is you're blessing another person in the standpoint that you're helping them get income. A lot of our people didn't have a job. They were trying to pay their bills, right? You've got to remember to approach this like you are literally building something special. Jim: Because you are. I won't get political for very long here, but I'll just tell you this: The government has no solutions. Major corporations don't even have solutions. They're laying people off faster than they're hiring them. Who has the solution for the economic future of our kids and our grandkids? Who's building that foundation right now? If our country is to stand strong in the next thirty, forty, fifty years? It's small entrepreneurs. Companies with fifty, or even arguably, twenty or fewer employees. We are the ones that will sustain this nation. The numbers back it up. That's not just me being proud of who I am. The numbers back it up. Brett: Right. Jim: We are the ones paying the bills at this point for the nation. We are the ones making it happen. To be one of those, it's an honorable position. A great book – I know I've recommended it to you Brett already, but for everyone listening at this point, when you start building a team, a book that really gets your head on straight – it's by Dave Ramsey. It's called “Entreleadership.” It's kind of smashed together, “entrepreneur” and the word “leadership.” Smash them together. It talks about not hiring employees, but hiring partners, for example. It gets your mind set on issues like: complaints never go sideways or down, they only go up. And they only go one level up. You don't skip your manager to complain to his boss. You complain one level up. And you bring a solution when you complain. You build that into your corporate culture. Things like that. Really helpful if you've never managed before. It's the story of how he built his business from his garage with two or three people to about two hundred fifty. I can't imagine myself ever running a company at that level. We're already almost there, but I don't have any employees yet. Just partners like you. We work together a lot. You don't work for me. We're partners. Everyone that works with me is a partner. So go ahead. I'll let you continue, but I thought that was some valuable information for people who are kind of intimidated by that thought. None of this is complicated so far. Brett: Exactly. As much as I would like to give a number. People always say, “Well,



how much do you pay them so that they don't leave you?” That number is always going to fluctuate depending on the role... Jim: The market. The market determines that number. Brett: Yeah. As long as they know your heart and you truly, truly want something great for them, those people aren't going to turn around and stab you in the back. Those people are going to be with you for life. So that's my very easy answer to that question. Build something bigger than yourself and have their best interests when you're building it. Jim: That's how you keep them from turning their back and competing with you. Now do you do...and I have no problem with this. We may feel a little differently about this. I have no problem with non-compete agreements. Brett: Oh, we've done those across the board. We've done non-competes, we've done contracts, we've done everything. But I will say, anyone who's been through any type of litigation or anything like that – because I've had family members go through insanely bad litigation – the key component is always how that person perceives you and your business and how you care about them. Jim: A contract can't protect you from a relationship gone bad. And a good relationship doesn't require a contract. But the great thing about a good relationship is, kind of like good neighbors – you know, good fences help determine good neighbors? Like you and I, “Hey, let's sign a contract just to put in writing what we've all agreed on here.” That's not going to be a problem with the right people. But you'll probably never need it with the right people, either. So a contract is a beautiful thing. Even if it's written up in plain language that you can both understand. I'm about to teach you some stuff that you're not aware of, I don't want you to turn around and use this information to compete with me, especially in the realm of selling physical products on the Internet. “If you want to work with us, you'll need to sign this.” That will be in the back of their head. Would it hold up in court if they brought in their team of lawyers and you brought in your team and you guys pound out everything? I don't know. Who cares? If you've got someone who resists that part of the process, maybe it's not a good fit for that person. Brett: Right. And any time a contract or whatever is coming in on the front side – remember, you don't want to do it on the back side, you want to do it on the front side before you even bring those people in and give them the whole Golden Nugget... Jim: Oh yeah, before you even hire them. Before you educate them. Brett: What it does is, it sets an expectation that maybe they weren't even aware of. So imagine you don't go over that stuff, they don't necessarily know that that is a bad thing to do. You'd be surprised at what people don't know. So if you're thinking about bringing a team member on – I use NDAs, we use Operational Agreements, we've used everything. But it's more from an educational side. Like, “Here's our expectations and terms.” That way, we know we did our work. Because if that person does something and then on the back end, you're going, “You



weren't supposed to do that.” They're going to go, “I didn't know that.” Now it's on you. Jim: Right. It's on you for not having a good system in place to educate them as they come in. Exactly. So that answers the competition question. Let me remind you of the other two: Where are you finding these incredible people? How do you find the right people? And how do you make them feel like partners from a pay perspective? Let's go over the numbers - just whatever you can share. I know they get a flat hourly fee, then a percent of the profits. How does that work? Brett: I'll start with the “Where do I find them?” question, because that will actually go really well with why I pay them what I do. I found success building out a team with trust being ninety-eight percent of why someone is coming in. Because when you're a small business, you've got all this stuff coming in. When you're sourcing, you're dealing with a lot of cash. You've got to be able to trust the person with everything. You've just got to be able to trust them. So with me, what I like to do is I like to build out from my inner network. That would be family, church friends, networks that have been part of my life for a long time. Go to them first and think, “Is there anyone in my inner network who can use an extra X amount of dollars per week?” Or per month, or whatever. From that, if a couple people raise their hand, then I've met my goal of bringing someone I can trust., Whether they're capable or not, that's a different story, but at least now I have a starting point of someone I can trust. It's funny, because I hear this all the time. People go, “I don't have a network.” It's not like I'm fishing from a network of a thousand people. I'm fishing from a network of ten. Okay? I'm pretty sure most people have three to five people in their network. If no one there raises their hand, then I go on to a referral basis. Meaning, “Is there anyone you know who you completely trust, who you would vouch for, who you would put your name to, who you think would be interested in this start-up and then this amount of money,” whatever At that point, I've had a zero strikeout rate, meaning that someone would refer someone. That's where I started. Some of those things have worked out, some of them haven't. But that's a great way...I don't post a job on Craigslist. That’s like, I don't know how that's going to turn out. A lot of people are great at interviewing, terrible when it comes to their everyday work. So I like to operate from referrals. That's literally how we've gotten everybody on our team and we've got over twenty people working in our office on a day to day basis. Jim: Yeah, we hadn't heard that number yet. You're up to twenty now. That's incredible. You've got your own office space. That's just beautiful. That's where you're finding them, how you're finding them. I completely agree. Everyone who is working for me locally are people I knew, like and trusted, or someone that person knew, liked and trusted very much. Let me just give people a little teaser: I'm going to be asking Brett here in a few minutes what are these people doing. We mentioned yard sales. When they go out, what are their marching orders? What exactly are they told? What keeps them from just going to lunch and keeping the time, coming home and collecting the money? We're going to be getting into those topics in a minute.



