What I Learned From Talking To The UK’s #1 Amazon FBA Expert, Jonny Bradley
(Plus, 7 Lessons From Six-Figure Amazon FBA Businesses)
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A few years ago I read a book by the billionaire investor Ken Fisher.
He was talking about the 10 ways to get rich, a popular topic for sure.
The book was good if you were just starting out, but I forgot most of what I read — except one part.
Over the years, number three in The Ten Roads To Riches was a lingering thought: Be a sidekick.
Ken’s advice was to hitch a ride to a Successful Visionary’s star.
It provoked me because I thought it was manipulative and unethical. He went on to explain that he doesn’t necessarily agree with the tactics (an example was marrying for money, not love). It’s just one of ten patterns he observed.
He’s partially right though.
Most people in business can easily identify who Bill Gates or Warren Buffet is. Who they might have trouble recalling are their sidekicks: Charlie Munger and Paul Allen.
Both of these sidekicks flew under the radar, and yet they both became billionaires from choosing the right business partners.
The truth is, “sidekick” is a harsh term. Charlie and Paul added tremendous value to their respective companies and helped shape entire industries with their business intelligence. However, they were never rock stars.
And that’s fine because they quietly made their billions and moved on in life. Some say it’s a blessing to be relatively unknown like that.
Years later an epiphany about Ken’s book came to me when I was advising startups and new small businesses.
I started seeing people making an incredible amount of money from creating businesses attached to big tech platforms like eBay, Apple, Youtube, and Etsy.
Not everyone, but a lot of people were making more money than they knew what to do with. Some of these people I actually knew, and I was quite jealous of them.
It made me think about platforms more than business models. I learned a great deal about this when I helped Sangeet Paul Choudary edit and brand his best-selling book Platform Scale.
Billion-dollar platforms have already figured out the ultimate business model. To make millions, many small businesses have figured out how to create a complimentary business model. The economic symbiosis is profitable all around.
If you hitch a ride to the right platform, are you destined for riches? Yes.
The Brightest Star
Lately, the brightest star to hitch a ride to is the largest online retailer in the world: Amazon.
We know for certain that Amazon is a well-funded industry leader with no sign of slowing down.
Amazon’s annual revenue for 2018 was $232.8B, a 30.93% increase from 2017. That makes it the 18th most profitable company in the world. At 6,000 online sales per minute, they have clearly mastered e-commerce.
The Successful Visionary here is Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and the richest person in the world ($153B and counting).
Now how can people hitch a ride to the brightest star? Amazon FBA.
So what is Amazon FBA?
When a customer buys an item on Amazon from a third-party, it can be fulfilled by the merchant (FBM) or by Amazon (FBA). FBM is difficult because the merchant has to provide the inventory, product space, customer service, and shipping all by themselves. FBA is a lot easier because Amazon does all these things for the merchant.
With FBA, Amazon stocks all the products at their advanced fulfillment centers. They also handle customer service inquiries, shipping, and tracking. In return for this robust supply chain system, you just pay a few small fees for each sale. Except for samples, you never really see the product you’re selling.
This turn-key system is incredibly attractive for the minimalist entrepreneur. A lot of the hassles of a business are absent and you can do it in your spare time. As more and more people learn about Amazon FBA, we’re seeing sellers show up by the truckload. And while many don’t make any money at all, there are plenty that do.
The Amazon FBA Opportunity Is Unsaturated
With a company as old as Amazon, it makes you wonder if there is any more room for yet another FBA seller. Is it saturated now? Not by a long shot and the potential to make money is high if you have the right training.
In 2019, a Marketplace Pulse study revealed that 206,237 sellers made $100,000 in sales. Another 50,465 sellers earned $500,000 in sales, and 23,172 made $1 million in sales. Depending on what they’re selling and how they’re selling it (their own products or as an affiliate of Amazon’s offerings), many merchants are bringing home over six figures in profit. There are a lot of skeptics about Amazon FBA riches, but the data clearly shows there is an impressive number of people making good money with it.
Based on numerous metrics, it’s safe to say that the opportunity to create an Amazon business is still wide open — especially in the United States and the UK. Of the 518,608 new sellers in the first part of 2019, only 9.5% come from the UK. The seller population there is far from reaching the saturation point. But even so, the number of sellers in the UK — and the world over — is not the most important metric.
