Neil Twa - Creating Wealth through Building and Investing in Ecommerce Brands

For a FREE COPY of Neil's latest book, Almost-Automated Income with FBA: Build a Profitable Lifestyle-Driven Amazon Business. Exit for Millions. Even Without Any E-commerce Experience follow this link and use code: MAKINGCENTS at checkout for an absolutely FREE digital copy! 

Neil Twa is a seasoned entrepreneur and e-commerce strategist best known as the co-founder and CEO of Voltage Holdings, a company that builds, acquires, and scales private-label brands—primarily through Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon).

Here’s a snapshot of his journey and work:

🚀 Career Highlights

• Amazon FBA Pioneer: Neil has been selling on Amazon since 2012, helping clients generate over $100 million in collective sales through his proven systems2.
• Voltage Holdings: His company uses a unique “pay as you profit” consulting model to help entrepreneurs build six- to eight-figure e-commerce businesses.
• Corporate Roots: Before diving into e-commerce, Neil worked with IBM, traveling extensively and gaining experience in tech and business development.

🎙️ Thought Leadership

• Podcast Host: He hosts the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, where he interviews successful entrepreneurs and shares insights on scaling online businesses.
• Speaker & Mentor: Neil frequently appears at Amazon seller summits and business podcasts, offering guidance on branding, product research, and mindset for success.

💡 Philosophy & Mindset

Neil emphasizes mindset, creativity, and resilience. He’s open about his own setbacks—including bankruptcy—and how he rebuilt his life and business by focusing on branding, data, and long-term strategy.

“It’s not who you know; it’s what you know. Who you know gets you there, and what you know keeps you there.” — Neil Twa

If you're curious about building a passive income stream or scaling a brand on Amazon, Neil’s playbook might be worth exploring.

Transcript

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Jesse Stakes: Hey, everybody! Welcome to making sense of it all. I'm your host, Jesse Stakes, and I am very pleased to bring you Neil, twa President and CEO of voltage. Neil, thank you so much for joining me.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Well, thank you for having me on Jesse with an E doing no.

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Jesse Stakes: For the audience. We were just talking about how how I have a little bit of a pet peeve, just because people spelled my name wrong for for my whole life, and I always make sure that I don't do that to my guests. So.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: I have a sense of humor and broad shoulders with my last name. I've heard pretty much everything. I'm always challenging somebody to find something new from my last name, because I haven't heard a new one in a while.

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Jesse Stakes: That's funny. So for my audience, for the folks that don't know who voltage is. Tell us about your company.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Yeah, in simple terms, we're an incubator. We focus predominantly on the 1st sales channel of an e-commerce physical private label brand with Amazon Fba. And then we move multi-channel for that e-commerce brand. And then we build those businesses to an exit in 4 or 5 years. So we're really focused on physical products and building exiting brands.

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Jesse Stakes: So I think that was a mouthful. It's a lot, but it's but it's simple as well like it's not. It's not like you're asking somebody to do brain surgery, or you're not asking them to go get educated in something you're you're helping them build their own business and then utilize, you know, things like Amazon to be able to deliver those physical products to people that would want to buy them.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: That's right. And 1st channel sales on Amazon is what we call an incubator. It's not a business yet until you have multiple sales channels. So with Fba, and it's fulfilled by Amazon, which is last mile. You probably understand it from, or others would, if you don't sell on it, because the products show up at your house in 2 h or less. We simply use that same infrastructure to deliver our products. We use Amazon to do it.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: and it's a marketplace of sales. It's a Juggernaut. It's an engine that has 49% of the Us. Based e-commerce marketplace, you know, 200 million prime members. It's an absolute Juggernaut, and the challenge, of course, is Amazon. It's a big company. It's a corporation. They don't always play nice. And I'm not Amazon fanboy, because they do a lot of stupid stuff.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: but at the end of the day it's the greatest place I've ever seen for an aspiring entrepreneur to start up a business and get access to people who want to buy products, because that's all they're there to do. And it's physical products with the private label side for us, not like wholesale or arbitrage, or flipping products, or any of that stuff. We build actual brands

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Neil Twa - Voltage: with trademarks. And you know, intellectual property that gives us a brand potential to grow products into a brand. And then in 4 to 5 years they become a saleable asset, right? So they appreciate in value over time until somebody wants to buy them. And in this case I'm also a buyer, and I work with a private equity company who buys those companies that we manage, and we are buying companies in the 10 to 50 million dollars space right now.

