In this article, we will learn from Taylor James’ Amazon journey.
I'm super excited to bring you an interview with someone that I met recently at an amazing conference called Taylor Jones. I've learned about his journey, but also, I think he's probably one of the craziest guys I know, jumping around and living a really extreme lifestyle and traveling.
If you want to learn more about him and the lessons he picked up along the way to achieving this extreme lifestyle, and making money, while also traveling to his heart’s content, this article will tell you about all that and more.
Who is Taylor Jones?
Taylor started selling on Amazon way back before the pandemic, around January 2020. He graduated college in 2017 with a business degree. Accustomed to having people in his family who are corporate workers. His father worked the same job for 37 years while his mother was a stay-at-home mother.
The advice he always heard from his parents was to find a good company, with a good job, and great benefits. He graduated with his degree and up until that point; hadn’t put much thought into where his life was headed. Jumping from job to job, became a bellman, and worked in restaurants. He tried a multitude of different jobs, but none of them really felt like he loved what he was doing.
After a while, he followed his father’s advice and got a corporate job. He worked in sales, which he enjoyed, but he soon came to realize that sitting at a desk all day wasn’t who he was meant to be. That was when he crossed paths with Amazon.
So, he started flipping items for a profit with t-shirts, sold his first book, and sent it to the Amazon FBA, all the while the whole process just made sense for him. Three months later, he scaled up his business and was making around $20,000 to $30,000 a month, and that was when he decided to quit his corporate job. Throughout, the time he’s been selling his business just kept growing substantially until he reached the point where he is today.
Now, he started to create a following on TikTok and started building a community, and through all this, he still does his online arbitrage while traveling the world.
Taylor Jones made $950,000 last year?
It came to around $930,000 to $950,000 last year. He didn’t really focus on breaking that 7-figure barrier, he continues to say that around that time he was around his family, enjoying their company, but still making $10,000 in profit by December, he was barely working, around 2 to 3 hours a day for 4 days a week.
Finding that he tends to have phases of being hyper-focused in developing his business and working on it tirelessly, but at other times he finds that he just coasts through his life, enjoying the spoils of his efforts. He likes to live life, spend time with his family, and his significant other, and travel. Currently ending his season of relaxation and is about to enter into a serious streak and focus on bringing his business to the next level.
What are his triggers to start and end a season?
It’s different. During the first 8 months of his business, he was just really grinding through work. Until he started to feel like he was beginning to become burnt out, so he opted to travel. Indulging a yearning to live his life and enjoy it.
If he were to give a concrete answer as to when his relaxation season would begin to start, or an event that would trigger it to occur, he can say that it’s the time when he’s about to burn out from the work.
Though this has got him thinking, that maybe he could do a lot more with his time and his life, that he could make more out of the time he has, which was the trigger for him to start learning the skills needed in online arbitrage.
Why is Taylor Jones not hustling?
The reason he started Amazon at the very beginning was that he didn’t like the state of his life at the time. He didn’t want to stay at a desk for 8 hours a day, hanging around people that really didn’t care about him. The drive he found in pursuing Amazon is because he wanted to be able to make money from wherever he was, through any gadget, be it his phone or his laptop, anywhere in the world, to have the luxury of doing what he wants when he wants.
In light of that, he is in a position where he is capable of doing that, making money anywhere he is. Fully committed to the process of long-term growth for his business and himself. Even if he did create and amass millions of dollars in his first few years on the Amazon, it would change very little in the way he chooses to live his life.
Why does he travel?
In his early twenties, he had this random urge to travel. He was terrified at first and tried to convince his family and friends to come with him. He traveled to a multitude of places, he felt as though it was his soul calling and telling him that he needed to get out of the small town where he had lived all his life.
He started that journey and learned a lot about himself, he feels that his interpersonal skills have greatly improved through interacting with different people from different walks of life.
Too much of one thing becomes the opposite of it, and too much of a good thing becomes a chore. Slowly but surely, traveling as much as he did, becomes a hassle. You have to find a balance between your enjoyment and your work life and build a good routine of going in and out of resting and working.
8 Things I learned about Amazon Reselling from Taylor James
Just like most of us, Taylor Jones started his Amazon business to get away from his corporate job and have more freedom in his life. After 3 years in the game, he's achieved success in both Amazon and balancing life. We also talk about the importance of credit in this field of work.
What are the biggest things that impacted his journey?
