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The speaker discusses the importance of Return on Investment (ROI) in business, explaining how it differs from profit margin and its significance in growth. They emphasize the impact of ROI on business growth and the importance of managing cash flow during different quarters. The speaker shares insights on sourcing products efficiently, handling returns, and scaling a business effectively by focusing on high ROI activities. They also touch on the value of tracking data for admin and sourcing purposes. Additionally, they express their views on virtual assistants and the need for hands-on involvement in key business tasks. The speaker emphasizes the importance of maximizing ROI to ensure sustainable growth in a business. term. It's something that is referencing your profitability versus your turnover. ROI isn't a real business term in the sense of, it's not if you went up to someone who is in the business owner and you told them you're ROI, they really don't care but think you're a bit daft. ROI in my eyes is a real growth factor and a growth metric. It's something that allows you to have a view of if you are cash limited then ROI is a very important factor because it's a rate at which you're going to be able to grow and compound. Whereas the margin, that doesn't show you any growth factor but margin at my point where I am cash limited is a very important factor and the margin is more important than the ROI. But when I only have a thousand pounds to play with, ROI is much more important than margin. In that sense, if you have let's say you have something that you buy for a pound, you sell for £5, that's £3 fees, that would give you £1 profit. That's only 20% margin but it's 100% ROI. If you have something that sells for, you buy for £500, sells for £1000 with £300 of fees, you end up with a higher profit figure, same margin but it's a much lower ROI. So the ROI on that front isn't going to allow you to grow as much but you still have the same margin. So when you are growing and you're looking at your ROI, then low value, low cost items can allow you to grow quicker. It's definitely a technique that I implemented when I was early in my growth stage, looking at a lot of small and light style items and ones that really allowed me to grow quickly because the ROIs were massive. It's less of a care in my business now. I'm definitely not going to see any of them questions are in this chat. I am going to answer that one. I drink a lot. What's my favourite drink? I've got, if you can see that, I've got a Johnny Walker Blue label which is very nice. I've got some Glen Farclay's 25. I've got some nice balls but I do like a tip of whiskey. I'm going to go back to the actual questions. How do you keep on top of admin invoices back to the inventory to streamline this process? Admin is something that's not a cash generating action but it is something that is required to support the business. To run any business, you've got your cash generating tasks and you've got your supporting business tasks which really need to be completed but don't directly impact your profitability. All of the admin tasks like that are them kind of things. For me personally, invoices, I have a part-time staff member that does my invoices. I do my fat returns because I like to control and have visibility of my numbers and inventory I manage myself. There's always ways to handle it. It's looking at what is the best for you in your own business and how you approach it. One thing I always work on especially in mentoring, I never tell people this is how you should be doing something. I always take very much specific views of how someone does something and help people become the best version of how they do things because what works for one person doesn't work for everyone. Do you agree with VAs, sourcing admin VAs? I don't like VAs. They're not my style because I don't believe that they are. The barriers of differences of approach, I am not a big fan of and it doesn't work for my business. I employ UK staff rather than VAs and I definitely don't agree with outsourcing, sourcing. I believe that is your highest value profit task within your business and you should be doing that yourself. Admin, yes, if you want to give it to someone, pay three quid an hour and crack on but it's not for me. I'd much rather have a UK staff that understands UK rules, UK legislation but that's my personal approach and that's how I try to run my business. These questions are just going to end up diverging. So going on to the next question, how to make the most out of Q4. How to manage cash flow during Q4. My average spend for Q4 is five cents a tip. I'll give you an overview. So cash flow, you really have to look at what your budget is and what you've got coming in versus what you've got going out. You have to make sure that you have enough money and don't over leverage when you're not going to get the cash back in time. You do not want to make