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Jesse Stakes: So you're almost in a way, you're almost kind of creating your own, your own stream of potential income in the future by giving people the opportunity to make money in the short term.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Yeah, we work with them on a consultative basis. They help use our processes system and technology to build up their own private label brand, and as they become strong CEO operators in the business of learning how to launch a physical product.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: we then work with them under partnerships or joint arrangements, or even give them percentages within the businesses we own, so that they can become an operator who participates in that with us and also participates in the exit. So that's 1 of the ways that I've been able to be a servant leader in this way through our we have 9 brands that we control that are our own in-house brands. So I learned and did first, st and then brought people to come in and learn how to do it with us

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Neil Twa - Voltage: as opposed to hiring employees. I trained people as CEO operators who now are operators within our business.

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Jesse Stakes: I think it's fantastic. And I think that just off the you know, when I'm thinking about it, even like there's so many people that. Just look at Amazon, and they see somewhere to buy stuff they don't see the they don't see it as opportunity for themselves to.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: They hear a lot of negative right?

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Jesse Stakes: Yes.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: I mean, you could probably go through the list of Bullet Point narrative myths about bad Amazon, right? There's a lot of people that speak about the bad side, and those of us who are understanding it appreciate it and utilize it. Don't always talk about the bad stuff because we're benefiting from it.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: We're benefiting from an ecosystem that's 20 billion dollars of infrastructure with trains, planes and automobiles moving, you know, 2,000 products every few seconds. And like 9,000 products a minute, so that it is a giant Juggernaut of opportunity. It comes with its problems. And I think that's where a lot of people hear the negative because there are problems. But then, again, all business is just a series of solving problems.

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Jesse Stakes: Right? Yeah, all right. So let's start at the beginning. I mean, if you know where like, if somebody's interested, if somebody's if somebody hears this, or you know they've looked into it. And they're like, All right. I'd like to do this. Where do they start?

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Well at the end of the day the 1st question that has always been the biggest one we've tried to solve, not only in our own brands, and getting our 1st brand to 7 figures in 2015, but the one that constantly is in the mind of most people who are aspiring or brand new, and that's what the heck do. I sell getting the 1st deal? What the heck do I sell? And who do I sell it to is kind of a big component of any success in business, and a lot of fears or thoughts of you know, I need a guarantee this is going to work usually come because there's a disbelief

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Neil Twa - Voltage: that people want to buy products from you. Oh, I had a friend who tried to sell a product. It didn't work. And I had this other thing. And I've heard online that people try to do this and it doesn't work. And you know there is a component of products not working. But here's the thing that most people Miss Brands live on forever. Products have a life cycle.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And I love to use this analogy for people who are listening, and maybe even you, of brands you may have heard of, but never used like. If you're not a smoker, I don't know if you are or not, but if you've never smoked, you've probably still heard of lucky strikes.

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Jesse Stakes: Sure.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Okay. But you're probably going to tell me what variations of lucky strike brand products there are. You just know there's a brand called that, even though you've maybe never used it, you may have, you know, never bought a Toyota. Maybe you have, but you know it exists. Maybe you can't list all the different types of Toyota. But you know they exist.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So when we start thinking about it in terms of building a brand, we have to realize there's a process of products that are set to fulfill the purpose in that brand, and they don't always have a long life cycle, and all products are not necessarily going to be successful over a long period of time, so we never want to marry those products. We want to utilize them as tools in the shed that we pull out and use, and sometimes new tools come. And so we have to use new tools.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So we got out in the market. And as we started to learn that ourselves, what we came to realize is that, you know, invention is like the 1%. Innovation is the 99%. And with that realization there are millions of product opportunities out there.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And what ends up happening is you get this idea or a pipeline, or even build a process. We have called the green light process where we use a system and set of tools that we created to make a software that now helps us do this even faster, and it uses Amazon's data to tell me exactly what's in the customer need and demand. But even then I have product opportunities, I see, but I still have to test them in the market, because I'm not smart enough to tell the market what it wants, but I am smart enough to see what the market wants and then give it what it wants.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And then with 80% confidence, knowing I did that right, it's the 20% the market gives me back. That helps me answer the question of what the heck do I sell? So we have to go through product iterations like, we will launch 3, 4, 5 product iterations to market test that product because law of averages kicks in and means one to 2 of those products will actually tell me where to go.

