#368 – Izabella Ritz: A Russian Entrepreneur’s Pursuit of the American Dream
Video of the episode at the bottom
Ever dreamt of building an empire from a humble start? Our fascinating guest, Izabella Ritz, proves it’s entirely possible. With her compelling journey from Russia to the US, Izabella has scaled the heights of entrepreneurship, starting from selling her interior design studio thrice due to earning restrictions in Russia and teaching herself English, to becoming a successful Amazon seller in the US.
Izabella’s story is one of grit, resilience, and a relentless entrepreneurial spirit. She shares her learning curve in product development, business expansion, and making the most out of networking opportunities. Her unique insights into managing a family business, with her daughter and ex-Marine husband actively involved, and her commitment to fostering a community of Russian entrepreneurs, highlight the essence of her success. Her experience in navigating the challenges of settling as an immigrant and pursuing the American dream while acknowledging the hurdles adds another layer to her unique narrative.
To top it off, Izabella gives a glimpse into her strategic investment in events and masterminds to stay competitive and her innovative venture into TikTok. The episode wraps up with a discussion on the opportunities available in the US compared to countries like Russia, Ukraine, and Mexico, providing an enlightening new perspective on the American dream. With Izabella’s inspiring journey, this episode is a treasure trove for anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit.
In episode 368 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Izabella discuss:
- 02:26 – Russian Entrepreneur’s Journey to Success
- 05:09 – Entrepreneurship Challenges in Russia
- 09:52 – Navigating Immigrant Cultural and Economic Differences
- 15:46 – Success in Selling Products on Amazon
- 19:58 – Building Successful Russian Entrepreneurship Communities
- 28:32 – The Transition to English-Speaking Community
- 31:37 – Surprising Talent
- 35:38 – Amazon Selling for Service Providers 105 Seconds
- 43:17 – Potential Changes to Amazon’s Review System
- 51:25 – Exploring Business Strategies and Self-Improvement
- 56:15 – Opportunities and Challenges of Immigration
- 1:01:44 – Kevin’s Weekly Words Of Wisdom
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 368 of the AM/PM Podcast. This week, my guest is Izabella Ritz. Izabella is originally from Russia, where she was a successful entrepreneur. She came to the United States in 2015, not speaking any English, and she taught herself English by learning how to sell on Amazon, and now she runs a very successful agency and she’s got some really cool and fascinating stories and approaches to how she does Amazon. I hope you really enjoy this episode and don’t forget, be sure to sign up for the Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter at billiondollarsellers.com. It’s totally free. New issues every Monday and Thursday. Enjoy. Welcome to the AM/PM Podcast, Izabella Ritz. Look who’s here. How are you doing?
Izabella:
I’m doing great, Kevin the king.
Kevin King:
It’s good to have you. You know, the first time I actually heard about you, I think it was with Bradley Sutton he was doing you came on the Serious Sellers podcast. Yes, yes, I remember I was driving somewhere running an errand. I think I’d go into the post office, taken some packages or something, and here’s this girl with this accent saying she’s from Russia and has this big Russian community and she’s talking about profit margins and stuff on there. Do you remember that podcast?
Izabella:
I do remember this podcast. I remember we’ve been filming this podcast and I was actually in the same room before we moved out from this house to Virginia. Now we came back and now we have a different background. Yeah, that was. I think that was my first milestone that I achieved. Like, Bradley Sutton is asking me some questions and I’m going to see the Serious Sellers podcast, then the second one we did, I think, in 2021. And now I am here first time with Kevin the King.
Kevin King:
Yeah, first time on the MPM podcast, but it’s about time, right. Your background is pretty interesting, pretty fascinating. We’ll talk a little bit about that. So you, originally you grew up in Russia and you came to the US as an adult. But you were pretty successful in Russia not necessarily an Amazon or e-commerce or but doing other things like interior design and you kind of hit your ceiling over there, where it was like I think you told me one time it’s like you know what I’m making, so money, it’s actually dangerous how much money I’m making. It’s not a good thing that I’m making, I’m being this successful. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? You’ve been an entrepreneur since you’re like a little girl.
Izabella:
Yeah, thank you for that. So yeah, I’m in the United States. I can talk these things on record. Anyway, back in Russia, you have, genuinely speaking, some limits when you’re making money and my first business was business training studio and I had web design studio and infographic studio and some other studios. I realized at some point that they have such a proven track record of different type of the agencies that I even didn’t know about it till I started thinking about it, like what type of the businesses I was doing. And interior design I was doing for almost 14 years and I sold this company three times and I created it three times.
Kevin King:
You’re saying company three times or you create three different interior design companies.
Izabella:
Three different interior design studios because in Russia you don’t have non-compete agreement and you, genuinely speaking, can create the same business. And I was feeling so bad by recreating the same business one more time because I’m like, damn, I sold this business, these people, and I was watching how this business is going after I sold it. And the first time I sold this business, the lady said okay, we’re shutting down the website. I’m like you cannot do it. You can shut down the website. This website is bringing your clients. This website is actually generating your leads. You’re having two contracts a day. You cannot shut down the website. She said I don’t like how it looks like. I’m like, damn, this blonde, blue-eyes lady decided to have the interior design studio without knowing how to run the studio and I was waiting till this company that I created and I sold will probably die. So I will not have any this bad feeling by creating the new one. And when I saw how she killed the company, I was super sad. But I’m like, okay, so now it’s the empty field again. I can fill it out, because I missed At first, I didn’t want to do it again and then I missed it, so I created this design studio again and it was successful again. And then I sold it again and I’m like, no, I’m never doing it again, that’s it, it’s over.
Izabella:
And then it was the year of 2010 and my friend came to me and she said what are you doing right now? I’m like, well, we’re running a couple of businesses and we’re doing construction, and we did something else at this time. And she’s like, can you help me to do the interior design studio? I’m like, well, I think I can. Yeah, and I helped her to do the interior design studio and we became partners. And then she backed out and I stayed with this studio again. I’m like, okay, so I guess I have this business one more time. And we had an office in the very center of the city of Moscow, next to Red Square, but we had the limit of how much money we can make before someone will actually someone will knock on our door by asking, like, listen, you’re making too much. You probably should share the amount of money you’re making. And now I would have to give up my company, or give up my company or to share the profits, and I really didn’t want to do it. So, as many of like Russian entrepreneurs, I believe they still do that. You’re doing pretty much.