But let's hit first: How are you paying these guys a profit share? How are you tracking that? Some people are confounded by that. I've got to tell you, with what I've got going on, I've got some shopping going on my accounts, I'm not sure when it's profitable enough to share it. How detailed are you in the tracking of the numbers? Do they really feel like...because every time that I've had a job where I've had a profit sharing plan, I always felt a little out of control of the results. Like some months you get a bonus and I didn't feel like I did a whole lot. Other months you work your butt off and you get nothing, because the rest of the team didn't perform that month or whatever. This could probably be an hour discussion in and of itself, but break it down for us. There's no wrong way to do this as long as people feel rewarded for their efforts at the end of the day. But how are you guys paying like that? Brett: That's a good point to bring up before you start this conversation. That's why I answered those other two questions first. We build something bigger than ourselves and we always have the other person's interests in mind up front. On top of that, we have a huge trust factor going into it. Next, we learned a couple things the hard way. I can go into an entire thing and sum it up pretty quickly of how we pay people, what we pay them for and then where we move them in our organization, almost as a graduation so they can make more money and have more opportunity. Here's how we started. And Jim, this is from you. It's not something that I made up. You said something that resonated with me. I think it was in the Proven Amazon Course. You said, “If you can't pay someone fifteen dollars an hour to do what you're doing, you don't have a real business.” Is that about correct? Is that what you've said before? Jim: That sounds like me. It sounds smart. I do remember saying that. What will happen is a lot of people will say, “I can't possibly outsource, because then my business wouldn't be profitable.” Then I'll turn around and say, “You don't have a profitable business yet.” Brett: Right. You just have a job at that point. Jim: You have a job. Brett: But working from that standpoint, Jim, I took that home and said, “In order for me to pay someone...” which the first thing that I wanted to replace was the worst part of the job: boxing, processing, inputting, taping, like the total data, I can do it while I'm half asleep kind of thing. That was just not going to work out for me. I'm talking not when I had an office and a warehouse. I'm talking when we were working out of a living room, still. I knew this is not a better life. I'd rather have my other job. Jim: This is back before the thousand dollar a day kind of thing. Brett: Right. Yeah. Jim: Couple hundred bucks a day level, maybe? In total sales on just Amazon.



Brett: Right. I want everyone to understand, you can sub in the conversations by saying what platforms I was selling on. It does not matter where you're selling. This system works regardless. If you can bring someone in to do that grunt work and pay them ten to fifteen dollars an hour to do it, you're going to have some happy campers. And you're going to be super happy on top of it. We started off by bringing people in on the processing side. What that did, that's the boxing, taping, inputting, everything like that. We brought in about three people and two of them ended up making the cut. This is really specific: When we bring them in, we bring them in on a thirty to sixty day term, when we're going to review their work, how they did and every milestone that we have. Then at that point, we're going to assess whether we're going to extend them hanging out. What that does on the front side is that protects you from someone who could be the nicest person in the world, but they totally suck at packing boxes and processing. Jim: You know what Zappos does? Have you ever heard what they do after thirty – I think it's sixty days? After you've gone through their full training program, you've done a little bit of work and they've kind of evaluated you, have you heard what they do to every employee? I'm pretty sure it's Zappos. Brett: Huh-uh. Oh yeah, they offer them money. Jim: They offer them money to quit. Here's a five thousand dollar check with your name on it. We can either tear it in half and you stay or you walk away with the money today. You can see all the beautiful things that says. That might be something, as your organization grows, you're going to see the personality is going to change. You're not going to know everybody as well as you intimately do right now. Around fifty people or so, it gets very different. Then at two-fifty, it's impossible. Brett: Right. Jim: That's a very special number in human relations. Two hundred fifty people. You can't possibly know who is connected to who and who brought in who and who is who's brother. You lose track immensely. I don't know if you'll ever get to that level, but there's different stages. I thought that was interesting. As you hire people in, off of applicants and no one knows this guy and we're going off of resumes, kind of thing, I think I would find myself doing that as well. I don't know that I would be as brave with as big a number as they're using, but at the point your organization is that size, I can see that it makes a lot of sense. Because they say that just getting someone trained you're investing tens of thousand of dollars in them just in the first few months. Brett: Yep. Jim: So to get them to walk away if their heart and mind really isn't in it? That's a small price to pay. Brett: Right. And the processing side, the tape and everything like that is the easiest to systematize. So it was a really good way for me to learn, on like an easy level, how to remove myself. I would get so angry a couple of times when they would do something wrong. I would



