Money Lost, Lessons Gained: Carlos Alvarez Reveals the Mistakes Behind His $16M Business Mistakes!

Home » Podcasts » Money Lost, Lessons Gained: Carlos Alvarez Reveals the Mistakes Behind His $16M Business Mistakes!

Money Lost, Lessons Gained: Carlos Alvarez Reveals the Mistakes Behind His $16M Business Mistakes!

Carlos AlvarezCarlos Alvarez is the Founder and CMO at Wizards of Ecom, a Miami-based global e-commerce academy educating entrepreneurs on how to leverage Amazon for financial freedom. Carlos is a 15-plus-year veteran in the Amazon space who has scaled his brands into a nine-figure entity. Additionally, he is the Founder and CEO of Blue Bird Media & Marketing Solutions, a digital marketing agency specializing in product sourcing, brand building, Amazon vendor management, PPC, and lead generation. Carlos also hosts the world’s largest free-to-attend Amazon Meetup group where participants discuss e-commerce, self-publishing, advertising, and selling on Amazon.

 

apple podcast
spotify
partner-share-lg
deezer
iheartradio
partner-share-lg
Amazon Music
tune in

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • Carlos Alvarez explains his passion for building a community of e-commerce entrepreneurs
  • Carlos discusses his many business ventures
  • Strategies for managing a portfolio of businesses
  • Carlos mulls over his past mistakes
  • Why is community essential for building a brand?

In this episode…

Scaling a business to seven figures and above requires a strategic roadmap that includes designing a vision, diversifying and expanding, and extending market reach. Boosting market coverage can also involve community building. Why is community essential to brand growth?

Carlos Alvarez, an entrepreneur and experienced marketer, asserts that he will only launch a product if there is a demand for it. Many Amazon sellers use pay-per-click advertising to raise brand awareness. Unfortunately, PPC prices have increased by over 30% since 2021 and will continue to rise. Carlos explains that having a devoted community of customers who trust you as a vendor can lead to customer advocacy, word-of-mouth recommendations, and positive reviews. Building a community can be as simple as creating social media accounts. However, Carlos advocates for in-person groups like Meetup. Face-to-face interactions allow for open conversations, brainstorming, and real-time surveys and opinions.

On today’s eComm Breakthrough Podcast, Josh Hadley interviews Carlos Alvarez, Founder and CMO at Wizards of Ecom, about strategies for building a community and brand. Carlos shares his passion for building community, explains his strategies for managing a portfolio of businesses, and discusses his business ventures.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure ecommerce owners grow to eight figures. Of course…

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

As a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month I’m giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session at no cost. Email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com with the subject line “Strategy Audit” and tell me why your business should win the free audit for the chance to win and don’t worry, if you don’t win the free strategy audit this month, you’ll automatically be entered for future months.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the eComm Breakthrough Podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level. Join Josh Hadley and eight-figure e-comm business owner and investor, as he interviews highly successful business owners. Get ready because you’re going to learn specific actions you can take today to help your business reach its full potential and leave a lasting impact on the world.

Josh Hadley 0:37

Welcome to the eComm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael E. Gerber, author of the E Myth, and Howard Thai. Today I’m speaking with Carlos Alvarez, the CEO and Founder of Wizards of Ecom. And we’re going to be talking a lot about building a community and a real brand. This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven-figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Carlos, I started my business back in 2015, and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years. But I made a lot of mistakes along the way that made the path of getting to eight figures take a lot longer than it needed to. There were times where I had a lot of self doubt whether I could lead a team of people, or whether my brand could actually survive in the marketplace. Or if I could have the cash flow to continue to reinvest in new products. I wish I would have had a guide or a mentor along the way, that would have helped me overcome a lot of those stumbling blocks. And so to our listeners, those of you who have hit similar plateaus, and are looking for the next steps to take your brand to the next level, then go to eCommBreakthrough.com to learn more. And as a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month I’m giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session at no cost. All you need to do is email me at Josh@eCommBreakthrough.com and in your subject line, say Strategy Audit, and then plead your case as to why I should choose you and your business to work with this month. Today. I am super excited to introduce you all to Carlos Alvarez. Carlos is the Founder of the Wizards of Ecom, the largest Amazon Meetup group in the world. He has a nine-figure Amazon e-comm seller who teaches businesses and entrepreneurs like you how to leverage the power of Amazon for financial freedom through free-to-attend meetup events. With that introduction. Welcome to the show, Carlos.