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Jesse Stakes: Right.

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Jesse Stakes: So what kind of investment are people like when they're like, if people are coming to you? And they're saying, Hey, I'm really interested in doing this, like the initial investment that they have to come up with upfront? Is it? Is it low? Is it low barrier entry, high barrier to entry. What! What does that look like.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Well, and I, okay, I don't run a course or program. I run my own companies and brands. So I have no intention of like selling people $3,000 courses, although a lot of people do.

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Jesse Stakes: So I've made the barrier entry for us an imitation only process for those who are really serious about spending the time, energy, attention, and money to do this as a team effort, and to really see that turn into something of an opportunity. I even put $10,000 on the line as part of our fees to get to a hundred 1,000 in net profits with them in 12 months after they launch, or I forfeit that money. So I have some money on the line that I lose.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: I believe in that because I believe in my process. So typically, what you're going to find is to build a business and truly understand what it takes to make money in a physical product business. You have to spend money

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Neil Twa - Voltage: because we're building product. We're buying product. We're developing brand. We're spending on marketing, and we have to see that inventory churn over so that we can order more inventory and sell more inventory and continue to grow that product brand line. So in year one, you know, I've had people spend up to a million dollars doing that. I've had people spend a few $1,000. But in the end the average of success that allows my metrics and guarantees to kick in

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Neil Twa - Voltage: is people will typically spend 50 to 100,000 in year one to put a real brand online with real products and actually take over market share

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Neil Twa - Voltage: that grows into year 2, because the systems of the whole economic engine. Turnover reviews come in market share starts to grow, and then by year 3, they could be in potential scale, right? Which means they're now finding those exact products, and marketing is dialing in.

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Jesse Stakes: And with my process I want them to become part of the 8%. I don't know if you've ever heard this or not, but 8% is the people who actually make it successfully in business. In years, 4 or 5, when 92% of them fail. So the goal here is to get them through years 1, 2, and 3 to understand the business, understand the economics, understand their product, and brand marketing.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Understand the time and market for share and opportunity to deploy capital even greater, to get more products in line, and to let that economic engine really become something of an opportunity in that 3 to 5 years, so they can live like nobody else can afterwards, because once you turn that into a real Juggernaut. Someone wants to buy it

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Neil Twa - Voltage: right. And there's your

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Neil Twa - Voltage: generational wealth and time exit opportunity because you've now created an asset. And I think a lot of people think short term about business. They may be here short term about opportunity or even near need, which I get because I went bankrupt once with 3 small children and a pregnant wife. So I know what need looks like.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: and I've had my back against the wall in the past and had to figure this out. But there are a lot of opportunities to start on your own. There are a lot of opportunities to hustle some products and get things moving. But if you really want to run fast and run hard, I've started to set the barrier of entry much higher in order to ensure that there's more stability in the process in the product and the opportunity upside potential.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Because it's just huge. It's tremendous. It's so large. It's it's most people can't quite fathom the amount of products that are moving online, the amount of data that's moving and how much opportunity there actually is.

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Jesse Stakes: I agree with you 100%. I don't think that people realize the opportunity because it's not something. It's not something that they're readily educated on, you know. I mean.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Yes.

