The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Quit Stalling and Build Your Brand: You Don’t Need an MBA to Crush It in Ecommerce by Ben Leonard

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Quit Stalling and Build Your Brand: You Don’t Need an MBA to Crush It in Ecommerce by Ben Leonard https://amzn.to/41kHs1P Looking around at the countless ordinary people who have managed to create successful ecommerce brands, it’s hard not to feel a little left out. After all, ecommerce entrepreneurship can be a gateway to freedom—financial freedom, freedom from boredom, and freedom from working 9 to 5 for somebody else. But the ecommerce landscape is also complex, with tons of pitfalls and speedbumps. It’s hard to know what information is valuable and what’s just another course hawked by a get-rich-quick huckster. Ben Leonard was once in the same place, and he went all in. His journey wasn’t all smooth sailing, but in three years, he built his ecommerce brand to $6 million in annual revenue and a mid-seven-figure exit. Since then, he’s continued to build new brands, mentor ecommerce entrepreneurs, and broker exits. Now, in Quit Stalling and Build Your Brand, Ben brings everything he’s learned to the ultimate ecommerce roadmap. Through practical principles, real-life examples, and step-by-step instructions, you’ll learn: How to overcome your fears and take the first step How to create a brand that feels authentic to you and your values How to build or reinvigorate your business on a solid, scalable foundation How to successfully launch your first product How to—eventually—plan a high-value exit Ecommerce is a vast and exciting landscape, and there’s a lot of money to be made. This is the book every successful ecommerce entrepreneur wishes they’d had when they started. And if they’ve already started, it’s the instruction manual to fine-tuning their brand. With the timeless insights inside, you’ll be ready to set off on your own journey to freedom. About the author Ben Leonard is the classic millennial entrepreneur. He built a business on a laptop, in a cupboard, in his spare time. The difference? Ben grew his fitness brand to several million dollars per year in sales and successfully exited after three years; the business holy grail. Ben has been featured by Forbes magazine, is a winner of the Elevator Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and a speaker and entrepreneurship champion. Ben lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland with his family.

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from any of the audience or guests that we have on as an audience, Jesus, go back and listen to the podcast again. Turn off the phones or something. I'm sitting here doing thousands of interviews and every guest brings me something new, a new way to look at things, some new perspective and everything else. So as always, be sure to tune in for that

and listen to the wonderful people we have on the show and support them as well for some of their books and some of the things they have. We have another amazing gentleman, entrepreneur, and author on the show with us today. Ben Leonard joins us on the show. His newest book came out October 5th, 2023. Quit stalling and build your brand. You don't need an MBA to crush it in e-commerce is its title. And he's going to be joining us on the show to talk about everything he went into and what he did. He is the classic millennial entrepreneur. He built a business on a laptop in a cupboard in his spare time. The difference, Ben grew an international seven-figure business and successfully exited after three years. The business, holy grail. Ben has been featured in various press, including Forbes.

He's a sought-after e-commerce consultant, author, and international speaker. Meanwhile, Ben's brands are used by international athletes, A-list, Hollywood film stars, and featured in multiple publications. He wrote the latest acclaimed book that we're mentioning today and talking about, and he's doing all over with new brands, helping others do the same with his e-commerce consultancy at benleonard.pro. Welcome to the show, Ben. How are you? I'm great. It's good to be here. Thanks, Chris. It's wonderful to have you as well. Give us all your dot-coms. I think I plugged one for you. Give us your dot-coms where people can find you on the interweb. There's QuitScallingBook.com. There's BenLeonard.pro. And for people who want to sell their e-commerce business, it's EcomBrokers.co.uk.

There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your new book? It's a roadmap from idea to exit for building a physical products e-commerce brand. It's the timeless business principles applied to e-commerce that I wish I'd had both when I started and as I was building my first brand, what it's not, it's not a technical book that's going to say, hey, download this piece of software or use this tool because that's going to go out of date in five months. What it is, is solid being there, done that advice that will transform your idea or perhaps existing e-commerce business into a legit brand that people will love and the one that you can sell for life-changing money. And it's my hope that this will be a valuable book.

And so far, it's going down really well for people who are just starting out or somebody who's already doing eight figures in revenue. I think there's nuggets in there for everyone. It's something you could read from cover to cover, or it's something that you could flick into the parts that you need as and when you're facing those challenges. There you go. And it sounds like you help them also build the brand so that you can exit it as well.