The Everything Store Doesn’t Have Everything . . . Yet
Amazon’s product sourcing and supply chain is quite impressive, but it’s not complete. A flurry of products are being invented faster than they can be marketed and sold online. Of the millions of products that could or should be sold on Amazon, most aren’t listed there yet. And every year, thousands of products are introduced into the market and have yet to appear in Amazon. Furthermore, products that already exist can be branded (white/private label) or rebranded to make a fortune on Amazon.
Does this proven method for making money sound plausible? Let’s put it this way. In 2018 there were 206,237 people that sold $100,000 in products. So why can’t you?
You won’t be early to the game, but you definitely aren’t late.
There is no denying the millions of customers that visit Amazon every day with the direct intent to buy. This is often the hardest part of creating a business: traffic. That huge hurdle is overcome here. The real challenge is competing with all the other Amazon sellers and Amazon itself.
So the trick is to find the Successful Visionary who is dominating this space and get training from them.
That person is Jonny Bradley, the UK’s #1 Amazon FBA expert.
Jonny Tried It All
Jonny Bradley had the typical occupational angst story. Like many, he was at a loss for what to do with his life, and he often wondered who would hire him. He tried so many things that didn’t pan out, it made him very anxious about his future.
In the past, he was a Domino’s Pizza delivery driver, retail clerk, bartender, Apple sales trainer, and guitar teacher. He even tried busking at Kingston Upon Thames in London.
None of these jobs paid well.
And despite the low pay, he stayed with Apple for a good 5 years. Apparently, Jonny was good at his job. The company promoted him quickly and soon he was training over 90 employees on advanced sales tactics. Despite his stature at Apple, it was not enough. He quit to pursue something in the corporate world.
When he finally did get a 9–5 corporate job, he was miserable. He hated getting up early in the morning, riding on the train, working a long day, going to sleep, and doing it all over again. His salary was good, but not great. He was adding to other peoples’ bottom line, but not his own. This is a familiar tune for so many people.
I suppose that’s just the normal situation for being a modern-day millennial, but Jonny was set on breaking the mold. He was frustrated and over the years, he had reached his breaking point.
On a holiday trip to Turkey, Jonny had an epiphany. He decided to commit to making his own business work and quit the 9–5 job he had. He was taking a big risk, but his time on holiday made him realize the life he had was not what he truly wanted. Needless to say, this trip was transformational.
Upon coming home, Jonny took his first online business course. After years of just dabbling in business and passively watching YouTube business videos, it was time to take a proper course. This was something he had never done and it made all the difference. He got in-depth knowledge and action steps to start making real money.
Not only did he apply what he learned in the course, he also created his own YouTube channel. He pivoted from being a consumer to a creator. On this channel, he would go on to document his journey to independence. And the subscribers came in by the droves, especially in the UK where there was practically no information on Amazon FBA.
Despite his early success, Jonny didn’t quit his corporate job immediately.
He wisely stayed with his job until he could replicate his sales over and over again, month after month. This meant that he was burning the candle from both ends. He needed to perform well at his day job, but also create a lucrative business when he came home. This lead to countless nights where he only got four hours of sleep.
Lots of people talk about quitting their job and starting a business. It’s just not that easy and not very practical. Jonny knew this and planned accordingly.
Myself, I’ve been there too so I understand. I have a graveyard of books and courses that I’ve taken and shelved or have not even touched. But they’re on my To Do list to activate for sure, along with 20 other items. Again, information overwhelm and staying-busy-but-not-productive is a thing.
I think we’ve all been here, and it’s not 100% our fault. Schools teach us to learn, memorize, and regurgitate that information on an exam. But in the business world, experience and results trump theory. Like so many, Jonny was sometimes too good of a student and that kept him from achieving his financial goals.
Knowledge is good, but it’s great when combined with execution.
Gaining FBA Momentum
I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical of Amazon FBA businesses. I privilege the Social Media Marketing Agency (SMMA)model, partly because I knew about it first.
However, the more I learned about the mysterious world of Amazon FBA, the more I liked it. It takes less time and less customer service than SMMA. I almost wish I tried it before SMMA. Who knows what I’d be doing now?
