Building a Private Label Amazon Empire with Expert Ashley Kinkead

David 0:00
Are you looking to grow your sales on Amazon? Chances are if you’re not selling on Amazon’s international marketplaces, you are leaving some serious money on the table. What keeps a lot of people from selling internationally are all the confusing hoops you have to jump through to get started. That is why we worked with Kevin Sanderson from maximizing ecommerce on our international expansion. Kevin and his team take care of the details and guide you through the process of expanding so that you can grow your sales and reach new customers. If you’d like to find out if working with Kevin and his team is right for you head over to https://maximizingecommerce.com/fire, once again, that is https://maximizingecommerce.com/fire

Ashley Kinkead 0:46
We generally like to be more higher price point than other competitors. That’s kind of our strategy. We like to be the more expensive option, we just figured out ways to create more value have a higher conversion rate at that price floor wait. So I think figuring out a way to be a price leader in your market and your space where you can actually make the most profit margins. So that’s sort of how we’ve been approaching things in 2022. We look for new opportunities. We look for opportunities to be one of the earliest entry people into the marketplace. Listen, I would encourage your listeners to start to think about as well when they’re selling on Amazon.

Intro 1:23
Welcome, everyone to the firing the man podcast a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and you know you were capable of more than join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David Schomer and Ken Wilson.

Ken 1:47
Welcome everyone to the firing the man podcast on today’s episode we are joined by Ashley Kincaid. Ashley is an amazon.com expert coach and master trainer. She’s inspired and equipped 1000s of business owners around the world with the skills and strategies they need to build full time online empires from the ground up. She’s the host of the top 1% ranked private label mastery podcast. She’s the author of the best selling home business book on Amazon million dollar ecommerce secrets. In 2015 actually desire to leave her dead end career as a manager in corporate America. She started out selling use books on Amazon FBA with just a credit card and a goal. She then launched into private label products, eventually listing over 15,000 products on Amazon, and making millions of dollars from her one bedroom apartment. We’re very excited to share Ashley story with you today. Welcome to the show, Ashley.

Ashley Kinkead 2:38
Thank you, Ken. Thank you, David, really grateful to be here. And so excited for your amazing audience to get to teach them at the end and also inspire them. So thank you so much, guys. It’s an honor to be here. Yeah, absolutely.

Ken 2:47
So actually tell us a little bit about yourself, your story and your background.

Ashley Kinkead 2:51
Sure. So I am one of these entrepreneurs by accident. And we kind of stumbled into Amazon FBA, during the heyday of Amazon back around 2014 or 2015. When anyone could sell on Amazon, it was just kind of a gold mine gold rush and I used to work for the man. So I’m really excited to be on the show. I was a substitute teacher actually. So worked at a for a public school. And I discovered Amazon FBA as a method to kind of support myself supplementally as a lot of people I’m sure your listeners do just wanting to make a few $1,000 Here and there, but really no entrepreneurial experience whatsoever. So I started selling on Amazon back in 2015. And it’s really been a life changing journey for me just to get to see you know how Amazon has changed my life over the years. But my very first business I ever had was an amazon.com seller. This was back again in 2015. And I started out as a bookseller actually reselling used books, going out to thrift stores and garage sales at a very small scale, and finding things just to flip for ROI. 99 cent items $1 item and I realized, wow, I can take a product, a physical product that spit some price in one marketplace and turn it into gold and another marketplace. So I went way beyond the scale of a typical Amazon bookseller, I had a large team here in Dallas. I’m in Dallas, Texas, and I had a Packers and shippers and sorcerers and all of those kinds of things and built my book selling business up to about 500k The first year in revenue, I made some great money and I realized wow, I could actually fire the man and do this full time. So came on and now turn that into my full time job. And then I eventually evolved into private label which I know is what more of your listeners are into these days. And I built a couple of successful private label brands on Amazon we also do consulting and education for private label sellers too. So I’m definitely a multiple income stream entrepreneur and I have a lot that I’ve learned over the years my Amazon business has been back to zero I’ve had so many roadblocks and obstacles over the years like I know a lot of your listeners have as well. So I’m really just in for the ride. You know, let’s dislike tell people about the opportunity of entrepreneurship and how much it’s changed my life. I think so many people probably in your audience don’t know that they can do something like this or they’re wondering how they can make this full time so I felt like and share a bit of what I’ve learned in nuggets over the years to get my Amazon business to millions of dollars in sales so far. So thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