That's an important thing a lot of entrepreneurs, including me years ago for decades, didn't really think about a business as an exit. I always thought it's empire building and it turns out it's probably probably smarter to exit them especially when you know market conditions can change and stuff on you yeah i mean i think it's both i think it's it's built it into an empire that is sellable and valuable attractive to somebody else who will pay you top dollar for it and And then, you know, depending on where you are in your life, you might then want to reinvest that money in a new project.

That's something that I'm doing now. And the many people I work with are doing, or it could be that, you know, that you're done. Now you're walking off into the sunset to, to enjoy the rest of your life, you know, doing whatever you may wish, depending on the size of your exit and where you are in your life. There you go. I mean, that sounds like a lot of fun to me. But I never really thought of it that way. And then we had some people that we've had guests like yourself on the show talking about exiting and preparing for exiting. And correct me if I'm wrong,

but one of the important things about exiting is beginning right, how you set up your business model, how you set up your books, how you set up the whole thing. Are you the business or is the software the business, I suppose? Yeah, totally. The most money you'll ever make from your business,

for most people, will be on the day that you sell it. If you break down everything that you've already paid yourself in historical earnings and everything that you might earn after you've sold it in like profit shares or consulting with the new owners and everything you get paid the day that you sell it more than half something like 60 to 70 percent will come the day that you sell it so if that's

true and we know it's true it makes sense surely that we'd at least dedicate some time to thinking about how that looks from day one and how that looks. People are often thinking, how much can I get paid for my business? But what they're forgetting to think about is you're only going to get paid for your business if somebody buys it. Right. So you need to step into the buyer's shoes and think about what they want and what they want is a legit brand, not just like a website or an Amazon account or Walmart account or something that's just selling stuff. They want a true brand that people are connected to that has raving fans

consuming their content all over social media and YouTube and a podcast, reading the email newsletter that makes people excited. And they want that brand to be profitable and growing so that it's got a future and they want it to be well documented in terms of all the right certifications and up-to-date accounts and great record keeping so that they can pick your brand up drop it into their ecosystem because most likely the buyer is going to be an institutional buyer not just some private individual yeah and then run with it. And so that's why I try to teach people. I try to teach people to take their businesses seriously. They're not starting some side hustle on the internet. They're starting a real brand. And the way I say to people to do it is think about your own favorite brands. And that could be a

product to do with your hobbies. Like I play the drums. So my favorite brand of drums is Sonor. Or it could be to do with your profession or whatever it might be. But think about your favorite brands and ask yourselves, how do they look and behave and feel? What do they do? And then apply that to your business. There you go. So tell us about your hero story, your journey. How were you raised? What made you get into the space? What made you want to be an entrepreneur? What was your journey? Yeah, the whole thing was a bit of an accident. I'm from northeast Scotland.

And the town I'm from is a small city called Aberdeen. It's an oil town. So it was almost inevitable that I ended up working in oil. So I was the environmental guy, the token tree hugger. Well, dolphin hugger, actually, to be precise. My background was in marine ecology. So I helped oil companies stay within the regulations. And I generally enjoyed it, right? But I was a tiny cog in a huge machine. I felt like something was missing. And in 2012, I had an idea to start a fitness brand.

And so I did absolutely nothing about it. like most people i was you know trapped in this belief that entrepreneurs are other people you know they're people with business degrees they're inventors they're people who inherit a business or a lot of money or have an mba as you quoted or have an mba yeah you know i the way i you know you kind of grow up thinking you go to school you work hard you might go to university get a job job, retire and die. And it wasn't until four years after that, that I got really sick with a heart condition. I'm fine now, but I had to stop work and stop my fitness hobbies. I needed something to do. And so I started this fitness brand as a hobby. I tried to sell the products into gyms. And it was a disaster.

I was laughed out of the gyms. But I realized I could sell online to people like me. And so I did. And I started selling on my website. And I started selling on marketplaces like Amazon. And before I knew it, turned out I was good at it. But my grandparents on both sides were entrepreneurs, it must have skipped a generation. And we expanded the business from the UK to Europe, to Australia, the Middle East, the brands now in the US. And eventually we were doing $6 million a year in sales.

And in late 2019, I sold that business. And now, like you said in the intro there, I'm building new brands and teaching others what I know. There you go. And you started it from a laptop, basically. And I think you said a cupboard.

