TrueLife - From IT Consultant to E-Commerce Trailblazer: The Mr. Lawson Story

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Mr. Lawson started SimpliSync 3 years ago with no prior experience in e-commerce. Through determination to solve a need for Amazon sellers, Mr. Lawson has grown SimpliSync into a successful management company. As Founder and CEO, Mr. Lawson now directs strategy and growth for a company serving dozens of vendors nationwide. SimpliSync has expanded by providing advanced software and stellar customer support to streamline order management across sales channels. Mr. Lawson conceived the idea while consulting in IT. Hearing clients voice headaches managing Amazon and other platform inventories, he saw an opportunity. Mr. Lawson self-taught the technology, funded an initial software solution, and made connections among Amazon sellers.  By consistently re-investing in engineering and talent, Mr. Lawson built an agile company fixated on usability, flawless integration, and delivering seller peace of mind. When not planning long-term, Mr. Lawson spends time in SimpliSync's forums getting direct customer feedback.  Mr. Lawson's vision ahead is expanding SimpliSync's unified data and operations capabilities to additional major e-commerce platforms. But he remains dedicated to serving the Amazon sellers who catalyzed the business with the most sophisticated and affordable solution possible.https://www.simplisync.us/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the wind is at your back. I got a great show for you today with an incredible guest. The one and only Mr. Jay Lawson, he started Simply Sink three years ago with no prior experience in e-commerce.

Through determination to solve a need for Amazon sellers, Mr. Lawson has grown SimplySink into a successful management company. As founder and CEO, Mr. Lawson, now direct strategy and growth for a company serving dozens of vendors nationwide. SimplySync has expanded by providing advanced software and stellar customer support to streamline order management across sales channels. Mr. Lawson conceived the idea while consulting in IT. Hearing clients voice headaches, managing Amazon and other platform inventories, he saw an opportunity. Mr. Lawson self-taught the technology, funded an initial software solution, and made connections among Amazon sellers. By consistently reinvesting in engineering and talent, Mr. Lawson built an agile company, fixated on usability, flawless integration, and delivering seller peace of mind.

When not planning long term, Mr. Lawson spends time and Simply Sinks forums getting direct customer feedback. His vision ahead is expanding Simply Sinks unified data and operations capabilities to additional major e-commerce platforms, but he remains dedicated to serving the Amazon sellers who catalyzed the business with the most sophisticated and affordable solution possible. Mr. J. Lawson, thanks for being here today, my friend. How are you? Appreciate it, George. I'm good, man. I'm real good. Well, I'm stoked you're here today. I don't know a whole lot about e-commerce. And when I saw what you were doing, I was like, man, what a great avenue for someone to get involved and create a new life for themselves.

So I got a bunch of questions, man. I thought I just fire one off here and see what you got to say, man. What do you think? Sounds good. Let's do it. Okay. So can you provide an overview of your experience in the automated Amazon drop shipping industry? And what led you to start your business in this niche?

Well, I started an e-commerce on eBay. I was doing it part-time while I was working. And then I started seeing the online arbitrage and the benefits of drop shipping. So it led me to like streamlining how it's done. After seeing all the pitfalls, having all the problems dealing with different issues here and there, I was like, this could be done a lot better. And as I grew, you know, my business, I was like, I can make this a platform. I could actually transition this business into like something I could offer to other people. And so when I moved over to Amazon, you know, drop shipping, I was like, okay, let me test this out.

Once I built up enough experience and I saw enough of the issues that we arise and solve a lot of the problems, I was like, yeah, I think it's time to offer this to others. So we, me and my team opened up simply sync to do Amazon dropshipping and ungating for you. So you don't have to do anything. You just sign it with us and we take care of everything else. Man, maybe you can maybe you can break that down a little bit. Like, what does that mean for me? Like if I want, what does it mean if I come to you? I want to drop ship something or maybe you can break down what's exactly going on there.

So, you know, it's automation, right? So what we do is we have a bunch of software and we have a bunch of people that know how to manage the Amazon process. Right. So that's our advantage, right? We're efficient. We can scale. And we know how to. save money. So when you save money by purchasing low and selling high, your gains are a lot higher.

And so a lot of our suppliers that we use, they use our software as well to sync inventory. They fulfill orders, update tracking, and everything else. So the Amazon model is pretty much buying it wholesale, selling at retail. So if you understand that, just that simple fact, then you'll understand what we're doing. We're just doing it at. scale. So we're able to process thousands of skews without needing a lot of staff because we have all this automation in place. And with new AI software and all these robotic knowledge tools and everything that computers are capable of doing now, we can do it with a really small team, which then also reduces costs on our end. Right. So when you come as a customer to us,

we do a profit share, but you receive more of the benefit of that property. share because we have less cost because obviously there's cost with everything but you don't have to pay it because it all comes out of profit yeah it's a fascinating time to be alive but what i guess maybe i guess you've kind of already explained the process but maybe you could just go a little deeper and explaining the process of ungating products on amazon and the challenges businesses often face in this regard so undating ungating is like crucial and it's really difficult without the right expertise. And ungating means that Amazon allows you to sell branded products.