yourself in the point that you've got creditors chasing you and you haven't got the funds to pay for it. So always be aware of your cash flow and imagine you're in and you're out. My average spend for Q4, I think last year it was, I think I spent £250k in November, maybe £180k in October and maybe £60k in December. So it's a decent amount but the amount that you spend has to be aligned with the amount of sales that you want to get. If you want to get £400k sales, you're not going to get it with spending £100k. You need to spend appropriate to what your target is. If you haven't got the stock, you're not going to make the sales. So you have to work back from that aspect. Best tips for sourcing OA. Work hard at it. I've been doing this for 5 years, that's why I'm good at sourcing because I have done thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of sourcing. Learn your websites that you buy from, practice, put the hours in. It's not going to be easy, it's going to be hard work, it's going to suck, it's going to be boring but that's how you get good at it. You're not going to click your fingers, you're not going to be told a secret method or whatever bullshit someone wants to tell you someone is spinning. The secret is hard work and that's it. How do you incorporate return losses into your bottom In terms of returns, STK is an indicative tool. It gives you a bit of a view of what you're doing day to day but it's not an accounting tool, it's not a bookkeeping tool. Your profits should be run and viewed from your zero, from your QuickBooks, anything like that. And if you use that, especially if you are VAT registered, you should be using LinkMyBooks. So for LinkMyBooks, any return that does it as a loss of cost of the item, so you just get a full return and that's how that balances it. Then if it's added back to your inventory, it doesn't really get added again, it just sells. But it kind of balances out through the year and it's long to do it every month, working out what your returns, what your sellable returns are, what your unsellable returns are. I tend to just wait until the end of the year when it looks for my annual return and making sure that my stock count is in line on that. Everyone who is asking questions in here, can you stick them in the questions channel because there's so many messages in here like Charlie the worker and he's just chatting shit, so I'm going to end up missing them. What channel are you in? Questions, what is it called? I think it's just QA call questions. Yeah, there you go, Robo is useful. So if you put them in there, I'll see them at the end. So if you were going to go back to the start, how would you scale a business efficiently? So if I was going to start again today, I would go back to grassroots and if you're looking at trying to make as much money as possible, as quick as possible, you want to be looking at maximising your ROI. So the highest ROI that I've ever done is from book flipping where I pick stuff up for 50p a pound and sell it for like 20, 30, 40 quid. So that's the highest ROI but it's really time intensive. Then you get to like car boots, selling used things. That's quite high ROI as well but it's time intensive. You've got RA, you can get a bit more and you can get readily access to more stock there but it's again time intensive but slightly lower ROI but still good. And then you go to OA where the ROI is slightly lower again but you can buy more of them. And then you go to wholesale and that is my view. As your ability to buy more items grows, your ROI typically drops. There's always an outliers but it's a very rough view. It's a bit of a sense of the more people that have access to something and the higher scale it is, then the lower your ROI will typically be. And I'm talking ROI even though I said I don't use it now because it's a growth metric. And you need to be looking at capitalising the most of your time without spending all of your money. So you don't want to run out of money in the first day and then be sat with your thumb up your arse for three weeks until you get a payout. You want to be buying as high ROI things as possible to make sure your cash lasts. Make sure you're reducing your capital expenditures. Do as much as you can yourself. Just make sure that you put everything into it and find high ROI things. That is how I would start again and just focus high ROI, high ROI until I have enough money to be going to scale. How much information do you use in admin sourcing? Not a huge amount. I could definitely use more. But I track a lot of data and I do see tracking data as a very important tool. The more that you track and the more that you document from the past, the better you're able to guess and predict what is going to happen in the future. So I really do believe in tracking data and that sort of helps me in the future for sourcing and admin. How do you scale or combat brickers? No, brickers are just knobheads. So if anyone in here is a bricker, you're