David 5:08
Absolutely. Well, that is that was awesome story. And I’m really excited to get into this interview. Now the show is firingtheman. And that was a great firingtheman story. So to some of our listeners that may be thinking about maybe leaving a full time job, take us back to that time, when you were working a full time job. You had this side hustle, you were thinking about transitioning, what advice would you give to yourself,

Ashley Kinkead 5:31
do it sooner? I think my advice would be to do it sooner, I think, Gosh, it’s just really powerful when you sire the man and decide just to go all in on yourself with like no backup plan, I really waited too long. My Amazon business was generating like well over six figures a month before I even left my day job. And so I really wish I’d done it a bit sooner, I think I would have picked up more momentum and learn more along the way. So that’d be the advice I think I would go back and just give myself is to have that confidence. But you don’t have to have all your ducks in a row. You don’t have to have everything laid out to finally do that. Take that step. But definitely, it took me over two years of attempting to build my business before I was able to fully quit. So I think I wish I’d done it a bit sooner. And also had a bit more advice along the way as well. There’s so many people in the Amazon space who can help you with taxes and payroll and all those kinds of things. And I went in pretty blind hat in the beginning but at something to to know about. Yeah,

David 6:26
I really liked that that perspective of you don’t always know what you’re doing or what the next step is. And so so Anyway, moving on, we had talked, you had mentioned that you started in 2015. And you hear it a lot today. 2015 2013. That was the Wild West. So nowadays, it’s too crowded. There’s competition. We have the Chinese manufacturers competing against you, you hear this? And so my question to you is, is Amazon FBA still a good business model in 2022. And beyond? It absolutely

Ashley Kinkead 6:57
is, it’s just changed a lot. It’s just changed a lot. I feel like in 2015, you could kind of be a hobby seller, or you could really not put much time into it. And you definitely can today, but I think that the stakes are definitely raised in 2022, you have to put in a bit more work to even become an Amazon seller these days, I remember when you know, in 2015, every category was open, every brand was open on Amazon, you didn’t have to have invoices, you didn’t have to have these like real strict supplier relationships. And today, it’s a bit different. But absolutely, I mean, we see people every single day like coming on to Amazon and making incredible amounts of money and really building really thriving businesses. So it’s still a great opportunity, I just think you have to be a bit more prepared for business today, you have to really think about I’m going to get my ducks in a row, I’m going to have my identity verified, I’m going to have a good valid relationship with a real supplier. But not to say that you have to have all those things, I just think you just have to be a bit of a higher level seller these days. And certainly the biggest thing I always tell people about is like differentiating your product we vary in our stores we very rarely sell like generic products, we really focus on like quality, innovation, diversification and then ultimately just creating the long term brand you have to think more long term these days I think and really think about not only to sell my gonna be on Amazon, but where’s my company going to be two to five years from now? How can I diversify, diversify myself across multiple income streams? Yeah,

Ken 8:24
absolutely. brand building is definitely the way to go versus saying it’s selling a meat you products and so definitely diversifying. And yeah, excellent answer. So so as you’re helping FBA sellers and business owners as you’re mentoring them, what are a couple of like, maybe the top one or two things that you see a lot of different people struggle with? And then how do you how do you help them overcome

Ashley Kinkead 8:44
that? Great question. I’m definitely just getting started. I think Pete often I talked to people who think that you need a grand idea, or some kind of seven figure idea before you can even like start, I can tell you my private label product had the most humble beginnings. When I launched, it literally went on etsy.com, I found a supplier of a certain kind of product I wanted to sell and I started really small, truly bootstrapping, I started with about $500 For my first private label product launch, and took me a couple of years to build my brand to like a million dollar brand. But I think people just overthink the whole process of selling on Amazon, they don’t even get started. I also see people thinking that they have to start really big. But I think a misconception is that you have to have I see people think you need 15,000 or $20,000 to even launch a PL in 2022. It’s just not the case. We actually test our we’re kind of innovative, we actually test lots of skews at once on Amazon. So we don’t just have one SKU, we usually will start with three to five skews, test it go really minimum and then move forward with our best skews. So I think you don’t necessarily have to have one product that’s a misconception as well. One home run product I have. I’ve had seven private label products at a time on Amazon and most of my colleagues have many as well. So doesn’t mean the common misconceptions just like not starting when they need to thinking they have to spend $20,000 to start. And also just thinking they can only have one product and probably going to have to have a couple of products on Amazon to get to like a full time.

