In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Carlos Alvarez, CEO of Wizards of Ecom, the largest Amazon meetup group in the world. Carlos shares his journey as a nine-figure Amazon seller, discussing the importance of community building, both online and in-person, for e-commerce success. He reveals insights from launching and exiting 17 brands, managing 50+ businesses, and leading a team of 242 virtual assistants. Key takeaways include prioritizing profit over revenue, establishing clear partnership roles, and leveraging local communities to drive brand growth.
Timestamps:
Introduction to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast (00:00:00)
Host Josh Hadley introduces the podcast, his consulting service, and today’s guest, Carlos Alvarez, founder of Wizards of Ecom.
Carlos Alvarez’s Introduction (00:01:59)
Carlos Alvarez joins the show, expressing his excitement to be featured alongside previous guests like Michael E. Gerber and Kevin King.
The Passion for Community Building (00:03:29)
Carlos explains his contrarian approach to business and how building in-real-life communities provides invaluable feedback and a competitive advantage.
Carlos’s Diverse Business Ventures (00:06:18)
Carlos details his portfolio of over 50 businesses, including 17 exited e-commerce brands and his current live insects brand.
Using Community to Enter Retail (00:09:09)
Carlos shares a story about leveraging his local community to get his candied bacon product into brick-and-mortar retail stores.
Three Actionable Takeaways (00:11:44)
Josh summarizes three key lessons: prioritize profit over revenue, clarify partner roles early, and build a local, in-person community.
Most Influential Book (00:14:42)
Carlos names “Blue Ocean Strategy” as his most influential book for its approach to finding uncontested market space for products.
Favorite Productivity Tool (00:15:03)
Carlos recommends the Headspace app, which helps him transition between his professional and personal life as a father and husband.
Most Respected Person in E-commerce (00:15:55)
Carlos names Jeff Cohen, formerly of Seller Labs, as a person he highly admires for his wealth of knowledge.
How to Connect with Carlos (00:16:45)
Carlos shares his social media handle, a link to his Telegram chat, and his personal phone number for listeners.
Links and Mentions:
Tools and Websites
“Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting“: “00:00:52”
“Wizards of Ecom“: “00:01:59”
“Telegram Chat for Wizards of Ecom”: “00:16:45”
Books
“The E-Myth Revisited“: “00:02:10”
“The Founder’s Dilemma“: “00:13:05”
“Slicing Pie“: “00:13:05”
“Blue Ocean Strategy“: “00:14:42”
Productivity Tool
“Headspace“: “00:15:03”
Influential Person
“Jeff Cohen”: “00:15:55”
Contact Information
“Carlos Alvarez’s Phone Number”: “00:16:45”
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 Kevin King, Michael E Gerber, author of the E! Myth, and Howard Ty. Today, I’m speaking with Carlos Alvarez, the CEO and founder of Wizards of Ecom, and we are 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.
Josh Hadley 00:00:52 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 who have hit similar plateaus and are looking for the next steps to take your brand to the next level, then go to E-comm Breakthrough Comm 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 Ecomm Breakthrough Comm 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 is a nine figure Amazon e-commerce seller who teaches business, teaches businesses and entrepreneurs like you how to leverage the power of Amazon for financial freedom through free to attend meetup events.
Josh Hadley 00:01:56 With that introduction. Welcome to the show, Carlos.
Carlos Alvarez 00:01:59 Absolutely. That’s an amazing introduction. Also to be part of the intro with Kevin King, Howard Tie, Michael Gerber, we’re talking about the Michael Gerber like is an e myth revisited Michael E Gerber.
Josh Hadley 00:02:10 Yes, sir.
Carlos Alvarez 00:02:11 I didn’t know that episode existed. I’m going to go back and listen to it. I also didn’t know I can plead my case or a strategic business audit. Like, surprise, surprise. I’m looking forward to pleading my case there.
Josh Hadley 00:02:22 There you go. So we’re going to this conversation is going to go on for a while. and Carlos, I mean, we’ve we’ve chatted for a while now. I think we first we’ve met I, I originally met you at prosper back in 2021, attended one year workshops that you were 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? and learned a lot from, you know, that class that you taught.
Josh Hadley 00:02:52 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 going to 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-com sellers, but like, where did that stem from?
Carlos Alvarez 00:03:29 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 contrarian. So people around me, competitors, colleagues, I’d see them doing it one way and I, 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 breadth as garlic.
Carlos Alvarez 00:03:58 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. I 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 costs 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.
Carlos Alvarez 00:04:38 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 Dice 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 said, 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 I 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 that’s where it started.
Carlos Alvarez 00:05:31 And since then it’s if I’m going to launch it with very few exceptions, if I’m going to 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 if I can’t answer that, does building a community look like for this? I won’t launch it.
Josh Hadley 00:05:51 Interesting. That is super interesting. I have so many questions to ask you about, you know, creating that community, but to help our listeners kind of understand everything that you’re involved in. Carlos, tell me more about, you know, you’ve got a lot of business ventures, you’ve got a podcast, you’ve got a lot of meetups. You’re also a seller yourself. And so you have your own ecom brands. Tell me more about all the things that you have going on.