From numerous conversations with others, I came to the conclusion that Amazon FBA is the ideal side hustle for professionals because it only takes a couple hours a day.
I like how Jonny was skeptical about FBA too, but did it anyway. He made it a side hustle to test out. At his corporate job, throughout the day he’d go to the restroom to check on his Amazon merchant account. His growing sales figures made him excited and those sounds of joy could be heard nearby. That must have been odd for anyone around, but he didn’t care. Within months Jonny had already made thousands from his side business. I can only imagine the odd pleasure of going to the bathroom in those early days.
The money was flowing, but things weren’t that simple.
In the beginning, Jonny was working too hard in his business. He needed to find a way to systematize and automate tasks. When he figured that out, he taught others how to do it to spare them the frustration. Just like in the Apple days, his students quickly started to replicate his results. That’s when he began to etch out his standing as the UK’s leading FBA expert. He didn’t earn this title from decades of experience. He earned it through his remarkable results with countless students.
Along the way, he perfected his online business system. After becoming well-known in the UK, clients from other countries started to recognize him. Hundreds of people signed up to get free training and then joined his SellerPro Academy. To keep up with demand, he had to hire people to help him because attending to their every request was the utmost importance to him. (Currently, there are five forms of customer service so that no Amazon FBA query goes unanswered.) He also wanted to connect with more people and build even better program assets.
One day he reached out to a friend and asked him to join Team Jonny. Oddly, at the time his friend didn’t have the skill set needed. However, Jonny was willing to let him figure it out. He just said,
“How much are your monthly bills? I’ll pay for them. Just come work for me.”
His friend accepted the offer and within four months, he figured out a way to do advanced marketing that added thousands to Jonny’s bottom line. Today, anyone in his SellerPro course has access to this secret and many other bankable FBA marketing tactics. These assets alone are worth thousands.
The Streamlined System
The holy grail in business is to find a proven way to make money, replicate it, scaled it, and turn it into multiple streams of revenue.
And Jonny figured that out.
He figured out how to do this without having to slave ten hours a day at a job he hated. So many would-be entrepreneurs fail because they don’t understand the path to success. They end up wasting time and money. In the end, they simply tire out and give up.
Entrepreneurship is hard work. Amazon FBA is not a get rich scheme. But the end is in sight if you commit to a plan. And in the star system of Amazon, it doesn’t need to be that complicated.
What Jonny really excels at is how to make lots of money with one product. This was something that everyone wants to learn since it minimizes the startup costs and makes the business more manageable. It’s also the quickest way to make money on Amazon.
One Product Away From A Six-Figure Amazon FBA Business
The premise of Jonny’s course is both promising and ambitious. I think it’s genius because if forces his students to have a singular focus: 1 business, 1 niche, 1 product, 1 brand, 1 message, 1 audience. Those six one’s add up to one six-figure business.
This is ideal for someone just starting out with Amazon FBA. They can put a little money into one product that is well-researched, turn a good profit, and reinvest their money into the same product if they desire.
For example, HydroFuel is Jonny’s own brand. He sourced it, branded it, and now it’s his flagship product. In addition, it serves as the perfect case study that other students have modeled.
Upon succeeding with one product, students can try out other products or different audiences. Jonny teaches students how to validate their products in the marketplace and scale with certainty. Where most FBA training skips over this part, it’s the foundation of what the SellerPro Academy is all about.
In The End, It’s About The People
S o what kinds of people take Jonny’s course? People from all walks of life. While he does have a focus on the UK population, the SellerPro Academy is for anyone wanting to start an Amazon FBA business no matter where they live.
Though the UK seller population is unsaturated, there are a few hurdles to overcome. Jonny addresses these topics in his course to expertly handle them. If you lived, for example, in the USA you would simply skip over those short lessons on UK-specific guidelines. It really doesn’t matter where you live, this program can be used in any country. Because of this fact, Jonny has a diverse student population in his course.
Some had money to invest, and others had to save every dollar for many months to afford the Amazon FBA opportunity. However, when you look at the high-achievers, there is a distinct pattern that got them to where they’re at today.
