Transcription
[Music] Episode [Music] 449 of Global From Asia: Being Grateful, Being Thankful. It is the holiday season and Thanksgiving. Let's tune in today!
Welcome to the Global From Asia podcast, where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down into straight-up actionable advice. And now, your host, Michael Molini.
449 shows of Global From Asia—11 or 12 years now—and we are just pushing ahead here in the New Year. It's the end of 2024. Thank you to those who came to the Crossborder Summit, our sixth annual, last month. I truly appreciate you, and this is a great way to support the show and the community: attending our event every year. We're going to do the same one next year, November 3-5, again in 2025 here in Changai.
So today's show is just me on a microphone, and I have some fun little clips to share with you and a little story. It will probably be a little bit of a shorter episode today. Let's first just be grateful. Take a second—maybe I'll even just leave some silence here—to be thankful. We are alive. We've been through a lot. I mean, unless you're like 5 years old or watching this, you survived the coronavirus nightmare and lockdowns. Wherever you are in the world, it feels like we're finally past that nightmare, truly. So let's just give a couple—uh, 15 seconds of silence.
All right, so let's do a little clip for the advertising. Thank you to the advertisers! Are you looking for USA banking solutions for your e-commerce business? I am proud to say Mercury.com is supporting the podcast here for the third year in a row at Global From Asia. We're proud to say it because we use them ourselves for many of our own Amazon brands and e-commerce brands and joint ventures with our US structures. They're super easy to do online applications, no fees, and they have great customer support. They have helped us with trouble with Amazon Seller Central over the years about some receipts and statements and everything like that. So we're so happy to say thank you, Mercury, for supporting our show, being a great service, and supporting other e-commerce sellers. We're really proud to say they're a sponsor here, and we also have a video tutorial as well as an overview and a special link with a little bonus for you as well for us under certain conditions. Check it out at GlobalFromAsia.com for that information. Thank you for listening, and thank you, Mercury!
I am in Thailand. It's Thanksgiving Day. My kids are in school. Some of my American friends take them out of school, but I think Wendy, my wife, and I decided to let them go to school on this Thanksgiving. They probably have more fun there than at home anyway. But I just realized how far outside of the Matrix that I am, right? It was a little sad. I'm not in my normal Matrix world, like rushing home, rushing to some family events in traffic and in the grind. So it is a little bit of a mindset shift.
So I just want to share this little clip. I call it "The Fleas." The fleas are placed inside the jar. They are left undisturbed for three days. Then, when the jar is opened, the fleas will not jump out. In fact, the fleas will never jump higher than the level set by the lid. Their behavior is now set for the rest of their lives.
I don't know; I keep these saved on my computer and phone. Maybe I'm a conspiracy theory crazy person, but I think this one—I watch this regularly. It's just a one-minute video. So if you're just listening, I know a lot of you are on audio on iTunes. If you're just listening, it's a video showing scientists in a lab putting fleas in a jar and a cover on top. The idea is that the fleas, originally, when they're maybe born or trying to jump higher, can jump higher than the jar's lid. But they keep hitting that lid, right? They keep hitting the lid, so they just stop trying to go higher than the lid. Then the scientist takes off the lid, and they don't even try anymore to jump above that lid height, even though maybe they're even able to. But they've been programmed by this lid of a jar.
So the idea, I guess, is that it's not just fleas; that is maybe animals, humans, plants, organisms—they give up, right? They're hitting this ceiling, and they stop trying. They stop trying to go above that ceiling. And so I guess the conspiracy theorist thought is maybe high school, society, media teaches you over time to just not try to break out of the wall, not try to go outside of that ceiling. It's like a class ceiling.
So that's the first one. And the second clip I watch even more often is called "Reprogram." Let's play that one.
"Reprogram the beliefs and behaviors you were programmed with as a child. Weren't your choice, but addressing and changing them as an adult is entirely up to you. It was others who installed your beliefs, habits, and fears. These were given to you by parents, teachers, society. But now you're the administrator of your own mind. Those old programs might be running in the background, influencing your thoughts and actions. They might be limiting your potential, keeping you stuck in patterns that no longer serve you. It's not your fault these programs exist, but it is your responsibility to update them, to debug the system, to install new, healthier software. You have the power to rewrite your mental code. You can't change your past, but you can change how it affects your present and future. The choice to heal, to grow, to reprogram—that's all yours."
