Angie Chacon learned how to make money on Amazon using the Amazing Selling Machine (ASM). Once a single mom struggling to make ends meet, Angie now owns and operates a multi-million-dollar Amazon business. Listen to Angie as she offers her Amazing Selling Machine review and gives advice on using the ASM course to pick the right product, investing back into your Amazon business, sourcing suppliers, and hiring employees to grow your business.
Contents:
Amazing Selling Machine Success Story
Using Amazing Selling Machine to Pick the Right Product
Financial Freedom and Investing Back into Your Amazon Business
Finding a Supplier – Overseas, Local, Yourself?
Hiring Employees to Better Grow Your Business
Amazing Selling Machine Training and Community
Amazing Selling Machine Bonus
Full Video Transcript: Single Mom Builds Amazon EMPIRE
Angie Chacon went from a stressed single mom—finding it difficult to pay the bills—to a multi-million-dollar Amazon business owner. Angie felt stuck in her 9 to 5 job and was lacking both the freedom of time and the financial freedom she wanted in her life. She knew she wanted a job she could do anywhere (whether that was traveling or being at home), and something that allowed her to spend time with her kids.
After hearing her friends’ stories about the Amazing Selling Machine (ASM) course and their Amazon business success, selling on Amazon made sense for Angie. Having no Amazon or e-commerce experience, Angie studied the ASM courses on evenings and weekends, and began to build her multi-million-dollar business.
Angie almost gave up a few times in the beginning. She did not go through all the ASM training on how to pick her first product. Instead, she ended up picking one she thought would work out well, but did not bring in many sales.
Angie warns others to really follow the ASM training course and not stray away from their strategies when picking products. After realizing that she picked the wrong first product, she went back to the ASM training, and her following products were successful.
In the first 6 months of selling, Angie went from 0 sales to $60,000 a month. After Angie paid all her expenses, she was left with a 30% profit, about $15,000 a month. Instead of living off her profit right away, Angie invested the money back into her business. This allowed her to add a new product every month and grow her business quickly. In 6 months, she was able to quit her job and live off her Amazon profits.
While you can outsource most things to Chinese manufacturers, ASM recommends using United States manufacturers when selling any health or supplement-related products, to ensure that all laws and regulations are met.
The company Angie chose to manufacturer with in America could not keep up with the demand Angie had every month. For a while, Angie ran out of her top five best-sellers. To make sure that never happened again, she started her own manufacturing company to develop the products at the speed and quality she needed.
Last year, Angie traveled more in a year than she has in her whole life. To make that freedom happen, she hired additional help to run her Amazon business. Now, Angie does not have to be there to run the day-to-day business. Her duties as a business owner are to expand the business she has, improve the products she has, and innovate new products.
At the beginning, Angie was doing everything from customer support to product selection, but as her business grew she realized she needed time to focus on how to grow and expand the business. Hiring two people allowed her to focus on the big ideas and let the day to day tasks run themselves. Hiring one additional part time employee allowed her to go from $60,000 a month to $200,000 a month in 6 months.
When Angie began, she knew how essential the Amazing Selling Machine (ASM) would be to her success. ASM gave her access to a community of sellers who willingly helped answer her questions and helped her with strategies to grow her business.
The Amazing Selling Machine recently launched the first 2 videos in a new video series. The series consists of four different videos covering topics like product selection, finding suppliers, using freight forwarders, launching products, marketing, and putting it all together to build a successful Amazon business. The videos come with bonuses like a complete Amazon sourcing blueprint and the best categories to create your first product. Videos can be found at asmnow.com/free for a limited time.
Jason Katzenback: Hey, there! I’m Jason Katzenback, co-founder of the Amazing Selling Machine. Some of you might not recognize my face because I haven’t been in the videos very often in the last few months, and that’s just because things have been busy, things have been crazy, but I am, in fact, for any of you new people, have been in this business, with the Amazon business since 2012. So I actually got into Amazon because of Matt Clark, me and him business partnered up back about six years ago, and he showed me his strategies for being able to build a business on Amazon. And because of that I was able to, in true, honest fashion, in four months, my first business, I was able to get to $10000 a month in just four months.
Jason Katzenback: Now that market was brand new, there was a lot of activity going on. Amazon had changed a lot since then, but I was addicted from that point and so since then, Matt and I, we created the Amazing Selling Machine and now Rich Henderson and Mike McClary are crucial parts of it, in fact, they’ve taken over a majority of the content creation because they’re the absolute masters when it comes to understanding this business. They’re in the trenches day in and day out. And because of all this work we’ve done to the Amazing Selling Machine, we’ve created so many success stories, and I’m very pleased to say that this beautiful lady beside me right now is someone that we’re very proud of, because she’s one of our success stories.