What was the cupboard reference to? I lived in a, at the time I was in a small apartment. And my workspace was a glorified cupboard in my flat. Oh, wow. I called in my office. Where you had your laptop and your work. Yeah, exactly. But I called in my office where you had your laptop and your work yeah exactly but i i called in my office but really it was a cupboard for my chair to fit at the desk the cupboard doors had to be open or or it wouldn't fit oh so really yeah yeah so it really

was just a cupboard oh it seems kind of bananas now looking back that i was generating you know multiple seven figures in in revenue and plenty of profit too from a laptop in a cupboard. But yeah, that's what happened. There you go. I mean, you know, I mean, a lot of people, you know, when I talk to them, you know, hey, I'm going to start a business, Chris. Okay, great. Go ahead and do it. And they're like, yeah, I'm just waiting for the time to be right.

I got to, you know, get enough money and I got to have the perfect office set up and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, if you wait for perfect, you're never going to do it. This is a, you know, doing in business and being an entrepreneur, it's a solvable problem where you've got to start solving problems right away. And you got to go through a bit of a process to that. And you can't just be like, well, I'll just start when it's perfect because no time is perfect. No launch is perfect. Nothing is perfect about being an entrepreneur. In fact, really the true nature of being an entrepreneur is problem solving. That's pretty much what you're doing. You're always just going to be problem solving.

So I love the story of you operating out of the cupboard. I mean, it paints a beautiful picture of, you know, you, you, you're going for it. You're, you're not sitting there worrying, going, well, I don't have the perfect desk. Well, I don't have the perfect space, blah, blah, blah, all these excuses that people will make, you know, you're just like, I'm going to make this work somehow. And that's, that's the beauty of successful entrepreneurs, I think, is they make it work somehow. Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there with a couple of things, I think, which is the idea of imperfection. So often, it's from the most imperfect circumstances that the best ventures are born. And I would just say

to people, the circumstances will never be perfect. For starters, perfection doesn't exist. So if you're going to take action, you might as well take action now. And I think a lot of people who want to start a business, they get intimidated because all over social media, I heard this. Somebody, somebody told me the other day, they call it entrepreneurial porn all over social media. You see these entrepreneurs painting this fantastic picture of how wonderful they've got it and how great their business is and how productive they are and how wonderful their career is. But the reality, especially when we're starting out, we're flying by the seat of our pants. It's chaotic. We are building the plane while we fly

it. It's also incredibly exciting. It's intimidating because we haven't got a clue what we're doing half the time. And that's normal and that's okay. But if you don't start, you ain't going to get anywhere. That's true. So that's the message I'm trying to get across to people. Every journey has to begin. Yeah, it has to begin. And you have to give yourself permission to start.

People think, oh, I'm not qualified. I don't have an MBA. I don't have, I'm not an inventor. I don't have enough capital. My friends will laugh at me. People will say, stick to your day job. What happens if I fail? But actually, none of that really matters.

Because when you think about it, you know, people say, oh, you know, I sell stuff on the internet, but it's not really a brand. You know, they think the brands are like Nike. But once upon a time, Nike was just an idea in somebody's head. And even on day one, when they decided to start Nike, it was still just an idea with zero sales. So if we all just give ourselves permission to start and treat our business

with the respect it deserves, as in treating it like a real big boy, grown up brand. And actually you'll find, even if it doesn't work out, well, at least you took the opportunity to give it a shot. Yeah. You're not going to.

I would rather have said, hey, I tried, I swung for the fences, and I missed, than say I didn't swing for the fences or I tried to bunt it. I would rather know that I swung for the fences. And the other thing is you learn so much. As an entrepreneur, there's a lot of small starts I did that failed and didn't really fail. They were just small starts trying to see if stuff would stick.