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Jesse Stakes: About the way that the education system works, or the way that people have been trained and grown up in the last. However, many years. Yeah, they're not trained to think that way.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: No, they're trained to be in the workforce. They're trained to go get a degree. They're trained to be in a track of getting through life getting married, having kids and pulling that track. And there's nothing wrong with that. I was on that path.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: I just got significantly disrupted by it in life, and realized, as I broke out of that trap, that there was much more than I could even see than realize. I was caught in a scarcity limiting belief mindset. I was going through the corporate track, and when I actually kind of broke out of that and realized there's so much more abundance, it. Just it blew my mind.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So now, when I talk to these kinds of people and those of you who may be listening to this, they're typically going to be folks who are more like me. They are, you know, working on wealth without Wall Street opportunities. They are now high income earners. I have spent 20 years in a corporate gig, or even in their own business, and they're kind of getting burned out. And they're like, Hey, this is not something I want to hand my next generation. They're typically thinking forward like, you know, what are the next? 5, 1015 years going to look like? Do I want to keep doing this, or would I rather be doing something on my own?

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Neil Twa - Voltage: You know the people who are thinking about investing in, you know, businesses are acquiring companies in that way. They may want to.

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Jesse Stakes: Sizes.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Maybe franchises that kind of stuff, high income earners usually, and individuals who have kind of reached the top of that place where they were at similar to the way I did when I was at Ibm until 2,007, I'm like, well, then, what next? Right like there's I don't want to keep going up the corporate ladder. I never truly wanted to do that in the 1st place, and when I realized I had to break out of it. It was like, well, I wanted to be somebody different. I wanted to own my time. I wanted to spend time with my family. That was a huge priority for me. And I wanted to hand my kids something that wasn't just a job.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Those are my priorities. And in building this and now doing it over that course of the years, and since 2012, launching our own private label brands and growing up, you know, tens of millions of dollars in sales. Since then I've been blessed to help other people grasp that concept too, and turn it into life, changing opportunity for them.

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Jesse Stakes: And so if people are listening to this, and they don't realize what a private label brand is or what you're what you mean when you're saying that, tell them what it is.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Well, in simple terms, it means that you're not going to flip someone else's product, someone else's Nike, someone else's thing. You're actually going to have a brand that you created with intellectual capital trademark. You're going to have it named, and you're going to have the product manufactured for you, and the whole thing becomes your property right, it becomes your own, Nike, it becomes your own reebok, it becomes your own coke, it becomes your own brand.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: and with that you have control over the collateral. You have control over where it goes. The narrative becomes yours, the price points and the market opportunity becomes yours, and you have an ultimate situation in which you're building with the end in mind, you're creating an asset that becomes saleable right? And just to borrow analogies. It's like you're taking a real estate opportunity with physical assets, and you're doing a virtual side on one end and a physical side on the other.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Right. And instead of keeping a dollar over here in the bank that's deflating, we're turning it into $3 in physical inventory over here. So we take that out of here in deflationary, and we put it in an inflation situation which we all have. It's transitory, right? And but we put it into a product that appreciates

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Neil Twa - Voltage: right out of the bank. And it's appreciated product. That product is worth 3 to 4 times what I bought it for, and I can repeat that process of taking, you know, tacit information and turning it into liquidity and taking, you know, fiat currency and turning it into inventory churn that produces more soldiers that go to work again for me.

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Jesse Stakes: Right and and for the again, just to reiterate what you had said earlier, you're utilizing Amazon and the data that Amazon provides, and that they have available to where you're not. You're not just shooting in the dark here. You're not picking products. You're not picking physical products that you have no idea if it'll sell or not. You're.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: I would guess, yeah.

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Jesse Stakes: You're not guessing at all. You're finding that information directly from people's buying habits.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Yeah, we actually have access to what's called product opportunity explorer, which a seller who is on the professional side of Amazon can get access to. But here's the thing, you know, taking 12 years of our experience and our data and our processes, and something we call a green light process, which means can all the data points in time and all of our products equal a green light process for a product type.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And we combined that process with Amazon's data, and we discovered something. And we actually used AI to do this. And in the process of discovering that my 15 year old daughter helped us pull the thread on this. One day she was going through some data reports that I'd asked her to go through, and she's really smart and needs to keep moving, we homeschool all of our daughters, and so they're always here with us. And

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Neil Twa - Voltage: and she was going through this data sheet, and she says, dad? I can't answer this question, and she started to repeat that process. And so I was like, Hey, we got to take a look at this. What are we missing here? And it just gave us a different way to look at the viewpoint, and when we considered it from what Amazon is doing in terms of its systems. And basically all online systems moving to an AI based, you know, large language model interpretation of all of their data. You see it now across every platform, social media and otherwise. Right?