Jason Katzenback: And what a success story you are. It’s so awesome. In fact, you’ve learned a little bit about her in the video 1 that was released just yesterday. And I think there was a picture, a video, a component of you on a fork truck?
Angie Chacon: Yeah, just a little bit.
Jason Katzenback: Just a little bit? Well Angie and I have a little bit of a connection there, because when I first started after college, I was a fork truck driver.
Angie Chacon: Really?
Jason Katzenback: So I actually did that for few years, yes, so I’m quite the talent on the fork truck, I feel.
Jason Katzenback: But anyway, now you have a great story, you really do, and maybe, for those of you who don’t know you, just give a little bit of a background about how you got into doing business on Amazon. And then we also want to hit on something when it comes to vendors and your suppliers. But let’s hear the story first.
Angie Chacon: Sure. I basically started about three and a half years ago. I saw some friends that had actually bought the Amazing Selling Machine course and they were doing fairly well and I thought, this could be a good opportunity for me. I was looking for something that was going to give me a bit of time freedom. I couldn’t really work the nine to five job. I had my kids, I was supporting them and I needed something a bit flexible for time and I wanted it to be where I could be anywhere and do it. So I wanted to be able to be at home, or if I needed to travel, I wanted to be able to do the business from anywhere. And I definitely wanted it to be something online. So when I came across the Amazon business, it just sort of made sense on why I would do that.
Jason Katzenback: That’s awesome, because that’s the exact reason why I started a business using the Internet too. With all those same reasons and freedom is really a big part of it. But, awesome. Okay, so then, when you came across the program, it hit all the right check marks, tell the story from there. Where were you? Were you doing already manufacturing? Were you already selling products? Did you have any experience in that? Or were you totally new to this industry?
Angie Chacon: Well I was totally new to Amazon and eCommerce. I had some business background prior, but I was actually working a nine to five job when I found the Amazing Selling Machine. I was studying it in the evenings and on the weekends, and actually I was working another job on the weekends. I was really keeping myself busy trying to make ends meet, because I was starting over, being single and I was raising my kids and it was a lot of work so I hustled.
Jason Katzenback: Very cool. So did you know, because I hear this a lot with successful students, did you know that when this started that this was going to work for you?
Angie Chacon: I didn’t know, I guess because I saw friends that were doing okay, that gave me a little bit more confidence. I see these people doing it and it should be fairly simple, but it just made sense to me.
Jason Katzenback: So there’s still a speculation? That’s great, that’s great, because a lot of times you hear people that’ll come in here and say, “I just knew, I knew.” But not everybody, so here’s someone that looked at it, everything looked right, but there was still doubt. So you just knew now that you had to work.
Angie Chacon: Yeah and I hate to say it, but I almost gave up a few times, too. Because when I started, I picked the wrong product. I kind of jumped the gun and I didn’t fully go through all the training on how to pick a product. And I had a product that I [crosstalk 00:04:51], I know this’ll work. I love it and I know I could sell it face to face with people, so I figured that this was a great product to start with and I went and I put it out there and put it on Amazon.
Angie Chacon: And it was this little trickle, this is not working, maybe this is not going to work for me. But then I kept seeing the other people that were succeeding and how can it be succeeding for them and not succeeding for me? And I went to one of my friends who had started it a year before me, and he was like, did you pick the right product? Did you really study, and he actually really emphasized on how I needed to just really follow the course and not go off and not do something else and not come up with my own ideas and that really made a lot of sense, and I started doing that. And then I realized I did pick the wrong product and the next two products I picked, they were killer, they did awesome.
Jason Katzenback: Yeah, we’re definitely proponents of follow the system. And so, with the Amazing Selling Machine, you got the training and everything. But your story is, what I love about it is, it’s much more than that. You’ve got the foundation, we helped you and thankfully it’s good to hear. I know Mike and everyone that puts so much work into the training love to hear that, when you follow it, it actually worked.
Jason Katzenback: How is your business doing? Do you mind sharing? I think you showed stats, yeah, so where are you financially with your business?
Angie Chacon: Yeah, let me start by saying that I went from 0 to about $60000 a month in sales in a six month period.
Jason Katzenback: So from 0 products to in six months you’re doing, how much?
Angie Chacon: $60000 in sales per month.
Jason Katzenback: With how much net, at the end of the day, after everything, expenses paid, how much money were you able to either give yourself or put back in inventory?
