AS 84: This Former IBM Employee Now Pulls 8 Figures Annually In E-Commerce – Bernie Thompson CEO of Plugable

Bernie built an 8-figure electronics business, wrote the book "Flywheels and Feedback Loops: A Guide to Success for Amazon Private-Label Sellers", and released the tools he used to automate the building of his own brand on Amazon. These tools are available at efficientera.com

In this episode, you'll learn:

* How Bernie grew his team

* When to add team members to your growing amazon business

* When to buy and puchase more inventory

* Critical decisions that led Bernie to where he is today

* Payroll, accounting

* Why he started his e-commerce company, and where he is taking it to

* Hiring decisions

* Inventory control and strategic advice

* Where he see's the e-commerce space going

* How he's up against massive corporations

* His customer support is killer

And much more!

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

BERNIE THOMPSON: Oh, thanks David! Glad to be on!

DAVID ALADDIN: Can you take us to the beginning before pluggable, before everything? Where did your journey begin?

BERNIE THOMPSON: Yeah, you know, actually, I have actually always been interested in technology, so, I got a computer science degree, worked at IBM in the 1990s, and worked at Microsoft in the 2000s, and started an electronics company in 2009 selling on Amazon. And that’s led to that being a pretty successful business and also we developed a lot of tools to make that business successful and now I’ve got a second business offering that tools to other Amazon sellers.

DAVID ALADDIN: So, why did you decide to leave IBM and Microsoft in the first place?

BERNIE THOMPSON: Yeah, yeah, you know, I think, you know, every job has its pros and cons. Actually, I love big companies. Big companies are cool. You know, you’ve got a big support structure around you. You know, at IBM I worked on OS2 which is an operating system that probably everybody’s forgotten about at this point. And at Microsoft I worked on tail end Windows NT and Windows 98, and worked on tail end Windows XP and Vista. So, you know, I was a cog in a pretty large machine, but I got…my stuff got seen by a lot of people. But I love small companies. Especially when small companies are successful there’s nothing that beats it in terms of good experience.

DAVID ALADDIN: So, in 2009 you decided to quit and you started a startup that just started launching products on Amazon, is that before FBA was launched? I believe so, right?

BERNIE THOMPSON: No, actually FBA had already kind of been opened up at that point. So, we were able to bet on FBA from day 1, which was a key part of it. You know, I really wanted to focus on the technology, on the customer support, and not have to think about the other things. You know, frankly I am terrible at sales marketing. And so, being able to, you know, kind of hand that off to Amazon and the significant part of the logistics which is something I had really no experience in physical goods. I am a software guy. So, being able to handle in most of that physical goods aspect to Amazon, you know, it was a big deal. I mean, it really enabled me to focus on what I was good at and that probably made the difference in terms of the business being successful.

DAVID ALADDIN: And when you left your job, did you just put everything behind you and you just moved forward with the startup, and how much…how much capital did you have when you started the startup?

BERNIE THOMPSON: Yeah, you know, electronics is a pretty brutal category. You know, if you are going to do anything interesting or you know, even kind of innovative a little bit, you need to have pretty high MOQs and the average price that you are paying is pretty high. So, yeah, I mean, you know,