[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive markets. I'm your host Ana Gonzalez and you can find me on social media naboutprime. Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you close bigger deals and scale your business faster. Big Ticket Pros is sponsored by Conversational Funnels, the new way to close deals in 2025 that does not rely on any of the old traditional methods everyone hates. We use this method to book 121 qualified sales calls in 10 days without any ad spend, outreach or endless social posting. Download the free step by step blueprint that shows exactly how we did
[email protected] that's conversationalfunnels.com Today's guest is Dan Brownshire.
Dan, welcome to Big Techet Pros. So, so glad to have you here. So what is the best piece of advice you would give to someone just starting out in your industry?
[00:01:00] Speaker B: A best piece of advice I would give to somebody starting out in my industry.
And to clarify, I run a, I run an agency, I run a commerce agency working with brands on Amazon.
So what I would do is a start, like make the decision to start because what you think you, your business will be or whatever your idea is may or may not be exactly how your business ultimately manifests. But if you never start, you're never going to find out where you're going to end up. So that would be the first thing. Second thing would be I would get, I would go all over LinkedIn and I would find thought leaders, experts in my field. I would follow those people, I would message them, I would schedule calls with them, ask them questions and learn as much as I can from people that are actually doing what I think I want to be doing. And the last thing is I would use, I would use AI like crazy chat GPT like crazy and help it answer all the questions that I have, come up with, all the documents or ideas, or flesh out everything that I'm thinking and use it to challenge my assumptions. So I would use ChatGPT like my.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Personal assistant, I think.
Yeah. So yes, I, it resonates with me the fact you say just start because there's a lot of people getting ready, oh, I need this. Oh no, I'm not ready. I need that. I need this. Color is off. So I needed 2 pixels down or 2 like codes down or 2 pixels to the right. And with getting perfection, being a perfectionist, it's perfectly not moving anything.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: There's never a good time, Anna. Like, there's never a good time and there's always a good excuse. Right? And to your point, hey, I'm. I don't know, people work, like, work on their logo, like, before they start the business or whatever. Like, get a business card, like. No, just start. Just do it, get into it. It's messy. It's going to be messy. It's going to change. You're going to learn stuff, and before you know it, you're going to be, I don't know, going down a different path, which is okay. It's totally okay, you know, or what you thought it was going to be. You know, I'm going to tweak this or adjust it, or it's going to be some variation of this. Or I stumbled upon this crazy new idea that I would never have even come up with unless I started.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot of iterations. What. Let me ask you this. What was the thing that you started with?
And how or where are you right now? And I'm guessing there were a lot of iterations along the way.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so I'll give you. I'll give you some. Some of the background, some of the story. So I. In 2008, I decided with a friend who's now my partner to start a side hustle business. We both had careers and we're doing well, but we wanted to learn how to sell stuff on the Internet. Right. 2008, 2009, the economy had just fallen apart, but we, like, were interested in selling stuff on the Internet, so that's what we did. Okay. We started sourcing products on Alibaba. We were sourcing, like, cufflinks on Alibaba, and we are selling them on ebay.
Okay. All of a sudden, Amazon comes around. Obviously, it was around a little bit before that, but we caught wind of it and we're like, hey, what if we sold these cufflinks or these products on Amazon?
And the business absolutely exploded. Okay. Instead of sourcing products from Alibaba, we said, you know, what if we go source products directly from brands and try to sell that stuff on Amazon? That was new. That was crazy. If we would ever decide to source cufflinks and sell on ebay, we would never have decided to go to brands and try to sell their stuff on Amazon. So the business changed. Okay.
And then we went through various iterations of that model and how we source inventory and how we work with brands and all these things and ultimately realized that the original business plan we had was actually the right plan, just needed to. To change it. And then we said, you know what, we've got all these relationships with all of these really amazing brands that are really struggling on Amazon. Why don't we create a service model and go help these brands solve that problem? So all of a sudden we had two businesses. We started with one, and also we had two businesses and so never would have started the agency if we had never started the product business.
And so that's our journey. That was my journey. So we built a, you know, a big Amazon private label business that was doing tens of millions of dollars a year and said, all right, let's keep doing that, but also let's go create this agency and replicate what we did for ourselves for these other brands. And so we've gone through various iterations of the agency. We already had an office, and now we're remote, and now we've got employees all over the world and we're working with some of the biggest brands all over the world. And so it's just iterative. Right. And it, it changes. It changes over time. And my business changes every single day.
And I never set out to build an agency that wasn't my intention, but it, it just happened.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: I think that's also great that it, what you said, it just happened because you started as a side hustle.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: And then it became this massive thing that is now working worldwide.
And then from that you had, let's say, a baby business, like a second business coming. Because you just saw the opportunity and you just started.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: We started it. We did it. We were in the environment and we saw it happening and we would have never saw it happening. It would be much harder to see it happening if we weren't in the environment. Right. Like, to come up with that idea out of the cold blue, like, that's crazy. Now, certain people, I'm sure, have done it that way, but certain things happened that led to it, for sure.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: And I'm sure that also having a business partner, which is where I'm going with the use AI like crazy to answer the questions that you have. I'm sure that having your business partner help you brainstorm. It's always easier when someone holds the mirror for you. You can see the big picture and you can use AI to you to do that.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: You can use AI to do that. When we started, we didn't have that. Right, but now you do. Right. I can create my own chatbot that can challenge any assumption that I have about any given situation.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: So.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's fantastic. Partners are also great.
Mentors are also great and important. And so part of this is surrounding yourself with like minded people that you can lean on and help you along the way. Because it's, it's hard. Right there's, it's not every day is rosy and the path to growth and the path to where people want to get to is not linear. Right up and down and it's around and it changes and, and you've got to be able to deal with those moments, the extreme highs but also the extreme lows.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah, it can get overwhelming.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: It can get absolutely overwhelming.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: That's awesome. So Dan, tell us about who you serve and how people can reach out to you.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So Channel Key, we're a full service commerce agency that serves really mid market and enterprise level brands on the Amazon Marketplace.
We've been doing it for a long time. We work with some of the largest brands all over the world and some smaller brands that you've never heard of before that do a lot of sales to the platform. So we're advanced Amazon partners. So we've got kind of their like top tier designation and recognition from Amazon. And the best way to find me is you can look up channel key, you can Google channel key. Go to our website, you can find us on LinkedIn. We put out a ton of content so you can subscribe to our blog, you can subscribe to our newsletter, you can follow me on LinkedIn, you can follow Channel Key on LinkedIn. It's pretty easy. We've got a YouTube channel, so search Dan Browner. Search channel key either on LinkedIn, on Google, on YouTube and you're going to have tons of Amazon content.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Fantastic. So we're going to wrap it up here. Thank you Dan for Dan Brownshire for joining us and sharing some wisdom about thriving in a competitive industry. You can learn more about what he does by googling channel key or visiting him on LinkedIn. Follow him Dan. Browser or follow channel key. Is that right?
[00:10:14] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Awesome.
So if you are an agency coach, professional services provider or otherwise sell expensive stuff, we'd love to have you in a future episode. You can
[email protected] and once again, if you want to learn about the new way, we're booking dozens of qualified calls per week with no ad spend, download our free blueprint@conversational funnels.com that's all for now. Go get that big ticket punched. See you later.
