Welcome to Episode 106 of The Growth Booth where today I'm going to be talking about why I rented a 40,000 square foot warehouse in the middle of Texas. I’m Aidan Booth, this is The Growth Booth. In the last episode of The Growth Booth and episode number 105, I spoke about e-commerce in 2024, the different types of e-commerce and what I would focus on first, if I had to start from scratch all over again, the model that I would recommend to my friends and family, which is of course, Amazon wholesale. That for me is the one that ticks all the boxes as we roll on and push in towards getting some traction going in 2024. So this episode here today is related to the last episode, because as we'll discuss, I've recently leased, taken on a five-year lease, in fact, a 40,000 square foot warehouse in Texas. To give you a bit of an idea about how big this is, it's about the size of a football field.

I rented this warehouse, leased this warehouse space for a number of reasons. Firstly, I've got a number of large selling physical product brands and I need a place to process the inventory that I then send on to Amazon, not just to Amazon, but other shops all across the United States. I also do sales on dropship websites, for example, websites that are run on the Cartzy platform, which I've spoken about a lot in the past, and these products need a home, these dropship products. I sell offline as well in something like 20,000 stores and I need a prep center for the products before they go into these offline stores.

Up until now, I've been able to do these three things that I've just mentioned using third-party logistics centers. It's never really been what I would describe as the perfect solution, but we've made it work and we've accepted a few issues. We've made it work, but by having my own warehouse operation, I can finally make the perfect solution. I can engineer a one-of-a-kind solution that's perfect for my business, which is going to save me money and a lot of headaches. However, there is a fourth reason that I wanted to take on the lease of a giant warehouse space, and that is so that I can help students who want to build an e-commerce business of their own this year. This is something that we felt we could not do to our full potential if we were going to force people to use third-party logistics centers, because quite frankly, we know a lot of the limitations that third-party logistics centers have. They're not ideal for people who are getting started in e-commerce.

So how exactly will this warehouse be able to help students or help people who want to build a new e-commerce business in 2024? Firstly, I think it's important that I recap, the e-commerce model that I'm focused on in 2024, which I think is going to give people the most benefit and provide people with the path of least resistance and allow people to get up and running as quickly as humanly possible and see positive returns, and that is the Amazon wholesale model. In its simplest form, what we're doing with this model is we buy products at wholesale. That means at a low price from distributors all across the United States. We then sell these products on Amazon at a higher price using free traffic. I want to be crystal clear here. The products that we're selling are already selling on Amazon. That's good news for us. They've already got listings, we can piggyback on those listings and tap into an existing buyer source and existing source of traffic. When we do that, we collect the revenue, we collect the profits and we can scale up from there.

Now there are three massive advantages to selling on Amazon. The first is that Amazon has absolutely monster traffic: 65 million daily visitors. These visitors at Amazon are there to do one thing. What is it? To buy products. If people want to research things, they typically go to Google or somewhere else. I don't normally go to Amazon Alexa researching a product that they want to actually buy. So that's the first big benefit, the first big advantage of selling on Amazon. The second one is that Amazon solves e-commerce complications that deal with shipping. They deal with customer service, they deal with collecting payments and a whole lot more, and they charge a fee for doing that, but it still nets out really nicely for the seller. In this case me or potentially you. The third reason, third big advantage that is a good reason to sell on Amazon, it's because people trust Amazon. They know they're going to get their products quickly. There's a certain level of expectation for the trust of their data so they put the credit card information in and they know it's not going to get stolen. It's one of the most trusted commercial websites on the web. This trust results in high conversions, which is obviously also really good news for us.

Now, as mentioned, in 2024, I firmly believe that the path of least resistance lies with Amazon wholesale but doing the model in a way that's very, very different to how anyone has done it in the past. So what do I mean by that? Let's say you want to get started building a wholesale business, what are the things that you would need to do that? First, you'd need products to sell, you'd need a way to process the products, and you'd need a platform to sell them on. Now, third-party logistics have traditionally taken care of number two, a way to process the product. That hasn't been perfect, has been far from ideal, but it's been a solution. A temporary solution anyway, for people who want to get going. So that second one, I said, there are ways to process the products that's potentially been sorted. Amazon is a great starting place for number three, which is a platform to sell them on. We'll discuss this more shortly, but number one, the products to sell this has remained a real challenge for people this has been people's Achilles heel, if you like, of e-commerce, and not just e-commerce from Amazon wholesale but any kind of e-commerce that I've seen over the past decade plus. People have struggled over and over again, with finding the right products to sell. Now, around about a year ago, we set out to change that to make the product part of this equation, that easy part, and to make sure that no one would fall down because they couldn't find a good product to sell.

Before I get into the details, imagine a situation where you've got access to products that have been pre vetted with validated demand, you've got access to products that are already selling, that you could start selling right away, because there's already a sales channel built up, cream of the crop products from a pool of millions of products that you could choose between, products that you could choose to sell and profit from on a month to month basis and keep turning these products over, which potentially results in a compounding effect, products from dozens of different suppliers, that you're able to sell without needing to first reach out and create agreements or contracts with those suppliers, products that tick all the boxes as well: products that are not oversize products, that are not dangerous in any way, products that are not restricted, and a massive vault of products that you could choose from to start selling immediately products that could be processed for you in a way that's both cost-effective and also specific to your exact requirements. Imagine that kind of a situation.