David 10:13
One thing that you said was people have troubles getting started. And I definitely experienced this. And I think a lot of our listeners probably do, too, where they don’t know what to sell, right? They you hear about me to products and how that is like don’t go into a me too product. And you hear a lot of people say, Well, I don’t I don’t have an invention. I don’t have a patent and so curious, from a product selection standpoint, what is helped you there? And what would you say to those people that are kind of stuck at that spot?

Ashley Kinkead 10:43
Well definitely like making decisions based on data, we have our own, we created our own kind of product research tool that we use at private label mastery. It’s not Helium 10. It’s not Jungle Scout, although those are awesome tools that really help people and we recommend them all the time, we’ve really like dialed in how to like filter Amazon’s data as well as possible. So I think product selection is super important. It’s really important. So many people I speak to and meet everyday just don’t really understand like basics of like best sellers, re making sure you’re not going too deep on a product, making sure you’re not going into competitive of a marketplace. So I would say just spend some time like really looking at data, whether you use Jungle Scout or helium 10. That’s the biggest thing I would encourage people to do to educate yourself on the amazing amount of data that Amazon does provide to us as entrepreneurs and then just try to make as much database decisions as you can and then just jump in, like jump in test, see what works for you, and then be willing to learn and risks and money along the way too. as well.

Ken 11:43
Yeah, excellent. No emotional decisions, all debt all database. That’s yeah, definitely something I get fired up on like shiny object syndrome and all that. And so for sure. Cool. So what are what are the top three things that you think Amazon FBA sellers and what you teach them? What are the top three things you should be focusing on in your Amazon FBA business? I would

Ashley Kinkead 12:03
say just healthy growth, healthy growth, like thinking longevity, thinking about how can I actually like build a real long term business, most of the people I know, in the space, we were really, really successful sellers are 789 figures, they’re thinking long term, they’ve really just kind of built the business in a healthy way. Being persistent being consistent. So I would say having a long term focus thinking about where you actually don’t want to take your Amazon business. But where do you want to take your brands are brands aren’t just on Amazon, just to be clear, they’re on Home Depot, they’re on Walmart, they’re on eBay, they’re on Amazon, they’re on lots of different platforms. So thinking long term, and what was your question again? Can I got lost? Yeah,

Ken 12:39
you know, what are the top three things that that you’ve built up as an Amazon FBA business to folk?

Ashley Kinkead 12:45
Sure, again, thinking about long term thought Lincoln about long term, and also just thinking about assets. When I started my Amazon business, I didn’t think about my business in terms of assets, my email, list my trademarks, things that I could actually create into a sellable business models. So think about how you can actually start thinking about, Okay, this is something I want to exit from in a couple years and do something else. And then as well, how to build your team, I think a lot of Amazon sellers are solopreneurs, which is great, I have a really big team of people, and I can’t do without them. So start thinking about those couple of key hires that you can bring in when your business starts making money. But it’s so key to growth, you can’t do everything yourself as one person for very long. So just building out your team and creating it in a way that can create a real business that you can remove yourself from in some way at some point. And as

Ken 13:33
you’re building a team, like let’s say, if I remember back several years ago, I was a solo person. What is your recommendation on like, Who’s the first hire like, like, say you have 10 hats, you’re juggling between it? And it’s like, who should you hire? First,