Izabella:
You’re not charging people officially, they’re not paying you straight to your bank account. They are bringing you cash and I remember I still have my Louis Vuitton bag that I was going in the metro and a subway and I was. This Louis Vuitton bag was filled with cash, with a lot of cash, and I was opening at some point. I’m like I’m scared to be in the subway with this amount of money. I probably shouldn’t be, I shouldn’t look that fancy and I was scared. So, anyway, and I tried to make it right, I tried to pay taxes, I tried to be honest and transparent, but it never worked. Because people are coming to you and they’re saying I want to pay you cash and I’m like, okay, you want to pay me. Cash means I cannot be transparent here, I cannot be transparent there. So the system works the way where you have to hide something, you have to always protect something and hide something, and it’s pretty stressful when you’re coming home and you have to always look back, like if someone is following or someone not following. So it is not cool.
Izabella:
And at the same time, I was traveling a lot. I was traveling all over the world and I was living before United States. I was living in Bali and Thailand and Spain and I was considering to move to one of these countries. But something came up and we decided to explore United States. And we came to United States and I got lost because I realized that I don’t know English at all, like I can’t speak. I knew this, this and this, that, that and that high and buy and that’s it. And I was facing the situation when people been asking me okay, what’s your social security? I’m like, what’s that? So what is your credit score? I have no idea what it is. So, to rent an apartment here, I had to have, I believe, 12 months worth of my rental to show to the property that they have this money on the bank account so I am able to cover the expenses. So luckily, I had this amount at the time and I started searching like what I supposed to do, like what business can I have here and what are the obligations? I realized that I don’t have to ask anybody if I have the limits of their revenue, because I don’t have them. I have the tax brackets I learned it later but I have, like I don’t have any limits. I don’t have hiding anything. And I was asking okay, so now I have money on my bank account, my business bank account, so how can I use this money utilized for myself? And someone told me you just charge the cart and you use this money for yourself. I’m like it’s impossible. It’s impossible and I had could not understand that I can charge the bank card and I can use with my personal purposes without being scared.
Izabella:
And I and that was such a transformation and like, even by saying it right now, I think it’s so weird, especially after I was living here for so many years. I understand it sounds so stupid and weird, but it’s a reality. Like people come in here they keep trying to hide stuff. When I meet some like new immigrants from Russia or Ukraine, they keep trying to do that. I’m talking like guys, you don’t have to do this normal. They’re like can you pay me cash? I’m like, no, I am paying you Zellie, or I am paying you, I can transfer you, I can use like Venmo, but can you pay me cash? I’m like, no, I am like I need to deduct money that I pay you, otherwise I will have to pay taxes. Then how are you going to pay taxes? Because if I’m not paying you. If I’m not deducting this amount, I have to pay taxes as my income and people cannot get it, and I understand when I came here I couldn’t get it. So this is like the very interesting part that I went through when I was facing the reality of absolutely different mentality, mentality that is not just the sentence structure, it’s the whole economic structure, lifestyle, housing, everything. Everything was so different. And yeah, answering your question about success there yeah, I was successful there and I’m sure if I would stay, I would be somewhere where I would have to share my income with the government and I don’t know, actually, if I would be alive or not.
Kevin King:
What year did you actually come to the US?
Izabella:
2015.
Kevin King:
2015. So you came in. So just eight years ago you didn’t speak clearly in English.
Izabella:
No.
Kevin King:
So did you learn? Did you take classes here? Did you just learn by just immersing yourself or watching TV with subtitles, or how did you learn it?
Izabella:
That was very interesting People like the people that have been living here. They said, OK, you have to go to library. Library has free classes for people that want to learn English. I went to the library. After three classes, I realized that I’m already ahead of everybody. Ok, I need something advanced. People told me you have to watch TV, and by watching TV I always feel itchy Because by watching TV I’m wasting my time, that I can be productive. So I watched a couple of movies with the subtitles. Ok, whatever. So I need to do business, I will figure out my English, and I actually started learning my language by learning Amazon account Seller University. When I find out, OK, let me try to do business on Amazon. And I pulled up the account Seller Central and I started learning stuff about Amazon inside of Seller Central. I just went through the help, I went through how to create the listing, what I supposed to do for a second step and, if you remember Amazon in 2015, that was pretty simple.
Kevin King:
Were you reading it or taking it like things you didn’t understand? Using Google Translate to translate I was using Google Translate.
Izabella:
Oh yeah, I was using. Google Translate and I tried to understand as much as I can and I was translating again and back and forth and I had a lot of notes that I was trying to. I was building the schemes for myself to understand. Ok, if I do this, then I have to do this. It was just I was diving in and I didn’t want to learn from any Russian gurus, because I have this belief if you are not in a place where this business is happening, it’s probably something off. So I’m like no, if I’m going to learn from somebody, I will learn from somebody here, but I can’t learn from somebody here because I don’t know language. So go and do yourself. So I was learning myself how to do that, and I remember when I went to my first SellerCon it was in 2019. And I was listening to people from the stage and I remember Ezra was speaking there too, and I was taking notes and I was literally translating while they speak what they’re talking about. So in 2019, I was already understanding people, but I couldn’t understand a lot of terminology still. So this is how this just I was learning on the go. And the moment I got married American guy, this is where my biggest improvement happened, where I realized that OK, so I guess now my English is supposed to improve from day to day. And this is where I am right now. I’m probably a little bit nervous and I’m repeating myself, but I think I’m pretty fluent and I can speak from the stage, and I still have a lot of grammar mistakes, but I can make myself understand.
Kevin King:
You’re doing a really good job, I mean, for someone that didn’t speak at eight years ago, and you taught yourself by starting on Amazon, and that’s pretty cool actually. So what got you into Amazon? So you came in 2015. I guess you said you got married to an American later on, but who I know is a great guy, and but in 2015, I guess you came here with somebody else.
Izabella:
Yeah, I came with my ex-husband and with my three children.