So if you want to sell Nike or if you want to sell Adidas or if you want to sell Apple, you have to be an authorized seller of those items. And when Amazon allows you to sell those items, those items that are high in demand, people will buy them from you because, again, our goal is to get them at wholesale and sell them at retail or a little bit less than retail so that people will be like, oh, I'll go to Amazon and buy it, right? That's the goal. we can charge a less than retail price because we didn't pay, you know, the highest cost when we purchased it. But once Amazon allows us to ungate a product saying that we're authorized to sell this,

we can then put it on your store or whoever customers we have, their stores, and then they are able to now sell those products. And, you know, the criteria for Amazon is opaque. So, you know, experience plays a huge role. And the fact that we've been doing it for so long, and the fact that we understand the processes, and we have a great team of ungating, we have an entire ungating staff.

That's the only thing they focus on is ungating products so that we can put it in our stores. It helps us, you know, generate pretty significant revenues. Yeah, that's, I didn't even know that that was a thing. I guess it kind of makes sense now that you're talking about it, but I didn't even know what ungating was, man. Pretty interesting to think about it from that angle. what about in the in the context of drop shipping like how do you handle issues like inventory or fulfillment

or customer support of or maintain like high levels of customer satisfaction well you know kind of like i was talking about before we use AI machine learning big data and a robotic process automation depending on where we are in the flow but it's our automated platform it integrates everything so the suppliers inventory the order management uh it provides real-time stock updates, like how many items you have in your store, how many items are available to sell. You know, that's really important. Prompt fulfillment so that the customer receives it on time. You know, Amazon loves that next day delivery stuff. So you got to make sure that you have your next day delivery handled the same way, right? And so we have to keep up with them. And then the

software also does, you know, tracking, sinking because Amazon wants to make sure they can follow the product from the warehouse to the front door. And all those things can create problems for Amazon. So we have to be on top of that, right? So our system also helps with customer issues. And we have a multilingual support team because this is global. Amazon is in a bunch of countries. And there's really no limitation to where you can grow.

It's just about how well you're able to fulfill Amazon's policies when you do grow. So we sell in Canada, we sell in Mexico, we sell in the United States. We sell in Europe, you know, we have a VAT, which is a, which is like a tax ID license for a European nation. So we're able to sell, you know, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, you name it. So anywhere in Europe and the European Union, we're able to sell products simply because we know how to put together the tax documentation needed to, you know, fulfill the needs of Amazon. Because all these things Amazon is looking for your store to have in order. What an interesting way to have such a global reach? Like, how does that feel as an individual?

To be where you are and have such a global reach? It seems like not that long ago, you would have to have an entire corporation to have such a global reach. But you as an individual, as a man, as an individual, how does it feel to have such a global reach like that? Well, I mean, we live in an age where me and you were having a conversation right now and we could be anywhere in the world. Right.

But it doesn't feel that way just because we're used to it. So at this point, a sale here or sale and Qatar, it doesn't really matter in the larger scheme of things because it's almost an expectation where if someone has a desire to buy something from you, it doesn't really matter where they are. And because, you know, I live in Hawaii and my entire entrepreneurial journey has been here, I've always dealt with clients outside of Hawaii, outside of the country, all over the world, engineers in Turkey, you know, development teams in Asia, clients and, you know, manufacturers of products in China, you know, clients in New York. So it's, at this point, it's a normality to have that type of reach. Yeah. It's fascinating to me. I've known you for quite some time and you are really great with relationships and very personable. And you have a very interesting and unique way of sort of cutting to the facts and figuring out who somebody is. I've always admired that about you. Are you able to use that same ability in your method of building relationships one-on-one? Are you able to put that into the business and kind of reach through the airwaves and, and know your customers that way.

Well, you know me for a while. I like to play the background. I'm a big fan of putting the right people in the right place, right? So having a customer service person that is really personable and really empathetic and really, you know, enjoys talking to people is an important part of any team. Right. You know, I'll do it. I don't mind talking to people like, I'm talking to you about it.

I love this. I do this every day. Like, I enjoy it. but I know there's other things that I need to also be doing. And so having someone on the team that can fulfill that role is really important to me as well. Yeah, I can see that. And if you can find the right person for the job, it's like finding an extension of you to do the similar same things that you trust in there. Like I guess kind of brings us to, you know, maybe you can share some insights on the tools and technologies that your business uses for automation in the drop shipping process.

We've talked a little bit about AI, but how do these tools improve efficiency and accuracy? Well, you know, a lot of it is proprietary, but I'll keep it as vague as I can, but it's perfect as I can at the same time. So we use a lot of data science and market research to figure out what the high potential products are in each niche. So as an example, socks. You wouldn't think that socks are really popular, but they're really high in demand. A lot of people wear socks.

and if you have the right sock at the right price, you'll be able to sell a lot of socks. And so just as an example, one of our clients came to us and they were doing 6K a month in revenue. And this was, they just plateaued. They had products in their store. They were like, okay, we're going to come to you guys to see if you can help us increase our revenues. So we onboarded them. And in about six months, we were able to provide them a mix of different items that they should sell in their store. and we were able to grow their revenue to 20K a month.

Wow. It was just by having the right tools, the right signals, the right search volume, having related products, knowing the right keywords, and then it's also seasonality and forecasting because you know wintertime is coming. And so people are going to buy sweaters. That's just a thing. They're going to buy jackets. They're going to buy winter clothes because it's wintertime is coming.