Ashley Kinkead 13:45
I would say probably someone to help you with your books or your taxes, either a CPA or so many great accounting firms for Amazon sellers, probably just someone to help you get your numbers straight. And ultimately, you want to know your numbers well as an Amazon seller, so just someone to help you just do your taxes, make sure all your recording and reporting and your profit and loss statements are up to date. And then probably the next person would be some kind of packing assistance, you’re actually doing all your packing and shipping yourself. I mean, you can hire someone these days for 2025 bucks now or a prep and ship company, which we use these several prep companies here in the States. That’s a really efficient way to do that. But you know, it doesn’t have to be a big team. I know many million dollar Amazon sellers that have like one or two employees. So it’s not necessarily something that has to be a big scaled up operation, but definitely just get your books in order. Get your taxes set up correctly. I wish I had done that a bit sooner as well. I grew a really large business and one day realize oh my gosh, I don’t know what I owe or what really is there health of my business. That was really scary for me when I first started my business, and I wish I had started sooner probably would have saved me a ton of headache.

Ken 14:49
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I totally agree with you. I come from a technical background. And so numbers are not my thing. And but yeah, luckily, David’s got the numbers under control. So you number but crucial. Yeah, if you don’t know your numbers, you don’t really have a business and you can’t really grow it right. So you can’t

Ashley Kinkead 15:05
and what’s the saying? If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it right. So

Ken 15:09
exactly. I love that one.

David 15:12
Sorry to interrupt the episode, you may have heard Ken and I talking recently about a new tool that we’re using for Amazon refunds. Now I have used other refund tools like this. However, I can tell you in the first seven days, they scrubbed the back end of my Amazon account going back 18 months, and found $5,000 of refunds. And the nice thing about this is, it’s my money, Amazon made a mistake, and they are just auditing my account. The other thing I really like about this tool is there is no monthly fee, they only charge a commission if they are successful in getting you your money. Go to att.com GE T ID a and enter promo code ft m for firing the man FTM 400. This is an awesome tool. I can’t say enough good things about it. Now back to the episode. So Ashley, when you so you identify the product, and now it’s time to launch? What would be your recommended product launch cadence? Is it one per month? Is it one per quarter? Tell us about that.

Ashley Kinkead 16:17
So we have our own kind of method that we loosely call the three by two method at our company when we launch products. So essentially, we’ll launch three private label products at once, we assume that we’re going to have two out of three winners, sometimes we’ll have one out of three winners, so we call it three by two, launch three move forward, we rarely will just launch like one SKU out the gate and expect it to just crush it. So our strategy is to kind of go a little bit wider with our new variations and see what works, collect data over like seven to 30 days, see what’s moving and see what has the consistent sales velocity, and then we move forward with the winner. So that’s our strategy. It’s pretty simple. And we have used it now across 1000s of Amazon Seller accounts that we work with kind of as a way to mitigate risk help people have their eggs in one basket, there are so many different ways to sell on Amazon, we do see people launch just one product and do really well with it. But you know, for most of your folks out there, they’re probably not wanting to go too deep on like an Amazon business right out the gate. So we’d like to advocate just a little bit be a little bit more conservative when you can just to start off.

David 17:20
So when you’re doing that three to approach, are you so like, you have your three products, right? Would it be, say like a black water bottle, a yellow water bottle and a blue water bottle? Or would it be a wine glass of beer mug in a water bottle? Are you identifying a category and then attacking it? Or how why does that

Ashley Kinkead 17:39
we do both we can we definitely will sometimes do like three variations, like you just said like red belt, Black Belt and green belt and see which variation sells the best and meet or best two out of three. But usually we’re going across a different a couple different categories. So there’s not like one specific hole that we put ourselves into. But again, it can be either way, generally we’re doing different, different products. And then moving forward with that when a product and if it does well will add variations or that will add multipacks and things like

David 18:07
that. Okay, in when so when you have three products and you’re voting one off the island, what metric are you looking at,