Kevin King:
Was he Russian or was he?
Izabella:
He was Russian. Yeah, with my ex-husband, with my three children at the time, with one stepdaughter and my mother-in-law, so I have this whole train of people and all adults didn’t work, so I had to have just.
Kevin King:
Did you come in on tourist visa or did you come in?
Izabella:
Yeah, we came on B1, B2 visa.
Kevin King:
OK.
Izabella:
And I had to take care of those people and I was like, ok, so what business should I do? What business should I do? And I was really googling and some Russian people here like, ok, let’s do this business, we can help you out. I never actually disclosed it at any podcast, anywhere, but this was the auto business and they’re like OK, we’re selling cars on buying cars on auctions, we can make you a lot of money. And I gave them 100 grand and I really believe that it is going to work. And it didn’t work. So I lost this 100 grand of the bad and I realized that, ok, now I don’t have anything to invest and I don’t have an income here, and I didn’t have an income from Russia as well. So at this point I have to figure it out. And I found that people are doing Amazon and I was really lucky that my product, my first product, worked. This was silicone wine glass that I didn’t know how. I didn’t know that I have to customize. I didn’t know anything.
Kevin King:
I just you see like Amazon.com or something online or what.
Izabella:
No, just watching.
Kevin King:
YouTube videos or just sell our university.
Izabella:
Just sell our university, just sell our university. And I went to read the blogs and people were saying you have to ask people for their reviews. I was there when we had to like we’ve been listing products I didn’t review some getting sales, so that was super simple. And by investing five grand, I got 14,000 on top. So I got 14,000 profit. To tell you how I was happy is like not tell you anything. I was like really jumping, screaming, yelling. I was happy that like OK, I’m in America, I found a business that can work and I understand, because I have the ground with the CEO, I have the ground with the agencies, with the graphics, so I understand how I can improve it. What I didn’t know, that products supposed to be customized. What I didn’t know is the approach to work with the suppliers. So all this stuff I had to learn in between 2015 and 2019. That was like a very hard time where I was learning something that I never learned before.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I’ll tell you a little story when you’re in that learning process. And this is not to pick on you, I’m just in the learning process. When I heard you on that podcast with Bradley, I think it might have been 2017, because you had a Russian community.
Izabella:
Yeah, I still have this community.
Kevin King:
Yeah, you do have it, but you had like a little Russian community, you’re like training Russian people, and it’s still when you’re in the process of learning. And I remember Bradley asked you something about profit margins and you said some crazy number on a profit margin and I was like that doesn’t add up, she’s leaving something out. I was sitting there listening to the podcast and I messaged Bradley you probably actually knew it’s just the way. You said. It was like you’re leaving something out. And then a few years later, like 2021, I guess it was I invited you 2021 or 2022? 2022. 2022, I invited you to speak at the billion-dollar seller summit. And when Bradley saw the list of speakers, he’s like Kevin, you know who? That is right, you know Isabelle. I said, yeah, I met her and she’s smart. She’s like you remember, that’s the same person that you told me like five years ago on the podcast. I’m like, oh, yeah, well, you know she’s smart, she’s good enough to speak on the stage, so it doesn’t matter. But yeah, that’s I always remember, always remember that.
Izabella:
That’s funny.
Kevin King:
Look, now you’re on this podcast and now we’re here and you’re speaking on the stage and everything, and it’s funny how these things happen.
Izabella:
Yeah, it is, and by the way, I was mixed in up. I didn’t understand in English the right definition of pop.
Kevin King:
Yeah, that’s what it was. That’s what exactly I realized that later is that you just had your words and things backwards. You know, because it’s not your native tongue. You’re still learning.
Izabella:
Yeah, it’s like my husband’s saying you know, sometimes she just say things. You have to ask her what she actually mean under what she said. So yeah, absolutely correct, I’m not even deflecting.
Kevin King:
So you know, recently I had a guest on the AMPM podcast, cat of Pips from the UK, and I was talking to her and it’s like how did you get into this Amazon space? And she said I was listening to Danny McMillan’s Seller Sessions and someone had recommended this podcast and I was listening to it and it happened to be you, Kevin. I was listening to the podcast and I was like this sounds pretty cool and I was like I think I can do this and that’s how she ended up getting into Amazon. Then she’s on the podcast. So it’s kind of funny how, in this world or a little world, how all these things happen. Yeah, it is, and it also illustrates why you got to get out there and why I mean, you’re a big proponent of getting out to events. You guys, your company sponsors a lot of events. You guys get out to a lot of stuff, and it’s a small world and there’s so many people that don’t get out of their house and don’t leave, and I think they’re just leaving opportunities on the table like crazy. And sometimes it’s. You would go to a show and maybe you come back and like, well, that was okay, but I didn’t make any buddies, I didn’t make any business partners, but it’s a long term play. It’s building that, those points that you can cash in at some point. And I think you’re a perfect example of that, because you started selling 2015, then you leveraged that into, you learned it went head in and then you built a Russian community, right? Can you talk about?
Izabella:
that a little bit. Yeah, these communities started, I believe, in 2016 and I was saying I’m not going to teach anybody how to do business on Amazon and because I had the community back in back in Russian, that was pretty big community back in those days and people were like are you a Russian Amazon seller or a Russian entrepreneur? Just Russian entrepreneurs. They’ve been following me for years and they’ve been always asking me like listen, how it’s there in America, what is going on? Tell us more. Tell us more.
Kevin King:
This is a group you started, or was it somebody else’s group and you participated?
Izabella:
in. That was my group. That was my group because, also, I was teaching people since my 17. So my teaching, my coaching practice didn’t go anywhere for years, till I came to the United States and I said, okay, I’m not coaching people anymore, I don’t want to do that.
Kevin King:
So you’re coaching in Russia and this into the interior design and all the other stuff you’re doing, yeah, and I’m just trying to get the entrepreneurs on how to be entrepreneurs and how to better.
