In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Jamie Davidson, co-founder of AMZ Insiders and nine-figure Amazon seller. Jamie shares his journey from selling cell phone accessories in 2012 to surpassing $100 million in revenue. He discusses breaking through a $50 million plateau by focusing on two key strategies: building a strong team, including expanding overseas to China, and maintaining a laser-focused product strategy. The conversation also covers actionable takeaways on team building, product development, and inventory management, along with book recommendations and favorite tools for scaling an Amazon business.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast
Host Josh Hadley introduces the podcast, his consulting service, and this episode’s special guest, nine-figure Amazon seller Jamie Davidson.
00:01:38 Introducing Jamie Davidson
Josh formally introduces Jamie Davidson, co-founder of AMZ Insiders, highlighting his nine-figure Amazon FBA success and coaching background.
00:02:16 The Journey to Nine Figures
Jamie discusses his journey, starting with cell phone accessories in 2012 and the plateaus faced at $40M and $60M.
00:04:47 Systems for Scaling Past $50 Million
Jamie explains the strategic changes and systems implemented to break through the $50-$60 million plateau and reach nine figures.
00:07:00 Building a Team and Product Development
Jamie details the two key changes for growth: building a 200+ person team in China and expanding product categories.
00:09:08 Three Actionable Takeaways
Josh summarizes the episode’s key lessons: systematically build your team, focus on innovative product development, and manage profit margins.
00:12:35 Most Influential Book
Jamie recommends “Blue Ocean Strategy,” a book about finding uncontested market space to make the competition irrelevant.
00:13:52 Favorite Productivity Tool
Jamie shares his appreciation for GoHighLevel, an all-in-one marketing and sales platform for managing funnels, emails, and more.
00:14:44 Most Respected People in E-commerce
Jamie names Dema Kubik and Carlos Alvarez as two of the smartest and most respected people in the e-commerce industry.
00:16:44 How to Connect with Jamie
Jamie shares how listeners can connect with him via his Instagram handle and the AMZ Insiders website to apply for coaching.
Links and Mentions:
Tools and Websites
“Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting“: “00:00:58”
“AMZ Insiders“: “00:02:14”
“NetSuite“: “00:06:20”
“Go High Level“: “00:14:02”
Books
“Blue Ocean Strategy“: “00:12:44”
Notable Individuals
“DeMar Kubrick”: “00:15:06”
“Carlos Alvarez”: “00:15:53”
Transcripts:
Josh Hadley 00:00:00 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 Michael E Gerber, author of the email, Bradley Sutton, and Kevin King. Today I’m speaking with Jamie Davidson, the co-founder of AMZ insiders, and we are going to be talking a lot about how to build your Amazon business faster, make it better, and make it more efficient. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Jamie, 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 as a leader, whether I could lead a team of people or whether my brand could survive, or whether we would have the cash flow to purchase new products, I wish I would have had a guide along the way that would have made getting around those obstacles a little bit easier.
Josh Hadley 00:00:58 So for our fellow listeners, those of you who are hitting similar plateaus and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to E-comm breakthrough. That’s Ecomm with two M’s 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 at Ecom Breakthrough Comm and in your subject line say strategy audit and then plead your case as to why I should choose you and your brand to work with for this month. But today I am super excited to introduce you all to Jamie Davidson. Jamie is an Amazon coach and co-founder of AMZ insiders. In 2018, he crossed the nine figure mark selling products online through Amazon FBA. Jamie is also a West Point graduate and a former Army officer, and was the CEO of a private equity backed company until 2013. Jamie now invest a lot of effort into helping new and upcoming entrepreneurs hit six and seven figures on Amazon through his AMZ insiders course.
Josh Hadley 00:02:05 And he also guides seven and eight figure on entrepreneurs to help them exit their brands. With that introduction. Welcome to the show, Jamie.
Jamie Davidson 00:02:14 Hey, Josh. Appreciate it. Yeah, great to be here.
Josh Hadley 00:02:16 Jamie hitting that nine figure mark. That’s a pretty big deal. You know we talk about you know, going from 7 to 8 figures and beyond on this podcast. And you’re the guy who’s gone way beyond right. You’ve hit that nine figures. I’m curious, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about that journey of of getting to nine figures and maybe some high level lessons learned?