The biggest advice that he can think of at every stage of any business, you run into different struggles. In the first couple of years, he was only doing what he could, he only had a credit card with a $5,000 limit. The biggest problem for him was finding more deals. Now, having access to the resources that he has, the amount of credit he’s managing. The biggest lesson he’s trying to learn right now is trying to manage all of that credit, trying to learn things that you should and should not do.
Without a doubt, the biggest mistake that had the greatest impact on him was one he made last year. The mistake was that he overspent on personal stuff using credit. You cannot get ahead of yourself, and you need to budget out expenses; you need to have a forecast and map out how much you can spend when you can spend, and what you are going to be spending.
He had a very carefree attitude about his spending. If he made $10,000 in a month, he’d use $11,000 to pay himself, which he didn’t mind because he’d make that $10,000 back in the following month. Which is the stupidest thing he could do. If you take your time and use the funds you make on your business to grow business rather than use your spoils for personal enjoyment, it could propel you higher in a quicker time frame. Online arbitrage is a very cash, credit, capital-heavy business model and you need to understand that skill to really excel at it.
Taylor Jones' team structure
It is currently a team of 1, of which he had 4. When he had a team of 4 people 5 months ago, 3 of them were all sourcing. He admitted that he did not have the management skills or structure with the team to make it feel like he was getting a return on that investment. He felt like with all the resources and time he had to allocate to managing the team, the leads couldn’t justify all of it.
Currently, he has 1 virtual assistant that manages all of his administrative stuff. The person does all of his spreadsheets, works customer service, and does any other tasks adjacent to those.
As she does the administrative duties in the business, he currently does the sourcing, finds the leads, and then sends them to her, and he personally does all the purchasing himself.
Why did he fire half of his team?
It was terrible he says. Honestly, the first 2 were okay, they had only been working for a few months and it was clearly evident that their performance was not that good. In June, he made a few mistakes in sourcing, he wasn’t analyzing his numbers and the return rates as well as he should have, and his profit went down.
Due to this bump in the road, he ended up having to cut his best VAs salary from $4 an hour to $2 an hour, which he greatly regrets. Due to this lapse in his decision-making, he had lost a very skilled employee, one that he really would like to re-employ.
A lesson he says is that if you’ve trained someone for a long while, around a year, make sure that they feel appreciated and compensated for their work. Do everything you can to make them happy with their job and working situation, because if not, they will leave and look for a better job, which you’re going to regret.
Why does he hold the Miami Sellers Conference?
Taylor actually did lose money in his first year. The reason was that they started it when he met with the co-founder of the event with him. Meeting with him changed the business in his life, though they had similarities in terms of hobbies and that they’re both entrepreneurs, he found still that they were functioning completely differently from one another, and he was struggling with working putting every effort he had into work while the other was on a completely different wavelength.
Through his chance meeting with the co-founder of the Miami Sellers Conference, he learned how fast one can truly learn from someone else, and how important having connections and bonds are in conducting a business. He was talking about SOPs. He was talking about VAs. In the 3 months that he knew the guy, he was already learning a lot from him.
They both noticed that there were no events or festivities they could go to as Amazon sellers to get to know and learn from new people, so that was their main intention. They lost $3,000 in the first year; they had 40 people come. In the second year, they had 90 people come and this year, they had 160 people come; it was fully packed.
You don’t know what you don’t know, you won’t find that out until you meet the people who tell you the information that will change the way you go through your life.
What does the future hold for him?
Taylor hopes to have more credit, and more capital, and to develop the skills to become better at managing all that. That is his goal for the next 2 months, execution, and so on. Increasing the credit line, growing the business to around $1.5 to $2 million.
He also wants to continue to grow his team, maybe add another 2 to the team, train them to source and do purchasing, and start building that team back out in the right way. That’s where he sees himself in a year.
Grow your Amazon business like Taylor Jones!
After learning about the journey of Taylor Jones and wants to talk to him, the best way to contact him is through his Instagram. You can also learn from him through his growing YouTube channel.
If you still want to learn more from other Amazon sellers. We got you! Check out our previous articles about Romer the Roamer, Raiken Profit, The Gravy Train, Scott Needham, Checkmate Flips, Fields of Profit, Gavin Sweeney, Jonny Smith, Soros, Flips4Miles, Clear The Shelf, and lastly Oliver Flips to know more about online arbitrage and their Amazon journey.