Ashley Kinkead 18:14
we’ll look at a couple things. One is just daily sales velocity, we like products that move at least like five units a day consistently, every single day over at least a seven day period or longer, we would rather have a product that just sells multiple units per day as opposed to selling two units one day 20 units and next day, we know that Amazon system really rewards that sales velocity and that consistency. So we’re looking for consistency. We’re also just looking for page rank, how our product ranks organically and then how it ranks with PPC as well. PPC is really important to us. So we run huge PPC campaigns in our business and our clients businesses as well. So PPC, sales, velocity conversion is huge conversion. If I could tell like one of your one big thing just to tell your listeners is like know your conversion rates of your products. That means like how many people are clicking your product on Amazon and actually buying it Amazon strongly rewards high conversion rates. So we like to keep that like well over 20%. I’ve even heard of like 30 to 50% conversion rates on Amazon. So it’s just something that if someone actually clicks your product and buys it, then you’ve got a winner

David 19:18
face one, one last follow up, then I’m gonna turn it over to Ken, you were talking about a PPC, you guys run a lot of PPC. And I’m gonna I’m going to show you that I’m a nerd. Right now there’s one particular metric that we have been watching very closely, and that’s tacos. So your ad spend divided by sales. And it seems like there are situations where you can kind of spend yourself into breakeven. And so any like rules of thumb, whether it’s a tacos metric, or something else that ensures profitability at the end of every month.

Ashley Kinkead 19:49
Sure, I’m not really the ads person on our account. We have someone that manages our PPC, I’m not really super knowledgeable about that. But essentially, yes, it’s true. You have to really know your profit margins. I do know that So Mike and I don’t manage your ads counts, but we generally are okay with breaking even in the beginning or even losing money on an initial campaign. And then as we go, we try to just kind of steer it towards more profitability. But of course, you want to find that way to be more profitable. And there’s several really great like PPC management software’s out there that can help you. We don’t have one internally, but that can help you like really see your profitability, but but don’t be afraid to like lose money and the beginning and a PPC campaign, you can capture that data and then take that data and put it into making your campaign more profitable.

Ken 20:34
Excellent. Yeah, one thing you definitely want to circle back on, and you mentioned conversion rate, like I am a huge proponent of conversion, right? If you could just increase your conversion rate, just 1% 2%. Over time, that really adds up into the bottom line, as well as ranking if Amazon’s got 100 products they can show to a customer, the NFL, one of them’s got a 45% conversion rate, the rest of them are in there 10 515 They’re gonna show the one that has the higher chance of Amazon making profit, right? And so I’m a huge proponent of conversion rate. It kind of brings me to my next question, what are some of the top two or three strategies that you see other sellers like missing the mark on you mentioned conversion rate, I think perfect example is earlier, a few more that you focus on that that other sellers have seemed to have missed the mark

Ashley Kinkead 21:19
on pricing. Like pricing is really important on Amazon as well. We generally like to be more higher priced late than other competitors. That’s kind of our strategy, we like to be the more expensive option, we just figured out ways to create more value have a higher conversion rate at that price fully. So I think figuring out a way to be a price leader in your market and your space where you can actually make the most profit margins. I met an Amazon saw the other day that had the most impressive profit margin expert she was for cost of goods is like $3. And the product she’s selling on Amazon was $35. And her was, even though her competitors were all under like 20 to $25. Just her images, her reviews for feedback or branding was just so onpoint. So just being able to set high prices, as well as being an add on charge of your photos, your photo conversions is really important as well, we spend a lot of time and money looking at our images on Amazon and making sure that our images are really high quality. A lot of times when I look at sellers images, they’re really bad. To be honest of your product photos. And product photos are extremely important. As well as enhanced brand content, we really encourage people to build that out to look at your overall listing and just make sure it’s again converting well, and split testing, split testing is really big too. We split test everything. If you don’t know what split testing is, you’re going to struggle to be successful on Amazon, you need to know what works and what doesn’t. So split testing is paid for us to

Ken 22:47
excellent tips.