And you learn things from those. And so even the mistakes you make even though the imperfection that you go through you you learn from those and there's things that you you learn from that eventually make it so that when you finally make things hit or sometimes the things you learn are the things that make things hit make all the difference you you targeted this book to talk about e-commerce and doing e-commerce very well you know i grew up in a brick and mortar world and now everything is kind of pretty much e-commerce these days how do you feel that e-commerce is better than maybe brick and mortar or doing other competing sort of businesses so i i don't i don't think it's better i just think it's different okay it's it's you know i guess e-commerce is just like the world i'm in the industry i'm in but i see people

absolutely crushing it in bricks and mortar businesses and we'll always need bricks and mortar businesses for different things you can't do you know cody sanchez she talks about acquiring bricks and mortar businesses and you know one of the the case studies that she's quite famous for is talking about laundrettes well you can't do those online right yeah and so we're always going to need bricks and mortar businesses and and to be honest so many of the principles in the book apply to bricks and mortar businesses. I think that where a lot of like, there's a lot of opportunity, actually, if it's something that you're into, to acquire antiquated bricks and mortar businesses, perhaps with owners who are of a different, or owners who perhaps are going to retire or something, who are of a different generation, who did a great job with it, but now it's time to pass the baton on and it's then taking a bricks and mortar business it still needs to be a bricks and mortar business but saying how

can we market this more digitally maybe even some sort of crossover there could be that you have a bricks and mortar service business i don't know i'm gonna make this up on the fly now you're you're you're you're in the pool cleaning business, right? It's not a bricks and mortar store, but it's a physical thing. But you spin off and you start selling pool cleaning accessories online. And you use your initial customer base and you say, guys, hey, you can get these on my website. And before you know it, you're actually then selling them nationally and potentially internationally. So there's absolutely a ton of opportunities in bricks and mortar. Bricks and mortar is absolutely not dead. Bricks and mortar retail is perhaps going to change

significantly. Although having said that, right, so many people banked on retail coming, you know, more or less completely online with the COVID pandemic. And it didn't. We've seen, yeah, sure, it came up a lot, but it didn't stay there. And people have gone back to buying from bricks and mortar stores as well as buying online. There you go. I thought it was interesting i haven't i don't know if there's numbers out yet but for black friday there weren't any of the stores were empty it's kind of interesting and it it they didn't you know they didn't have people getting trampled and all the rioting that you know we all enjoy watching the

videos sickly sometimes that didn't happen this year no and do you think we finally made the the conversion to where people are just buying online is this a i think that we're getting we're getting there right so i think that bricks and mortar retail will continue to be part of the mix but e-commerce is only going to continue to take more and more share of it especially as you know you look now you got amazon and other organizations trialing drone deliveries we've got the ability to place an order and have it delivered to our house within hours yeah um something from walmart in an hour yesterday yeah the convenience is just remarkable why would i go stand in a huge line pretend you know really unpleasant experience when i could just get it online. It's very true, especially at Walmart.

Especially at Walmart. The thing I'm sick about at Walmart is those stupid self-checkout things. I think yesterday I made the decision that I'm just not going to deal with it anymore. I'm just going to have delivery done. I was really shocked at how many people

it didn't appear were doing Black Friday, weren't in the stores. I saw the videos of employees posting stuff. You know, there wasn't a crush of people. I'm pretty sure we're not in a bad recession where people just weren't spending money. I think they just pretty much all did it online. I know I was sitting around online waiting. I had like 50,000 things I wanted to buy if the price dropped and some stupid some stupid I'm like I'll pick that up but and I already broke the bank on

Friday but you know it just it just seemed like it was a thing and then I was seeing the inventory that you know I thought at first I thought oh somebody's taking video and they're they're taking select cuts like maybe they recorded the video before opening hours they're like there's no one here and they're they're taking select cuts like maybe they recorded the video before opening hours and they're like there's no one here and you're like maybe this is a spin but then you saw like the inventory the leftover inventory that was still there you know they brought all these tvs that were still sitting there and you're just like wow that's that's that's not fakeable really yeah but e-commerce why is e-commerce easier and do you recommend it for people who, as a first business, as opposed to, you know, doing franchising or doing or something else? The playing field is so level.

Years ago, people like me couldn't have got into entrepreneurship but now the abundance of free and affordable knowledge online and free and affordable platforms online and the ability with us to work with manufacturers on the other side of the world through free and very affordable platforms like alibaba for finding manufacturing partners, for instance, means that the playing field is so level. Yes, you need some startup capital to get going in the first instance. But other than that, it's a huge leveler. And even if you don't have some startup capital, you can still get in with like a dropshipping model, for instance.

I mean, I personally prefer to teach people to actually build legit brands and hold inventory and act like a real consumer goods brand. But if you don't have enough capital to do that to begin with, then dropshipping can be a great way to learn the ins and outs of e-commerce, build up some funds to go and develop a real brand after that. So, yeah, e-commerce is so accessible. Yeah. I mean, you can go online. You buy a website, pay your money, and then you can market. You've got low overhead and everything else.