So you have to be able to forecast, well, these. things were popular last year. So maybe we should stock them again and then begin to test the market and say, okay, people are still buying this item. So this is something we want to bring into our store. Not every product works. And that's business, right? So we may buy some inventory of something and it may not sell through all at one time or at the rate that we expected it to. But because we have a mix of items, it's never really an issue because we're always bringing in profit every month, we're profitable. Because, again, we're buying at such a low rate and we're selling at such a good margin

that even the products that sit on the shelves for a little bit longer, we're not taking a loss on those products. Yeah, it's fascinating to think the evolution of the marketplace. You know, when we were little, we'd go to the mall or footlock or buy some new shoes, you know, and they might not have your size, or they might not have the color or something like that. But in today's, you know, creator economy, it seems. that there's an almost an infinite supply of products out there.

And if you own a store, you know, you can really change what's in your store or the products in your store or you have such a bigger variety of doing that. It seems on some level, like that would be, it would, it takes a lot to figure that the branding compiled with the strategy of it. What are some, what are some strategies that you use? I mean, you spoke about different seasons and stuff. like that. But is there any way like you guys follow trends? Maybe that's proprietary, but what do you do about trends? Like, how do you forecast that? Well, the learning curve and the set of complexities

are challenging. Yeah, I can imagine. If everybody could do it, everybody would be doing it. Because there's a lot of money that can be made online and e-commerce. One of the guys I work with, he pretty much said, Amazon is an ocean. And we are a small fish. No matter how much we sell, will never become a whale just because how large the market share is. And Amazon actually has some restrictions on allowing you to grow up with so much. And it changes from time to time. But like they at one time, it was like you cannot make more than a million dollars a month. They put a cap on it.

And so they start to remove your ability to sell after you reach a certain level because they don't want you to pretty much cannibalize socks. right they they want other people to be able to sell socks so with our on guided with our guided onboarding it simplifies the process we don't want you to do anything and we don't really want to tell people what we're doing because they don't need to do it it's like we'll do it for you that that's the beauty of our system you know we'll leverage our existing ungated product catalog and our account health best practices right to avoid those common account suspensions because it's it's rampant Amazon will you know, suspend your account in a second, give you an audit, keep your money.

There's a lot of things that they'll do. And, you know, that's what our expertise comes through. So it navigates clients through those hurdles. We don't want, we want it to be a completely hands-off experience. We want you to just move in, move into the store and just hang out. And then customers will come. And your, your cash register, so just keep chinging, you know. And don't worry about, don't worry about all the things that happen in the background.

we'll take care of that for you. Yeah, that's a beautiful strategy. It's interesting because most people will never know all the violations or the barriers to entry or the roadblocks that happen on the platform. That's probably something you guys learn after all the years working in there, right? I mean, compliance is insured. We have to because Amazon, like I said, is quick to take your money. They have no problem saying, okay, well, you made $40,000 this month, but you violated a policy. Yeah, we're not going to pay you.

So then you're, you know, you'll never receive, you'll never get that 40 grand back. You may have to hire an attorney and you still may never get it back. They have a really good system set up to keep your money. And so we're constantly, you know, monitoring policies and holding inventory. If it violates a policy, we won't sell it. Even if we bought it and, you know, for whatever reason Amazon decides to change something and say you can't sell this for whatever reason. You know, we'll just hold it and we'll find other avenues. And so that we may have to bring on a Walmart store.

we might have to bring on an eBay store. But you'll as a customer, it doesn't matter, right? You'll still be like, oh, I sold through all my inventory, but we may have to have moved it through other channels. And so if quality issues arise, you know, we quickly switch suppliers and pull a product because we know that if somebody complains, Amazon is going to be like sending us email, you guys got to fix this thing. So we get ahead of those things before it even becomes a big issue. And we have automated systems. Again, like I said, set up for refunds and support if we need to be proxious. active and resolve customer concerns. But it's a steep learning curve.

Yeah, it sounds like it. But that's with anybody who becomes really good at what they do or an expert or becomes in the top of their field, it usually comes from getting ahead of the problems, getting ahead of the curve and finding ways to solve problems or see them on the horizon. And it kind of sounds like that's what you guys have been doing for a while. You know, maybe you could, what about examples? Like maybe we've been talking about what can happen and what might have. happen. But can you give an example of a successful case where your business helped the client

achieve significant results through automated shipping on Amazon? Well, yeah, I mean, similar to the one I just told you about, they came to us and they were stuck. We have clients that come to us that have stores. We have clients that come to us that have never sold on Amazon, but they've always desired to get into this business. And so for those customers, we have a system set up that pays them to set up their store, in essence, once they sign up, they don't have any fees. We'll handle all the inventory. We'll buy all the inventory. We'll sell all the inventory. And then we'll cut them a check. And then we'll just invoice them for the maintenance costs and the cost of the products. And we'll do a profit split. So we want, so, you know, we want customers to just come and learn the system and then just receive a check.

because this game is so difficult to teach. And we don't want people to come to us and say, oh, you gave us this lesson and it failed because of X, Y, Z. We don't know what they did after they took the lesson. We don't know how they, you know, used the verbiage or the templates or the stock inventory schedule that we sent them. We'll never know. So we just say, you know what, don't worry about it.

