By the time he was a high school senior, Beau Crabill had already built an online sales business so successful that he was outearning his teachers.
“I was making good money,” Crabill says. “But I wasn’t too focused on growing the business. That wasn’t much of a priority, because my intention was to be a college athlete.”
After receiving a track scholarship, he arrived for training camp as a freshman last summer. Before classes even began, he had left campus and created a new plan.
“I realized that being a student athlete took up a lot of time, and I was running several businesses, so it would have been impossible to keep doing it all,” Crabill says. “I decided to quit college and keep growing my businesses.”
Eight months later, the 19-year-old is bringing in $100,000 per month selling name-brand items (think Sony and Mattel) to Amazon buyers from his home in Olympia, Wash, the retail giant’s backyard. The entrepreneur’s next million-dollar idea is to teach you how to do the same.
After his YouTube videos describing his business best practices led to more consulting work than he could handle last spring, Crabill created a 16-hour on-demand training course to teach wannabe Amazon entrepreneurs his secrets.
“The principles of selling have always been the same,” Crabill concedes. “But you have to know what products to sell. In 2018, you can get a lot of data and analytics from places like Amazon, where they tell you what’s selling. There are more sellers today, but there are also more shoppers selling online.”
Crabill got his start selling products online at age nine when he helped his dad post items for sale on eBay. By 12 years old, he had his own successful eBay business selling trendy Nike socks to other middle schoolers. That led to buying and selling other items via garage sales and Craig’s List before transitioning to his current business model, which Crabill maintains is easier to scale.
“There are sellers doing over $100 million a year in the same business model as me,” he says. “I don’t have to physically ship products; I don’t need employees; I don’t need a store; I don’t need a warehouse. So it’s something that the average person can start without a crazy amount of money.’
Why on-demand videos work
Crabill believes that on-demand, online programming is the best way to teach the online sales business because the format makes it easy for him to update the program to keep up with any changes to the Amazon program.
“I’m not offering a CD or a book that I can’t change, because the information I teach right now could be totally different a year from now,” Crabill says.
Twenty-one-year-old Hayden Hogan stumbled on the course while researching business opportunities after being laid off from a seasonal job. He and a friend purchased the course on February 22 and made their first Amazon sale on April 1. They did $57,000 in sales last month.
The Sarasota, Fla., resident credits his quick success with the online course format. He watched the entire course three times in the first week, and then went back to it often as he was setting up his business.
“He has live examples, so I can go back to any video and watch how he does something,” Hogan says.
Opportunity for entrepreneurs
As e-commerce continues to grow, so do the number of entrepreneurs building huge businesses that take advantage of online platforms for sales. RXBar, the protein bar producer sold last year to Kellogg for $600 million began in 2013, with the first two years of sales occurring almost exclusively on Amazon.
“The secret was we didn’t have any resources,” founder Peter Rahal told Chicago Magazine in October. “Instead of going to investors and taking a bunch of risk and making 100,000 bars, we went straight to consumers. There’s less pressure and you can pivot a lot easier.”
Beau Crabill's on-demand, online course, Beau Crabill's Online Retail Mastery course is available here.
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