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And we said, Okay, how is the data interpreted? How's the AI? Looking at the data? And in simple terms we discovered in that question that she had in the process afterwards was the 103,000 customer needs that actually power. All of Amazon so based on what those needs actually are. It tells us how they're searching, who's searching for it, where it's in Amazon and specifically in alignment with that. And then, which products are meeting that exact need.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So when we combine those 3 steps together, I literally have a path from the exact need that's meeting that demand in the engine because the AI is pushing it, based on everybody else's demand where it actually sets in that big filing cabinet of Amazon inside. So it's categorized correctly. So the AI understands what it is.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: and then which exact product is meeting that demand right now today.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And with that I can choose a product that I know is already in the demand.

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Jesse Stakes: Right. And so you're just competing. You're creating a competing product.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: I'm converting competing brand. That's right.

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Jesse Stakes: That's gonna that's gonna actually try to essentially grab a piece of that market share.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: I see 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 of those people currently selling on Amazon who meet that demand for 10 or 20 or 50,000 units a year. Right? I can see that that's exactly what they're moving every year in that product. And how many people are selling that average amount of units, and then I can determine, based on my supply chain and manufacturing. Can I make a profitable version of it? And if the answer is. Yes, I test market. That product.

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Jesse Stakes: That's fantastic, just, and just to crystallize this, for people give people a real world example. You can use something that's antiquated. You don't have to use something that's you know, right now, but but share, you know, kind of a share. Real world example. So people can kind of truly understand.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: An example of a product, or a brand, or.

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Jesse Stakes: Up.

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Jesse Stakes: I guess I would say both because I mean the brand. The brand is only conceptually going to be worth like of value. Once people buy the product, or once people see value in the products. Yeah.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: That's the point of Amazon at the end of the day is that I can leverage their 200 million prime members and their brand authority to build a brand in 10 min, and no one's ever heard of and make it a household name.

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Jesse Stakes: It's pretty quick.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So that's what's so cool about. That is, I can leverage that until people start to recognize that the product they got was mine.

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Jesse Stakes: Yes.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So through packaging and other materials and presentation as they get the products they recognize. It's ours. And you know, we don't create cheap products. But it's not the 1st thing we solve. We solve the data problem 1st

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Neil Twa - Voltage: for a product type, and that can identify things like kitchen home and outdoor gear, for example, and down in there it could be a tent, and we've sold all kinds of stuff, literally everything under the sun, from supplements to kitchen appliances right? And we're selling 9 different brands of products right now in those areas. What I don't sell is supplements. I tried for a while, and that's too much. We don't sell electronics because man has changed like every 3 months. Now.

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Jesse Stakes: Right.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Really hard to keep up and compete in the electronic space. We don't sell apparel or clothing because there's such a high return rate right from the digital world. So we stay away from those. But pretty much everything else we sell. And what it really gets down to is the profitability of the product. So we will typically end up with products that are between 100 $500 in retail price point in order to meet the profitability requirements of every unit sold right.

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Jesse Stakes: That.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So we want a product that has more than $12 in net profit for every unit sold. That's what we get to keep right to keep. It's all that matters, because revenue is vanity, and profit is sanity. Right and cash flow is king.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So we want those products to cash flow every 90 days. We want to turn that inventory, and so we'll do kitchen appliance counter stuff up to like $400. We've got towels in the 20 and $30 range. We typically don't sell those anymore because we had that established like 5 and 6 years ago. But now we sell products 50 and up in range in order to meet the profitability, requirements and

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Neil Twa - Voltage: fascinating thing most people don't understand in terms of product. Price point Amazon's prime day last year proved, and then the holidays, that the average order value of a product on Amazon is actually $69.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So.

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Jesse Stakes: Interest.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: With that, anybody selling sub $69 products is actually below the average. Right? So if you're at average or above, you're gonna hit closer to where the mainstream market on Amazon actually is, which is products between 50 and $100 in Price point.