Izabella:
Yeah, I know it’s a little bit confusing here. So my first coaching was about how to create the trade show, and this is how I get into the business in general and like to tell long, very long story short. I was working when I was 17,. I was working for the manufacturer, like huge, huge manufacturer, and they told me Okay, listen, now you have to create a trade show. I’m like what do you mean? I have to create a trade show. I have no idea how to do that. What is the trade show? And they told me, like, okay, listen, now you have to go and learn and we don’t care how you gonna do it, but you have to do the trade show is like a thing two months and I’m 17. I’m really I just got into the college and I’m working and I’m learning and now I have this freaking trade show that I have to figure out how to do. I learned that. I learned also how he’s teaching people and I was just like how much did we pay? We paid $350. And that was 1999. The end of 2000. That was the year of the 2000. And like, okay, so we paid $350 for me to learn from this guy.
Izabella:
I did the trade show, I got my practice. I came to the company that hired this guy and I said, okay, now I have practice. I want to teach people how to do this trade show Because and I’m gonna like, I want to do it the same, the same price that this guy and they’re like, okay, we don’t have enough of teachers that have coaching people go and do that. And I got so happy, I got so excited. I was super nervous, but I did it and they invited me again and I’m like, Okay, so now you’re paying me 350 a day and I like for two days it’s 700 bucks, but you’re charging people Like you have, like I think they have like 16 or 20 people. Like, okay, so what if I will create the company that will invite speakers, that will speak and that will teach the world how to do stuff? So I found the best, one of the best coaching coaching, coaching people in the industry. And we’ve been teaching people how to do the contracts. We’ve been doing the corporate trainings. We didn’t do any bit B2B2C, we’ve been doing only B2B. So we’ve been selling corporate trainings for the companies and we had so many different topics from, like, how to do the trade show to how to close clients, how to find clients, how to do the right conversations, and like many of them. And then I sold this company when I was 18, but I never stopped teaching people and I was teaching people for years. It was just nonstop experience.
Kevin King:
Not trade show stuff, but just entrepreneurship and whatever was the thing.
Izabella:
Usually it was applying on the business I was doing at the time, plus the classes I was doing in the past, and this is how just the experience was building up. So, like I got this experience, I got this experience and I was just like translating it out there. And then I came here. I’m like, no, I’m not teaching people how to do business on Amazon because, first of all, I don’t know yet how to do it myself and, second of all, it’s English and I’m not really fluent here and they’re translated to Russians. Their mentality is different. So that was a lot of no-nos. But I ended up in 2017 to do my first class, when we crossed our first seven figure. It was the end of the year and I was and I started teaching people how to do business on Amazon. Yeah, there have been Russians. There was a lot of Russians here and that was pretty hard because it’s I was over Was it the Russians in the US.
Kevin King:
So these were Russians in the US plus Russians there.
Izabella:
So they’ve been.
Kevin King:
Ukrainian probably too.
Izabella:
Russians, people from Kazakhstan and like all over the world. And the toughest part here for me was to teach people how to do it right. And for me, it’s been always important to have a success rate Because, like when you’re teaching people and I hate when these fake gurus do that they are teaching with the purpose to charge and they don’t care about success, which, generally speaking, you don’t have to care about people’s success, because the purpose of the coach is to translate the knowledge, to make sure the person received the knowledge. But this is my thing. I always care and I cannot sleep well if someone is not succeeding. For me, it is like for my mentality, it’s super bad, like I can’t sleep normally. And this is how agency came out in 2019, because I decided, okay, instead of like teaching people, let’s just do it for people. Especially, the agency worked out pretty well when it was COVID and we’ve been sitting home. We didn’t go anywhere. So everything we’ve been doing is just we’ve been doing agency and we’ve been doing our Amazon. Our Amazon was pretty cool in 2020. It’s a rich momentum.
Izabella:
Yeah, so, and it was. It has been happening with Russian speaking people, and this is how Russian community been growing. We have we had a lot of successful stories. We had a lot of successful screenshots when people have been launching their private labels under my supervision, like and, of course, the supervision was improving from year to year because we went from like, one type of the main picture to a different type of the main pictures when we started testing them, and et cetera. I was improving my coaching sessions as well, but it took so much time and when you teach people, you cannot guarantee people that they will receive information on the way how you want you want them to receive information. And when they receive an information, you cannot guarantee that these people will implement it properly. And this is where those links are failing, and this is something that I still like. If someone will ask me, how would you fix it? I don’t know, but people are having these blanks in between. Like I learned from somebody the moment, they learn from somebody now they don’t know how to implement it properly, or they’re adjusting some actions how they can implement it and then they’re not doing it correctly, and this is the failure is happening.
And when we created the agency, our success rate went up. We still have some like unsuccessful stories, of course, like it will not be true if I will say we have 100% success rate absolutely not. We have failures, but the success rate went up. It’s became easier to help people, but it’s became more expensive, of course, because by helping people, you’re literally you focus everything you have into this help. So people are paying you for your experience and to be hands free. So we even we’ve been calling Amazon hands free at some point and then I decided, no, it is not true. We cannot do Amazon hands free because we’re not running Amazon for them. We’re helping them to launch their Amazon to the launch point. Like we can help with like first couple months of sales, but then they have to run their business. So, yeah, this is something about my coaching in my Russian community, so, but now I started with Russians but now Ritz momentum does.
Kevin King:
it’s not just Russians, it’s anybody.
Izabella:
now, yeah, I have American husband, so he taught me how to speak English now Americans, and the biggest challenge was actually to switch from Russian speaking community to English speaking community and to gain trust here. Like to talk to Kevin King, to talk to Bradley Sutton it was so challenging and to prove out there that I listened. Here’s the girl well, not the girl anymore from like Russia that came here and she wants to be with you guys on the same stage.
Kevin King:
That’s someone you’re successful where you came from and you have. You know you’re good, but you didn’t have the confidence yet because the language barrier right Language barrier and I had to have some like successful stories.
Izabella:
Like if you ask me like, can you show me your successful sellers on Amazon, I can pull that up. So, and if you ask, me, can you? Show me unsuccessful stories, I also can pull them off. We all have those. If you’ve been doing this a while, you have you have some more.