Just come to us and we'll do it for you. And so that person that I was referring to that came to us and they were stuck, they were stuck at 6K a month and they were doing it. I mean, 6K a month is good money. That's not bad money for a lot of people. But you have to take it to consideration that probably only 30% of that was profit because they have to buy inventory. They have to deal with returns and chargebacks.

And it's their time, right? And so they're paying themselves a salary for doing all these things. you know, they probably receive $1,800 a month, $2,000 a month for a lot of work, and they're stuck. And they're like, how do I get over this hurdle? And, you know, $2,000 a month, again, is not bad money for a side gig. But if you're trying to turn this into a full-time job, if you want to support your family and if you want to increase your lifestyle, your gains have to be a little bit bigger. And so when they came to us, that's what they told us. They're like, we need to grow and we don't know how and we don't know what we're doing wrong.

And we're like, we'll just take it over for you. don't worry about what you did wrong or what you're doing right because if we explain it to you sure you can go off and try it but you're going to come back because there's so many things you have to learn you literally have to sit in our office every day to know what's going on with the amazon policies to know what's going on with eBay Walmart whatever e-commerce you're using because it's evolving every single day these these companies don't stay still and so we may have talked to you something last week that may not apply to this week and we can't just pick up the phone and call you and be like, oh, that thing we told you last week doesn't apply this week.

And this is the reason why. So it's difficult to allow people to do it on their own. That's why we just do it for you. Sometimes that sounds like, it sounds like, does there any trust issues? Like the people just come to you and you're like, we'll just do it all for you. Do they ever say like, why? Why would you do it all for us? Well, that's the customer we don't want, you know, to be.

completely honest with you. We want the customer that's looking for residual income with no work. There's a lot of people out there that would just like to receive residual income and do nothing. So that's the customer we're looking for. Obviously, we're doing it for a reason, right? So Amazon allows us only to have one store per household. That's their thing. But we have warehouses of inventory. So we're like, okay, well, we need to franchise this. So if you were to open a franchise, a McDonald's franchise, they tell you what to do, who to hire, where to put it, what to sell, how to sell it, how to cook it, how much to take. They tell you everything. There's no, you cannot, there's very little variance that you can take when you buy into a

franchise. This is a very similar model. We're saying, these are the employees. This is the store location. This is the inventory. This is how much is going to sell for. The only difference is you don't have to go to work every day. You don't have to manage the employees.

We do all that for you. So in essence, we put a manager in your store. for you. The only thing you need to do is open your store. And which that allows us to do is move more of our ungated products. So if we have 100,000 socks, well, one store may only be able to move 10,000 socks a month just because of multitude of reasons, location, buying patterns, Amazon's algorithm. So if we have two stores, we may be able to move 20,000 socks a month. And then three stores, 30, so we're now able to move through the inventory. that we've already have in our warehouses.

And that's why we're like, don't worry about what we do or why we do it. We want to just do it for you. And the only thing you need to do is open a store. I see. The more outlets you have, the more product you can move, and then the more everybody makes. Exactly. Yeah, that's fascinating. It's an interesting concept to.

And then we have investors, as a side, we have investors that say, okay, a certain thresholds, we want to buy more inventory. So if we move through those 100,000 socks in a month, let's just say that was one of the inventory goals. You can move 100,000 units in a month. Okay, well, we're going to now ingest more money into the company, so now you can buy a quarter million socks a month. So, okay, well, now the people that are already in our stores,

the customers that are already attached to Simply sync, their profits will increase because now we have more inventory to move through their stores. And so they did nothing, but now their payments just get bigger. And they, you know, you ask wise because we had a capital infusion. And we were able to purchase more inventory, which then means we're able to make more sales. Because one of the biggest things that happened with our stores when we first started, we would sell through inventory in three days. but Amazon takes two weeks to pay you and a third week depending on your bank.

So they'll send the invoice or they'll send the money, but it takes a week for the bank to process it. So that's 21 days that we wait before we can purchase more inventory. So Amazon, we sell through products in three days, then we have to wait another 21 days or 18 days before we can purchase more inventory. So in essence, we only get paid once a month. And so we're like, how do we scale? We can't scale like this because we are constantly waiting for money. And we sell through all these socks in three days. And so, okay, George opened this store.

Great. So now we move to double the amount of inventory in the same three days, you know, and then we're able to recoup the next time. And so that's why we want to bring on stores so that we can, in essence, purchase more inventory to make more sales. Yeah, it makes sense. It's an interesting. concept and I think it's something that's only begun to evolve in this digital landscape and

like this creator economy. It's fascinating to see the way in which the food chain moves or the waves in which it comes, whether whatever mode of capitalism it is, it just seems that there's this new method of finding ways to do it. It's awesome to see in this. What about what are some common pitfalls and challenges that entrepreneurs may encounter when entering the automated business such as this one. How do you overcome these kind of obstacles? Well, again, we want people to come to us. Right.