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Jesse Stakes: Okay.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: So if you're selling the lower end products, you're selling on volume. But you're not selling on profitability.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And that's where a lot of sellers make mistakes in this. So that's why we typically want them to see more deployed capital, a minimum of 25,000 to the business launch and process in order to get to the products where the profitability and demand is actually at.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And many sellers miss that right? So with that, we can sell things like espresso machines which we sell right? $499 machines we are going to sell. We sell air fryers which are going to be 150 to $250 in Price Point. I can go down a list of products, but we sell sheets at a higher end, you know, 200 plus in sheets.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: The end result is, each of those brands was targeted because the product green light process told me it was already in demand. Right? So I fall in love with the brand, not the products means I can sell all kinds of product types. I'll sell Fuzzy Bunny slippers to grandma if she loves it, and wants to tell everybody, and is super happy with the product right.

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Jesse Stakes: Right.

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Jesse Stakes: And it's really, I guess that's the point that I that I wanted you to make. There is that it doesn't. It's it has nothing to do with what the product is. No, it has everything to do with what you're the profitability, profitability algorithms and everything that you're looking at from a really, from a data standpoint, that's.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: 100% on the data. First, st can I sell that listing to an AI engine and get it to believe that I'm the better product, so that when my product in 2 days or less shows up to the customer which it is a good product. But the second thing I solve, not the 1st thing they want the product. They like the product, it doesn't break, and they give us a good review. And that completes the economic engine, right? But most importantly, sales, fixes everything.

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Jesse Stakes: Right.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And it's not on volume or vanity of sales. I hear this constantly from the Hopium Gurus on Youtube and crap right. They go in, and they all end up in the same $27 product that sells 10,000 units a month, and they say that's a win.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: But they have like a dollar and 25 in profit before taxes. That's not a win.

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Jesse Stakes: Right? No, it's just activity.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: It's a lot of activity, masters, productivity, with no actual results or profitability coming out of it. And that's the major concern. And so I always want to focus on how much can we keep per unit after we market after we buy the product after we hire people after we get involved in the business, and we keep profitability high, which means we're shooting for at least 20% net profit at the bottom line of every brand we have.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: That's our goal.

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Jesse Stakes: Topical to today are the things, the negotiations, such as like tariff negotiations, things like that are they? Are they impacting your business? Are they impacting where you're where you're looking to deploy? Capital.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: No, I mean, I would say no, in a very soft, not strong way, because there is a small impact. And here's where it actually is.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: The impact is based on the current market share availability that is actually changing very dramatically because there is a fallout of the amount of sellers and people online, Chinese sellers and products, because things like Walmart and Amazon and some of their brands stopped importing. Some of those products put a hard stop on it for a bit.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: and there's a lot of Chinese sellers who are falling out because de minimis rules and other rules are forcing them out of the marketplace, and there are a lot of lower end sellers who don't have the fundamentals took the coursework are dropping out because they can't stay in the business which is opening up 30% more traffic on Amazon. The demand of 5 billion a month in impressions has still stayed steady.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: right? The demand has not changed, and people might think it has. But it has not. What has happened is 30% more of that traffic is going to people like us, because the other people fell out of the market. So it's a huge opportunity. So what happened in 2020 was very different.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: very different. Okay, 2019. We had products in 40 foot containers that cost us around 4,800 landed cost onshore. Okay.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: in the 1st quarter of 2020 that jumped to $25,000.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Right? That is, you're not seeing that at all. In any of the tariff impacts. We're seeing, you know, 4,000 go to 8,000 or 9,000, maybe to 10,000 shortly based on current demand need. And it's an elasticity of supply chain. It happens all the time right? But because so many people are focused on health and wellness, and this scare and all that crap, they weren't paying attention to what the rest of us were dealing with tactically to keep products moving in the system and the demand in that 1st quarter of 2020. You may not have known this, Jesse, but it went hypergrowth

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Neil Twa - Voltage: right? Because suddenly, in that 1st 3 months of 2020, everybody's home and they're all buying. So we had 10 years of growth in 3 months.