go, “How are they doing this wrong?” Then I realized, “Crap! That was actually my fault!” Jim: Yeah, it's a breakdown in the training. Brett: I didn't create a system for them. Jim: The system is broke. Exactly. This is another interesting factoid, too. I'm going to kind of educate, remind, pull some lessons in for you, for the people listening: In the Japanese culture, they have a tradition where if you go into, say the hotel business, you could have a Master's degree, eight years from the largest university in hotel management and you're going to start off, for the first six months, you know what you're going to be doing? Cleaning toilets and changing sheets. You come in at that level. For the very reason that we're mentioning right now. You'll have a new-found respect and admiration for the people that, that's the highest their career ever goes, but you know how vital they are and you know how much work it takes at that level. This is a beautiful way to build an organization, where you've done it. But what you can't get stuck at is the changing sheets and cleaning toilets level, which is the taping and boxing level. And, dare I say it, going out shopping, scanning, barcodes. Brett: Oh my gosh, yeah. Jim: That's the equivalent of being in a hotel management position and cleaning toilets and changing sheets. I just now made that mental connection in my head, but hopefully that resonates for people. If you get in your car and you're using your day that is worth five hundred or a thousand dollars an hour – and you may feel like you're doing great because, “Look, I'm making more money than I used to!” No. You need to be building systems and building teams, because tides change. Things shift. You need to be agile and ready to jump on opportunities that come along and launch those great streams that you're going to be hearing me talk about in six to eight months from now. Because Brett's going to have the time to launch those. If you're busy standing and shopping and packing boxes, you're not going to have the time to launch those business and those income streams. You're going to be too busy cleaning toilets and changing sheets. Brett: Right. What I always say is, “You're stuck in the hamster wheel.” You think you're going somewhere and you're going really, really fast and doing a lot of things to get going, but you're not actually moving forward. That was a really hard pill for me to swallow. Remember, I never made any money online. So for someone to come and say, “Hey Brett, you need to keep progressing,” my first thought was, “What do you mean? I'm making more money than I have ever dreamed of!” Right? Jim: I had four hundred bucks six months ago and now I've got ten grand in the bank! Leave me alone! I'm happy! Brett: Right, right. But then all of a sudden, my wife goes, “Hey, let's go on a five day trip!” Or, “Hey, let's go to Texas for a week.” I'm going, “No I can't. I've got to go shop at the sales.” And I'm going, “Oh, that's not good.” That's kind of like the eye-opening experience of, “Wait a second. I've just built myself – instead of having a sixty hour a week job, I've built



myself an eighty hour a week job.” Jim: The pay is great, but you can't take a break. That's right. And that's the difference between eBay and Amazon also. With eBay, someone has to be manning the shop constantly. With FBA, it's a little easier to automate, as most of the audience listening to this knows. That’s why we do both and that's why we have people to manage all of it. Now it doesn't matter where you go or what part of the world you're in. As we were talking before this call, you could live anywhere. You and I could live anywhere and do this. This is truly a global opportunity. You don't have to be in the United States to do this. You can do this from anywhere. It's an international opportunity right now. This trend is global. For people starting to shop online more and more and more, the people who can find product and move it from where it's sitting on a shelf collecting dust to sitting in front of people looking at their computer screens, that's a profitable...You could almost create a college degree off that and just have floods of people pour into it and still not half the tip of the iceberg of opportunity that's here. So we're cutting edge pioneers in this industry. I feel like I've been doing it a while, but this is a massive opportunity. Brett: Right. I totally agree. Jim: I don't want to get too far off track. Brett: To go back to – people might be going, “What does the processing have to do with the sourcing?” As I move people through – they were kind of graduating on the processing side and taking on more responsibility – what I noticed was, they had a better understanding of how the business works. Meaning they knew, this product doesn't do well. For whatever reason. Fill in the blank. Whether it's eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, selling on the sidewalk. They knew – they started to see value and not value. So instead of me sending them out and paying them hourly and them buying at the same time, they were getting an education on the buying process. It's kind of like Mister Miyagi, the “wax on, wax off” thing. They didn't know they were getting educated on the buying process while they were packing boxes, but they were. So what I ended up realizing was, when a person starts in processing, they have a better opportunity and holistic understanding of the business to become the best buyer on your team. Jim: Beautiful. Brett: So what I did is, the gradual procession is, one hundred percent processing and maybe they make the cut as a full time processor. You look at some people, they never want to move from that. “No, I love processing. Let me be a manager of a hundred people who process.” So that's where you're the person on the other side going, “Okay, where does this person really fit in?” Most of them that I've seen, maybe eighty to ninety percent, eventually go, “Hey, I think I can do more than process.” So then we started where ten to fifteen percent of their time is spent training on the buying. The training was a lot more fluid and in sync when they came from the processing. So eventually all we'd do – I'll use garage saleing, but you can fill in garage saleing for going to stores and scanning for going to big buys and scanning, whatever. It doesn't really