And let us do it. There's so many things that are happening, like I was saying before, and every day you would have to sit in our office. Just as an example, we, you know, there's some emerging trends that are happening right now, like voice shopping or, you know, personalization that we can't even see, we can't even, forecast people go on Instagram and touch a shirt and it tells the price and they can just hit the buy button

well how do we then forecast that a celebrity is going to wear this shirt and 100,000 units are going to need to be sold in a week right and so trying to keep up with that trying to tie into those softwares that already exist and find ways to incorporate ourselves in their algorithms these are things we can't teach. And these are pitfalls that will exist because so many things will come along with that. So if we go back to inventory, if you say you have a certain amount of inventory in your store and you sell somebody a product and you don't have the inventory, Amazon notes that, but you may not have been able to keep up. That's just one pitfall. And that's the ding on your account. If you end up selling that sweater or shirt that I was just talking about,

celebrity war, but you weren't ungated to do that. Well, that's a violation because now you're selling a brand. You're not allowed to sell. But as a newcomer coming on, you may not be considering these things. Oh, I can't sell this particular shirt or these particular shoes or sunglasses or whatever it is because I don't have the rights. How do I get the rights? How do I go walk the process of ungating a product? Or if you're doing FBA, which is unfulfilled by Amazon, you have to send product to their warehouse. Well, if you send product to their warehouse and has defects, well, you're going to have a problem because Amazon's not going to move through that inventory. So before you ship it, you have to have somebody there that's going to do quality management.

But if you have a palette of whatever you're shipping from one warehouse to Amazon's warehouse, and it's not even in the state that you live, how are you going to make sure that that inventory is not damaged. Amazon doesn't care if it arrives damaged or not. They didn't pay for it. They're going to get their cut after they sell through it. So if it's on their floor and it's damaged, they're going to send it back.

And who has to pay for the shipping costs on both routes? You do. So there's a lot of when, and it's not for, these pitfalls are not for the individual that's only selling one or two items a day. Right. So I'm not talking.

talking about someone that's just doing this as a part-time day. I'm talking about someone that's trying to replace their working income and that's trying to, you know, change their life and they want to scale, but not do any work. Yeah, it's fascinating to see, like, kind of pull the curtain back and get to see what's happening behind there and get to see all the regulations and pitfalls and obstacles and I guess that kind of gets into the idea of compliance with Amazon's policies and regulations is too. What maybe you can talk a little bit about what some of the changes that you've seen since you've started there and where you're at now, like maybe on the customer of relationship front or maybe in the Amazon sort of obstacle front or maybe just in general.

Like what are some changes that you've seen happen there? And maybe you can forecast some other things that you might be seen in the future, just kind of speculating here. So Amazon changes their policies regularly, depending on how many people are affected by it. So drop shipping as an example. At one time, they didn't want any drop shipping. Then they put in place policies that allowed you to drop ship, but it had to be a certain way you did it. And then they were like, okay, not enough people are able to do it this way, so they changed the policy again.

And a bunch of people got violation letters, right? And we had to solve these audits and violation letters because we weren't doing it. doing it, the new way, the new policy way. So then we had to change the complete way. We do it, but we have to figure these things out along the way. And so it's ever evolving. And these things are ever changing and these policies are ever moving. And similar to like a VAT, which is like I said, a tax ID for Europe, the regulations behind that and how you go about getting it and how you go about utilizing it, they're regularly changing. What country you decide to register your VAT, Poland, Germany, Switzerland,

London, all these things have different stipulations. Like if you register your VAT in England, because they split from the EU, how you go about paying your VAT, you might have to pay it in two locations. Because if you ship it from your England and you ship it outside of England

to some other country in the EU, they have a different tax law now because they're not part of the European Union anymore. So that was a huge, major shift. It was like, okay, so anybody that's registered with the VAT in England, you might want to consider getting a VAT in Germany or Poland or another place because you don't want to necessarily ship things out of England. You might be able to ship them into England without having to deal with that regulation. And then you have to deal with customs as well. Customs is a big

thing. And that's also ever changing, depending on what the global climate is, if there's a war zone or if there's, you know, there's unrest in one location and the next and you're trying to move product via flight or train or boat between two different nations, you might have a problem. You know, there's a lot of countries that we deal with or that we don't deal with specifically because of those reasons. Like, we know that this is unstable and we don't want to move product through here or around here or buy here just because it's a high possibility that it may not make it to his final destination.

So there's so many things that you have to take it to consideration when you try to scale. And again, like I said, this is not for the individual that's trying to sell. you know, one thing to a person and in the state next to them. This is someone that's trying to move pallets of product from one country to another country via air, land, or sea. Yeah. Do you find the same trends? I know that over the last few years in the news and just from what I have seen,

we're kind of seeing a trend away from brick and mortar stores. And like the world of e-commerce is exploding. Is that trend still happening? Do you see it more and more where you're at? and is your, is e-commerce affected by the same sort of issues that brick and mortar is? Okay. So before Simply Sink, I had another startup that was in retail and then COVID hit and then it changed everything. And brick and mortar was the standard up until, you know, it wasn't that huge of a shift.

Amazon was, you know, playing a huge part. but COVID definitely completely changed the landscape because it became a necessity to be able to receive product without leaving your general vicinity. And once people realized how easy it was, you know, we're a populace of convenience. We like to have what we like to have right now and not have to spend any additional effort trying to get that thing. Yeah. So automation and on demand products will never go away. It's only going to increase. And not only that, now refrigerators are smart.

So it knows what groceries you have. You can now put your toilet tissue on automatic repeat. Diapers are automatic repeat. So then every 35 days. it just lands at your door. You don't even have to think about it anymore. And so brick and mortar is going to have a tough go. But people also want to commune.