Jamie Davidson 00:02:38 Yeah. So, you know, everything is, you know, a number is a number, but the kind of the strategies or the approach can be applied, whether you’re looking to go from, you know, trying to get to nine figures or a lot of people, you know, or let’s say maybe low seven figures and trying to get to eight figures, and that might be the toughest part. Through it.
Jamie Davidson 00:02:58 So I can share a little bit about. But a lot of the lessons are very similar. In our case, back in 2012, 2013, early days, we were beginning we were selling, in the cell phone accessory space. So cell phone cases actually originally iPad cases was was kind of our really big thing. And there was an early opportunity. So there was a good window of opportunity with my my next door neighbor at the time, I was a, said an executive for a private equity backed company. And so it was like, oh, what’s this side hustle that we’re doing? He’s doing out of the garage. And then I quickly realized, like, oh, this is like garage is like filling up with a lot of stuff and it’s taken off from there. So, without going into all those details at the beginning, but essentially we had a business that got to, you know, was a little different back then where we got to $10 million. We basically got to eight figures within a very short period of time, like within two years.
Jamie Davidson 00:03:49 But if you want to talk to like, kind of fast forwarding and again, I’m sure we may dive back to some of that stuff, but, at this point, as the team grew out here in Atlanta, Georgia, with a warehouse and we had about, 20 employees at the time, essentially the business kind of stagnated at a few different levels. at about kind of the $40 million mark. We were stagnated for a while. we actually did a small acquisition that helped get us to 20 million. and then we got to kind of like the 50 to $60 million mark. And we kind of stood there for about a three year period. which again, mace is like, hey, it’s a lot of money. But of course, it depends on your margins and how much you know where the business is or if you have issues or lawsuits or whatever the case may be. So your margins were were differed by a year. But essentially, to get to that next level, we had to make a change.
Jamie Davidson 00:04:35 But so yeah, we basically implemented a bunch of stuff I’m happy to go into to some of it, as you think’s relevant, but we basically made a strategic change to go from that plateau we’re at to then within about three years later to break the nine figure mark.
Josh Hadley 00:04:47 Yeah. That’s amazing. And I know before we hit the record button on this podcast, we talked about, you know, some of those strategies of what helped you kind of get to that nine figures. And really it just in general, not even just nine figures itself, but helping scale brands from wherever you’re at to get to that next level, from 6 to 7, from 7 to 8. Right. It’s all about kind of the systems in the processes that you’re able to implement. And there’s different systems that you’ll implement at different times in your in your business. But Jamie, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what were some of those changes. And I think the systems really that you applied into your business to where you were stagnating around 50 million to then explode, to cross that $100 million mark?
Jamie Davidson 00:05:33 Yeah.
Jamie Davidson 00:05:33 So it’s interesting, a couple of things. It was like, so my partner Jason again, who I if some of you guys, if you’ve heard any of our background in the past, it was my next door neighbor. He’s a native from from China, was in the US for about 30 years, and he was a software consultant. And again, I was like, this hired gun CEO. Another deal was a chief operating officer, then a chief and a CEO of these these private equity firms where they would hire me, drop me into these companies they bought to, to either turn them around or to grow them. so this Amazon thing was different, but but a lot of the fundamental principles apply, especially as you get the bigger scales, because the businesses I was a part of before were were much bigger. I didn’t have a lot of startup experience, I’d been more kind of big corporations. And so, so a couple of things helped us. One, he had a, and he was a software consultant.
Jamie Davidson 00:06:20 So he basically for Microsoft or using Microsoft Systems or Oracle Systems. So he had that mindset going in, which helped us early on, which was that the way we knew was like, hey, we’re not necessarily experts on any given product, but we understand systems, we understand data really well. And and we’re good enough to recognize that, you know, we need to become good at product and we need to understand how that works. But so even from the beginning, we were we were pretty good at that in terms of setting up systems. That’s part of the reason we were able to scale to even eight figures so quick. we set up, we used it. It’s different now, but, you know, we used it’s still in existence like so we use NetSuite pretty much to customize all aspects of our business because, in Jason’s case, that was his expertise. So we essentially, you know, set up a, a process and a software process, outside of what, you know, Amazon had for for every aspect of our business.