matter. For researching product online. That person can look at it and as long as you have some kind of system in place... I'll give you my garage sale system. All we would do is simply test them out on a Saturday. We would give them a route to go do. Really what we're testing is, do they get up on time? Do they fill out all their paperwork and do they come back with the product, following the directions? So you have to do the directions on the front end. Now that doesn't mean you're going to do that every time for that person for the rest of their time, but what you're doing is, you're giving them the opportunity to succeed and then if they come back and have it, you slowly move them more and more into a full time role of a buyer. The buyers, when you get educated and successful buyers on your team, there is nothing more profitable than having a team of buyers who believe in your company and who get excited every day to land a great deal. That is where all the money comes from for my business. That's the graduation process for them. Jim: That's beautiful. I can totally see the system playing out. I see the progression. This is a completely new career opportunity. This didn't exist a few years ago. But now we've got – especially with the emergence of Amazon, we've got multiple outlets now to move inventory. One thing I didn't want to let escape here, we've got a lot of people here who are really excited about Amazon and eBay is kind of like the second place step-child of online shopping, whereas it used to be kind of reversed – These trends flow. These things flow. It won't surprise me if five years from now, it's reversed again and eBay is kicking Amazon's butt. Shoppers are there and the activity is there. Because with the influx of attention, advantages start to taper. All the competition is on Amazon, so eBay is going to sneak in the back door again. Same thing with Craigslist. Help me distinguish a little bit what you tell your shoppers when they go out. You told me, you're just as excited about eBay right now as you are Amazon. Brett: Oh yeah. Jim: Because everybody is kind of overlooking yard sale finds. I don't go to yard sales. I don't like shopping. When I go shopping it kind of looks like this, I tell my wife, “Hey, I'm going to go out to the store. We need this, this and this.” I go, I get it, I come home. That's all the shopping I do. I don't want to browse around and look for deals and scan barcodes. But my mom, however, she could do it literally all day, every day and be the happiest person. She loves finding deals. She'll find something for herself. “Oh, I've been looking for these.” Then she finds all kinds of profitable inventory as well. She just feels fulfilled and energized by it. So what do you tell those people that love going out and doing this? They're out there. A lot of stay home moms and second income families, people with part time hours that they could give you to do this. What instructions, what training do you give them? I'm hoping the Proven Amazon Course is maybe part of that? But you know, what other materials and resources are you giving them to help them find profitable inventory?



Brett: That's a phenomenal question. There's two answers to that. The first answer is to remember that most of these people have come up seeing some part of the business from the processing side. Second, in a lot of those scenarios, those people in the processing side have been excited about something. Let's pretend...My current business that I have, we send out tons of teams going garage saleing every weekend. We go to thrift stores. We go to do retail arbitrage where you go in, buy a product from a Target or wherever and then sell it online for more, right? Most of these people that have come up through the processing side have fallen in love with one arm of that. Or maybe a couple. A lot of them have fallen in love with the shopping side, like your mom. They get to go and shop. They get to find stuff for themselves. They get paid to shop. They love to call themselves Professional Shoppers. But the key is you have to make sure that you've trained them correctly on how to buy. So here's the process that we run them through on how to buy. First, they go with the most experienced shopper that we have. Let's pretend that I have no one and I am the most experienced shopper. So this is what I do. The first week, they come and shadow me. Maybe a total of ten hours. They're taking notes and I'm giving them basically the whole run-down of how to go to a Target or a local store, find some product and take it back out. So if you're an international seller, you don't actually have to be there and shadow the person. Basically the way that you need to think about it is, can you teach a sixth grader to do this? Can you lay out the system so that a sixth grader could take it and run with it? Again, let's say you're the only person in your business. It's got to start with you educating that person on how it all works. How the buying process works. Jim: Let me make just a quick point here, Brett. In the Proven Amazon Course, we have numerous resources for how to source, many of which don't require anyone to get in a car and go out to do anything. They've got people hiring teams to shop websites all over the Internet and look for deals, where it's selling for X on this website that no one's ever heard of and it's selling for four times X on Amazon or eBay. Then all they do is they send those deals to you and you've got someone just slipping them through buying those deals all day. It's not rocket science. None of this is complicated. But you will need to train people on how to do it. The point is, it doesn't matter where you live, The Proven Amazon Curse has international students. We have people – one of our biggest success stories lives on a beach in Jamaica - Barrington. There's no Amazon warehouse in Jamaica, if people weren't aware. There's no Amazon dot JA for Jamaica. It's all going somewhere else, being bought somewhere else and going somewhere else. He manages it and he helps us with all kinds of international issues as well. He's got his own niche built up because he's helped so many people go international. But I just wanted to re-emphasize, this isn't all just about getting in the car and going out shopping and hitting the retail stores. You can have teams all over the place doing this sourcing in many different fashions. But go ahead, please continue. Brett: Really you just have to do each thing that you do – there's a process and a system behind it. Unfortunately, you’re not that awesome. Whatever you’re doing, as long as you swallowed that pill that it can be done by someone else. That's hard to admit sometimes. “Hey, what I'm doing is not that hard. It's a step by step system.” Whether you're buying online,