Kevin King:
We have war stories. We have unsuccessful stories yet, but you’ve turned it into. It’s almost it’s a family affair. Your daughter, your 17 year old daughter, is like actively involved. This is your husband doing like. This is like the whole family. Do you have your baby doing stuff? Is the baby posing for pictures? My baby is. I’m waiting till someone will reach out to me and say listen, I have the baby product.
Izabella:
Can you do some pictures? I am waiting for that. So if you guys are listening out there, I will do it for free, just to take my baby to someone else’s listing. So, Elisa, she turned 18. She’s an adult now. She’s making her own decisions. I don’t have to be there at all, but it’s a joke. She was watching me doing Amazon for like again since 2015. And she was always saying I don’t want to do what you do. And she saw me doing business in Russia and she loved it. She saw like how I was, you know, running not hundreds like 50, 60 people at the same time and we had so many clients. That was so visible because we had the huge office here in Orlando. We have, like pretty small space, but we have it and she was watching me. She said, no, I don’t like what you do, I will never do what you do.
Izabella:
And then when she turned, I believe, 16, we’re a couple of years old and she said listen, can I try? I’m like, well, if you want to try, try. And she substituted within the time she substituted two people, two adults that been doing their job poorly than she was doing at her 16. And that was very hard to admit that, like she’s so talented. Because, as mom, you don’t want to praise your child so much by saying you know, I don’t want to praise your child so much by saying my child is the smartest, my child can do stuff. Usually you’re down at least me I’m downgrading. I’m like no, she’s not ready, no, she’s not there yet. No, she’s supposed to be under control. And like I have to check every single thing that she’s doing. And then I realized she doesn’t have to be supervised on the way how I get used to supervise these adults and she’s probably one of these, like thousands of people that can do her job better than adult and she’s doing it pretty good. So the results that she’s showing, the approach she learned, how she’s working with clients and she’s working with our designers, so she’s she’s our project manager in at risk momentum. She, if she will decide to quit tomorrow, I will be without, like my right and left hand. So she is really six important person in the agency.
Izabella:
My husband, he was Marine. He is Marine, marine are never in the past. He resigned this year and when we’ve been thinking what he’s going to do and we’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking he said you know what, like I have skills, he will. He got some offers from financing companies and he said the skills that I have, the skills that I have will be much better to help grow our agency. Let’s just do it together. I’m like, okay, that’s amazing, like I love to do things together. So now we have this just out of nowhere. I never planned it. So now we have kind of family-based business where we all holding our hands and helping each other to struggle, to grow, to hustle. So yeah, we can name it as like family-based business.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I can tell when I see you guys at events and you’re all there, you’re like, you’re like all running as a team, Like you all kind of know your place and your job and your duty and it’s just like it’s like just clicking, which is really cool to see. It’s like no one’s like a boss bossing someone else around. It’s like everybody just knows what they need to do and when they need to do it, and they take care of it.
Izabella:
Yeah, that’s true, that’s true.
Kevin King:
That’s really cool. So you’re still selling right now too right? You still have the agency stuff or you still actually have active seller accounts selling.
Izabella:
I still have several actual seller accounts. We launched back in 2021. Yeah, back in 2021, we launched six brands, three diet immediately. I’m like, okay, that’s not gonna work. Three of them are still okay. One of them probably will grow into something and if we will do everything correctly, like we do with our clients, because we’re literally not putting all our focus into our Amazon account, then we probably will exit in 2025, I think 2024, 2025.
Kevin King:
So the agency is the goal to build that and then sell it, or what’s the goal?
Izabella:
Well, the agency plan is.
Kevin King:
You sold all your past agencies, and that’s how it is. So the plan is.
Izabella:
you’re absolutely correct the pattern cannot be changed. I think I don’t believe the pattern can be changed that fast. I think we will grow agency to some extent and we will exit it, maybe also like 2025. Maybe they will actually come together as a package with the Amazon seller central account, because I strongly believe you cannot do, you cannot be a service provider if you are not selling on Amazon. It’s just impossible. You have to keep up with all this PPC and with the updates and listings. Like, seriously, almost every other day when I’m looking in their account, I’m like demo, something new again. They change some stuff, so you have to keep yourself updated. And all the software that we use, they all linked to Amazon and they link to Amazon seller central and this is where you see, like, all the dashboards, what is going on and et cetera. So, like you have to sell, to provide services. There’s no way to go around and like I don’t believe in service providers that don’t sell on Amazon and the agency. I don’t know, probably we will sell it with the account too, because that will be like listen, this is where you sell, this is where you learn and this is where you implement.
Kevin King:
Well, you see, a lot of service providers not all, but a lot of service providers are failed Amazon sellers. So I mean, there’s so many service providers and software companies in the space now that when you started back in 2015, when I started, too, as the FBA mod, I’ve been selling on Amazon long enough. But FBA this didn’t exist. And now there’s a lot of people that get into it. They either fail as a seller and they switch to an agency, or they get to and sometimes it’s not. They don’t fail because they did something wrong. It’s sometimes they fail because they ran out of money and they’re like I can’t cashflow this, so let me do an agency where I can sell digital error and sell my time and I don’t have to invest all this crazy money in inventory and take a risk that someone else pay me upfront. What makes Ritz Momentum different than the 500 other agencies out there that will do your listings and do your copy and help you with launch something? What makes you guys different?
Izabella:
Great question. I know that right now there are plenty of agencies that are doing listing copywriting and SEO copywriting and they’re increasing conversion. This is not our main thing. I know that we do it great. I know that we can guarantee the results will be improved. If one client is coming to us and they’re saying like this is my listing, can you do something and we can project how much we can improve the listing and how much money they potentially can make after the improvement, we can even split the payments by saying like listen, you don’t have to pay us in full, let’s make a deal that you will pay us after. You will see the improvements of your listing if we’re really confident in the product and in the potential. There are agencies that do the same.
Izabella:
We do reverse engineering. We’re learning the audience before we do some type of the movements into the before we’ll start to improve something. We have to learn who are we selling and why we’re selling and what are we selling. Before it will be just BPA free, fda approved, a stainless steel or something else. So we don’t put just features. We’re selling experience on the listings. Our main thing is that we’re doing the product research and product development and product validation for people. This is our strength, so we’re finding and validating the products that people want to sell and we’re helping them to sell on the way and how they will be profitable, to make sure they are winning their market before they go on the market. So this is something that we do and I would say we probably only one company on the market that do it in full and like Stephen.