Now, to give you a bit of an analogy to walk you through this a little bit more, imagine you walk into a candy store, and you see plastic bins full of candy, and you can choose the candy that you want. It's a bit like that. This is not a gumball machine where you put in some money into the machine, you turn the lever, and a gumball or some piece of candy drops out the bottom, but it's random. That's a gumball machine. This is more like a superstore where it's filled with candy, and the candy is in different bins, and you can go in and choose the candy based on a whole bunch of criteria that you may have, and then you can go away with that. That kind of approach to serving up products instead of candy has actually become a reality. It's thanks to not only the 40,000 square foot warehouse that I'm now in control of, but also the dedicated team of people who are working day in, day out, day after day after day to make this work.

Now, this idea started as very much a pie in the sky, something that was floated as “Imagine if we could give this to people,” that kind of idea. But it wasn't something that we've really seriously thought about until after more brainstorming. We've realized that we may actually be able to turn this into a viable solution, and it may be viable for us, by us, I mean my company, to uniquely deliver for a number of reasons. The first is we founded Cartzy, which you might be familiar with, which gives us street cred, quite frankly, when we're dealing with suppliers because we've got thousands of people a very large user base and millions and millions of dollars processed through Cartzy. So if we go to a distributor, and we say "Hey, look, you know, this is a little bit about our business, and oh, by the way, we've processed millions and millions of dollars on Cartzy. We've got a whole userbase of people,” then that gives us street cred, and they're going to get back to us. They're going to reply to us in a timely manner.

The second advantage that we've got is we've got over a decade of experience in the wholesale model, experience in selling not just online, but offline in large volume, and my own company can showcase their history. Again, distributors take us seriously. The third thing that we had working in our favor was an incredible in-house team with over six years of experience in this exact wholesale model, and also in specifically the logistics part of finding products, preparing products, and getting them ready to go. The fourth thing that we've got is, which is definitely not the least important on the list, in fact, arguably, it’s one of the most important, is an in-house accounting team that can navigate the tax implications from potentially buying inventory from many different suppliers, and then making that same inventory available to others. These are four ingredients that we felt would put us in a position to uniquely deliver this candy store to users.

But there's still one thing that we're missing, and that one thing that we were missing was a place to run the operation, a place to hold the inventory, a place to ship products to, a place to ship products from. That is why we ultimately decided to take on a five-year lease and an absolutely massive warehouse in Texas. Why Texas? The reality is there are much, much cheaper options out there for warehousing, but the exact spot that we ultimately chose is within two hours of 14 different Amazon fulfillment centers. This gives us a massive speed advantage. Because imagine if we're using Amazon as one of our sales vehicles, and it's not the only one, but it's a great one to start with, and if we've got 14 different Fulfilled by Amazon distribution centers within just a couple of hours of drive, it's not just a massive cost saving, it's a massive time saving as well, which can ultimately be passed on. It's not just for us, it's for anyone that uses this solution.

So how is this relevant to you? As I mentioned earlier, my main focus in 2024 is on helping people get started with building a successful online e-commerce business by taking that path of least resistance, which in my opinion, is clearly the Amazon wholesale model. It has never been clearer to me than it is right now. By developing this candy store approach for e-commerce products that I think that we were uniquely qualified to be able to do, we can then serve up, prepare and ship out products for people. I believe this can effectively give people as close as possible to a business in a box, a pre-vetted income-generating machine. And as always, there will be limitations, there will be work that you need to do to be able to use this for yourself, there will be a cost. Of course, none of this is something that just magically happens for free. There are real costs involved, but all of these things in my mind pale in comparison to what this could do for people in 2024.

So where do we go from here? On Wednesday, the 17th of January, I will be releasing a book which dives deeper into this model. You can find out about that by going over to eformula.com. The book will only be available for a very short period of time as I'm only going to open up this initiative to a very limited number of people for a limited period of time. Now, as a listener of The Growth Booth, you have advanced notice here so you can prepare yourself to get your hands on this book the moment that it's released to the public. The book and also subsequent emails that I'll send you out with more information will ultimately direct you to how you can jump on a webinar with me where I can dive into this model in much, much more detail and give you examples and show you on my screen exactly how we implement this model and give you more information about the warehouse as well and why that's such an integral part of what we're doing here. 

This is exciting. It's unlike anything that I've ever seen come before. It's the result of thousands of man hours, of hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment and really thinking outside the box, thinking about how we could attack this from another way, thinking about how we could, in an ideal world, deliver so much value to our customers that it would almost be as close to inevitable that they will succeed as humanly possible.

That's what I wanted to share with you today. This has been a shorter episode, but I wanted to at least get this idea out to you. Make sure to stay tuned, keep an eye on your email inbox, subscribe over at The Growth Booth if you haven't already. I'll be sending you more information very, very soon. As I mentioned at the very beginning, this is episode number 106. You can tune in by going to thegrowthbooth.com. You can find show notes there, and you can also catch it on YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever it is that you'd like to consume your content. So that's a wrap for this episode. I look forward to sharing much more about all of this with you over the next week and giving you more information as well in the next episode. Bye for now.