They want to be in a community environment. People like going to the mall, even just to walk around, even just to be with their friends and have that space to, you know, be free. So I think brick and mortars will have to evolve similar to the commercial real estate. They're going to have to evolve because the buildings already exist. It'd be too expensive to tear them down. And so they just have to change into something else. And with Amazon and e-commerce, they're already so far ahead.

They know what's happening and they have their finger on the pulse. As long as you can keep up with what they're doing. I don't think there's going to be much of an issue. Yeah. You know, as you're talking up, I'm reminded of like a whole new set of valuable, profitable product. And that is the product of information. It seems to me when you're talking about people buying or ordering stuff online,

that, you know, they're giving up all this like information to Amazon to build like, you know, a customer profile on them and stuff. And what do you guys do to make sure that your customer is, information stay safe. Well, that's truly the security. We're relying on the security of Google. We're relying on the security of Amazon. Because just to open a store, Amazon wants to know exactly who you are. They already build a profile. There's no way to get around it. If you want to own a store, it's kind of like if you had a brick and mortar, the state is going to want to know who you are, what your financials are, you know, that you're a real person. You know, that you're a real person.

that you don't have any felonies, right? The state wants to know all the same things that Amazon wants to know. It's just the fact that it's on the cloud. And you hear of a lot of security breaches that happen with all these multinationals. You know, even banks. I mean, banks are getting hacked. I mean, you can buy people's information on the dark web. There is a risk and taking a risk, but it's actually, you know, by opening a store,

there's even more risk by being left behind. And so you have to weigh it to say, well, do I want to work every day for the rest of my life, where my job actually may not be available for the rest of my life? Or do I want to find a way to slowly replace my working income so I can do the things that I'd love to do? And that's kind of where we see as a company this thing going. because you hear things all the time similar to, you know, what is it, the income they were giving people, universal basic income.

They say those policies actually work. They tested it in about eight states, and they said the people that they gave money to, they actually improved their life, their livelihood. And they were able to do the things they needed to do to get to the next rung of their social climb. but a lot of those systems were funded by individual investors, which is funny, right? So the individual investors are like, I want to give back to the community that I live in so that it's not as dangerous for my kids. And so let me help the people that are, you know, in a bad situation in my neighborhood become, so my neighborhood can become safer. My property bodies go up, you know, it's just overall better. And so that's what we're doing with Simply Sink. We're saying, hey, we're not asking to do anything.

You literally just have to sign up. go through the process of starting a store and we'll manage it for you because we want everybody's vote to rise with the tide. You know, not just ours. Ours is going to rise, but we're going to end up plateauing like this guy that came to us. Eventually, we don't want a plateau. We want to continue to grow. And in doing so, we want to help others that helped us grow. Yeah, it's a great analogy. And I think that it's more of a wave of change that's coming. and it's the only way in which we all get better

is if those of us who make it reach back and help the next person up. Like that's the only way it's going to get done. We need to start seeing each other as each other. When you do that, you start realizing that, you know, if you look outside your house and you see a bunch of, you know, people that are up, that are hurting, that are dying,

like, well, what does that say about your community? What does that say about you? What does it say about your neighbors? If you can help, you should do that. It sounds like an awesome model, and I totally agree. what about if we pan back a little bit and we talk about your entrepreneurial journey. Do you think a lot of the previous things that you have started up have helped you be where you are today, especially in this venture?

So I've been in IT starters for maybe 12 years now. And the ones that failed were based around team. if the right team wasn't involved in the business model, it was destined to fail. Now, you don't know that going in. But that is like one major thing. The second thing was when we built these businesses, a lot of the time we were just looking to benefit from the system. We were looking to just take, right? We were looking to extract value from whoever was willing to pay for it.

And the longer I went along in my journey, I started to look for ways to not only build businesses, but help others build businesses as well, because I felt that that was the best way to grow the business model that we were working on. If others were involved and they were also benefiting, you received this community of people that are like, yeah, this works. we want to do this thing. But the issue with that was a lot of people don't want to get financially invested in something that's not, they didn't create. So even if you say, I have this business that works, but you have to pay this much money to get involved. People are like, oh, I don't know if I want to do that. And they're like, okay, well, this thing works.

You can kind of look at my lifestyle and see I can show you, you know, deposits and checks and slips and all this stuff. But they're like, yeah, but it's not for me. Well, okay. So this simply sync model was like, just remove all of the doubt, remove all of the barriers to entry. Because the people that understand the value of residual income, they'll join. You won't have to convince them. They were like, oh, I understand what you're doing. Similar to people that invest in real estate or that invest in stocks to hold, not stocks to trade, stocks to hold. They're like, I'm not buying this today for me. I'm buying this for the future.

And so Simply Sink, when we originally came up with it, we were, we initially were doing another startup I was working on before COVID, was we were giving, we were taking the proceeds from the products we were selling and creating scholarships for college students. And the model really resonated because college students are deeply in debt. or they're going to become deeply in debt, you know. And they're looking, I mean, the federal government is looking for ways to stop that right now. Right. So we were trying to do our part. And so what we realized was, okay, if we're able to figure out a way to make sure other people benefit without having to do much work, we'll be able to do a greater job at helping and a greater job of marketing and a greater job of expanding and growth.

