Building Your Business With The Exit in Mind with Neil Twa
“One of the things I finally realized about building business and building opportunity, building wealth, and networking was it's who you know, that gets you in and it's what you know, that keeps you there.”
Neil is a 7 figure ECOM expert who has shared stage time with Kevin Harrington, Jay Abraham, been featured in Entrepreneur.com, Huffington Post, and INC for his knowledge, training, and business growth around SaaS and E-commerce focused companies in the Shopify and Amazon markets selling physical and digital products. He's successfully coached over 500+ entrepreneurs and made dozens of millionaires teaching them how to sell physical products online, just like he's going to show you today. The software he'll demonstrate is hands down, the best in the industry for managing order fulfillment, product sourcing, automation, and product selling.
Since 2012 Neil has been selling on Amazon using private label branded products and FBA. He's been building online businesses since 2007 after leaving his corporate career with IBM. He spends most of his time focused on helping his clients through brand growth strategies and business development. Through his company Voltage Digital Media they also acquire e-commerce brands with a focus on Amazon FBA.
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Brett:
I'm excited about our next guest. He is the founder and CEO of Voltage Digital Marketing. He has been launching operating and growing private label e-commerce businesses for the last nine years. As of today, he and his clients have sold over $100 million in plus and physical products primarily through the Amazon FBA sales channel, he shares his blueprint for how to build an online business that can generate a passive six-figure income and just hold months while setting up the business from potentially for potentially millions in sales within 18 months. Please welcome to the show with me, Neil Twa. Neil, how are you doing?
Neil:
Good, Brett, thanks for having me on, man, it's good to be here.
Brett:
Excited to get to know you a little bit better. Here on this show, and for our listeners getting snow for the first time, would you give us a little bit more about your story and your current focus?
Neil:
Give you a few minutes on that stuff that might be of interest. It's not maybe applicable to my mom or whatever. I started in the e-commerce stuff. When I dropped out of college in my third year, I went to school on a full-ride music scholarship, but then realized I didn't want to live in a van down by the river, I wanted to obviously increase my wealth, get my business going and do all kinds of stuff. Because of the timeframe that I was looking at. No one could literally teach me how to do international or e-commerce at that point in the world, because it was just getting started. I went out into the corporate world, pulled myself up by my bootstraps, got into management, and into senior management eventually got into sprint PCs is it launched which was really cool to watch the first mobile phone, go to market. They got picked up by IBM, it's been almost five years at IBM building companies within companies that didn't work on work on POS for less than a million dollars.
We worked in enterprise-level, financial, and big tech and customer service mobile areas, as well as e-commerce, set out on my own, and just got into management consulting. For a lot of high-end companies started building my own company up, got involved in more online marketing, around 2009 found had an aptitude for media buying. I got very good at driving traffic to other people's businesses. I woke up one day and said, you know what I should be building my own products and businesses that way. I got involved in the physical e-commerce of space, which led me to find out that you could actually sell products on Amazon.com around 2010, and I was like, this is an amazing opportunity. nobody's really taking good advantage of this yet. Let me see what we can do. Fast forward nine years later, we have a software team. Coaching and mentorship, we have a digital agency, we launched these businesses, we operate them for our clients, some of it even 100% passive for them, as well as exiting and acquiring brands now, through our portfolios brand, in which we literally build these companies for exit.
Brett:
We're talking about building your business with the exit in mind, and this is Neil Twa. By the way, can learn more about Neil Twa at voltage D as in David M as, in Mary.com, it's VoltageDM.com. But Neil, before we go there, I want to help our listeners and myself get to know you a little bit better. I want you to go back and I want you to put yourself in the high school days, maybe the university days, and if the younger Neil, and I believe we've all been given certain gifts in this life. Some people call them superpowers. Some people call them strengths, I believe the God-given gifts they've been given to us to be a blessing and help to others. I'm curious, what are the one or two gifts that you believe you were given? How does that help how you help and bless people today?
Neil:
In the end, one of the things I finally realized about building business and building opportunity, building wealth, and networking was it's who you know, that gets you in and it's what you know, that keeps you there. As well as your network even can do. You obviously have to know what you're doing. I had learned through the school of hard knocks to learn how to kind of do networking. The fluidity of business for me is like a moving River. Because through high school and college I played music as I mentioned, I went to school on a music scholarship. I love jazz and classical specifically jazz is an improvisation and I found that business gave me the most flexibility to create and adapt and change and move when my business partner likes to joke now as I'm the guy that jumps off the cliff without a parachute, and he comes with me and after nine years he now learns to build the parachute on the way down, which isn't his biggest comfort zone.
But it is my Change and adaptability reinventing myself through life through different business models for being in the oil and gas space and having patents for wireline technologies in the oil and gas space to ending up in high tech, then ending up back into e-commerce, which was my original love, and the reason why I even dropped out of college. You know, being flexible, accepting changes the normal process of life, these are been things that I have, I believe been gifted with to see the optimism and the possibilities of them not be to really differ by the difficulties, but overcome those objectives. With a positive mindset with a positive attitude and the realization that I can just keep shifting gears and changing directions and flowing with that river, as it's changed on which has created a lot of opportunities for me.
Brett:
I think have changed flexible adaptability, I think of the honeybadger. A little bit right, and you can just put up. I a little bit honeybadger, and me too. That's really cool. Thanks for sharing that. Now let's dive into the number one Secret to Building your business with the exit in mind. When you're coaching, consulting, even for yourself, what's the number one way to make sure you're keeping the exit in mind?
Neil:
At the end of the day, a profitable product, build a profitable brand and build a profitable company, and obviously a good profit and loss statement. It's really understanding the customer solution, the number one thing is really putting yourself in the mind of someone else really stopping, as they say, to walk a mile in someone else's shoes to really understand the solution that you're trying to provide for that product that's going to build a brand of solutions for a specific kind of person, or what we refer to as an avatar profile of a person, if you can really put yourself into that person's needs and wants and desires, and really adapt what they're doing and understand what solutions and things they're trying to do through a product format.
That's the way we solve those on a basis of products, then you can double if you double your understanding of the customer, you will double your revenue. We really spend a lot of time putting ourselves into the market focus where we've gotten really good at reading with the market once as opposed to telling the market what at once. I think that comes from a bit of adaptability and flexibility in my past to really look at our customers. The number one ticket for us is really defining that really good customer avatar for us, it has to do with a bit of a solution-oriented nature. Let me give you an example. That means instead of, for example, looking at a customer base that says, I'm willing to wait for an hour and pay $300, to have that abscessed tooth taken care of from the dentist, we're looking for the customer base that says, you know what, I want that out in 10 minutes, I'm willing to pay $500 for it.
That's the solution that I'm looking for, and if you provide that level of solution, certain aspects of the business model workout, then a lot of people focus on the idea that if I don't sell the $300 solution, I'm not going to have a mass-market appeal, which is actually kind of a stinking thing, and as I refer to it, the truth is there are just as many people buying the $500 solution as the $300 solution. Really, the secret is understanding that customer avatar really driving into the solutions, that they're looking to solve what they're really trying to solve, not you necessarily, which is typically a profit-oriented focus, but a solution-driven business model with products that actually made that solution.
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