a knobhead. So don't brick. It doesn't help anyone. Is it possible to expand an Amazon business to six figures with ROI? Yeah, pretty easily. I know people who do ROI at 20, 30 grand a month but it is just really time intensive. You've got an opportunity to make a lot of money from not a lot of money but it's going to be time intensive. You're going to spend a lot of time on the road. You're going to spend a lot of time manual prepping which again eats your time because if you're prepping, you can't source. So it's about looking at where your time payoffs are. I certainly started using a prep centre much later than I should have. I think I was at 700k in the last 12 months when I went to a prep centre and I should have definitely done it earlier because I'd have probably gone a bit quicker at that point. I didn't value my time enough and I saw my time as free when I was prepping when it isn't free because if you're spending time prepping, then you're not making money for the business and really you should be looking at making as much money as possible for the business which is sourcing. To maximise your sourcing time, you'll get better at it and therefore be able to make more money from it. How do you know what amount of stock to buy on a deal? It's not always that straightforward as it sells loads by. To get to big numbers, you have to have large amounts of stock. Do you buy amounts below 30 for example? As one lasts long and less gets totally bricked. I don't tend to buy small quantities but that's because I'm the size that I am now. But when you're growing, then it is important. It's something that I try and look at. It's about looking at what is the percentage of the buy of what you're looking at versus what you have altogether. So if you have a grand to your name and you're looking at spending 50 quid on stock, then that's 5% of your total funds. So that's a decent amount. That's a good amount. But if you have 10 grand or 100 grand, then it's a much smaller percentage and it becomes less worth your time because that 50 quid buy might make you 20 quid. Which if you're trying to make a grand a month, then that's 2% of the way there. You only need to do that another 50 times over a month, which isn't that much. If you think twice a day, that's alright. But if you're trying to make 10 grand a month, then it's not quite enough and you need to be up in what you're making. So the amount is very dependent on scaling your targets. Hopefully that makes sense. When making business-to-business wholesale orders exceeding 30 to 40 grand, do you always make sure to have cash available or would you risk using credit if the buyer accepts it and at what point do you feel a shift between debit versus credit? So I regularly do 30 to 40 grand orders with wholesale and business-to-business. Most of them aren't going to accept credit cards or they don't even want debit cards because any card transaction charges a fee and realistically they're going to pass that fee on to you. They're not going to do it for free. So everything looks at backs. Any wholesale worth their salt is going to be working on very, very slim margins. So a 1.5% transaction fee is going to kill it. I would rather have 1.5% off the cost of the item and pay by backs. So I tend to try and hold out 100 grand in cash to ensure that if I get offered any deal, if any deal comes up, I have the cash to pull the trigger on it. I have a few suppliers that I use that I have credit lines with which obviously I'm going to utilise because if I'm paying backs anyway I might as well wait 30 or 60 days to pay them. I can have quite a chunk of the stock I've given me sold in that time. Best way of vetting sites when doing OA? So that's a really good question. It's really important. So there's a lot of dodgy sites out there, especially when you start trying to dig as deep as possible. And what you need to look at is the kind of things that the UK, if you are buying from a UK site, needs to be a legitimate site. So you need your address, you need your back registration, you need your company number on there. And really they're minimums. So you want to be looking for them. If they aren't displayed on there, there should at least be a contact Give them a call. I would much rather give them a call and see if they are legit than not and give them a grand or whatever it is. So just give them a call, ring them up, talk to them, check they are legit. And most of all, pay on a credit card, pay on Amex, make sure that you've got some security should they not deliver. What split of wholesale, OA, PL are you and why is that? How do you split your capital? So I'm predominantly OA. Don't do any PL. Wholesale I'm starting to increase it. But I'd say I'm probably still sort of 60 to 70% OA spend a month, which will be even higher coming into Q4 because of the OA deals. So yeah, I'm still predominantly an OA seller at my scale. Any tips to stay organized? How do you set your priorities without falling behind