Carlos Alvarez 2:36

Absolutely. That’s an amazing introduction. Also, to be part of the intro with Kevin King, Howard Thai, Michael E. Gerber. We’re talking about the Michael E. Gerber like is an E Myth Revisited. Michael Gerber?

Josh Hadley 2:48

Yes, sir.

Carlos Alvarez 2:49

I didn’t know that episode existed. I’m gonna go back and listen to it. I also didn’t know I can plead my case, or strategic business audit, like Surprise, surprise, I’m looking forward to pleading my case.

Josh Hadley 2:59

There you go. So this conversation is going to go on for a while. And Carlos, I mean, we’ve chatted for a while now, I think we first met you at Prosper back in 2021, attended one of your workshops that you are presenting on, and heard like, I have 200 VAs. And I was like, blown away. I was like, How in the world is this guy doing it? I learned a lot from you know, that class that you taught, and then I had been following your podcast since then. And it was a pleasure, you know, coming on your podcast earlier this year. And since then, we’ve been in touch and you know, developing a good relationship. But Carlos, I admire everything that you’ve been able to do in the Amazon space and everything that you offer to the community as a whole. And, you know, I mean, that’s gonna be the topic of our conversation today. And I’m just curious, Carlos, why are you so passionate about like building this community of not only Amazon sellers and e-comm sellers, but like, where did that stem from?

Carlos Alvarez 4:06

I feel like it stems from the exact answer. I don’t know, I want to say it had to do with trying, I’m very contrary. So my people around me, competitors, colleagues, I’d see him doing it one way. And I felt like there was an easier way to go about it. And an example would be a friend of mine was this was a bazillion years ago, it feels was launching a mat. And I feel like a yoga mat should be same bread, Fez, garlic, garlic press. Real gloves, like the thing that everyone kind of uses an example that you shouldn’t launch and was struggling with it really bad, was like, why don’t you just open and they were into yoga, by the way. And I was like, why don’t you just open up a yoga studio, a whole bunch of traffic that’s there. You get to build a community get to meet real people to talk about and get feedback on your yoga mat. That’s crazy. There’s no way that I’m going to open a location and teach yoga. That cost too much money like all those, you know, costing too much money for the location was the big one. And I was like, Man, how much are you spending in PPC? Like how much hemorrhaged ineffective PPC Are you spending, just get a little bit of that and open the location? Well, he wound up doing it. And it wound up working amazing one of the top yoga accessory brands selling on Amazon. But that’s always been my way of thinking like wanting to be around people wanting to get feedback from real people. And then also many years ago, I heard from Ryan Deiss, was on stage traffic and conversion. And I was actually right on the verge of like, joining war room myself. And he said something about businesses and he’s so I feel like he’s been phenomenal at like saying what’s going to work down the road. So you really get to get ahead of it. Unlike a lot of conferences, you go there, and they’re telling you stuff that you should do, but you already should probably be pivoting out of that thing. And it was predicting that businesses that would really be able to succeed would do things that were not so easy to track the ROI on. And one of those things for me was building communities, especially in communities IRL, like in real life, where you get to like build real relationships. So yeah, that’s where I got my start from, that’s where it started. And since then, it’s, if I’m gonna launch it with very few exceptions. If I’m gonna launch a brand, one of the first things I look for, besides Is there a market for this online? And can I do something better is what does a community look like for this brand? And sometimes if I can’t answer that does building a community look alikes for this? I won’t launch it.

[Continue to Page 2]

Pages: 1 2