Angie Chacon: It was like 25, 30%, I put in my pocket, all expenses covered.
Jason Katzenback: So what’s that? That’s about 15 grand a month profit, after only six months? That’s like $180000 a year in profit after only six, wow!
Angie Chacon: Yeah, thanks. I just want to say that was the moment when I was like, this is working. It’s working. Just copy and paste, get another product and put it on there, get another product and put it on there. It was really exciting. I actually was working full time, a job and doing that for those six months and I was pouring all my profits back in and I wanted to just accelerate it as fast as possible so I got my first product a couple months and then it was a product a month. I had five products by that time.
Jason Katzenback: And that’s a really good point. That’s something, we want to be as transparent with all this as possible. Yeah, you know, the success you had, obviously you’re making $15000 a month, where, yeah, you could start living on that, but then the problem is, you can’t grow your business and you start taking away. But if you can just dedicate and keep working and give yourself a year. How much did you give yourself?
Angie Chacon: That was six months and that’s when I quit my job and I was Amazon full time. At that point, I had to take some cash out, but I had enough where I could still reinvest and by a year, I was doing $100000 a month and then actually about four months later, I was at $200000 a month. I jumped really fast from $10000 to $200000.
Angie Chacon: I launched a bunch more products and it was Christmas season went and it just sort of kept going, January, February, March. It was awesome.
Jason Katzenback: Christmas season’s so awesome, Black Friday and all that, Cyber Monday, Prime day.
Angie Chacon: Yeah, that’s been my best sales day so far, Prime Day.
Jason Katzenback: So for your market, January does very well, right?
Angie Chacon: January, February, March actually did better for me than November, December. It was pretty crazy, wow, I love that.
Jason Katzenback: And so, another important thing here, so you’ve got, you’re doing very, very well. You’re doing upwards of-
Angie Chacon: Well in two and a half years, I hit half a million a month in sales.
Jason Katzenback: There you go. So I mean, you’ve got a multi million dollar business from a brand, that how many years ago, did not exist?
Angie Chacon: Three and a half years ago.
Jason Katzenback: That’s pretty awesome. So and you did this all on your own, in your house, with your internet, no other systems in place, nothing, working a job, raising children, making family on your own.
Angie Chacon: Yeah.
Jason Katzenback: Again, that’s so inspiring, it’s so cool to hear, but something else that’s really cool, which is a good time. So yesterday’s video that you would have seen, we talk about selecting products and finding products. In the next video, tomorrow actually it’s going to be released, we’re going to be talking about sourcing products. And some of your options, that we hear a lot about China, going overseas to get products, because there’s a lot of products that it does make sense to go over there. Because simple things that can be made, like plastic, these look real though-
Angie Chacon: They’re not?
Jason Katzenback: They’re not real, but these kind of things, that’s a great kind of product for going in China, because they can mass produce these really inexpensively. But when you start getting into other products like health supplements, anything like that or things where there’s more laws in place, you want to be local, because you want to be on this side of the ocean, in our opinion anyway. And so, that’s kind of the route you went, where instead of going overseas you came here, but you actually now are your own manufacturer as well, is that not correct?
Angie Chacon: Yeah.
Jason Katzenback: So let’s hear the story of that, because not only did you create a half a million dollar a month physical products business, but at the same time you managed to build something else that has this whole other revenue stream on top of it all because of the Amazon business.
Angie Chacon: Yeah, it’s true.
Jason Katzenback: So, I’ve got to hear this story.
Angie Chacon: It was kind of interesting because it was right when I hit the $200000 a month mark and my sales were just skyrocketing and I was launching a bunch of new products and the company I was using to manufacture for me could not keep up with my demand, basically. What do I do? I actually ran out, my five top sellers, I was out of stock for a little while and I was like, I’m never going to have this happen again. What can I do? I’m just going to create my own manufacturing company.
Angie Chacon: It took me some months, I had to figure out all the rules and regulations and consultants and all this stuff. It’s not something I recommend everyone go out and do, but for me it made sense and I was excited about doing that. First, I just put it there really for myself, to manufacture my own stuff, have my own chemist, create my own formulas and just have full control over the manufacturing, the quality, the speed.
Jason Katzenback: And that’s the one thing, especially with that market of products, you want to make sure you’re delivering what you’re saying. I can totally relate, because when I first got started on Amazon, I was actually in the health supplement market, it was actually raspberry ketones and garcinia and cambogia and all those. And it was a nightmare working with manufacturers to get legitimate results when we tested. It was always off. And it was a nightmare and it was expensive too. So very cool, very cool.