In fact, Jonny had so many students making a healthy income that he invented a special “10K Club” to acknowledge them. To any of his students who achieve £10,000 in sales, he sends them a completely customized 10K trophy. It’s quite an expensive award made of solid aluminum. The cost didn’t matter. Jonny wanted to reward his students for reaching their first FBA milestone. Over the years he has handed out numerous 10K trophies and now he’s starting to hand out 100K trophies!
“I want to inspire people to take action, follow their dreams, and do the things that they want to do rather than just accept their 9–5 or whatever it is that’s holding them back.” -Jonny Bradley
Seven Secrets For Amazon FBA Success
If you’re serious about creating a profitable Amazon FBA business, these are the proven secrets to getting there. (I know, finally!)
1. Customer Empathy Is Job #1
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” -Steve Jobs
You’d think that nowadays most business owners understand that everything must be customer-centric. But based on what Jonny noticed on Amazon, you’d be wrong. So many vendors write weak product descriptions and minimal images. It’s as if the customer only needs the gist of a product to want to buy. The reality is that lots of products need “lifestyle images.” That is, images of real people using the product in its natural or ideal environment. Show the customer using the product! This is one of the things that Jonny emphasizes and teaches.
Professor Peter Fader of the prestigious School of Wharton has shared this sentiment for decades. In his award-winning book The Customer Centricity Playbook, he outlines how customer empathy goes above and beyond just understanding your customer today. It extends to their lifetime value, future needs, and relationship with the products. This is the very thing that Jonny builds into his business and branding.
2. Aggressive Patience
“Fall in love with patience early on to be able to be fast for the rest of your life.”
-Gary Vaynerchuk
Another commonality with six-figure FBA owners is that they have a lot of grit and persistence. They strive to make progress every day. You can’t wait around for miracles to happen. In a business, there are a million things to do. In Jonny’s course, one of the best things is that he helps pace his students and he gives them the right sequence to do things. It doesn’t make sense to worry about things that aren’t up yet. In the meantime, other things can be done and we have to be aggressive to the point that we’re certain our time is well spent on relevant tasks. This is what Jonny calls “aggressive patience.”
3. Specialized Amazon FBA Training
“The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.” -Steven Spielberg
As mentioned above, Jonny’s trip to Turkey gave him an epiphany: take a real online business course. That little change made all the difference. I think a lot of us think that the sheer volume of YouTube videos and free courses are enough to develop a valuable skill set. However, free isn’t always the best. And while there can be tremendous value in free videos or ebooks, what we need is specialized training to get a specific result. Paying for it makes having some of your hard-earned money at stake makes sense.
FBA is very granular. Unless you have a detailed course, it can seem chaotic. There’s simply too much to know. A good course can prioritize the components of FBA and give you relevant assessments to truly master the skills. Jonny’s course SellerPro Academy does just that. His style reminds me of Tim Ferriss’ DSSS framework: Deconstruct, Select, Sequence, and Stakes.
There are many online training courses that look good on the surface, but they fail to capture the interest of the students. Jonny applies the best practices of online learning backed by neuroscience. One example is that most of his videos are short and to the point. For memorization and processing, the brain’s hippocampus can only deeply focus for 20 minutes or less. Jonny’s 3–6 minute videos combine this limitation of the brain, and the idea of microlearning (i.e., delivering content to learners in tiny, very specific bursts that result in greater control for the learner).
4. Learn Only From Experts
“To be the best, learn from the best.” -Darren LaCroix
Early in my SMMA training, I was duped by someone selling a course I spent a lot of money on. I was furious. It was the early days of SMMA and few people had a course out. I bought into the marketing hype of the course and dove straight in. After spending time in the course, I was sorely disappointed because the teachers were obviously charlatans. (Eventually, I did take one SMMA course that blew me away.)
Like a lot of online business courses, people often learn just enough from their mentor, and then they try to create a competitive spinoff. They lack the hours, months, and years required to grasp a specialized skill set. The result is a generic course that leaves the student with tons of questions. These same questions an expert could have easily answered directly in a short video, thus saving students lots of time, money, and frustration.