David 22:49
On the topic of price point, this is something that we are working on internally right now on our team. And there’s Avenue A where you can have a lower price point and be a higher volume seller. Or it as you pointed out, you could be a high price point seller, and trying to like identify the right price is very challenging, right with a higher price. Generally your conversion rate falls, it’s going to impact PPC. And so when you’re trying to get priced dialed in, what are you looking at? Or what are you referencing to kind of right size, that price? Well, we

Ashley Kinkead 23:25
generally like to be like at least like 10 to 20% higher than our competitors and just create that value. And again, it’s something that we split test, we use several different software’s, there’s a lot of software’s out there that you can use to split test your prices will test them for 30 days, seven days, you know, seeing what actually converts the best again, it always comes back to conversions conversion rate, like what converts the best at which price point. So again, our strategy is just to be a bit above like the top seller in the market. If we look at like the best rate product for that keyword, we just want to be 10 to 20% above it and figuring out like how do we actually be able to convert at that price point. So I’ve also seen sellers doing really well kind of undercutting prices as well. Again, it’s just about finding that strategy that works best

David 24:11
what what split testing software you guys using?

Ashley Kinkead 24:14
We were using cash cow Crow, I’m not sure if you’re actually still using cash cow bro, I’m not sure what software you guys use for split testing. But cash cow Pro is historically what we’ve used. So we use split

David 24:25
Lee for a while and then it went away. And we have been, I guess to share with you our strategy has been inching up 50 cents every week to an established price point and then monitoring BSR along the way, and to the extent that we see BSR fall off that’s probably where we would stop and so but kind of early on in this process and I ever since split Lee went away I’ve been curious what else is out there?

Ashley Kinkead 24:53
Yeah, we’ve used cash cow Pro also use an Excel spreadsheet of basically just tracking it ourselves internally like cash Pro seller a lot of sellers of use lately as well. But, you know, it’s just I agree. It’s like monitoring it watching the BSR seeing what goes up seeing what goes down. And if you see your conversions go down, that’s probably a good indicator to like, I’ve kind of reached a point, right?

Ken 25:14
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So what are some of the the E commerce space and Amazon especially is constantly evolving, always changing, adding new programs, changing things up? What are some of the big changes you’ve seen in 2022? on Amazon?

Ashley Kinkead 25:28
Absolutely. Again, more stringent requirements for categories. We’re seeing like more subcategories, the gated more sellers, private label wise, needed invoices if you want to actually sell in a certain subcategory. So I’ve seen that as well, as well, as I’m just more sellers, somebody in the marketplace is definitely a lot more sellers coming in 2022, which isn’t a bad thing. But those are the two biggest things that we’ve seen just obviously just increases in competition, there are a lot of direct sellers now selling directly on Amazon as well. And I personally just see that kind of as an exciting thing, there’s still more opportunity if you’re open open to creating your own product if you’re an innovator. And right now, particularly, I just like to give a little golden tip, we’re really focused on just bringing like really new products to the marketplace. Like if we see just a completely new opportunity, we try to be one of the early adopters of that product as well. So for example, there’s a certain keyword, there’s just no good sellers on Amazon, we’ll just try to get in that space as soon as we can. So that’s kind of how we’ve been approaching things in 2022. We look for new opportunities, we look for opportunities to be one of the earliest entry people into the marketplace. Listen, I would encourage your your listeners to start to think about as well when they’re selling on Amazon.

Ken 26:38
Excellent. So what is private label mastery? And what type of clients do you serve?

Ashley Kinkead 26:44
Sure. So we private label mastery was a little company founded in 2017. And we started as just a entry level private label educational service for people that you know, wanted to launch a private label product. Today, we have 1000s and 1000s of stores that we manage and help people to manage what we basically help people launch specifically private label products on Amazon FBA. So we have now to about 50,000, private label products on Amazon, generally people doing smaller businesses 10 or 20k a month in revenue. But we also have some really big accounts to the melting millions that we manage as well. So we basically provide coaching, consulting, setup services, account maintenance, those kinds of things to people that are trying to get started on Amazon. So it’s definitely an exciting time to be a private label seller. We don’t really get much into wholesale or drop shipping, although I don’t know much about those models. But mostly we’re just focused on the branding, the brand buildings that basic things on Amazon FBA specifically.

Ken 27:43
Okay. Excellent. Well, cool. Anything else? We want to cover David or Ashley before we get into the fire round?

David 27:49
Nothing on my end, this has been an awesome interview. Leah, let’s get into the fire round.

Ken 27:53
Cool. Ashley, are you ready? Yeah. Ready. All right. What is your favorite book?