You don't have the high overhead that goes on. I noticed on your website, you've got several different offers. You've got an entrepreneur mindset, mini course, brand building offers. Tell us about those. Sure. Yeah. So I work with people in like a variety of ways i consult whether that's with like individuals and small teams who are in e-commerce business but also with you know

large you know private equity backed brand houses you want to understand why it's guys on laptops in spare rooms that are crushing them on e-commerce right because those are large sort of bureaucratic organizations they want to understand how to be nimble like us. So I do the consulting. There's the book. And when you go to the book website, yeah, there's a little mini course. You slam your email address in there. There's a little mini course you can get.

And if you enjoy that, there is a course that goes with the book that you can upgrade to if you want. That's over at product-empire.com. So that's the course that goes with the book. But I wanted to make sure that I kind of practice what I preach in terms of accessibility and affordability. And that's why the book is really comprehensive. And so for the cost of a book, whatever it is, 15, 16 bucks on Amazon,

you can learn from someone who's been there and done it. And part of my motivation for the book was really that I was frustrated at the amount of fake BS gurus out there on Instagram, on YouTube, who've never owned a successful business, but are just parroting and regurgitating stuff that they've heard, which is mostly wrong. And people are losing their life savings investing in stuff that they've heard from these guys when actually all they need is is it legit advice from someone who's been there and done it and to treat it like a real business and not some sort of get-rich-quick scheme and I you know in that way ecommerce can be can be life-changing you just you just got to get it right and learn from the right people definitely you've got a there's a lot of, what did you call it, entrepreneur porn, success porn that's out there? Yeah.

In the marketplace. And sometimes I just look at some of it. And sometimes, I mean, relationship porn, dating porn, there's nutritional porn. There's so many of these people out there that you're just like, we really need to see your degree or something. Because, oh, man. Like, you know, some of them are just quite it's it's just interesting to see when people that i guess clearly are have uh the degrees and the knowledge call out other people and you're like oh wow okay that's going on so there you go so how can people onboard with you, coach with you, et cetera, et cetera,

get your personal assistance through your website? I know you have a broker site too. We should probably get a plug in here and explain how that works too. Sure. Yeah. So when I sold my first business back in 2019, the brokerage I worked with could have done a slightly better job. And my accountant has sort of close to 30 years mergers and acquisitions experience. So she and I decided to do a better job. So we set up e-comm brokers. So we're based in the UK, but we've got a deal director sitting over in Chicago. So we help e-commerce business owners plan and then execute their exits.

Mostly physical products, brands, but also a bit of software too. Range of things, you know, we're selling somebody's business right now. It'll go for about 700K. In January, we'll sell somebody's business for about 12 or 13 million. So there's a huge range there. And if you're looking to buy a business, that's a great way to get into e-commerce. You know, hit us up as well. So that's over at ecombrokers.co.uk.

And then just in terms of getting in touch, you know, you can email me, ben at benleonard.pro or ben at ecombrokers.co.uk. I'm all over social. My handle's at benleonard.pro or ben at econbrokers.co.uk. I'm all over social. My handle's at benleonardpro. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very approachable. I'm happy to help or point people in the right direction if I can't help. And if you want to get inside my brain, honestly, the best thing to do, sure, you can book my

time if you want on my website, but it's much cheaper to just buy the book. Buy the book. Buy the book. There you go. And all that good stuff. So this has been really insightful. We got to your dot coms there as we rounded out, didn't we? I think we did. Best thing to do is search on Amazon for Quit Stalling and Build Your Brand.

Yeah. Quit Stalling and search on Amazon for Quit Stalling. Thank you very much, Ben, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Chris. Enjoyed it. Thank you. And thanks to our audience for tuning in.

Order the book wherever fine books are sold. Quit stalling and build your brand. You don't need an MBA to crush it in e-commerce. And I can second that motion. I never went to college. I did get a virtual MBA by ordering Harvard Business Review lessons and studying every book I could on business, but I never went to college and built multi-million dollar companies all my life.

So I can tell you, you don't need an MBA. You don't need all the excuses you think you have. Just about anybody can be successful. Jesus, if you met me, well, I wasn't an idiot. I've gone back and read some of the stuff I was writing back then but i don't think i was the brightest stick of wood back in my day and somehow i made it work so you can too order up folks by ben leonard available october 5th 2023 thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time