This is why you should only learn from experts if you can afford it. They’ve seen all the mistakes and have been doing real work in the field. Training is not about theory, it’s about practice. As professor Anders Ericsson pointed out with his 10,000-hour rule (made famous by Malcolm Gladwell), “deliberate practice” administered by a true expert is the three-part recipe to success. Luckily, a growth hacker like Jonny can reduce the time you need to practice and apply the lessons.
Jonny’s course is great for self-directed and highly-motivated people. Every lesson is essential and potent. It primes you enough to take action, so you reduce the learning time. It reminds of what the musician and entrepreneur Derik Sivers once said: “The standard pace is for chumps.” It truly is.
5. The Branding Edge
Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room. -Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
With Amazon FBA, it’s often the branding that makes you different from your competitors. This is something every good FBA course addresses. Not only do you have to understand the customer and speak their language (dovetailing Customer Empathy), you have to take that information and translate it into your branding.
This is a major differentiation in Jonny’s Amazon FBA UK course. As we have seen, Jonny was one of the top sales trainers at Apple. They actually flew him to the U.S. headquarters to partake in top secret projects and initiatives. Now think about that for a second. Jonny lived and breathed the DNA of Apple’s world-class marketing, branding, and customer service. He had access to some legendary people in the industry.
If what sets you apart in a sea of Amazon merchants is branding and strategy, getting an education from a trillion-dollar brand like Apple would be ideal.
And for now, an extra thing you get with the SellerPro Academy course is an additional course: Monetisation Mastery. In my opinion, it is a masterpiece. It’s all of the greatest lessons Jonny got from his job at Apple and then applied to an e-commerce business (not just Amazon FBA). This course would be an asset to anyone starting a personal brand or business from any industry.
6. Self-Mastery
“It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.” -Jony Ive, Apple’s Chief Design Officer
The funny thing about building an Amazon FBA business is that sometimes you learn more about yourself than the actual business. You learn about your weaknesses and strengths. You learn how you deal with various challenges. You learn why you do things and how that benefits others.
Building a business requires personal leadership. It helps to adopt the right mindset, strategy, and actions to succeed. This is why entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. You must learn to be excellent at things that might be foreign to you. This takes a certain amount of humility, practice, and persistence. Because if you’re not giving yourself and your customer the best you have to offer, your competitors will.
7. Ethical Entrepreneurship
“I don’t care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing.”
-Steve Jobs
Although this is the age of radical transparency, it’s hard to gauge honesty when you’re online. In cyberspace, you can look bigger than you really are. However, e-commerce companies come and go. Thanks to third-party review sites like Trust Pilot, it’s becoming easier to sniff out a company’s transparency and honesty. Needless to say, ethics are important.
Amazon’s version of Trust Pilot is tricky. Surely, you can game the system and get plenty of 4 and 5-star reviews. But they’re cracking down on black hat tactics like this. To avoid getting your account suspended, it’s best to get real and honest customer reviews. In the long run, it pays to be 100% ethical and over-deliver value.
Regarding doing business in the UK, it’s the best in the world according to Forbes. It ranks #1 from analyzing a diverse set of business metrics such as corruption, taxes, innovation, technology, and workforce. According to this report, “The UK is the only country to land among the top 30 (out of 161 countries ranked) on all 15 metrics Forbes used to rate the countries.”
What I get from Jonny’s Amazon FBA UK course is that he’s a proud Brit who seeks to do right by his country. He has high standards with his content, marketing, and customer service.
With online courses, I have a 4 E’s test I put them all through. Is it Ethical, Efficient, Effective, and Exciting? If so, I know I’m getting a good course. Jonny passes the 4 E’s test with flying colors.
The things Jonny knows about online business could fill a book. In fact, I hope he writes that future best-seller one day. Until then, we have his online courses and that is a priceless thing in itself.
Most entrepreneurs are 2–4 startups or micro-business experiments away from finding a winner. What I kept thinking about with Jonny’s course is that it would be a great place to start if someone wanted to create an online business. His FBA blueprint is easy to follow, and the products already exist. They’d make more money than they ever thought possible if it were the right business for them. However on the chance it wasn’t, I think the SellerPro Academy would provide an incredible skill stack that would easily transfer into their next business.
With Jonny’s comprehensive course, the stars don’t have to line up. It teaches you to become a star in your own right.
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