slash off your radar? I have a, I use Notion, I have a to-do list where I constantly need to update because I never get anything done. So asking me about my priorities and how do I stop tasks from falling behind is not a good shout. You end up with, especially as businesses grow, you end up with so many tasks and so many small bitty bits that you end up constantly firefighting. It is difficult and you need a management tool, be it writing in a notepad, be it Apple Notes, something to just try and organize your mind. There will be a lot of things, like any given day I'll have at least 10 to 15 bitty tasks. That's just reply to this, pay this invoice, do that, do that. And just having somewhere to write it all down is really important. So I would just say keep notes of everything to try and make sure that you don't miss things. If you make sure that you always write everything down, then you allow yourself to forget it. If you've ever seen or heard of GTD, it's getting things done. It's a book, an audio book. It's really good and it's good at helping you sort of be organized and get things done. So I can definitely recommend that. Can you see arbitrage carrying on for a long time with lots of fighting, it's been hard-gated like in the US, beauty is quite fucked. I do, I really do. I think it's getting harder, that's no doubt, and that's because of the popularity of people doing it. And I'm hoping that as it gets harder, people are less inclined to put the effort into it. But there's always ways and things adapt from arbitrage and it's like how I'm doing it now. It's not strictly arbitrage in the whole sense of it, but I still do mainly ordering off websites. I think it will still carry on because there will always be offers, but it gets into the point of buying while it's low, selling when it's high, rather than years ago you used to be able to do arbitrage in the sense of it would always be £5, but you can sell it for £10 on Amazon. Whereas now you have to look a bit more like it's normally £10 but there's an offer making it a fiver and then I'll sell it for £10 on Amazon. Anything that you are selling over IP will ultimately get bricked if it's available over RP because lots of people will find it and everyone likes to penny undercut nowadays for some reason. Don't ask me why because I think they're idiots that do that. Do you think the Amazon business model changed for a new starter in 2024 versus when I started in 2019? If so what's it going to take differently if you start fresh? The model hasn't necessarily changed, no. The principles behind it are still 100% the same, but there's a lot more information out there now. When I started there really wasn't things like Discord groups, it wasn't a thing. There was Instagram where nobody wanted to share anything and you kind of just had to do it yourself and just figure it out for yourself. So I think there's a lot more access to information and a lot more support so I think taking advantage of them can really give you a leg up on where you can be. In terms of what would I do differently, I guess it's the same thing. It's hard to say what you'd do differently. If I was starting fresh today I would not focus where everyone else is focusing because you haven't got an advantage over other people because you're fresh. So don't just focus on the popularity things. Do something that's a bit more for yourself as well. What would you recommend to start sourcing as a beginner? As a beginner you really need to learn Keefer. Keefer is your best friend so you need to spend time learning that and learning how to read data from it. You can source from there as well, but spend a lot of time just searching websites, looking at websites, looking at comparisons on Amazon. Spend time building newsletter lists. Just spend time sourcing. Nobody will spend an eight hour sourcing session. That's new and find as many deals as someone who's been doing it two, three, four, five years. It's just not going to happen. But people are led into this perception that they are going to and that gets really demotivating because you really need to understand that you're new, you're fresh and you're going to have to put in a lot of practice before you manage to find a lot of things. So I think it's just be consistent and don't get disheartened. What was your mindset when you first made your setbacks or had a lot of money tied up in dead stock when you didn't have a lot to play with? I felt like quitting it. But it's all about how you approach this. I always approach this as it being a fun side thing, a fun hobby. I never expected this to become my full time job. So because I only started with 200 quid, my biggest loss I could make was 200 pounds. It didn't matter if I lost 10 grand in the business. I couldn't lose more than 200 pounds because that's all I put in. The rest of it were unrealised gains. So you've got to look at the bigger picture and step back. It's really hard. I lost like 9 grand worth of stock due