Carlos Alvarez 00:06:18 Oh, wow. And we have we need two hours for that. But I’ll do the I’ll do the quick one on it.
Carlos Alvarez 00:06:23 I’m, I have over 50 businesses. I’m obviously not fully involved in all of them. That would just be impossible even with an amazing team. most of the businesses are not ecom related, but they’re all funded initially. Bye bye bye, Grandaddy Bezos, if you will. And it was just I got suspended when I first started Amazon. And I was just like, I really don’t think this is going to last more than a few years. And this is 15 years ago. I need to get into something else so I would get a percentage of the money I was bringing in and I would start something else. So everything from just brick and mortar, coin operated laundry, it could be a dog grooming thing. It could be a salsa dance studio, whatever it might be. I’d have those. I have some service based businesses I started, so I have a lot of that going on. Amazon and selling on Amazon has always been the the lion’s share of of my revenues and what I do and I passions.
Carlos Alvarez 00:07:14 I’ve successfully started and exited 17 brands to date. I think about 14 of them. I started and exited the other three I was part of during an exit. The last three ruiner rolled up at the beginning of last year, I think, before the spigot got turned off, if you will, in the Amazon aggregator space. Yeah, the only brand I have left right now is my brand of live insects, which is which is also my my largest one. And it’s also like a big shocker for most people, like, wow, you could sell live insects online. And I happily married dog, two kids trying to model how you have your life going on. On the personal side, why not taking my foot off the gas on the professional side? The community. The community. Seven years old as far as the Wizards of Ecom community. And I’d have to say that that’s my biggest passion right now. And it’s free. So it’s not like there’s a hidden. Come to the back of the room.
Carlos Alvarez 00:08:04 Give me your 401 K type a turnkey thing. It’s free. I feel like my motives for doing that is to grow. We’re talking a little bit about before starting the podcast about like how you’re and you are an actual seller. So like having people on the show that are sellers, you might you learn some tactics from them that you can apply in your own business. So there’s a lot of that going on. Podcast. Wizards of Ecom, an annual event called Online Seller Cruise and I think I. Oh, and a brand called Salsa Kings, which is, the number one Latin dance studio, United States. I have business partners on that. Yeah, I think that sums it up. It’s a lot and I do it amazing. 242 virtual assistants, an army of domestic employees just learned early from a coach that Chris Ducker, who I don’t know if you know, so learned early there just just hire people smarter than you. And that’s that’s what I did.
Josh Hadley 00:08:56 Carlos, this has been an amazing conversation where we got to wrap things up here, but is there anything else that you would like to add on that we haven’t necessarily talked about or touched on in regards to building the community?
Carlos Alvarez 00:09:09 I would share a quick story as to like how I use community to actually get into my first brick and mortar retail stores.
Carlos Alvarez 00:09:15 so I would go to farmer’s markets to advertise my products and the at the farmers markets. It’s it’s really hard to get people to, stop and hang out at your booth. But when you’re bringing your own community locally, even if it’s like 4 or 5 people, when you first start, that changes everything. So I would have at this time when I was doing a candy bacon brand, I was having people come and sample this candied bacon and use the short code like text the word pig to 69922 and they’d they’d get on a list. And I’m doing that right there. And one day somebody who had frequented the the farmer’s market came to me and said, you know something? I went to my local store and they you’re you’re not going to believe this. They didn’t even carry your product. Of course, they didn’t. Like I wasn’t in any stores and I was I was immediately like, really? What store was that? Like, who do I need to go talk to? She tells me.
Carlos Alvarez 00:10:10 And she goes, but you know what? I told them that I wanted to order it. They went online and they placed the order, and they told me they’d let me know when it’s in the store. And I was like, well, how are they going? I’m thinking to myself, how in the world are they going to get this right? So they never contacted me and never got into the store. But she kept going back and she said, finally she speaks to someone because at this point she’s she’s furious that she keeps getting, you know, your other drug like this. And they told her that, you know, not enough people are interested in this product for us to carry it. And so I was like, well, I have a community. and at this time we were at like a few hundred people. I was like, how many people do I need to send in the store to ask for this product, for there to be enough interest? It wound up being under 30.
Carlos Alvarez 00:10:49 I wind up getting a contract or reach out on my website. They contacted me and I wound up getting in the local store, and that really set off getting into brick and mortar big box retail stores. But it started there. From the experience of my community going in and asking, why don’t you carry this product? I’d like to buy it.
Josh Hadley 00:11:07 Carlos, that is such an amazing example. I absolutely love that. I just love that throughout all these stories that you’ve shared, you just got this, like, hustle, grind, like I’m gonna make stuff happen, mentality. And, you know, I think our listeners, I hope you’ve paid attention to what Carlos has shared. And I would definitely recommend you go follow him on his podcast. He has so much knowledge to share. I’ve got a million ideas flowing through my mind right now, Carlos. So thank you for all of that. Now, as we wrap up, I love to leave the listeners with three actionable takeaways from each episode.