buying wholesale, garage saleing, or you're going into stores, each step can be broken down in a way that someone else can understand it. So like I said, the first step that I do is just educate them. Give them the opportunity to understand the whys the whats, everything like that. The next step is a fifty-fifty way of sharing whatever way you're sourcing product. So here's how I do it: Fifty percent of the time, I kind of do a refresher where the next week I'll take them in or maybe we're shopping online or whatever and I'll say, “Remember this? Remember this? We touched on this.” It's kind of more like a bullet point structure of the bigger concepts. Then for the second half of the week, they have to run with it. They have the cash. Now it's a small budget, because remember, we're really testing their ability to take in information and implement it. We're also testing, does your system work? It's really easy to blame the other person, but most of the time unfortunately it's on the communicator that is blowing it. That was something really hard for me to understand. So it's a fifty-fifty arrangement with the buyer. Meaning that fifty percent of the time, I'm the one who is helping oversee the process. I'm educating them. Then fifty percent of the time, they're doing it on their own, with me kind of like directly over their shoulder stopping them if they're going to make a big bad wrong move. The third step, which typically is in the third or fourth week, they're going to do an entire week or two of work by themselves with a heavy assessment on the back end, but it's not as immediate. At that point in time, so typically not more than a month if you have your systems down correctly, you can have a buyer who is well-educated, understands the system, and is going to make you profitable in the coming months based off of your ability to train them in that first month. I wish it was more complicated and cool than that. But it's really not. That is the system that we run every single time we bring someone in. Just so everyone knows, just on large liquidation buys alone, on any given day, we have four to six people looking over those buys. Just on emails coming over from suppliers. So just to give you an idea, we are eighty-ninety percent buying, ten percent processing. Meaning everybody in our office can process when they need to, but we love buying. We love sourcing. It is the backbone of our business, so we put a big emphasis on it. Jim: That's beautiful. The simplicity of it. I love how you've been through it far enough and deep enough now that you've finally got a process that just about anybody who is listening to this can imagine themselves going through these steps. But what have you run into if anything, that's been a challenge? Maybe something that those who haven’t gone through this have hit a stumbling block, a roadblock. You know, getting employees – Did you have to get an accountant, a lawyer? Has there been any kind of paperwork you didn't anticipate, or rules, or laws? Anything like that to give people a heads up beforehand? What professionals have you relied on, if any, to help you get established? Brett: Yeah, I could point out some of the bigger headaches that come through in the process. Any time you are using a freelance person to 1099 them...Just so everyone knows our



eBay deal is actually a consignment deal. So we really have a beautiful arrangement there. We really don't have to worry about a lot of stuff. The person just takes a consignment cut from our stuff. But in any situation when you're building out, one of the biggest frustrations, I think is that you need to remember that whatever person you're communicating with, they don't understand the entire business yet. So a lot of frustration and anger to the point of giving up can occur in the process of building up your team. Because I know I felt like that. As long as you take the personal responsibility to understand that just means I have to communicate in a different way, or I have to communicate this to the next person so that they aren't confused or left in the dark on this. That's actually the hardest part of this process: fine tuning your training process. It's being organic and filling in the gap every time a new situation comes up. And going, “Okay, for the next person that I train, here's the ten steps instead of the four that I had originally.” So you have to have the ability to take the ownership as a true CEO and say, “Hey, this is on me, not on them to build out the right system.” Jim: I have a feeling we're going to have some people who are fairly interested in having someone help them through – you know, you mentioned you have steps for different processes and things. We obviously can't share this in an audio, although I would say that most people listening to this are perfectly capable of going through the Proven Amazon Course, doing it themselves and then having other people help them do it and growing a team. But you've covered some of this ground, so we might end up offering something else. Return to the Proven Sourcing dot com page, we might have other offers. Or if you've purchased this report, maybe there will be something near where you downloaded it, where we kind of talk about some of these resources and things that we may make available. At this point, they're not. It's just literally, “This is the way Brett's doing his business.” But I approached him with, “Hey, let's share this with others. A lot of people could benefit from this.” Organically, the questions that pop up and the things that people want to hear more about, we may create additional resources and maybe some hand-holding and coaching. Since you keep your time fairly freed up, we could have people willing to pay well for you to take them through that process. So just keep that door open as a possibility. Because I think a lot of people could take advantage of that. We're making it sound simple, but I'm keeping in mind my audience. My team is fairly small. I haven't taken the time to make it huge yet. But here's a couple things we're doing that you're not. How about I throw that in the mix and we'll see if any of these things resonate with you? One of the things we're doing, and I don't know if you end up with extra inventory, but there's a lot of times where you'll go out and it will be an eighty-twenty kind of day. Like, “Wow, we got some great stuff here, but what are we going to do with this pile of stuff that's just yuck?” Brett: Right.



Jim: Well, you know what we found – a lot of that stuff moves very, very well at a flea market. I haven’t been to a flea market myself. My mom loves them. We've actually bought a booth at one of these consignment flea markets where one person runs the whole place and there's a cash register up front. Brett: I love it. Jim: And everybody has their booth space. We'll throw extra shoes in there, or stuff that we got that's too big, too bulky. Just extra stuff you've got on your hands that you don't know what to do with. If you put it in there, mark it down, next thing you know, that booth is making a lot of money for us moving inventory. We also rented a house near us. I encourage you, as soon as you possibly can, don't keep it in your basement or your garage, because then you've got people showing up annoying your family because they've got to put in some extra hours at six o'clock on a Sunday or whatever, showing up, checking email. We rented a little house near our neighborhood. Got a great deal. Talked the guy way down, because we basically said, “Look, we're not going to use it evenings or weekends. Give us a good deal. We're going to keep it clean, professional, non-smoking. We're going to take care of your place. The toilet's only going to get flushed a couple times a day, instead of fifteen times a day. It's going to be great. Give us a deal here.” And he did. It's worked out really, really well. That's how we manage our team. So just a couple little tips in between where you are and where my team is right now. Do you guys do the flea market thing, have you had some good experience there? Brett: The funny thing is, right when you brought it up – it's going to sound bad, but I hope people take it as a positive – We run so much stuff that sometimes it's hard, like in a, “Hey Brett, what's everything that you do, real fast?” For me to go like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and name them all off – one big place that we're making right now with the women's clothing and with our excess inventory from our really, really cool buys – that's exactly what we're doing. We're signing up at big – around here they call them “fairs.” So like, big fairs. Especially during the summer months right now, it's a great way to move inventory that is not typical. But the whole point and what you're pointing out, Jim, is, I wish there was a hard and fast way, “If you do this and follow x, x, x, x, x. It's like the blanket way to run a team.” But you just pointed out, each person's situation is going to have a slight adaptation to the foundation of building out systems and replacing yourself. I love the concept that you rent out a house and run your business out of there. It doesn't fit my model, because if I rented out a house in Orange County, I would be way upside down, because it's super expensive. But that doesn't negate the model itself. So everyone listening, I want you to know: It's complicated, but it's not. It's very, very doable. As long as you believe in the foundational concept of, “Hey, I'm always going to be working to replace myself and building something bigger than myself,” you're going to eventually build something amazing.



