AS 74: How Steve went from Janitor to selling 750 Million on e-Commerce, Box, and Amazon

Steve Simonson came on the show today and revealed dozens of golden nuggets. He is a serial entrepreneur (e.g. last real job was as at the age of 18) & has built a few businesses from zero to 50 Million +.  Over the years Steve's ventures have generated over 250 Million in consumer sales & 500 Million + in B2B sales.

This is definitely one of my favorite amazon podcasts interviews thus far.

In this episode you'll learn:

* How to sell private label on Amazon

* How Steve grew his brands from zero to millions

* Dozens of golden nuggets in this action packed interview

* Steve's insights into e-commerce

* White labeling strategies

* Big insights on scaling from 0-2million, 2million to 5 million, 5 million to 10 million and beyond

* The types of products Steve sells

* What products to sell on Amazon

* What products sell better on Amazon

* Why margin is the key to success

* Mistakes Steve made

* How he prepares for Amazon 4th quarter

* How he packages his products

And lots more!

Contact Steve:

http://StartSolid.com

DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Steve!

STEVE SIMONSON: My pleasure, glad to be here! Thank you!

DAVID ALADDIN: So, can you take us to the beginning? Before your first million, where did it begin?

STEVE SIMONSON: Sure! Well, I can tell you that… I went to college…I won’t bore you with that long story. But I went to college I dropped down after one semester. I was working as a janitor, and I was too poor to continue on frankly. And I didn’t really like it, if you want to know the truth. I thought college was annoying, and I thought it was cumbersome and I was making 3 bucks an hour working in the middle of the night.

You know, once I kind of got my first taste of business with a partnership there that kind of expanded into becoming a partner in another line of business that we had, and we expanded from, you know, kind of janitorial to carpet cleaning, into insurance restoration work. And over time we kept learning pieces of the puzzle, of how you run a business, how you hire people, how you grow, how you sell, how you market. And all of those lessons were learned the hard way in my opinion.

We generally made mistakes, we generally, you know, hit problems that were, you know, catastrophic like how do we make payroll, or how do we, you know, get this customer to be happy when we’ve really messed up in a huge way. So we learned lessons in a very old school way, which is just by doing it. And so, from there I ended up getting into some showroom businesses where we had home improvement products, window treatments, floor coverings, counters tops, things like that. And that was kind of an off shoot of the insurance restoration business and the construction businesses and at that time, and so it was out of stock, so, we e-mail the customer: hey, sorry, it’s a couple weeks delayed.

And the moment the rug came in, I sent out my best person, I said: Kathy, run down there and get that rug off to Bulgaria, and then we are going to toast again that we are international business people, this is a Friday. And so, she runs it down, we send it off, and the very next day we get a credit card notice of, you know, fraud.

DAVID ALADDIN: Oh, Jesus!

STEVE SIMONSON: Our first, very first sale, was fraudulent. And that was the first lesson we learned about the internet converse.

DAVID ALADDIN: Wow!

STEVE SIMONSON: So, can you believe that? It’s a credit card fraud, the very first one!

DAVID ALADDIN: It’s impressive!