to a terrible prep centre that I would not recommend at all. But I won't say them or that their name is a bit like a colour and a number. But yeah, I won't say them. But yeah, I did say the name. But yeah, so I had a big loss there with 9 or 10 grand and it really hurt me. But I had to step back and look at the bigger picture which is really hard to do but you have to. How do you deal with the stock that you can no longer sell on Amazon? So in that respect, you really have to look at what other outlets you've got. You can look at eBay, if you can sell on eBay. Or what I do every few months during the summer, I sell at Carboots. Anything that's low cost, just flood at Carboots, get some money back in your pocket. If it's that tied up and it's that dead money, just liquidate it for anything you can. It's better to have money in your pocket than just throw it in the bin. I've experienced a few issues with electronic returns, more specifically headsets on the basis of curiosity. What are IDAs in specific categories compared to your normal requirements? I don't. I genuinely don't. I assess everything on an individual basis. I don't have set rules for this is my ROI here, this is my ROI there, that's my ROI elsewhere. Every single item I look at on an individual basis and ROI isn't my key criteria. But yeah, that's just because of the scale I'm at now. Some electronics are good, some are shit for returns. You really have to build it from your own experiences. Like you say, headsets. I had one skew and I sold maybe like 3,000 headsets and my return rate was like half percent. So it really does depend on what ones it is. But if they're really bad, just adjust what you want to use going forward for your bracket ROI. Or just avoid certain brands or certain items. How much do you pay UK staff? I'm having trouble with workers in China, not speaking proper English, gets on my nerves. So UK staff, depending on what you're wanting them to do, you're looking at using the national living wage. I'm not actually sure what that is, you know it's about 12 quid, like 11, 12 quid an hour or something like that. That's your sort of bottom entry and depending on how many hours you want them to do a week, it's aligned with that. So you need to be looking at your national living wage and seeing what that is in comparison to your hours and that's where your pay scale will land. I think on a 35 hours a week contract sort of national living wage is about 21, 22 grand. So that's your minimum wage and then anything you want to pay above that you will get better quality staff. How do I calculate my leverage on Amex and COTS? How do you manage to spend a month? Charity workers, there's a really nice feature on Amex and COTS where you open up the app and it tells you how much you owe. So if you add them two together, it will essentially know what you owe. If you know what your own card and what you've got in the bank, you also know what you've got anticipated from Amazon in the next maybe 7 to 14 days. You can give a bit of a sense of what you're going to get. Once you know what you're going to get and you know what you've got going out and when it's going out and what you have in hand, then you're able to anticipate your cash flow and whether you're going to be over leveraged. Personally, I always make sure I have in the bank more money than I have on credit card so I'm never over leveraged. Apart from in November, that is the only time that I am ever over leveraged in the business. How many hours did you put in to start with and how do you balance that with family life? So I used to source 3 to 4 hours a night every night and then prep on the weekends. I used to be just sat on the sofa with my laptop and then after the missus went to bed, do more sourcing. It's difficult to balance. It really is around full time jobs, especially if it's a demanding job, if you've got kids and things like that. So I'm not going to say it's easy but everyone has things that they do that aren't probably the most productive. If you swap them out for something that's a bit more productive and do a bit more sourcing, then that'll support your goals and your aims long term. So you really need to just look at what you ultimately want. If you're trying to just go to Amazon to make a quick buck and think it's going to be easy, then you're probably not going to do it for the long term. You don't actually get to take much money out of it quickly. Everyone sort of says, like, I've made a grand in my first month. But you're not going to see that grand for 12 months because you can't take it out because if you take it out then you can't grow and you can't compound it. So I didn't take any money out for the first two and a half years but that allowed me to grow to the point where I can now take money out. What do you do if your stock was great when you purchased it and it sits on bricks for a while, in an ideal world would it flip within one to two months but not always possible? There's