Josh Hadley 00:11:44 Carlos, here are the three takeaways that I noted. Let me know if you think I’m missing anything. Number one, I’m going to go back to the very first mistake and experience that you shared, which was that wholesale business. $16 million. Sounds like you’re crushing it, but revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. And so my number one takeaway in action item for all of you is get really good at reviewing your books and understanding all the levers that drive profitability in your business. And if you’re not doing that, and if you don’t have a financial monthly review with your bookkeeper, you need to implement that ASAP, because you can keep growing the business and thinking that you’re killing it, when in reality, sometimes you’re just funding and moving money around and you’re losing money. So that’s action item number one. Action item number two is going in with the recommendations that you had for the Founder’s Dilemma book, as well as the Slicing Pie book. I think that this is so crucial. So many people just jump into a business relationship or it’s something new, just because it sounds good and you’re not thinking, what happens if this business does start to crush it in five years? And what my recommendation here is, is get very clear with the roles and responsibilities.
Josh Hadley 00:13:05 Before you partner with somebody, make sure you have ironed out what are my KPIs? What are your KPIs? What are you overseeing? What are what am I overseeing? Make sure there’s a clear delineation. In addition to that, I think one of the most important things that you can do is have an exit strategy already in place so that you could say, hey, if this relationship doesn’t go the way we want it to. What are the options for us to for either of us to pull the ripcord and to exit on mutual terms where we’ve already gone in. And there’s not going to be any bad blood, so to speak. So that would be action item number two. Action item number three would be to build a local community. I think this flies against everything that especially a lot of the e-commerce entrepreneurs are listening to. Because we’re all digital marketers. We’re thinking about Facebook groups. We’re thinking about all the things we can do online. The one of the biggest difference makers would be actually implementing a physical, in person, local meetup group, and you shared numerous examples of how powerful that can be.
Josh Hadley 00:14:10 And I think, you know, many of our listeners, imagine if you had 5000 local people that loved your niche and your products that you could like that is as powerful, like you mentioned, a thousand people locally as as powerful as, you know, maybe 50,000, 5000 people in a Facebook group. So, Carlos, is there anything else that you would add ask as a takeaway?
Carlos Alvarez 00:14:32 Oh, that’s. That’s perfect.
Josh Hadley 00:14:33 Awesome. All right. Carlos. Well, let’s ask you my favorite three questions to ask every guest. Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?
Carlos Alvarez 00:14:42 I mean, it’s hard to do one, but I will. So picking one is going to be Blue Ocean Strategy. It’s how I approach private label. I can’t be in that blue ocean. I’m not going to launch something in a red ocean.
Josh Hadley 00:14:54 Yeah, that is a fantastic recommendation. Question number two. What’s your favorite productivity tool or software that you’ve been using that you feel like is a game changer?
Carlos Alvarez 00:15:03 I’m going to say headspace.
Carlos Alvarez 00:15:06 I it’s doing as many businesses I do and trying to keep my pedal to the metal and trying to also be world’s best husband. World’s best dad. The transition between one to the other, headspace, coupled with a business journal is is, allows me to switch hats. so that’s the number one thing in my life is I want to be a better dad. I want to be a better. And yeah, that that helps me.
Josh Hadley 00:15:31 It’s all about that that focus and. Yeah. Headspace a great way to kind of visualize and meditate and, you know, actually realize and put the most important thing first and to help prioritize. Echo everything you talked about. Their final question here is who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following, and why?
Carlos Alvarez 00:15:55 I’m gonna say, Jeff Cohen, Jeff Cohen, used to be with Seller Labs. now now he’s working at Amazon up there. Jeff, over the years, I’ve known him forever. we actually didn’t actually meet, though, I think, and known each other personally for six years now.
Carlos Alvarez 00:16:12 And just any opportunity that someone has to go speak to Jeff, I highly recommend doing it. He’s a wealth of information on the digital marketing side, the family side, just the way his mind works. So, I admire him more than I’d say. that’s my influencer in the space, if you will. Like, that’s who I go to. If I, if I have an issue and need to solve something.
Josh Hadley 00:16:32 Jeff Cohen I love it. He is very well known and I echo that as well. Now, Carlos, if people want to follow your journey, they want to learn more about you, ask you further questions. Where can they find you?
Carlos Alvarez 00:16:45 Anywhere on social media? At Wizards of Ecom we have a telegram chat too. If you’re if you want to talk Amazon or e-commerce to free telegram chat at Wizards of Ecom. Com slash chat. And most people don’t do this, but my phone number that you can actually use is (305) 902-1283. I suggest texting before just calling, but if you text me, we’ll probably jump on a call and it’s me answering.
Carlos Alvarez 00:17:06 There’s no automation or anything like that. I’d love to hear your thoughts. I call BS on some of the stuff I’m saying. Or tell me how you why you don’t think it’ll work. It’s all good.
Josh Hadley 00:17:14 I love that. Look at this. He’s giving you your his personal cell phone number. Dropping so much value today. Well, Carlos, thank you so much for your time. And I appreciate all the knowledge you’ve shared with us.
Carlos Alvarez 00:17:25 Thank you so much.
