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Brian Johnson, founder of PPC Scope, joins us in another meaningful in depth conversation. Learn from his journey into Amazon success plus tips and strategies that you can apply to your business today.
A little bit of a background..
- Neither of Brian’s parents is an entrepreneur.
- He played around with creating things and tinker with electronics.
- His first two jobs were under the table: a pit-runner for a gun club at 13 and a bar back at 15 working for a private club).
- Brian is competitive and his driving force is competing with others who are in the same business. This helps him expand himself.
- He worked retail for ten years but on weekends, he was trying to think of a great business.
- He also got into network marketing in his late teens and early 20’s.
- He would go to local auction houses and later moved on to auto auctions.
Starting Out
- Understand the numbers and the opportunity. You have to understand the opportunity, your market and the work you need to put into it.
- If you are not an expert in that field then you are much more likely to make bigger mistakes.
- In his late 20’s, he was always working on a project, having day job working as an IT/desktop support and keeping a business.
- Lesson: working a side business and a day job has always been a crunch. If you could learn the pain of doing business, early on, you’ll figure things out sooner in your life.
- We teach our kids not to do the same mistakes we did but we don’t do a good job of teaching them where we succeeded.
- He was always trying to be the good kid. He grew up believing in the stability of employment and living pay check to pay check.
- Being an entrepreneur is exactly the opposite. Keyword: Volatile.
Fumbling Moments
- Naming your business a project allows you to dissociate with it and to remind you that there will be successes and there will be failure.
- The challenge for entrepreneurs is that the failures are much deeper and the successes are much higher. There is a bigger range.
- You have to have risk tolerance as an entrepreneur.
- But when you do find your feet, your failures become smaller, more manageable and easier to park.
- You think about where you are going with your successes and failures.
Thinking Like a Business Owner
- He was thinking about titles as an employee. The mindset of an entrepreneur and that of an employee are exactly the opposite and are not very compatible in a lot of case.
- As an employee, are you doing the business for a perceived ROI or are you just doing something that can be measured that can be valued by the company?
- As a business owner, any decision you make comes back to you.
Running a Company
- Brian has four companies now.
- As the companies grow and evolve into new levels, leaderships make changes.
- You have to change and adapt because what got you HERE will not get you THERE.
- Change is painful. Adapting is painful. Sometimes you end up kicking and screaming and question why you are doing the changes but you’ll understand it later on when you look back.
- Ultimately – you have to learn. There is a difference between starting the business and managing the business to higher levels of success.
- People screw up more than they win but ultimately they do win. There are mistakes we make once, twice, ten times because it is part of our characters.
- As a business owner, put someone in that position where you are bad at. That will free you up to focus on where you are best.
Fighting the Impulse
- Before Brian started his own company, he was fighting off the impulse to do so and went into a few more rounds of working for some Fortune 500 companies.
- Finally, in 2005 he got to the point where he got out and started his own business selling full time on Ebay.
- He was working 80 to 90 hours a week but barely made enough to make up. This is when the pain started coming into play.
- He went into MLM (multi level marketing) and realized there are things he did’t like to do but had to be done to grow the business.
Problem Solved and Unsolved
- So Brian made a software to do advertising, create classified ads types, and his software did all the work.
- The software panned out BUT the revenue he made was gone in two weeks when the parent company stepped in and phased out the software.
- His funds got frozen as a consequence and he never got back the money he made ($120,000).
- On top of this, the payment platform has already reported the “earned” amount and he had to pay tax on the earnings he never got.
- This has burned him but he also realized that he can be successful and as they said once you get a success, you’d always want to get back to that.
- Then he had to go back to work as an employee and got a day job.
- Lesson: If you’ve got one income stream and that income stream gets taken away from you, what are you going to do? Always have two or more income streams so you if you lose one, you can have a little bit of security on some other area.
Listen to Episode 2 HERE.
Connect with Brian Johnson:
View Brian Johnson’s 9 Steps To Profitable Amazon Sponsored Ads:
http://help.ppcscope.com/en/collections/975023-weekly-optimization
Connect with Brian Johnson: support@ppcscope.com
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