no set rule for it. You have to look at a listing, look at is it going to sell out, is it going to come down in price. If you're looking and it looks like it's going to take six months to recover and you're going to have to pay six months of storage just to get 20p more profit, then it's not worth it. You have to look at what missed opportunity cost you're going to have by having your money tied up in something else. If you're running out of cash and you've got some bricks out there, clear your bricks. But it's really difficult to say a hard and fast rule that applies to everything. I very much analyse everything based on the individual. I took my money out and reached 15k month profit. So that's pretty much what I did. I very much said I wasn't going to take out until the amount I needed to take out was less than a third of what I was making per month. If I made 15 grand I could take 5 grand out and 10 grand would still allow me to compound my growth. Do I do private label? No. I can't really advise on it. I know bits about brand registry but I'm not a private label expert. I'm not going to pretend I am. As a beginner is it better to invest in high ROI, slow selling stock or fast selling lower ROI? High ROI, fast selling. That's what you're best doing as a beginner. It's out there. You'll be able to find it. If you're a beginner you ain't got much cash. So save your money for better stuff rather than compromising on something. How many newsletter do you subscribe to and what percentage of your leads would you say are from newsletters? I get like 200 or 300 emails a day. So a lot of it is newsletters. A lot of different sites and quite a large chunk of my initial direction on where I source is from newsletters. A few of my mentors did talk about PL listings, not actual PL but created listings for B2B So I do some of that for one of the brands that I work with. So I'm on the brand registry, I create listings, do things like that. So I know about it, I'm aware of it and I understand the process. But if you're doing that you need to be on brand registry. You need to have the security on there and ability if you're the only one who wants to sell you, you have to have the ability to kick people off the listings. I'm reading them from the channel, Q&A, calls, questions channel. How many hours per week do you spend sourcing? At the moment like 6, 7, 9, 10. Maybe an hour or two a day, 10 hours, something like that. A lot less than people think. But these people that post going, I only work 1-2 hours a day and I make 20 grand a month. They're just chatting shit, it's an absolute bollocks. I might be able to do that in sourcing, but sourcing is the only part of this business. There's so much to it aside from sourcing. I didn't mention any names, I never mention names. I wouldn't think of doing that. Anyway I can't see anything from Felix, I'm blocked. Anyone that says 1-2 hours sourcing is chatting bollocks. 1-2 hours a day is chatting bollocks, so ignore them. I just realised Spencer is recording this, swearing isn't an issue is it? Can you show us an example of what data you're tracking? That's going into Keeper Analysis. I'm not going into Keeper Analysis on this. If you want to go into Keeper Analysis, you can book a call on me and I'll go through in depth with any single thing that you want on Keeper and anything on that front. How would you break down your sourcing methods? My manual outside newsletters has grown, but newsletters is still a lot of where it directs me. Keeper Product Finder, 5-10%, it's a bit of a spotting tool. StarFront None, because just what's the point? A2A Pings, 10% maybe? Mainly because A2A, it's a bit of... The issue with A2A for me is I can't get enough, so 3 units or anything like that doesn't really fulfil the requirements that I need quantity wise. If anyone's got an unlimited account, I am more than happy to jump on and then I would increase my A2A Pings percentage a considerable amount. I'm pretty excited to probably do about 25k a month. I don't need a repricer if you've got 100 aces. Yeah, just get a CK repricer. Yeah, just don't manage 100 aces without a repricer, just get SDK. Any exclusive discount code for calls? There is exclusive discount codes just for PS and ProfitSuite people, so I think Spencer's got that listed somewhere. So it's 10% off any of the calls from myself, Dan or Susan. How do you position yourself to businesses when trying to buy wholesale? I can't imagine telling them you're shifting all their stock on Amazon. Yeah, I'm just completely honest. You've got to be honest. I was pointing the line to them. If you don't tell them that you're selling on Amazon, they're going to find out and then they're going to stop you from buying from them. So if you want to build lasting relationships, then you need to be honest. You can get a shout out to ProfitSuite. Whoop whoop, ProfitSuite. Is that what you wanted? Can you... What's your stance on prep centres? Are they low-cost, small