Jim: And we've got a business model, again, that is the foundation of all of this. It's a profitable business model. It's been proven time and time and time again. I'm fairly convinced at this point that there's no other model – now I teach three different business models, I've alluded to that. Of the three, the one that people are kind of the greenest and newest and not real sure about themselves yet, the one they should be getting into, is the one we're talking about right now, which is Proven Amazon Course. Selling physical product. Because it's the easiest to build a team, it's the easiest to start having success with right away. You can see the testimonials, you can see the massive community. I know you're going to be joining us at an event here in a couple months. Not to date this call, because it's going to be relevant for a long time after that event has come and gone, but we sold out that event in a day! The number of people that can't wait. Hundreds of people, right around five hundred. We sold out the tickets in a day for that thing! That's how many people are excited. Seventy-five percent of the people that are going to be there, we've surveyed them, they're making money with the stuff we're talking about right now. Brett: Right. Jim: And most of those people weren't a year or two ago. It's coming on strong. There's a huge opportunity. There's no end in sight for this, if you're willing to go multiple routes for moving your inventory: eBay, Amazon, Craigslist. Even if it comes down to hiring someone who loves flea markets. Find someone who runs to flea markets on weekends and say, “Hey, swing by. We'll do a consignment deal.” I want to talk about your eBay consignment arrangement again. Any parts of it you just don't see yourself doing, let someone else do it. Let me just kick a few butts here. People get on the Internet looking for a few opportunities. What they want is a four step system where they can click buttons and make money. I'll give you a hint and save you thirty thousand dollars right now. That system does not exist. Now if you listen to any number of other people out there, they'll convince you that it does and they'll show you success stories and show you these big checks. The way you can make money in four steps is by selling systems that don't work to people who are going to figure out eventually that you're a scammer. And they're going to call you a scammer. You can have about a year and a half run doing that and make some decent money, convincing people that you know the secret Holy Grail to making money on the Internet, but eventually you're going to have a bad reputation and there's going to be just as many people out there saying, “Don't listen to that guy,” as there are people going, “Hey, I wonder what he's all about? Look at that fancy sales letter. He's got a car, a nice car. Look at that vacation he took with his family.” Well, he made that money selling a course that's garbage, guys. Just to let you in. Every business opportunity on the Internet that works requires work. I have spent twelve years finding three. I've been exposed to hundreds. There are three. If I find a fourth, I'll let you know. But I haven't yet. That’s why I pound and pound and pound: It's going to take some work. But of the three, selling physical products on the Internet is a fantastic model. What it does is, it scares off most of the people, like many listening right now. They're like, “Oh, but I'll have to touch box tape. I don't want to do that. I have to actually ship stuff? All I want to do,



Jim, is sit home and click buttons. Jim and Brett, you don't understand. I want to sit at home and click buttons from about eleven at night until midnight. Click some buttons and make money.” That business opportunity does not exist. I'm sorry to tell you, it doesn't. You can chase it for a few years and then come back to what works, if you'd like. Or you can save yourself some money. This one does work. The beauty of it is, as Brett told us toward the beginning of this call, you don't have to be the one touching the product. I don't touch the product in my business. Ever. If someone held a gun to my head and said, “Put these products up for sale on Amazon,” I would be a little lost, because you know what? I've never done it. But I've put my team through the training that's in the Proven Amazon Course that was completed by other experts like Brett, who I brought into the picture. Because my job is partnering with people who are smarter than me at this stuff and bringing them together. And creating legitimate opportunities for the rest of everyone. I'm a filter. I'm a professional filter. I don't actually run the businesses for my multiple income streams, but I filter and I make sure that I know that this stuff works. So that's my little soapbox about putting a little credibility around this conversation that we've had. What else do you have to share with us beyond just a pat on the back encouragement, type of stuff? Are there any other logistical things that someone should be considering before they take on this business? Any other lessons or tidbits that someone should know? Brett: Yeah. Here's more of a nitty-gritty thing. Here is a question I get asked a lot. You touched on it a bit. “How do you compensate all these people?” What does that model look like? Any processing, taping, anything like that is a straight hourly. One of the worst bits of advice that I've seen out there – again, this is me being real from my business experience, so please don't take it as a blanket statement, but I know this would bankrupt my business. We pay a flat hourly for processing. Period, end of story. Because it's such a volatile position. Meaning one day they could be processing three thousand units, the next day it could be three hundred. We do not pay on a per unit basis for processing. Just to let everyone know. That's a nitty-gritty thing. Processing is a flat rate, with an opportunity to progress into something else. Next, buying. So if you just kind of, in an easy way, put processing and buying as the positions that are filled, on the buying side, we typically...Well, there should be three: Processing, Buying and Managing. The buying side, we typically have a unique structure. Here's the unique structure: a base pay. The reason we started with a base pay is that I experimented a lot with straight commission. That did not get the buy-in that I wanted. There were only two things that got the buy-in that I wanted: A straight partnership where that person has a part of that business, meaning they have maybe a small part of the business and then a high upside on the commission. That has a great result. So everyone that is thinking, “I don't have any money to build a team,” that is the first thing that I did. I involved my in-laws who basically ran the business while I was at my full-time job. And built it to a way that I would never have been able to with my full-time job. So partner with a commission. The other side is a base pay with a commission. With our buying side. So the base pay, as of