Jason Katzenback: So you decided you need to do this, how long did it take you to actually do it, to now have your full own fork truck?
Angie Chacon: Probably, that’s a good question. I want to say a year, but it probably took me a little bit less than that.
Jason Katzenback: I think a year.
Angie Chacon: It’s about a year.
Jason Katzenback: A year’s impressive enough, we’ll just go with a year, that’s very cool. So now, and correct me if I’m wrong, so not only is your business producing results for you, but you actually create products that other people are now selling on Amazon as well too, so you actually private label?
Angie Chacon: Yeah.
Jason Katzenback: The whole package is, what I love about this story is because with the Amazon business, I don’t even like calling it an Amazon business, because it’s a physical products business. But you’re getting started leveraging the power of Amazon, and because of that, because you were able to tap into the power of Amazon, now you’ve created so much more out of it. It’s not about just creating a company that sells products on Amazon, you could do that, but I think you’d be cutting yourself short. It’s like the sky’s the limit with this, because, the freedom it gives you because, I just saw you in Orlando last week. I see you traveling all over the place. Tell us how your life has changed from that perspective, because obviously you have to work, I don’t want people to get the wrong impression, that all of a sudden now you’re sitting there sipping dacquiries on the beach all day, you actually have to put in a lot of time, but explain that, I think you can explain that better than I can.
Angie Chacon: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s been great. I mean last year I traveled more than I have my whole life. I went to China twice for a couple weeks, I was gone basically a month out of the year in China, just helping other people source products and I went to a bunch of different conferences and I did some other events and things like that. So I was traveling a lot and I have one and a half people run my Amazon business. One and a half, someone else does something else too, so I say one and a half, let’s just say there’s a couple people that run the Amazon business. I don’t have to be there too much to actually run the day to day, the daily operations are pretty much taken care of. When I go into my business, it’s really just expanding, maybe innovating products I already have or improving on them or launching new ones.
Jason Katzenback: I’m a big proponent of something someone taught me quite a few years ago, about really segmenting your time. You got to figure out what are the tasks that people I can pay $10 an hour to do, up to $100 an hour, because you need to grow your business. If you want to be a multimillion dollar business, you’ve got to be doing those $10000 an hour kind of tasks. I have to admit that’s what’s impressed me a lot about what you recently, I’ve even seen some posts on Facebook about your organization structure and everything. And it’s those are like those hard things, but people who are listening, at the beginning of this you had to do everything, right? You were doing customer support, you were doing everything.
Jason Katzenback: But if you want to be able to really grow this business, it’s not really, there’s not anything special, well there is, you’re awesome. But I mean it’s that you really identified with the fact that to grow this business, I can’t be doing these little tasks, I have to focus on, what you were saying, how do I grow the business? How do I expand it? So you delegated quickly. Two people, that’s it?
Angie Chacon: Yeah, I could hire a lot more and do a lot more, and actually I am doing that right now, I’m actually building a whole team. I just hired actually about five different people in last couple of weeks. So it is something to get to the next level from where I’m at now, I have to put a lot more organization, a lot more structure and just have everything documented and just kind of put the machine there.
Angie Chacon: But you know, I will say that that was probably one of the most important things I did that actually helped me to scale and get to the next level. It took me from the 60,000 to the 200,000 and that was like six months, was actually hiring somebody. At first I just brought somebody in part time, if I keep handling customer service every single day, I’m not working on new products, I’m not working on increasing my volume of sales, so that was the first thing. Let me bring somebody in, let me put them in customer service and, at the time, I was like, I really don’t have the money, so I was like I’ll just bring somebody in part time. So I did that, I brought somebody in and she started part time and within a couple weeks, she was full time.
Angie Chacon: I kept delegating things over to her and I noticed my time was getting freed up, now I could focus and work on these other things which was great, so now I’m actually working on creating the future of my business. The other thing that was great too is, when I was sitting there just doing it by myself, man, you have to put a lot of energy and effort into being self motivated. The distraction of like I want to go get coffee, I want to go outside, I’m going, you’re at home, I’m going to sleep in today. It’s funny, because I had people approach me that I help, how do you do that? Yeah, you’ve just got to motivate yourself and yeah, but I don’t get all the tasks done that I need to get done. And I’m like, you need an accountability partner or just hire somebody to come in a few hours a day, because you have to sit down with that person and work with them.
Jason Katzenback: It’s true. How do get something to hold you accountable? That’s why I like as you develop, you hear people getting business coaches and everything. Because even as you grow it sometimes, you want to make sure you’re always focusing on the right priorities. So when you’re in your house by yourself, which is what’s awesome about the training, because it does step by step with you and the mentors and everything, try to push you through it. So let me check one thing, I just want to check on time. How are we doing on everything, time? Are there any questions or anything that we want to cover?