And so that's how Sinkly Sinkly Sink came about because we were like, we want to say in four years, if you're with us for four years, you'll be able to pay off your college tuition. You'll be able to pay off that debt. If you just saved the money that we gave you for the four years that you're with us, you won't have any student loans or student debt or whatever. That is the goal behind what we're talking about when we do this. So if you look at obviously predictions are hard and predictions about the future are really hard, But if you were to look at how much you've grown in the last few years and apply that to the next four years, is there some sort of projections or do you have goals to hit like a certain number of stores? What does your projected growth look like when you pan back and look at it?

Well, personally, my goal is to hit 100 stores because I know that we'll be able to sell through our inventory. We'll be able to bring in a large enough investment where the people that are getting checks every thing. two weeks, they'll be pretty happy with, you know, their bank account increasing at a significant levels at 100 stores. After that, it really, I'm not one of those startup founders. It's like, I need to have a million users or 10 million users. You know, I need, I want to go public. Like, I saw those things. Oh, I want to, you know, I want to sell to the highest bidder. It's never been my go, I've seen it, you know, but my lifestyle already is satisfactory. I'm okay. I'm good where I'm at. So if I can help 100 people get to where I'm at or close to it or in the realm or whatever

achieve their goals financially, I feel like I'm, I've done good as a human. You know, I've affected 100 families, maybe not families, but 100 individuals that may have families. And they'll be good for however long, you know, we continue to run this business for. And so that's my projection. I'm not, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to scale to infinity. It's too much work. And it's unnecessary because the, the, the, the, the margins are already significant. So even a hundred is a lot. Like, you know, but yeah, that's the goal. Yeah, I like it. It's, it's, it's, sometimes it's the, unrealistic goals or the unrealistic dreams that cause the breakup in companies or relationships. And that's when the corruption kind of seeks in is when you have these incredible numbers.

And you're like, wait a minute. Like, what am I doing? It's easy to lose track of what's important when you start taking the important things out of the equation. That kind of makes sense. And I know, I know why I'm doing this. Again, we were giving out scholarships. It was very similar ideas.

Like, you know, we wanted to give out a thousand scholarships. And if COVID, if not for COVID, you know, probably would have been at that point at this point. We'd have probably been close to it, maybe in, you know, 700 realm. Because we already had the ability to scale. We already had the investors. We already had the platform. We already had the strategy locked, you know. And so that was the same.

Like at a thousand scholarships, maybe we just keep rolling a thousand. Like every time somebody graduates, okay, we put one back into the system. But it wasn't like less, you know, 100,000 scholarships. That's just too much. It was, it gets to a point where you have to then hire too many people. And then the piece of the pie keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And person on the end doesn't really receive any benefit.

You know, they don't have that one-on-one communication. They don't have that personalization, you know. They don't have that feeling of, oh, I'm being helped. Someone cares about me. I think at 100 people you could probably fit them into a ballroom and have a little conference and, you know, shake everyone's hand. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that this is this particular trend of, you know, peer to peer on some level

is going to continue to happen in throughout the world? Or is this like a phenomenon that's happening in the Western countries? But what do you think about this kind of getting rid of the middleman? and really tightening that supply chain down. It seems like that's kind of what's happening. Is that a trend or is that like a blip? Or what do you think about that? I don't think you'll ever get rid of the middleman.

And I don't think you should try. There was a report that came out that said, you know, the United States government tried to put some regulations on products coming in from China. And then when they did a study, they realized that, well, the products that the United States government was buying from Mexico or Ecuador were coming from China anyway. So the pieces and the parts that they were manufacturing with were coming from China. So they were like, did you actually stop the import of those Chinese products? No, you just change the origin country that it came from.

It was just a smokescreen. And so simply sink is the middleman. because we don't manufacture the products. And so anybody that sells on Amazon, they are the middleman because they don't manufacture the products and they're not buying the product. I mean, they're not buying the product that they're selling, I should say. So they're in the middle.

Right. And so social media is the same way. I mean, Facebook is the middle. Instagram is the middle. TikTok is the middle. They are the middleman of how the system works. It is peer to peer, but it's peer to middle to peer. and I think it will always be that way.

Even if you have a robot or AI or chatbot, they are the middle. You're not going directly to the source. If you type in a question in chat, GBT, well, chat GBT is the middle. They're taking all the information that they can accumulate for you and giving you a response. They're the middle. Yeah, it seems like it's a streamlined middle. I guess like, you know, we used to have these giant, I guess those are, Megalith corporations too.

I guess, but it kind of seems on some level like we're getting away from, you know, like the, maybe they're just moving online. Maybe the, you know, sports authority is just becoming sports authority online. You know, but it just seemed powerful to me that an individual can open a store and almost produce the revenue that a larger store was doing before. That, that to me is a beautiful thing. And in some level, it seems like it must be streamlining the profits or streamlining the business in some way. Well, I mean, sports authorities still get their cut.

