Dan Meadors is the cofounder of the Wholesale Formula and also has a full service Amazon agency. Join Dan's community. We discuss how best to grow sales, avoid common sourcing mistakes, and where private label and reverse wholesale collide.
How does private label and reverse wholesale work? Developing products.
How do you grow sales?
Mistakes you've experienced or seen, that others learn from.
When doing wholesale sourcing research, find product where there is space on Amazon not being served. Find products with lack of competition.
Dan started w/ RA, failed w/ PL - and discusseds the challenges that led him to reverse wholesale.
What's the current business model you guys use, and how is it different than more traditional wholesale? The types of wholesale, problems with other models, how it relates to a lot of the same thing that PL sellers already do.
What makes this model different than Private Label? Cost, Speed to Market, Investment Time, Risk, Budget)
Aren’t you just selling other people’s product? Dan's answer: Assets, Exclusivity, Cashflow, Monetizes A Skill You Already Have.
Private label can incorporate Reverse Sourcing Wholesale into their business.
Dan and Dylan are both from one of the poorest parts of the country - Southeastern Kentucky. They ended up landing pretty decent paying jobs, at least for around here and were considered to be doing really well by the standards of our area. In 2011, the CFO at Dan's company told Dan he was quitting his job. Dan couldn't believe it because he knew the CFO was making a six figure salary.. When Dan asked him why he would ever quit his job, the CFO told him he was making more money selling stuff on Amazon than he was as CFO and so he was just going to do that full time. Dan was shocked and asked him to prove it. So his CFO took him to Walmart and taught him the basics of Retail Arbitrage.
That was enough for Dan and so he started pursuing the RA model for himself. He spent his nights and weekends in stores scanning or at home packing and prepping. And it worked. Within four months, he was making enough money to quit his job too. He reinvested every dollar he could back into the business and that's how he grew. By 2012, Dan had a million-dollar business. But the honest truth was that it wasn't really a "business," it was a j-o-b. It wasn't sustainable. If he wasn't working, he wasn't making money. So he had to work, and work hard, all. the. time.
When Dan came to this realization that something had to change, he brought Dylan onto his team and that's when they discovered the reverse sourcing wholesale model. And once they started pursuing that method and left RA behind, they tripled the business in size in the first year to $3 million in sales. The next year, it doubled again to over $6 million in sales. And this was an actual business - a scalable, sustainable, passive income model where they didn't have to work in it for it to run like a machine.
Today, Dan & Dylan work less than 4 hours per week in that business. They have totally outsourced it so that the business runs and continues to grow for them. Their business has now done more than $30 million in sales, million in profit and sold more than 500,000 products.