Kevin King:
Cole, you give them the product, or they come here and say I have this product is my idea Does and you validate it. Or do you say they come to, you say I want to sell on Amazon and I want to extend my brand and you make recommendations to them of what they should sell.
Izabella:
It can be both. It can be both. People are coming to us and they’re asking listen, I want to sell the toothbrush. Okay, let us validate the toothbrush, like the toothbrush that you have. Will you be able to succeed with this toothbrush? And we’re validating it through different type of the software. So we use all these tools for building relationships and between the tools to understand if we can make this decision towards the toothbrush, if you can actually sell it. Maybe you cannot sell it as a toothbrush keyword, maybe you can sell it like brown toothbrush brush with, like I don’t know, some special hand or whatever.
Izabella:
And the second part that we do we’re developing the point where, finding the product. If people come into us and they’re saying I don’t have a product to sell, then we are building the product from scratch, the product that we found. But we have to make sure the product we found and we developed and we validated, we tested against competitors. And here’s the very tricky part. So when we test the products, we have to test against competitor. We want to win. We also have to make sure this competitor will be in the market in like three, four months from today. This is the approximate time when our product will develop, will be on the market and we have to make sure that other two, three competitors that are behind this main competitor, we’re winning them as well, because sometimes, if you will be based on the big competitor big based on the numbers some small competitors are also pretty strong with the keywords and with other stuff and they have some benefits that you also supposed to go after and they have some strength because of, maybe, influencers or brand awareness or something else. So you have to win pretty much all of them and if you want them, you have a buffer for the next, usually like 6, 12 months, to win the product, to win the market when you will be there.
Izabella:
We’ll also take taking into the consideration the amount of reviews that you will have when you launch your product on Amazon, because initial up to 30 reviews by one program supposed to be so helpful, where people will have to buy your product because they want to, not because they have to, and when they will look in the competitor and into the Amazon, into the product that you are selling, they will choose to buy this one, the one we developed, against the one that is having like 14,000 reviews on it, and you know, right now we don’t know if Amazon will consider to have to suspend the amount of reviews and we will see ratings or we will see the amount of reviews and the ratings. So we don’t know how Amazon will actually list the products on a page one in the next couple of months, but up to right now, amazon is still testing ratings versus amount of reviews. But at the end of the day, we still want the buyers to purchase the product, because this product been developed on the way how they want to purchase it.
Kevin King:
Yeah, they say 21 is the magic number statistically for people to believe the reviews, and once you hit 21, they’ll actually believe it. And then it becomes a game of do I believe 21 reviews at four and a half stars or do I believe 10,000 reviews at four and a half stars? And people will typically go for the 10,000 at four and a half stars, and that’s a big thing that a lot of people look at when it’s determining how competitive this product is. If Amazon makes these changes that they’re testing right now in India and the US and some other markets they’re doing some other stuff in India that a lot of people don’t know right now they’re testing. I think it’s gonna level the playing field If they actually make these changes permanent. I think it’s actually a good thing for the customer. You have some of the bigger sellers pretty upset about it because they’re like I’ve been working my ass off and getting reviews and doing all this and now you’re gonna say that you’re not gonna show that have 10,000 and this guy that has 21 or 30 reviews, like you just said, on the vine can come in and compete with me. That sucks, that’s not fair and I’m like yes, it is fair because your product has an unfair advantage, because your product may suck. This guy’s new product may be better. Maybe he read all your reviews and he made improvements or made something different. He doesn’t have a chance, and so the customer is not getting a chance to actually see a better product because of this fact, and so it’s gonna give. I think it’s gonna open the door actually if they make this permanent and I think they should.
Kevin King:
Casey Goss actually talked about this years ago. If you listened to, he used to have a podcast called Follow the Data when he ran Virolaunch. That company’s still around but barely hanging on, and he talked about it. I think 2018, maybe To 2017, 2018 about what he actually said. This is what Amazon needs to do and it’s basically what they’re doing right now, and I think it could actually open the door back up for more new people to get into Amazon, because right now, there’s a big barrier that in the reviews are the biggest moat. The aggregators were looking at how many reviews do you have and it’s the biggest moat around a product, and if that goes away, then it’s good. And now what they’re doing with 90% of the people testing, 90% of the people said this or 70% of the people didn’t like this. It’s gonna make for better products and better experience. It’s gonna change how we, as sellers, do things and how you, as your company, is helping people find stuff. So are you, when you find something, are you developing these from scratch, like some of the other guys do out there? Or are you finding if it’s a toothbrush? Are you helping design new molds and come up with new designs? Are you just finding it on Alibaba or at trade shows or at the source and just kind of modifying it a little bit for your clients?
Izabella:
So when we do the product development, that’s supposed to be based on what the buyers are looking for. So it cannot be like, listen, we’re creating the product because we decided it’s gonna be just different, so we have to learn the customer avatar, and recently, actually, datadive came up with a new feature when they’re summarizing the experience of the clients and they’re creating the customer avatar for you, which makes it a little bit easier, but we still do it manually a lot. So if the person wants the toothbrush that will be ergonomically comfortable in their hand and they’re actually talking about it, then we probably will consider this part as a part of the development. If people are not searching for any additional features and they’re like I just want to like layout pattern, then we probably will create just additional pattern. But usually don’t do that.
Izabella:
We’re trying to consider people’s needs, accumulate all their needs into one product and by talking to the supplier, if it’s possible, where we will not be able to increase the cost of goods still there and back, so then we will include these features into the product. So it’s never happening just because we go to Alibaba, search something and like, look at what will be trendy. We’re really learning what people want to have on the product. We are making sure that product development will not take people in production for like six months. We have to make sure it’s easy to manufacture so it will not be something like we have to create the mold that will be creating like I don’t know for six months. So it’s supposed to be still something simple.
Kevin King:
Are you just doing the US market or you do other marketplaces too?
Izabella:
We’re trying to focus on US. If you will do everything, you will end up with nothing. We can validate product for Australia and Europe, but we’re trying to be focused on the United States.
