I recently read Bryan Young’s new Book Flipping book. Not only is this a great read, but he takes this book one step further than most Amazon FBA authors. He outsources the entire process of his FBA business including sourcing and listing. Here are the specific roles that he outsources.
1) Book-Sourcer. He hires people to go to library book sales, thrift stores, yard sales to find books for him. He gives them a scanner and trains then how to read the data on the scanner.
2) Book-Lister. Bryan also hires a person to list the books on Amazon. A Book-Lister is someone who prepares, labels, packs, and ships the books to Amazon FBA. The Book-Lister works in the comfort of his or her home using ScanLister.
3) Repricer. He uses an automated repricer to manage the prices of his inventory. Repriceit.com is affordable starting at $9.95 per month.
4) Book Sales Manager. He also has a manager that oversees the process. The manager’s responsibility is to:
- Hire and train Book-Listers and Book-Sourcers.
- Coordinate sourcing in an organized fashion to avoid overlap.
- Manage and encourage Listers and Sourcers.
- Be vision-minded and on the lookout for opportunities to expand.
- Offer tech support if needed.
- Be in regular contact with ownership in regards to the health and future of the business.
According to his book, Bryan averages $4100 per month in profit. The best part is that this is passive income. His contracted workers do all the heavy lifting.
This is an impressive feat considering that most sellers (including myself) would be uncomfortable hiring someone to do the listing and sourcing.
But Bryan makes a very good argument: Don’t be Indispensible.
On page 10 of his book, Bryan writes, “Many successful online sellers have difficulty with the notion of outsourcing something that they believe would be an impossible task for someone else to so at the same level of success. They’ve created an impressive business that would be impossible for them to step out of, because they have become the indispensable ‘Linchpin’ in their organization. In Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Godin lays out the compelling reasons why you should not be a replaceable cog in someone’s business machine, but instead you should position yourself in a way that you become irreplaceable in the company. Be the employee that the company can’t live without! Well, that is great for employees, but not for entrepreneurs and not for business builders.
If you want to build a company that is truly excellent, it has to be bigger than yourself, and it can’t depend on you in every aspect of its operations. It just can’t. In fact, if you really want to take your business to the next level you need to hire people that are smarter and better than you.”
You can buy Bryan’s book at his website ProfitSourcing.com. He also offers a video course as well. Use the promo code B2FPSGOLD to get 50% off the Gold Package (Book + Training Videos). This will bring the price down from $99.95 to $49.95.
Good read Nathan, my concern would be jeopardizing my relationship with Amazon if one of my employees gets into a beef with me and really screws with my biz…..I’ve heard of it happening before and Amazon can be tough once you get in their bad graces!
Yes, hiring the right person for the job is extremely important. Bryan goes into detail about the hiring process as well. I personally would be more comfortable hiring a book-sourcer first. A book-lister would make me a little nervous.
Hey Scott,
You make a good point, when building this sort of business we should definitely choose who we hire wisely. We give our book listers minimal access to our AZ account which helps to take out some of the liability. But ultimately it comes down to recognition and trust. We recognize our workers for their hard work and effort by paying them VERY well. In addition to financial compensation we are also always looking for other ways to publicly express our appreciation for them.
Trust also plays an important role, we are giving them some control over our business so we have to be confident that they won’t put our Amazon account in jeopardy.
This could be done but it’s not PASSIVE income. Passive income is like a house rental and even that is not passive because you still have to check up on the management company. I think this is more like “additional” income, but still a great post!
After spending a few months developing and tweaking our book selling business we have been able to completely outsource the whole thing. Your right about passive income never really being 100% passive, there’s always some sort of administration that needs to happen from time to time, I mention this in the first chapter of my Book.
The dictionary definition of Passive Income says that its income that requires “minimal” effort, whatever that means. Anyways, our Book Sourcers buy the books and deliver them to our Book Listers, our Book Listers box and ship them directly to Amazon for fulfillment, and Amazon ships them to the customer when they’re ordered. Our Book Sales Manager oversees the entire operation (hiring, firing and training) and our repricer handles repricing.
I talk to the manager on the phone and via email about once every other week. And my wife pays everyone bi-weekly on a Monday morning.
So all in all its pretty hands off, which has been great at helping us free up our lives to do the things we really want to be doing.
Bryan, I ordered Book Flipping 2.0 through yourimc.com, an affiliate. I paid via Paypal, have a receipt, but it takes me to a page that requires you to spend more money for access. This was very misleading. I went to Google to look up reviews on the course(s) and decided I wanted to dive in, but this seemed like a bait and switch as a portal to order hundreds of other courses, yours as just one of them. How can I get to your video courses without paying more?
Bob
Please contact Bryan Young directly and he will help you get set up.
[email protected]
My pension is the only thing I know to be 100% passive income. I worked for 30 years for the same employer and now they send me a check every month. It requires nothing else from me.
True. I’m sure Bryan has to train his staff and manage his employees.
Very interesting points about being indispensable! Never thought about it that way before. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Serena! Yes, I found that “indispensable” material very informative as well.
How do you get around the book sourcer you hired finding the books and then saying gee I’ll just keep the books myself and sale them. The temptation is going to be so high when your book sourcer buys a textbook for $3.00 dollars and sees it can be sold on amazon for $50.00 to $90.00. What is going to stop them from doing that? The temptation is got to be so hard to resist. You see if I take a job were a guy is going to show me how to source books and I’m working an hourly wage with him and I start to notice books I’m sourcing are making incredible returns. I’m going to start doing it myself. Now I’m aware that not evrybody wants a book buisness and so there are trust worthy people that will work for you and get the job done but the temptaion to steal is got to be overwhelming when your worker finds a textbook or book that they can buy for $1.00 or $2.00 and see that it actually sales for $30.00 or $40.00 on amazon.
Hey Timothy,
I think that the fear of creating a new competitor was probably the biggest hurdle that I needed to overcome to be successful in this business. The way that I have addressed this legitimate concern was to; only hire people that we trust (as you’ve alluded to), compensate our workers way above the market value for the work that they are doing (Sourcers $30-40+/hour & Listers $20-30/hour), do everything else to ensure that I’m building employee/contractor loyalty (See Winning by Jack Welch & EntreLeadership by Ramsey), only give my workers the information and access that they NEED to succeed, and finally trust that I’m of a different mindset than 99% of people out there.
Most people don’t have the vision and the financial ability to start their own businesses, or to even see the opportunity for one. Most people are much more concerned with making a steady pay-check so that they can do the things they love to do when they get some time off.
We also build incentives into our business to encourage our Listers and Sourcers to produce this includes bonuses for high-priced books sold, the overall velocity of sales customer feedback and more.
Also, Neatoscan has a feature called “employee mode”. You can set the triggers and the user can’t see the prices. They can only see the “accept” and “reject” notification. I’m not sure if Asellertool has that feature.
ASellerTool has that feature too, but I’m not a fan of audible pricing triggers, I’ve never been able to get them close enough to what I’m looking for in a book.
Also if you have your book listers use ScanLister they’ll price at a default price, so your Listers won’t know the estimated value of the books.