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Jesse Stakes: Yes.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And that came along with 10 years worth of pricing, all bundled up into one thing, which means all the containers and prices went ridiculous, and that went on through 21 and started to slow down in 2023. So we have just seen in the last 2 years the prices of containers come down to where they were. Pre. 2019.

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Jesse Stakes: Okay.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Okay. So now we're in the T Riffs problem, Youtube doesn't like it. When we say the other word, the effect has been, well, a lot of people are suddenly armchair quarterbacks because they're not focused on the other stuff. And some people are very volatile in the geopolitical world today. And so they're all hating on the idea of, you know, these tariffs, and in actuality we're generating more income last month in our country than has ever been seen before.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: and with that the influx, the the elasticity of this is like a rubber band pulling back

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Neil Twa - Voltage: this rubber band is going to snap shortly right when it snaps. We're going to see a resurgence of capitalization. Trillions of on shore dollars being dedicated. Manufacturing is go. I haven't gotten contacted by this many manufacturers ever in the last month from the Us. Then we've gotten contacted both for the last 30 days. Just crazy, right? Right? And the elasticity of that, with the general increase of 30 plus percent

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Neil Twa - Voltage: means that the price point of is matching just fine with the increased cost of products. And, by the way, there are hundreds of ships coming into the ports. We're not locked up at all. What we're actually about to see is the amount of ships that are going to hit the ports is going to create a congestion period

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Neil Twa - Voltage: coming up in about 30 days from this, where we're at right now. May 30.th So we're actually going to see a slowdown at the ports because of the amount of ships that are trying to offload.

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Jesse Stakes: Okay.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Right. So everybody's still yelling about negativity over here. Apparently they have no idea what's happening really. At the end of the day, when, in actuality the opportunity is going through the roof.

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Jesse Stakes: Well, I think that that's the truth is that there's a lot of there's a lot of negativity. There's a lot of fear being kind of sewn to where people keep their eyeballs on the television. And people continue to sell advertising. I mean, that's their that's their job advertising.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Is up. And, by the way, Amazon, next year its advertising revenue will surpass all of its other profitable including aws all of its other systems. It will be the most profitable of their revenue streams, and it will then put them on par with Google as far as an advertising engine goes.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: That's amazing. Yeah, it's changing dramatically.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: dramatically, fast, right? So there's huge opportunity. And you know, while that ocean is going out, people are being found naked, as Buffett says, and what we're doing is doubling down.

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Jesse Stakes: Join.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: We're dedicating like 2 million in inventory this year in the next 6 months before 4th quarter, because we're going bullish into the market because market share is opening up like crazy.

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Jesse Stakes: Yeah. And I. And you said it before we before we even got started today. But and I think you're a hundred percent right? I mean, there's not really a better time than right now to be starting your own business, or to be jumping in with with feet and and getting in.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: It's incredible. People don't even realize the amount of tool sets we have now that wasn't available 2 years ago, right? The amount of intelligence systems now being ran and monitored by AI and blinky dashboards, I can have an operator running 3 7 figure companies now, because he has the tools, dashboards and supply chain metrics and systems to monitor and manage all of that across 3 companies.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Right. This is like you used to take 5 or 10 people.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: We don't need that anymore. Like the systems of AI, and opportunity has been projected to build the 1st single person 1 billion dollar company next year, and I never thought that would be possible 2 years ago. But now I see it. I see exactly how it's going to happen.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: And with that technology boosting specific types of long term business models, folks like e-commerce is not new. The Internet's been on since 99. We have fully online since 99. It started in 94, 95. But we're now watching the 3rd iteration of what will become a completely different change in the way people take and capture product or data or purchasing behavior. You see the use of Gpt being now the number one search engine.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: you see the tools and technologies able to make videos and images out of thin air to use for marketing or other purposes, and with our side the physical products, which is like the second oldest perfection behind onlyfans would be, which I know, you know, whatever is, is selling products.

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Jesse Stakes: Is that your next venture?