Kevin King:
So you do a lot of stuff to actually expand your knowledge out there. You sponsor events. You go to a lot of events. You try to speak it quite a few. You join high-end masterminds. I think you just recently joined like Driven, which is like was it 25, 30 grand, something like that, to join Driven for a year? You’re in the offer mafia that Sean has, where there’s a lot of sharing. How much does that kind of stuff really help you in your business?
Izabella:
It does help With Driven Mastermind. I feel myself as the stupidest person in the room and that’s challenging.
Kevin King:
You actually want that. You never want to be the smartest person in the room. That’s how you grow. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
Izabella:
That’s correct and that’s why I joined, because I’m like I have to learn from these people. These people are like right here and I’m right there.
Kevin King:
Now this is for those of you listening Driven is not an Amazon mastermind Driven. There’s Amazon, some Amazon sellers and people that sell on Amazon in there, but it’s more of a general marketing. It’s Perry Belcher’s Mastermind. It evolved out of the war room, which is a digital marketer mastermind before that, and so I like going to these as well because I use them as brainstorming sessions. I can sit in these and I go to an Amazon event. I hardly ever sit in the listen or if I’m listening, I’m not paying any attention because it’s just stuff I already know, or speakers aren’t very good or they’re just talking corporate and it’s nothing actionable there. But you go to something like this and it’s I like it because there’s a little bit of Amazon, there’s a little bit of general marketing, a little bit of social media, a little bit of all these different modes of actually selling, and it starts giving you ideas. You’re like, oh, what if I took this? These guys are crushing it, doing this on ClickFunnels what if I took that and did this on Amazon? Or I took this element and this element it’s really good brainstorming and I come away with it like, well, I need to take these elements from this other business and apply it here or mix these principles together and that’s how you stay cutting edge on leaving the pack instead of following the pack on things. So I think they’re super valuable. And then, like the offer mafia that’s, they have monthly meetings, they have a meetup in Florida and that one is good too, because mostly it’s other agency people. How do you get clients and how do you do things? And I’ve seen recently you’ve picked up on your social media like you’re doing a lot on TikTok and stuff. How is that going for you and what’s that like?
Izabella:
What the TikTok is for us is not going anywhere. But my team is just experimenting with TikTok and, Kevin, you’re the only one person that is telling me. You see me on the TikTok all the time. You’re my one follower.
Kevin King:
I don’t think I even follow you. I think it just. Maybe it’s going to be your phone. We went to dinner and went to an event together. Maybe it’s your phone in proximity. You know how you ever go to a concert, yes, and then you’re like, you know, you’re at a concert. This happened to me. I was at a concert with my wife my soon to be ex-wife at one point and we were watching Carlos Vivas and there’s a cute girl in front of me the whole concert. And you know I’m not, you know, just, naturally, you see there’s a cute girl dancing in front of you. Well, like later that, no, the next day it comes up on my social media hey, you might know so and so, and it’s that girl. I’m like, look at her, she looks familiar. I’m looking at, oh, that’s the girl that was in front of me. So maybe that’s what happened. Maybe, TikTok is reading.
Izabella:
Yeah, their data is reading. It’s scary, it’s scary. It is scary. We are not having any business from TikTok and I know we should do business there. We should do a better job. We are very good on Instagram. Instagram is like really giving us a lot of leads. We started recently doing LinkedIn. We’ve been doing outreach. It didn’t work for us, but I know it works for a lot of people on Offer Mafia. So we are trying to do different. We’re building funnels. Right now we’re really after a driven event. I’m like, okay, we’ve been always thinking about funnels. We’ve been doing them with like left hand somewhere there, so let’s do it right. So right now, we’re building funnels that would will be a kind of evergreen that will work for us as another income stream. And yeah, those masterminds are keeping me in a tip at those, because I see people that are more successful and they like it. Because you feel that you’re not doing enough, you’re not good enough on a good way, not on the way where you will beat yourself and you will put yourself in a depression mode, but on the way where you want to grow and you want to be out there and you will feel comforted, confident to kinking out with all these people because you’re at least on a similar level, and those people are like top 1% of the United States. So it’s it’s important.
Kevin King:
So, coming to the US, what’s you made a comment I think we were at dinner one time about the opera something that people take for granted. I think it was, I don’t remember your exact words but people that live in the United States take take it for granted how easy it is or how good they have it here when it comes to entrepreneurship and business. Can you explain that a little bit or tell me your thoughts on that and maybe slap a few people upside the head here that real, so they understand how good they actually have it?
Izabella:
Yeah, you’re like, you know where to push the button, Kevin. So as an immigrant, from my perspective, I can tell people that have been born in the United States do not understand how valuable is an economy, how valuable is a free speech, how valuable is the opportunity that you guys have here. Because if you’ve been born in the United States at your 18 years old, if your parents did a good job, you have a perfect credit score, you can go buy the car with zero payment down. You can go on by any house you want with like 5% or zero down. If you’re it’s your first time purchaser, you have opportunities to build business, because banks are literally throwing throwing money into you. If you have a good credit score, you have open doors everywhere. You have free internet in the libraries, you have everything. You have free iPhones, guys, you really have everything. Like country that I came from.
Izabella:
You can buy the phones I mean, right now something probably changed but you can buy the phone only for the full price. So now let’s just switch it. You can have a car only if you pay the full price. You can have a phone only if you’re paid the full price. You can have a mortgage only if you pay at least 20 to 30% down. Let’s now think how many people will be homeowners in the United States. Now, right, so how many people will be driving the car? How many people will have the phones? Then, at the end of the day, if you file the taxes in Russia, in total you have to pay, I believe, up to 50 something percent, and then what are you going to have in a pocket?
Izabella:
And this is where we’re talking about, like honesty and this honesty and being transparent or not being transparent. So the opportunity people have here on their beaching that like, oh, it’s not enough, or all government is not going to have food stamps or something Russia doesn’t have the definition of food stamps, or like Ukraine or like other countries, it’s just not there. Here, you cannot be hungry. You can go to the church and ask for money and for food and you can have it. It’s just, if people don’t have something lazy and they don’t want to do stuff and they don’t want to have that, they choose to be poor, they choose to be in a like, in a bit, in a bad place in their life. It’s a choice, and for people out there who are not living in the United States, they don’t have this opportunity that people have here and choosing not to have this opportunity. So this is something, probably, that a lot of people don’t even understand what about, though?