So if they're manufacturing and they're selling a wholesale, if sports authority is selling a wholesale. I mean, if you're buying it directly from Nike, that's one thing. But how many people are going to get that contract, you know, not that many. You still have to buy it from Sports Authority. Sports Authority is still getting their markup. And I read a report the other day that pretty much says, know, all these larger brands, the reasons why they give their product to influencers is because they know once that influencer wears that thing or promotes that thing, their audience is way

bigger in some respects than the product itself. You know, that jacket or shoes or whatever glasses, the manufacturer of that may only make 10,000 units, 100,000 units. And if you give it to five influencers and there reaches a million people, they may be able to sell all the units they manufactured within that time frame of, you know, whatever their goal was for just giving away five to ten of those units. But that influencer becomes the middle. The manufacturer still gets their cut.

The brand still gets their cut. You know, it's just a new way of marketing. So when I open my store for Nike socks, and I open 100 more stores that sell the same Nike socks, Nike's not taking a cut. I mean, they're getting their profit. They're not taking, you know, they're not taking any lawsuits. So allowing me to open a store on their behalf is beneficial to them. Yeah.

It's a brave new world out there. And I like the way in which you describe it as a different way of marketing and a more robust exchange that's happening and right to the customer and being able to, help out people along the way. I think it's a great, a great process and a great program. You know, I guess we're getting ready to come up on an hour right here, but where can people find you at? If they wanted, if they wanted to come to you and learn more about what you're doing, how do they open a store? What's going on here? Like, where would they, where would they go to find you? So, just so people understand, you know, our experience in proprietary automation

enable the new sellers to like instantly compete at the highest levels, you know, while remaining compliant. So we're not looking for the person that's just like, I just want to open a store and sell cookies. Do that. You don't need us, you know. But if you want to sell truckloads of cookies, well, they also have to fit within the realm of do people want these cookies?

You can't come to us and be like, I want to sell these specific cookies because we're not going to be able to sell those cookies for you. We're not in the business of selling cookies. We're in the business of selling products that people buy in large volumes. So that is the first thing they need to understand before they come to SimplySink. But they can go to SimplySync.us, and they can fill out the form. And there's a system of people that will get in touch with them and help them work through the process of opening their Amazon store. And once their Amazon store is open, they just allow us to give us the credentials so that we can go in and manage it for them, buy their inventory.

It takes about three to four months because Amazon also has policies, which is another pitfall that you can fall into. If you scale too quickly, Amazon will think you're fraudulent and they will shut your store down, simply because you sold too many socks your first month. They're like, nope, we don't know how this is possible. We don't like it. We're just going to kick you off the platform to keep your money. And so this is not a get rich quick scheme because Amazon won't allow you to get rich quick. they put barriers into how much you can actually move. Their algorithm has parameters set up to say, if you move too many units in a specific time frame,

we're going to flag this account because we don't know how you're doing it. Because they have to worry about money laundering. They have to worry about, you know, people use and stolen identity information. They have to worry about so many things that they just don't want to, you know, have to deal with certain issues. So anyway, it takes about, you know, three to four months before we can actually start generating profit on your stores. We have to ungate products for you. We have to buy inventory. We have to ship it to Amazon. There's a lot of things that go on in the background, but you don't

have to worry about any of it. You just come to us, you fill out the form, you open your store, you head us the credentials, and we take it from there. And simply sync that U.S. That's where you can find the information you need. Man, I love it. It's a great, it's an amazing new world where there's a lot of opportunities for people who are willing to take a chance and want to live a best. better life and are willing to do their own research and check everything out. I think it's a wonderful time and opportunities are out there for people if you're willing to put in the hard work and check it out. What else you got coming up? Jay, is there anything else coming up besides

simply save anything else you're working on? No, man. This is my sole purpose right now. I mean, other businesses that I've started, they're autonomous now. I mean, they work for themselves. And that was always the goal, too, even with this, is get it to a point where the people that work for the company don't have to do as much work. So they can enjoy their life, right? That work-life balance? Yeah. It's vitally important. I didn't want to start a company where I would have to talk to customers every day all day.

And I don't want the customers to feel they have to talk to me every day all day. You know, it's unnecessary. You get a check in the mail or in your bank account. If you want to send an email to, you know, one of my assistants, if you have something that is, it's, it's a little. is really necessary for you to get in contact with me, you know, put it in the email, send it to my people and we'll figure it out. I have people that are also signing up other stores and so they are affiliates, right? And so they want to get a percentage of profits from the people's stores they sign up. So there's that option as well. If you know a lot of people

that want to build stores on Amazon, you might as well benefit from that. If you're the first person to join and you want to tell your first person, friends about it, you know, let us know. And we'll help you get through that process as well. Fantastic, my friend. Well, I'm stoked to learn about it. I'm stoked to always see what you're doing, man. You're a mover, a mover, and you're an awesome person to be around. You have a beautiful family or an amazing human being. I love talking to you, my friend. And I appreciate it. Yeah, well, it takes one to no one, right? That is very true. That is very true. All the same to you, Thank you. I appreciate it, man. And well, hang on a brief. I'm going to talk to you afterwards, but I'm going to hang up with the people here. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. I hope you have a beautiful day. Go check out simplysafef.com. Simply sync.U.Sysc. And the reason why it is simply sync is because it's very simple. And we sync all the accounts and automation. So it's sync as in you're putting two things together. You sync something.

Simply sync. Simply with an I. Simply sync.us. Dot us. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have a beautiful day. That's all we got.

Aloha.