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Jesse Stakes: Was that my next picture? Yeah, sure.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: I don't think my wife would like that very much.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: 4 daughters. So I really hate that. So I'm getting them into physical products.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: not physical, of yeah, but it is the second 2 things, right. Prostitution and products and movement of products is in bartering and trading has always been there. It's always been.

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Jesse Stakes: 100%.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Digital technology to make that product happen now. And I can sit here and watch logistics happening across the world of products, from ships and trains and planes and warehouses, and I never touch it.

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Jesse Stakes: Right.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: It's a magical time to be alive, dude.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: There's so much opportunity out there for people to get in that now, and to learn how to adapt with technologies that are creating opportunity. And I would be frankly, if I was in Ibm, where I was previously in the years 2,003, 7 that timeframe in today's world. That job, 20 years later, would be completely replicated by AI. If you are in that space in the Business Analyst project management. If you got an Mba.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Build a business, this is your chance to get ahead of it before you are becoming obsolete. That's the area by which it is going to remove the upper middle class of individuals, high income earners in the 250 to 500,000 range. Those jobs in those corporate settings are replaceable.

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Jesse Stakes: So all that being said, if if somebody's listened to this, you have got them interested, you've peaked, you've piqued their interest. What's the best way for them to learn more, get a hold of you, and potentially engage with you and do something with you.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Yep. Well, we are an incubator of brand managers, Ceos, and operators. So it's an invite only process. If you go to voltagedm.com. You can watch a presentation with myself and my partner, Kevin Harrington. We go through our product. He's a shark tank from original shark

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Neil Twa - Voltage: from the original Shark Tank Series. He also wrote the forward to my book, and we talk about our business strategy for an omni-channel business starting with Amazon, and you can learn how we do that and what it takes to develop the team effort, the time, energy, attention, and money. And then, if you're of interest to, you know, interested in learning more contact me personally, because I don't have a sales team or anything else we talk.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: We find out if we're a good fit, we may get in the rowboat together. You might want to go from your Hell Island to my Heaven Island, because I'm sitting on it now, and 50 acres in the country enjoying my lifestyle that I've spent 18 years building, and can teach you possibly how to do that too, if that's of interest to you, but we do it through physical products and branding.

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Jesse Stakes: I think that's fantastic. And you guys offered to provide my audience with 10 free copies of your book as well. So share with my audience what what the book's about I can kind of guess, but just share a little bit about the book, and we'll make sure that they have access to, we'll come up. We'll come up with a good way to make sure that those get out to the right people.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Okay, yeah. 10 free copies for anybody who wants to learn the strategy. There's a lot of tactical books out there, and quite a bit of tactical information on Youtube and other places which is great. But at the end of the day it is the strategy of business and the fundamentals of business that make a company profitable and make it grow. So with that book I wrote, based on my podcast the high voltage business builders podcast

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Neil Twa - Voltage: is the 15 chapters that were written basically on 15 different guests who have experience and finance and wealth without Wall Street, and banking and research and media and influencers and all the components of a physical business was built into each of those chapters.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: I'm in that conversation talking about my experiences, we have our resources. We have case studies that support that. And really it goes through the 5 step strategy of building these businesses. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur or an existing business entrepreneur in the physical product space, you would learn the strategies by which we built 8 figure companies using that.

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Jesse Stakes: I think that's fantastic, Neil. I want to thank you very much for joining me today. I feel like that just kind of scratching the surface and just learning a little bit about what you're talking about, because I think that there's there's so much, especially if it's not something that people have taken the time to learn now, and now's the time to do it. If they're not, if they're not doing it, they're missing out, and they're going to get. You're going to get hit by the train rather than step off the tracks and join it.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: Building a real business is very important if you're going to do it right. Not a side hustle or a hobby business. That's not what we're talking about here to be very clear. And we're not building Amazon only businesses. It's just a single sales channel on the road to building a holistic e-commerce company, and I very much appreciate you having me on, Jesse. It's been great to speak with you, man.

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Jesse Stakes: No, thank you very much. And we'll make sure that that links to your like, to your, to your channels, to your podcast and everything are below this interview everywhere. We put it out so.

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Neil Twa - Voltage: That. Thank you.

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Jesse Stakes: And we look forward to catching you down the road.