Kevin King:
a lot of people think that everybody wants to move to everybody. You know, you see it, people come across the border from Mexico and people trying to get to the United States and live the American dream, and there’s a lot to that and, like I agree with you, the opportunity. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve seen, you know, I was married to a columbian. I was. I know I understand a lot more than a lot of people on on that, and there is great opportunity here. But I also a lot of people don’t realize that some people that come here and immigrate here, you, they, sometimes they come and they think I’m just going to go to America and just start picking up dollar bills off the sidewalk, and you know those people are a little bit disappointed. But the ones that are coming and they’re willing to work.
Kevin King:
You look at some of the Asian communities and stuff that people that come here and they, they build up these businesses and just completely change their lives for their kit, for themselves and for their children’s and everything. And some of the Indian, you know the programmers and it’s from all, all races. The opportunities are great, but then you get to some of them. They’re like once they’re here and they’re in this in the American system, and they’re doing well, a lot of them actually get homesick and then you see some of them, at some point, either for family reasons they gotta go take care of a a sick mother or father, or they just start missing their buddies or their culture or their food and they end up moving back. What do you think you’ll ever go back?
Izabella:
or do you think you’re here, you’re, you’re done and you’re you’re, you’re here for the long term oh, it’s my, but United States is my place and I hear what you’re saying and I meet a lot of people here in United States that are immigrants, never learned one word in English, and they’re just like don’t understand what you’re saying and we can talk about it too. But regarding me, like I never go back, no, like something that I have here, I will never be able to get anywhere else. I can travel to the different places and I can come back. We’ve been talking to my husband couple days ago. I’m like, imagine if you have 30 million dollars and you can build any house you want at any place you want, it cannot be commercial. And he said it’s like you know me, you’re already not priming into the business with 30 million dollars. I’m like, no, it’s supposed to be your primary property and we, like, we’ve been doing this like workshop and we decided that, like, if we’re gonna like, if we have the opportunity to build, like the castle, for example, it will be the castle in United States, because United States is like it’s a proven place for the opportunity for multiple generations ahead. This economy never changed. It’s only getting stronger and if you’re smart enough and not every single person’s entrepreneur, that’s why people are coming back. People are coming back to something that they get used to, to the culture they get used to. A lot of people get used to suffer and they feel confident to suffer. I don’t, I hate suffer. So, yeah, I’m not one of those people that want to come back. But I know the stories when people are they don’t want to stay just because they have to work. United States, the country of capitalism, you have to work to have something. You can have something, but you have to work for it. So not a lot of people want to work true statement.
Kevin King:
Well, Izabella, it’s been great we can sit here and probably talk for another couple hours. We talked for like an hour before we even started recording this. I’m like oh wait we gotta hit, we gotta hit the button now. It’s been awesome having you, having you on here. If people want to learn more or fire, follow you or find out about your, your agency or what you’re up to, well, how do we do?
Izabella:
that. That’s so simple. It’s a LinkedIn. Izabella reads with the z and double l and reads like reads Carlton or famous cracker, whatever you want to compare me to, and you can always go to our website reads arm.com, arm like arm, and yeah, fill out the form. My team will reach out to you pretty quick. If it’s a weekend, then on the Monday first thing in the morning and we will be happy to help pretty much anybody. We’re here to help and you’ve got.
Kevin King:
Even if you’re, if you are subscriber to the billion dollar sellers newsletter when you first subscribe you get a coupon book and if you look in that little coupon book, I think there’s something in there a little Scobey snack from Ritz momentum as well in that coupon book. So make sure you check that out as well.
Izabella:
Thank you for this, Kevin awesome.
Kevin King:
Well, I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again soon, maybe even in Hawaii next year for the Billion Dollar Seller something you never know, and, uh, it’s always great chatting with you
Izabella:
Great to chat with you too, Kevin.
Kevin King:
Thank you for having me here today as Izabella just said, the opportunities we all have selling on amazon or some of the greatest opportunities ever and if you don’t take advantage of that as an option manure right now in this space, you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. It’s a great talk with Izabella, fascinating story, amazing entrepreneur, someone that is really doing things right and doing things well, and congrats to her. We’ll be back again next week with another amazing episode. We’ll be talking about aggregators and AI and a whole bunch of cool stuff with my guest, so don’t miss that next Thursday when that new episode drops. Before we leave today, I got some words of wisdom for you. You know you get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve. That’s Elon Musk that said that you get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve. Have a great weekend. See you again next week.
Enjoy this episode? Want to be able to ask questions to Kevin King live in a small group with other 7 and 8-figure Amazon sellers? Join the Helium 10 Elite Mastermind and get monthly workshops, training, and networking calls with Kevin at h10.me/elite
Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast!
Want to absolutely start crushing it on eCommerce and make more money? Follow these steps for helpful resources to get started:
- Get the Ultimate Resource Guide from Kevin King for tools and services that he uses every day to dominate on Amazon!
- New to Selling on Amazon? Freedom Ticket offers the best tips, tricks, and strategies for beginners just starting out! Sign up for Freedom Ticket.
- Trying to Find a New Product? Get the most powerful Amazon product research tool in Black Box, available only at Helium 10! Start researching with Black Box.
- Want to Verify Your Product Idea? Use Xray in our Chrome extension to check how lucrative your next product idea is with over a dozen metrics of data! Download the Helium 10 Chrome Extension.
- The Ultimate Software Tool Suite for Amazon Sellers! Get more Helium 10 tools that can help you optimize your listings and increase sales for a low price! Sign up today!
- Does Amazon Owe YOU Money? Find Out for FREE! If you have been selling for over a year on Amazon, you may be owed money for lost or damaged inventory and not even know it. Get a FREE refund report to see how much you’re owed!
- Check out our other Amazon FBA podcasts including the Serious Sellers Podcast, as well as our Spanish and German versions!
- You can also listen to the AM/PM Podcast on YouTube here!