this call, is ten dollars an hour. With a commission structure that is typical, our typical number that we try to hit is ten percent of the total profit, from whatever entity is selling it. That's where our Google docs come in really handy, because I put the responsibility on them. Remember all I'm doing is I'm confirming a spreadsheet. If that. Most of the time, I get to do my favorite thing in the world, which is build new revenue streams. I absolutely love that. You say, “Brett, what gets you excited when you get up in the morning?” It's waking up and saying, “How am I going to grow this revenue stream, or how am I going to build a new one?” That's what I love to do. So that's what I do every day. But it's only because I put in the time to build out these other systems. So on the pay side, let's say they went and did a big buy. And there was X amount of profit to it. They have a commission structure that they're tracking themselves through. If they fail to do that, they know that their bonus is gone now. Because it's on them to track it. That's the structure we have with the buyers. Then with the managers, we have – typically those are people like with the eBay side, who are doing it on consignment and managing all these different things, because they're heavily motivated to have everything working together, because that's where all their upside is, is on making sure all the product comes in and everything like that. So that's some nitty-gritty ways that we compensate people based on our experience. But it's not like you must do it that way. That's the way that has shown us the most success on our build-out. Jim: Sure. While we're talking nitty-gritty, we went past something that caught my ear a few minutes ago. Ebay, you said it's all consignment. Does that mean if I go out garage saleing and I find a fifty dollar item, and we sell it on eBay for eight hundred – great deal, we really did good – I'm going to get a piece of that? Versus just getting paid hourly? Brett: No, no, no. Sorry. The consignment side is the person over – it's not my eBay account. It's his eBay account. His eBay account basically, we're the supplier for his eBay account and he's super excited about it. So basically he oversees...because his account, like I said, I'm not good at eBay. I've never really built it out. Anyone jumping into eBay right now, if you're brand new, you'll see eBay puts some parameters on your sell-through. Just to let you know, our buying side, just for eBay in a given month, can bring easily a hundred to two hundred thousand dollars in product to the table. So we're a heavy hitter when it comes to selling on eBay and being able to source for it. So when I approached him and said...And this is a guy who came up through our processing. I want everyone to know that. He started with just taping boxes, but he understood our business. So when I said, “Hey, you have a seasoned eBay account that would do great with this. Can we just do a consignment model with you?” He's like, “Yeah, that's awesome!” So it's that simple. On Mondays, we drop off all of our stuff. That's it. Jim: Wow. Okay. So you've got someone else who had an active eBay account and you're using their account and they're paying you a cut.



Brett: Right. Yep. Jim: Gotcha. Brett: It's just simple. Very, very simple consignment model. The person knows that I have their best interests at heart. Someone would probably go, “Well, aren't you scared?” This person, first off has been with us for a while now. Second, this person is excited, because they're going to make more money than they ever have and now they're managing something which he's even more excited about. So that's what I'm saying, it's building those win-win-win situations out that we go, for me , I don't have to worry about, “Oh man, now I have to build up my eBay account. How do you do Global Shipping? Oh no wait, should I do this?” No, this guy is already the expert. All I'm doing is bringing the product. Jim: Got it. Whereas if mine were to grow out and all of a sudden I have eight people hitting yard sales and bringing back stuff that was better on eBay than Amazon. Maybe we can hit how do you decide what goes where? You give your perspective, I'll give mine as the last point on the call. If it was me, I've got a pretty active eBay account. I've had it for a long time. I could handle the volume, the numbers that you just talked about if a team did it. I'd rather keep it in house, personally. So we're not saying there's one right way to do this here. We're just saying if you looked at the unique advantages and opportunities you have in front of you and the creativity of your team, they bring you ideas, it's profitable, let's run with it! Reward those good creative ideas whenever you can. For me, it would be my account. So if I was bringing in people, we'd be moving it all through my eBay account. Then what I would do is, I was curious – I thought I heard you say you use an item by item breakdown to pay people. I wouldn't have done that. I would have said overall, if eBay does X profit, you'll get – we'll all share the benefit. Brett: Yes, yes, that's what we do. On the spreadsheet, they do have it broken down item by item, just for accountability reasons. But it's an overall big, bulk number that starts to be split up between everything. Jim: There you go. If you're tracking it, it's easy. Who was it? Juran or Deming, one of the quality gurus said, “You can't improve it until you track it.” Accurate numbers are everything in business. When in doubt, track that number. You'll never know when you'll need it. We keep very accurate records of what we paid, what date, who purchased it, what did it sell for on eBay, what was the shipping charge, what were the Paypal fees. You capture all that, then you can run great reports. Some people love those kind of numbers. The more numbers you're capturing, the better. You can always use it to go back and make good decisions. Make sure you are rewarding the people that are really bringing the value. Let me ask you this. We'll make this the last question, then we'll wrap up and encourage people to jump on to the Proven Sourcing dot com. Go back to the Thank You page where you purchased this, or if you haven't bought it yet and you're just listening to this, go ahead and make the purchase. It's not expensive. Proven Sourcing dot com. You'll get this interview, you'll get the other resources we talked about. You'll get a discount on the Proven Amazon Course that