Jamie Davidson 00:07:16 And we can go into some of those things. But, so whether it’s logistics or whether it’s, obviously logistics is, is a is a big one, but eventually even became, you know, as we expand product. But the two things that really changed, that allowed us to kind of break through to that next growth level was we decided to really build a team. So we had a team again, about 20 people, eventually about 30, 40 people here. and even that team was growing even bigger. this we actually built the entire team over in China. So Jason moved to China during these periods of time. And we built a a large team, so you don’t have to do it the same way. obviously he’s from China, speaks Mandarin. So it worked well. But basically we built a 200 plus person team in Shenzhen, China that’s still in existence. And, so which was unique. It helped us because the cost of the employee was about a third of what we were paying here in Atlanta.
Jamie Davidson 00:08:09 the retention of the employee was much greater. And, and the other thing that helped in China, and I think this probably exists in the Philippines a little bit, but I haven’t done a scale. Is there there’s like in a whole economy of people around Amazon. so the ability to hire people in the Amazon space, like if we needed a fluent French speaking person that had experience in Amazon, and we could actually hire that in a week here in Atlanta, you know, it was very difficult. We had to train everyone up on Amazon. So, so the first one was definitely the, the, the team building. and we can, we can dive into that around there. And the second one was, was the product side too, because we actually had never we. I think it was one of our strengths. We never left the cell phone accessory space, you know, up to about the $60 million mark. So hence we were one of the biggest players in the US in that space.
Jamie Davidson 00:08:57 But we never went into another category until after that. And I can talk about some of the reasons why we stayed so focused in our lane, until we felt like it was time to to go to the next level.
Josh Hadley 00:09:08 I love that now, Jamie, I love to leave each episode with three actionable takeaways for our listeners. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if you think I’m missing something here. But first of all, the key parts that you talked about with growing and exploding your business from that, you know, 50 million to 100 million came down to two things. And we’ll take those as our kind of top two. Number one is building out your team and you address this like as an entrepreneur, as you’re growing from six to 7 to 8 figures, what you are working on in the business should continue to change, but what you need to do is you need to offload things off of your plate in steps, right? You’re not going to wake up tomorrow and be like, I gotta offload everything or I need to hire a CEO tomorrow.
Josh Hadley 00:09:59 That’s not that’s not necessarily the step. What you do need to do. Conduct a time study. Understand where you spend most of your time, and then understand where is most of your time going, and can that thing be done at least 80% as well? If it’s done by somebody else, if so, sop that process. It might be tedious to begin with, but sop it out and then hire somebody to take that load off your shoulders. Because if that happens, you now have an extra, let’s say that took up 50% of your time. That opens up 50% more of your time to focus on other initiatives in the business, to help it continue to grow. So that would be action. Item number one is like scaling out your team systematically. You’re not going to have the 200 plus team members that Jamie talked about tomorrow, but over time you can build that out. Action item number two is in product development. I don’t think we could talk about that enough. Number one, it’s not creating me two products.
Josh Hadley 00:11:01 Number two, it’s staying on top of trends that are coming up in your aspect. It was you know, what’s the latest iPhone going to look like and how do we pay for and get early access to this information so that we’re ahead of the curve. Right. So similarly this should become a core focus in anybody’s business. What are the upcoming trends and how do I get access or knowledge about these upcoming trends. Because if you can get that first mover advantage, I mean that can make a world of a difference, let alone that it’s continuing to refine your business because old products launched in 2018 are just, you know, there’s increased competition, designs change and what customers want changes over time. So you can’t just rely on SKU or multiple SKUs that have done well in the past for you. And then finally, action item number three is focusing on your profit margin and inventory management, both of these together. I think wherever you’re at in your stage of business, six figure, seven figures, eight figures, those are two ultra important aspects that you need to have dialed in.
Josh Hadley 00:12:14 Do you have the profit margin you need to continue to reinvest in new products, right. And then making sure you’re never going out of stock with all of that. And we could dive so much deeper in there. But, Jamie, those are my three takeaways for our listeners. Is there anything you think I’m missing here?
Jamie Davidson 00:12:31 no, I love those. Those those are big ones. And I think you recapped it really well.
Josh Hadley 00:12:35 Awesome. All right, Jamie, let’s get into my favorite three questions here that I ask every guest. Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?
Jamie Davidson 00:12:44 Yeah. So I think there’s there’s so many main ones. I think one of the ones is a little more nuanced is, I like a lot is blue ocean strategies, blue ocean strategies that it basically talks around that most people compete in the, the red ocean, which is like the where the sharks are all eating each other. And so you really want to it’s a really kind of fun, easy book, really challenge yourself to find like you’re talking about the key to growth that you can’t rest on our laurels from years back in terms of your products is to always be looking for new opportunities.