So this was a powerful one. I hope maybe you didn't—I don't think you even need to watch that; you just listen to the audio. But it chokes me up still. It gets me thinking a lot when I see that reprogram one. A lot of us just accept the life that we are given, right? I think of the Steve Jobs quotes. I think of Steve Jobs a lot, right? Most people accept the life that they're given. Of course, it is hard to break out of that mold where we're born, right? I love a lot of my hometown friends. I love them, and I've worked with them in business, or at least lately less. But a lot of people just stay in that system, right? Maybe it's because they miss their family, but they're born somewhere, and they want to stick with their family and their friends and their work and their commitments. I accept that, and I understand that. But I think those are sometimes maybe excuses in a way that we can't do things.
Sorry, my timer—I'm a Pomodoro. I love Pomodoro. If you're not doing Pomodoro, I highly recommend it. I'm going past my Pomodoro for today's video. Let me turn it off. I love this timer; I kind of clip it on. So we have to—hopefully that little video is helpful to you. And I don't want to try to change other people's thoughts, but we should be open-minded. We shouldn't be trapped in the society and the education systems that we are born into and raised in. Of course, it becomes our culture, our soul in a way. But I'm here on Thanksgiving, on a normal workday here in my studio, working. And we need to realize that we can break out of that and reprogram it, and it's really up to us as individuals. Of course, maybe we'll get resistance from our friends, our family, our colleagues, but it's really up to us. There's no other excuse or reason, really, in my opinion. Of course, I know a lot of us have commitments to our families and friends, but it's still a choice, and there are always creative solutions, I believe.
So that was some parts about being thankful, maybe some mindset things to reflect on at the end of the year. I'm going to go into my story—one story. There's always stories where I'm thankful, not just for the good things but the bad things. A lot of times in life, we let obstacles get in our way and be excuses. One of our more successful e-commerce brands, ASO, is doing pretty well now. I really appreciate our team and my business partners there and their patience. But I want to go through that story of why I'm thankful for even the hard times.
So the story starts in 2019. I sold a brand, and I was looking to do another brand. I thought about the bar products industry I had been involved with, and I went to the factory that I worked with and pitched them on the idea to partner with them to make a private label brand of the factory products. The feedback was, "Not interested. Focused on B2B. Maybe you do it yourself; I'll support you." And I did. I was working on it myself in 2019. I didn't get to the launch phase; I had a trademark, got things set up. Of course, COVID slowed things down on there, right? A lot of things in life changed. That was a little bit on pause.
Then maybe Q2 2020, maybe even earlier, I get an email reply on that thread: "Hey, things are definitely changing. I'm open now to this business partnership. Are you still interested?" Something like this. And I replied, "Sure, of course. COVID right now makes it very difficult, but the idea of the story—the thought process of this was let's build it. There's lots of branding and the listings and the product research that we need to do anyway. And then hopefully this COVID will be over soon enough that when it's over and the shipping rates drop, we can then start to launch the brand." Of course, COVID lasted a lot longer than we had thought, and the container prices stayed high a lot longer. So we had delayed it for 2020, 2021.
2022 comes, and basically every few months we would talk about shipping. This product is already packaged and ready to ship. Our Amazon account was opened; the business was opened. We didn't want to spend like $30,000 on a container, so we kept waiting. But around early 2022, we were like, "Okay, we just got to do this." So I think we still spent $20,000 to send a container at that point and worked with a friend's logistics and worked with the—I find it hard for me to say friend now—but somebody I knew in their 3PL to launch this and send it to an LA 3PL because it was two containers—the biggest one I've done with 40 different listings, tons of different products. But basically, we sent it in and bit the bullet on this investment of logistics and getting this brand started. We were hoping COVID was going away.
So that was around summer 2022. I think the shipment left, and I think around September it arrived in LA. I'm not really sure of the exact story, but basically, the shipment got into some issue, or there was some misunderstanding about the prices of receiving two containers and the ability to send them into the Amazon warehouse to sell from Amazon. It was a very painful couple of months. Finally, we found out a logistics company that was able to fulfill to Amazon and take some of it—about half or one container load approximately—out of that 3PL to then fulfill. It was really a nightmare. I unfortunately am still not speaking to this person, but I don't want to get into it too much. In a way, it was very stressful, and we almost went bankrupt in that venture. I mean, you send two containers, and you can't even sell it. You can imagine what a nightmare that could be.