Ashley Kinkead 27:59
I have a couple that I would say one of my favorites that we have our whole team read is called The Slight Edge. And it’s a mindset book. Because mindset is super important for entrepreneurs. So the slight edge, we do a book club, actually at our company. And every month we have a new book everyone to read. So right now we’re reading the slight edge. So one of my favorites. I also looked at some of the good old fashioned leadership books like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, I really encourage every entrepreneur to read Peter Lencioni as his name, I’m not sure but any of those just good old fashioned like, leadership books and all.

Ken 28:30
Excellent. What are your hobbies?

Ashley Kinkead 28:32
Well, I just bought a house. So my newest hobby is like repairing stuff, fixing my pool, figuring out when my hot tub heater isn’t working. That’s kind of my lawn maintenance, that kind of stopped. So I also love to travel selling on Amazon has given me kind of this new lease on life where I’m able to just pick up and I don’t have to tell someone I’m going anywhere. So I love to travel to Yeah, big traveler.

Ken 28:53
Awesome. What is the one thing that you do not miss about working for the man,

Ashley Kinkead 28:59
I definitely don’t miss just not having location freedom. Gosh, I put the money aside, I think there’s no price tag you can put on just having location and time freedom. It’s just priceless. And so I just really am thankful to be able to control my day at the end of the day and decide what I want my life to look like for me. So I really love love working for myself and being an entrepreneur.

Ken 29:19
Excellent. All right, last one. What do you think sets apart successful ecommerce entrepreneurs from those who give up fail or never get started?

Ashley Kinkead 29:27
Gosh, there’s so many things. But I would say like persistent most almost I’ve worked with 1000s of entrepreneurs and typically people that are just like very driven and very persistent towards their goals. They tend to get what they want in life. And if you give up early I don’t entrepreneurship is going to be tough for you got to be able to ride through the waves and ride through the seasons good or bad and take some risks along the way. So I think just that hobby and that persistence of that discipline as well is going to get

Ken 29:52
you excellent. Yes, definitely agree. David over to you want to close out the show.

David 29:57
Yeah, absolutely. So Ashley, if some of our listeners are interested in getting in touch with you in private label mastery, what would be the best way?

Ashley Kinkead 30:05
Well, we’ve got a little podcast too. It’s called the private label mastery podcast. They can head over subscribe, we’ve got 10s of 1000s of listeners on our show. Also, I’ve got a website with a free book who Ashley can k.com forward slash welcome. So your listeners can download a free copy of my book. It’s a really quick read about my specifically my private label brands and detail exactly what they are photos, listings, everything and download my book. It’s a great way to get in touch with me as well. And again, it’s www dot Ashleigh kincaid.com forward slash welcome. I’d love to get to meet some of your listeners and hopefully just inspire them on their journey to private label. It’s a lot of fun. So

David 30:40
all right, well, thank you so much. We will post links to all that in the show notes. actually want to thank you so much for being a guest on the firingtheman podcast and looking forward to recording another one with you.

Ashley Kinkead 30:51
Thanks, David. Thanks cannabis has been it’s so much fun, and I really appreciate your time.

David 30:54
Thank you everyone for tuning in to today’s firingtheman podcast. If you liked this episode, head on over to firingtheman.com And check out our resource library for exclusive firing the man discounts on popular e commerce subscription services that is firingtheman.com/resource. You can also find a comprehensive library of over 50 books that Ken and I have read in the last few years that have made a meaningful impact on our business, or that head on over to www.firingtheman.com/library Lastly, check us out on social media atfiringtheman in on YouTube at firingtheman for exclusive content. This is David Schomer

Ken 31:35
and Ken Wilson. We’re out

David 31:36
before you go fun fact for all you Amazon sellers out there when you start selling in international marketplaces, all of your reviews come with you. At the beginning of this year, Ken and I sat down and talked of ways that we could double our businesses in size and landed on international expansion as our number one initiative this year. We partnered up with Kevin Sanderson from maximizing ecommerce and he has made the process an absolute breeze walking us step by step through the process. If you want to grow your revenue and reach new customers head on over to https://maximizingecommerce.com/fire and connect with Kevin Sanderson today. Now back to the show.