items? Are they 44 per huge? What could be the difference? So I think prep centres is a massive need and a massive... People who are trying to put off work full-time, which is going to be the scenario when you're scaling, you need to be using a prep centre. I use Cramer and Kirkman and they do a cracking job for me. You say about the 45p per unit charge being the difference between 10% and 30%, but are you essentially valuing your time at receiving the parcel, putting it on, packing it, creating the shipment, getting rid of the cardboard? It's not just the price of sticking a label on. It is answering the door. It is unpacking it, getting rid of the rubbish, labeling it, creating the shipment. All of that 45p isn't too bad. And if you're saying that it's between 10% and 30% ROI, you're meaning valuing your time at nothing, which isn't the real reality. Because if you're labeling, answering the door, if you're doing a tip run, then you're not sourcing and you're not generating money for the business. 45p per unit is a bargain, especially when you're doing it at scale. When I'm still self-prepped, the amount of tip runs I have to do, the amount of space taken up in the garage, the amount of time that I've lost to family time, to sourcing, it's not worth it. So if you want it to scale to any sense, value your time at something because your time isn't free. What did you do in order to grow quicker? What did you do in order to get more sales? Was it wholesale, OA, and high ROI? If you look at it, that's really the way to do it. Yeah, anyone got a good percentage? Yeah, Craner Kirkman. Especially for Q4, the direct shipping and the spot on that is, yeah, it's going to make a big difference. If anyone does fragrances, things like that, having the diet and not having to pay 10 quid a parcel by UPS, that's uninsured. Yeah, it's not worth the risk. I think from using CK, my monthly inbound charge on shipping with UPS has gone from a grand down to like 50 quid for, I think it's 200 quid. 200 quid plus VAT a month. So, yeah, bargain. How much more difficult do you think it is to scale a business without using credit cards as opposed to using it? It's not difficult, it's just more time consuming. But it makes yourself harder. If you've got a credit card, then you're going to buy shit because you think you've got money. And then you're going to realize it's shit, you're going to break it, and you're going to ruin listings. Whereas if you actually go organically and realize it's a marathon, not a spring, then it's not much of an issue. I think you just have to adapt your expectations. Top three sourcing tips. Try harder, try harder, and practice more. That's basically it. You've just got to spend time, you've got to work harder. It's not easy. Anything that's good isn't easy. How can you spend the sort of cash you must spend on OA? I struggle to find enough to spend my pitiful budget because I've been doing it for five years, so I practice and I understand where I can buy in quantity and I understand where I can't buy in quantity. But yeah, I spend, what's my... So last month on OA I spent 115 grand. So there's stuff out there, you can spend the money, you've just got to put the hard work and the time into it. Oh no, sorry, it wasn't 115 grand, it was 143 grand OA. Do I do EU A2A? Yes, I do, but you need to be careful, especially when it comes to electronics because obviously they have a different plug. So if you're sending them straight to a prep centre, you're not inspecting them, expect to have a different plug if you're buying electronics from the EU, people will get tricked up. Do I sell outside the UK? I sell some, like in the last, so if I look at the last 30 days, last 30 days 197K to UK, 6.7 France, 1.7 Italy, then like a grand to Spain and Germany. So I do do it, but it's not a bulk thing for me, it is just pretty much UK, that's where I spend most of my efforts and time. Yeah, I get lots of cancellations, like I think last November I think I had about 100 grand's worth of orders cancelled. But here's what it is, I think I spent 350 grand pre-cancellations and ended up being 250 grand after the cancellations. Do I use software such as Arbisource and SourceMogul? No, I do not. I know people do, and I know people have success with it, but personally I don't. What did the prep centre do to make you lose money? They used to do direct shipping, did the colour and number place, and they said that they'd delivered it, Amazon said they hadn't received it, and then they denied liability, because they said they'd delivered it, and Amazon said, well, we've never actually received it, you haven't got a stamp on the proof of delivery, you've not got any real proof that it has been delivered, so I didn't get reimbursed from them, and the prep centre said, tough, not our problem. So yeah, that's how it happened. At what point would you say it's suitable to go full-time? Also, would you say a contract is needed when using a prep centre, as you