Jamie Davidson 00:13:18 Where it’s blue ocean, you don’t have to worry about as much, you’ll have some competition, but where it’s so much smoother sailing and really try to challenge yourself to find that. Because when you get the product right, you know this business is so much easier. Part of the reason we grew so fast is because, you know, it was a blue ocean. There wasn’t people really doing this stuff. And as it got more competitive and choppy than you got to kind of. You can still do well and refine it, but the more you can find those products and opportunities that are kind of blue ocean or kind of trending or unique ways to stay, you know, kind of build those moats, the the better you’ll do. So yeah. Blue ocean strategies.
Josh Hadley 00:13:52 Yeah. Completely agree. Great recommendation. Question number two. What’s been your most favorite productivity or software tool that you’ve been using that you think is a game changer?
Jamie Davidson 00:14:02 Yeah I’ll share one. This is one more recently the last year or two, which is I’m a big fan of of go high level.
Jamie Davidson 00:14:11 so if you guys have used the tools like, Clickfunnels, there’s all sorts of tools for email management and everything else, but, a really pretty clever tool in terms of putting together all of your email, your text messaging, landing pages, your, a bunch of other things that, you know, if you want content, course creation, websites, all this stuff kind of all in one at a, at a reasonable, reasonable price. So. Yeah. voice mail drops like the ways you can follow up with customers. Pretty powerful stuff. And doing it in a way that’s a lot cheaper than a lot of the tools were in the past.
Josh Hadley 00:14:44 Awesome. Go! High level. Great recommendation. All right, last question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space and why?
Jamie Davidson 00:14:53 All right, Marla, to name two people or I gotta keep it one for.
Josh Hadley 00:14:56 Yeah. Give it. Give us. Give us your. Yeah.
Jamie Davidson 00:14:59 So one of them I mentioned before, who I said, came up shortly after I met him at the billion dollar seller summit a few years back.
Jamie Davidson 00:15:06 We kind of hit. It was the first, event that Kevin King held there, and, this guy, he was speaking, which is, so dema Kubrick was the final speaker. But when he got to know me, like, two weeks later is like, hey, can I fly up to, to meet with you? So. DeMar, I think is one of the smartest people in the industry. He’s, really fun. has a good time with it. But he’s built he’s really good at building businesses. so that’s that’s one. I’ve been asked that by, like, the big aggregators in the room say, you know, who do I think the smartest guy in the room is that they should know. And, DeMar is the one I, I pulled out and then, the other one who’s I have a ton of respect for two is, is Carlos Alvarez. So Carlos and I, we both talked about the battle to nine figures back in the day. But, you know, Carlos down in Miami’s got a massive, you know, following group.
Jamie Davidson 00:15:53 But I just really respect his approach to the industry and his humbleness, his willingness to help. And so I talked about earlier, try to give value to each other or find people who can do it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a mastermind. he’s an example of someone. When we’re together, I’ll. I’ll give him a couple tips and he’ll be like, oh my God, I’m going to implement that right away. And the guy will like, you know, he’s giving me so much to to help me out too. So but yeah, Carlos and DeMar are probably the two that come to mind first.
Josh Hadley 00:16:19 Awesome. We’ve had Carlos recently on the podcast. He’ll probably his episode aired I think 3 or 4 episodes before yours. Perfect. So people should definitely go back and take another listen to Carlos’s episode. Great conversations and great recommendations. Now, Jamie, if people want to, you know, get to know you a little bit more. They want to follow your journey. They want to learn more about AMZ insiders and your coaching services.
Josh Hadley 00:16:44 Where can people reach out to you?
Jamie Davidson 00:16:46 Yeah, I’ll just give two ways. One is, Instagram is totally fine. You can feel free to DM me. I think if you follow me, it’s a little easier, but, that’s Jamie Davidson dot official so on Instagram there. So I’d love to hear from you if if you’re interested in chatting you want to get on a call. It’s I’ll give you its AMZ insiders apply and essentially you book a call and we’ll chat with you and see if we’re a good fit to help you out. Whether it’s building your brand, scaling, or if you’re looking for advice to how to exit, we’ll give you a tips whether we end up, we’re a good fit to help you or not.
Josh Hadley 00:17:21 Awesome. Well, Jamie, you’re highly respected in the industry, and I appreciate your time that you shared with us today. And thanks for your insights.
Jamie Davidson 00:17:29 Thank you. Josh, really appreciate it.
