David Storey is the founder of Amazon FBA Build to Sell (AFBTS), a unique coaching and specialist advice program designed for Amazon sellers who want to build their business with a mindset to sell the business in the future. In this first blog post, David tells us how his experience as an Amazon Seller who went through the process of building and selling his business led to the development of this program.
Question: David, would you mind introducing your company and telling our audience a little bit about what you do and what your business does?
David: AFBTS, which stands for Amazon FBA Build to Sell, is about building an Amazon business with this end game in mind, from the outset or as early as possible. Because if you do that, it has a massive positive impact on the value of the business and its overall salability.
I’ve been an Amazon seller since 2014. I had a really successful business and I should have sold it in early 2017, but decided to make it a lot bigger. That was a mistake, and lots of things went wrong that year. When I went to go out and try and sell it again and it was unsellable because it was a distressed asset, it was going negative.
I spent the next 18 months working out from buyers of businesses, sellers of businesses, brokers, what it really takes to maximize the value of a business and make it highly sellable. I found out all this new stuff, and it completely changed my way of thinking in the business and my strategy for the business. And I implemented that over that period of 18 months and had a seven-figure exit myself in 2019.
At the end of that I thought to myself, “Wow, there’s so much stuff here that I didn’t know before.” I’d spent 20 years in the industry in quite reasonably high-level positions in operations, and I don’t know all this stuff. So, that means that all these Amazon sellers, which can come from any old day job, they get enticed into selling on Amazon, won’t know this stuff either because it’s definitely not in the training programs.
I thought, “wow, I’ve got to pass this knowledge back to Amazon sellers so they can do something similar to what I’ve done.” Because if I’ve known all that stuff then, then I probably would have sold it in 2017. I decided to start a company with a training program.
Question: You’ve had two groups of students so far, one with the first 30 another that’s got 370. Where are these businesses coming from? Do they tend to be concentrated in the same types of business lines?
David: They’re really from around the world – some from Australia, a few from Asia, there’s a couple from the UK, Portugal, Germany, Europe, USA. Their businesses cover a wide distribution with all different categories, across sports, automotive, home and kitchen, baby, tools, arts and crafts.
The smallest businesses are doing around less than a million dollars turnover or 750,000. I’ve got a bigger business in there it’s doing 15 million turnover, that sort of range. I would say the most common range though, is doing between one to three million. There’s a lot of those. The type of sellers that are attracted to my course are normally just one person or perhaps a partner as well.
In Part 2, David will elaborate on why financial planning is so essential to starting off on the right foot with your Amazon FBA business. If you would like to know more about Amazon FBA Build to Sell, click here.