technically have no guarantee if they'll lose your start? You should sign the contracts whenever you start with a prep centre, because they have terms and conditions which you need to agree to, so you should have a signed contract anyway, or an agreement that is put in place, reaches C's and C's. At what point, profit-wise, would you say to go full-time? Ideally, needing to take out less than a third of what you're making, to allow you to grow further. If you're taking out all of your profits every month, you're not going to grow any more. That's my view on that. Fucking hell, how many more questions have we got here? Someone come and ask a question in voice. I feel like I've just been nattering at you guys for like an hour now. Someone speak up. I'm not going to do any more questions on here. What's the reptile in the cage behind you? Yeah, I'll answer that one. It's a tortoise. Is anyone else going to speak up? Anyone? Spence, how do you make people talk? I think you can request to speak. No. Alex Kane throwing shade on Spence. Yeah, I'm closing the questions thing now. If anyone wants to ask any more questions, you have to come on voice chat, and then we'll wrap it up. I might drop in. Spence, have you got a lounge in here? I might jump in. Have you got like just a lounge chat? I might jump in. Oh, yeah, you have. But you can't access. Oh, no, I can. Can I? Yeah. Yeah, if nobody's going to jump up on here, give me 20 minutes, half hour, and I'll jump in there, and I'll talk. Well, I'll not be the only person talking. Other people can have a match as well. Hopefully, I've managed to answer a lot of your guys' questions, and thank you for leaving the questions in the Q&A chat. And, yeah, if you want to talk about anything specific to your own business and talk in depth, then there is the discount links for myself, Susan, or Dan. Dan, he's, I think, 1.3 million in the last 12 months whilst working full time. So he's got a real wealth of knowledge when it comes to being time efficient and managing a huge-scale business whilst still working full time. And then Susan's been doing this a long time. She's got a wealth of knowledge, brilliant for newer sellers as well, and she's been really close to running non-VAC groups and just really has a lot of knowledge about putting things in place and growing. Yeah, I'm ready. Oh, for fuck's sake. Here he is. For fuck's sake. What's going on, brother? Right, question for me. What's the top three biggest mistakes you've made, and how would you avoid them? How would you avoid them? Do you know what I mean? What have you learned as well? So really, it's coming to bad buys. When you're looking at your buys, if you grow too quick, you can end up with too much in the game. So I always look at... I always now look at what I'm buying as a percentage of my risk. So if I've got 100 grand that I'm playing within the business and I buy 20 grand of one ASIN, 20% of my capital is tied up within that. So I try to limit my risk exposure to 5% to 10% of my overall availability because I have gone too deep on things before, had stuff tied up, and not been able to act on opportunity buys because of it, and then lost money. So really limiting your risk exposure when you're buying things that I have learned from that. Hope that's alright. Yeah, I like the answer, I like the answer. And you mentioned about buying low-ticket items as you're growing. What do you think about buying the odd high-ticket item? Is it worth it? Is it worth the risk when you're growing or not so much? Not so much when you're growing, I don't think so. High-ticket items are typically lower ROI. It's really hard to find high ROI, high-ticket items. It's normally much lower. So as ROI is a growth metric, you're going to grow slower because you're buying lower ROI items. Also, if you've only got 20 grand, which I say only, 20 grand is a lot of money, and you buy something that's £1,000, and it gets returned, that's 5% of your overall funds gone. And it could be fucked, it could be broken, you could lose a grand. And that's going to mean a lot to someone who doesn't have a lot of money. So it is high risk for people that don't have a lot of funds. Dan Pelfast, what camera are you using? I am using a Canon EOS R with a, I think it's a 24-105 F4 lens. And then I'm using a Rode Streamer X capture and mic. Yeah, fucking hell, Spence called in again. Right, looks like I've got to go. Spence has called in. GGs. Right. Thank you very much. Yeah, I really appreciate everyone joining. I really appreciate you giving me time. I understand it's over on a little bit on the hour, and I'll sort of say it back a little bit. But no, thank you to everyone who has joined tonight. Thank you to everyone who has joined tonight. I do really appreciate it. And reach out to me if you want to discuss anything further, if you want to do any calls, just give me a shout. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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