Mike: I do have one question.
Jason Katzenback: Sure.
Mike: About how much did you start off with in inventory, how much did you spend?
Jason Katzenback: Just to make sure everyone heard that, so the question is how much, how much capital did you start off with for inventory when you got started?
Angie Chacon: Okay, I kind of had a unique situation, so I might be a little different from other people. So, I had zero money when I started and I didn’t have any access, my credit was bad and so I’ll just say that. I wasn’t able to go get a bunch of funding, so I actually found somebody to loan me the money to even do the course. But I realized how important it was for me to have the course and it wasn’t for the course, the group was more, because I knew people that had the course and to be honest, I had learned some of the course, but it wasn’t the course I needed. I needed the group, I needed to be able to go into the community and ask my questions and get help to get to the next steps and that was actually the most important thing.
Jason Katzenback: Very cool.
Angie Chacon: But, I borrowed the money, I got the course and then, I was that was all I had. I actually literally found somebody who had a skin care manufacturing company who was willing to give me units on consignment. And I literally bought units and I had them relabeled and I was like, 25 units at a time. I would never really recommend that to anybody these days.
Jason Katzenback: So that’s a good question. Let’s start with that as a budget. If it was 25 units a day. If it was your money, so that someone sitting here, you have the money, how much money of yours, would it have been that you would have started with? What was that cost?
Angie Chacon: I didn’t have to pay for those units until they were sold, but essentially I was committed to $5 a unit times 25 units.
Jason Katzenback: Very cool, I’m not guaranteeing that anybody is going to have luck like that. [crosstalk 00:20:26] I shouldn’t say that’s luck, and I don’t like saying the word luck sometimes because it’s finding those opportunities and capitalizing on them. It’s identifying them. Luck is when something is just given to you where you don’t actually have to ask, to work for it. So I don’t want to take that away from you, but that’s awesome. That’s what’s great about this business as well is, it’s not the amount of money you start with, it’s the more money you have, the more freedom you have of options of what to start with.
Jason Katzenback: Because at the end of the day, I think anybody, if you have $100, you can literally find somewhere where they’ll sell you a few units to get started and you just slowly get started. The problem is, it’s going to take you so much longer to build up because you can’t do those promotion strategies and everything. So usually, I think we recommend, what, about $2000? And that way you can get a good amount of inventory and marketing push and everything to give yourself to give yourself a really good go.
Jason Katzenback: So that’s awesome. What an awesome story. And again, not luck, for you being able to see the opportunities as they arose, really cool. Any other questions?
Mike: No, that was my main one. You get a lot of great kudos. People are loving your story, Angie.
Angie Chacon: Awesome, thank you.
Jason Katzenback: Awesome.
Jason Katzenback: So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to close this call, but I want to remind you guys, please, please, please, first of all, if you have any other questions, keep putting them on there. I’m sure, Angie, you’ll check on it later.
Angie: Yeah, I’ll go in there and answer some questions.
Jason Katzenback: But please check out tomorrow’s video, because tomorrow’s video, we actually go into how to find suppliers. And they get some bonuses with that. Mike, remind me what the bonuses are right now with tomorrow.
Mike: With tomorrow? They’re going to get a complete Amazon sourcing automation blueprint.
Jason Katzenback: So a complete sourcing blueprint. Everything you need to know about that and-
Mike: And also with the first video, they’re going to get how you can set up any country in the world and the best categories to create and sell your first product.
Jason Katzenback: Coll. Did we include, do they get an interview with a freight forwarder in this?
Mike: We don’t have that in this one, but we do have information about freight forwarders.
Jason Katzenback: So you’ll learn about freight forwarders, you’ll learn about sourcing, you’ll get the roadmap, the blueprint for sourcing your product; super, super valuable. You’ll be able to connect all the dots, plus some great training where you’re going to see, I think there might be some more fork lift adventures with Angie on the call tomorrow, but you’re going to learn a lot of valuable information. So check out the video tomorrow, I think it’s 9 o’clock in the morning?
Mike: 9 am.
Jason Katzenback: 9 am central. Thank you for joining us. Thank you Angie.
Angie Chacon: Thank you. Yes, always.
Jason Katzenback: This is awesome, you’re such an inspiration to everyone.
Angie Chacon: Thank you.
Jason Katzenback: Everyone, take care. Have a great day and we’ll see you tomorrow.
Angie Chacon: Bye.