will more than cover the expense. But the last question I want to hit is, “How do you know if something is going to go on eBay or Amazon?” I'd like to hear your answer first. When it comes back to the office, how do you quickly sort through? What's the process? Brett: We do have a system in place. Here's the system. If it's brand new, retail-ready and we are approved to sell it on Amazon, meaning like, it's so beautiful it could be put on the shelf at Target and no one would ever think that it came from someone's front yard, or a liquidation service or whatever - then it goes on to Amazon. If it has a defect or maybe it's a unique item or can't be...what's a good example of something we sold recently? Oh, a Nerf gun. Garage saleing, we come across Nerf guns all the time. But they're not Amazon eligible. We don't have the box. An Amazon customer would be really upset if they got this nice, clean gun that wasn't in a brand new box. Brand new retail ready: Amazon. Everything else: eBay. That's why I love eBay. Because the opportunity that is out there for the “everything else” that doesn't fall under retail ready. I'm telling you, Jim, if you said, “What are you most excited for in your business?” It's the eBay side. It is like the ocean of products that are out there that have a slight blemish, or that someone had no value for that we're buying for a dollar and it sells for fifty, sixty dollars, that's what we send over to eBay. It is beautiful. When I see those sales coming in on the eBay side, the most beautiful thing is – my favorite job is I come in and I go, “Hey Doug, how are sales today?” He goes, “Awesome man. Here's the report.” I go, “That's awesome.” I didn't do one description. I wouldn't even know how to do a good description on Nerf guns. Then I say, “Hey, here's Stephanie. Can you train her? She's going to help you with the listing. Train her on how to list stuff then she can help you go buy at thrift stores.” Boom, we've got our new buyer. I don't even train now. I just put them in the right direction of the people that can do it. Jim: That's beautiful. The way that you split your inventory was perfectly stated. The only other thing that I would put on there is sometimes stuff is going to sell for way better on eBay, on occasion. You might move it over. But even wasting the time to do that point by point research. Here's a tip on researching for people that are listening to this. Some people don't know. You probably do, or at least your team has figured it out now, I'm sure. That you can search Completed listings on eBay. You can't get pricing data on Amazon as easily. You can on eBay. You can easily search and say, “What's this product been selling for?” Completed listings. How many completed listings have there been for this item? So you can very intelligently make decisions. Especially if you have a smartphone on you. Paying no money to anyone, you can see what's happened the last several weeks or a couple months on this product. Is it selling? Do an Advanced search, search Completed listings and see what it's going for. Just because someone's currently asking a hundred dollars for an item doesn't meant that it's going to sell for that. Use some caution when you're actually securing eBay inventory at a yard sale or whatever.



Well, this has been a great call. I'm sure we're going to have a few people with some other questions, things we didn't think of. We'll have discussions on our Facebook groups and we'll have links to all that. Again, the Proven Sourcing dot com, if you're listening to this for free and you haven't paid for it yet, go to Proven Sourcing dot com, pay for it. That will get you all these fantastic resources where you can get more information and continue this conversation and get more details. If there's more offers that we make, such as coaching or other things that we put on the back end. We'll just see how the audience responds to this. But I think people are really going to eat it up. I know that we've given them incredible value. Thanks so much for your time. You've gone from a guy with four hundred bucks in the bank to a guy running a several hundred thousand dollars per month business on eBay and Amazon with a team of twenty people, waking up loving what you do every day. I can't wait to meet you in person. We've never met. We're going to meet for the first time here in a couple months. I'm sure there will be many new projects coming down the road as your creativity continues to grow things out there. It's just a pleasure to work with you. You're a true professional and a great leader. It's my honor to work with you. Brett: Thanks, man. I appreciate it. The one thing I want to end on is: Don't get held up by your constraints. Don't get held back by, like I said, my eBay account could not handle the velocity of stuff that I can bring in. But I found a solution for it through my team. Those constraints are always going to be there, but it's up to you to make the mental decision to push through it and find the solution and not just be bummed out. Jim, that's why I love your stuff. It gives the foundation: If you know it works, see it through. So put in that time. Don’t try to be something overnight. It's not going to happen in a flash. Put in the hard work and something amazing will come from it. Jim: That’s where being a part of a community can really help. We've got some incredible Facebook communities. Links to all that are on the Proven Sourcing dot com Thank You page. After you purchase this audio and other resources, you'll see links to groups. You can get in and just literally, it can be three in the morning and you can say, “Wow, guys. I'm trying to think through this issue. I don't know what to do about X.” And you'll have six or seven people jump in. It's a community that we've got a lot of people now paying attention to these things and building these kind of businesses. Your problem keeping you awake at night is a problem that someone else solved in their sleep six months ago. Brett: That's probably right! Jim: They're sleeping like a baby now, because they solved it already. So just drop it out there. That's the beauty of a team. It's not what Brett knows or what I know, it's this community of people that are very willing to help each other out. You know, Brett didn't have to get on and share this stuff today, but he is. Yeah, we're going to pay him a little money for it. But we're not off in our own little corners kind of keeping our secrets hidden. We're sharing it openly. The opportunity is so huge. We're taking about six percent of a hundreds of billions of dollars pie. That six percent will soon be fifteen, eighteen, twenty, forty percent. We're going to need thousands more people that understand these concepts as this opportunity grows. We're



light years ahead of where the colleges are. They don't even understand this stuff. We're still cutting edge with this and there's plenty of room for you in this whole physical product game on eBay and Amazon. Come on in and join us. Jim: Thanks again, Brett. I think I'll cut it off here. This has just been tremendous content for those who took the time to listen to it. Thanks again for your time, Buddy. We'll talk to you again real soon. Brett: All right. No problem, man, Take care. Jim: Thanks, Brett. God bless you.


Interview with Jim Cockrum & Brett...

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