Luckily, I really appreciate my business partner at the factory, and we were able to at least get one container selling well. Of course, there were some good ones that were in the other container or in the other shipment lot that we didn't get to. But basically, we wrote off that it was a loss—a massive loss. But we persisted, and I'm really appreciative of my team at Shad Stone. I'll be seeing them in the Philippines next week— a lot of them. Of course, there are others in other parts of the world that have helped, but a lot of them we'll see in the Philippines. They're still with us years later. I appreciate you.
And it was still very painful, right? Of course, there are costs to these 3PLs, there are costs of shipping, and there are some products that didn't sell as well as we had thought, but some that sold better. But a couple of years later, I'm thankful that I stuck with it. There were a couple of chances and discussions and thoughts to just give up, right? There were thoughts. Nothing is as easy as they say. There are all these stories and blogs about how successful some made it look so easy or so perfect. If anybody follows what I say or what I talk about, I don't like to BS people. It's not always so easy. It never goes as smoothly as you think. You have to be mentally prepared.
I've really strengthened my mindset the last few years. I think the coronavirus, that brand launch, various other ventures, a lot of crypto, and Web 3 have been very painful—very painful. It's been a testing of my, what is it? I don't know—mindset, patience, endurance, stress. There have been nights that I wake up feeling like spiders were biting my feet and my legs. I had so many nightmares, so much stress from this one story. But there are many other stressful stories. I'm thankful for those hard times. As much as it's hard for me to even say that, it makes us stronger. We grow in the hard times.
When you're locked down in an apartment in China for years, when you send goods to somebody you feel like is on your same wavelength, and there's a massive miscommunication, that's massive stress, right? Massive anger, blame to yourself, right? Of course, to maybe other people. But you can't think like, "How did I get to make the decision to do such a thing? What was the misalignment here?" So we have to be willing to put ourselves out there. I'm trying to teach my son that, right? Don't be afraid to fail. Of course, you don't want to jump into failure. Sometimes I feel like I'm going too fast sometimes, and some of these decisions are probably the biggest lesson for me.
But I like to think you take coal or a rock, and you rub it—you put enough pressure, you make diamonds. That's what I feel like as an investor. I guess even if you're not a money investor, you're an investor in your knowledge and your time and your team. There's another opportunity coming. There are lots of opportunities, right? But it's how do you endure? How do you push through? How do you make it to fruition? That's something I think I have personally gotten better at the last few years.
So I do think those people that help teach me that—I don't know if that was intentional talk or not, but I'm thankful for where I am. We should all be thankful. I'm going to start to wrap this one up. Life is hard; life is not easy, right? Of course, it's easy if you just do whatever somebody else tells you to do. But I think we shouldn't just do what somebody else tells us to do. We have to persist when things get hard. I'm very appreciative. I can't wait to meet a lot of the team in the Philippines for Shad Stone and our Ninja Retreat. There'll be published the week this goes online. I'll have some nice Thanksgiving dinner with my co-founder, CTO John, at his house in Hamza, our first Decom Marketplace.
So let's just keep these things in mind. I appreciate you for listening or watching this, especially if you come to our events or support our various programs and opportunities we do over the years here. Some of those have also gotten rocky, so I appreciate you. And I hope no matter what, even if you don't buy anything that I sell or offer, I appreciate you. I hope that today's episode maybe inspires you. It's not going to be as planned. Life does not go as planned. There are going to be bumps in the road, challenges, tests. What makes this success is persisting through it and then deciding when to give up, right? Because we have to give up on things, right? If we never give up on something, you have to be able to adapt or pivot to find the right angle. I hope this can help you find that too in your adventures.
Thanks for watching. I think that's it for today. Go.com thankful! So I'm thankful. I actually can't wait for next year. I think it's going to be one of the best years ever for a lot of us. I can't wait for our startup, Hamza, the decentralized e-commerce. I believe crypto is going to be globally adopted. I believe you're going to all be studying it, whether you're studying it now or in five years. So I look forward to next year, and I will see you in the next episode. Cheers!
The future of e-commerce is waiting. Load Pipe is back! It's a protocol we are making—the new way to do e-commerce with blockchain technology. This is a very early stage, and we have Hamza as our first marketplace in this new ecosystem. It's very epic! If you want to participate, we are in Alpha stage in Q1 2024, where you can be a buyer or a vendor—application only. Check it out at ham.biz for the marketplace or the overview of this protocol, and subscribe for updates at ladp. See you there!
To get more info about running an international business, please visit our website at www.GlobalFromAsia.com. That's www.GlobalFromAsia.com. Also, be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed. Thanks for tuning in!