In Eric Walsh’s very first year of business selling cell phone accessories out of two carts in a Danbury, Connecticut mall, the 21-year-old college dropout made multiple six-figures. Young, eager, and ambitious, Eric quickly reinvested his profits to expand the business throughout the northeast United States.
Within his first three months of business, Walsh opened a third location in the same mall, right next to the Apple Store. The location was meant to be temporary, just for the holiday season. It ended up becoming one of his most lucrative locations. Walsh built a relationship with the Apple Store, and soon the store’s employees would walk their customers out to the kiosk, telling the customer what accessories to buy. The store made over $120k in December 2010.
After making north of $200k at just 21, In 2011 Walsh expanded and opened two more locations in the local mall in South Portland, Maine. He moved there and lived out of a Day’s Inn for three months while setting up the store and building relationships in the community.
“Business is always about the relationships you build. If you want to scale and scale fast, then you need to focus on relationships to accelerate your growth,” explained Walsh. “Once I was able to build trust with the Apple, Verizon, and AT&T workers, it catapulted our store’s revenue into profit and heavy foot traffic from the mall. Growing each location into $100k+ profit businesses wasn’t that difficult—all I had to be willing to do was work hard and make sacrifices.”
From there, Walsh’s goal was to expand to 20 locations to net a profit of a million dollars each between himself and his business partner. After just three years in business, they were up to 17 locations throughout Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.
So, was Eric Walsh, at just 24 years old and three years in business, making $700k a year, three locations short of a million dollars?
Unfortunately, the answer was no. In truth, Walsh was nowhere near $700k, and he ended up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars he had invested into the business. Many factors led to this, but one stood out the most: He was on the road 40 hours a week, without time to spend even an hour in each location. The minimum wage went up each year and malls began to raise the rents. They also began to allow more competition to open.
“People are the hardest thing to manage. They can be unreliable. Dealing with people calling out or not showing up for work while trying to manage stores across multiple states was extremely difficult,” said Walsh.
As stores began to slip, parts of the company began to lose money. Stores that needed to do $22k per month in revenue just to break even were doing $12k-15k. Average this loss across 70% of the locations Walsh had. The six-figure stores began to decline from a lack of attention as well as covering the hemorrhaging losses the other locations were taking.
“I became a slave to my business instead of my business working for me. No longer did I feel like I was an entrepreneur. This was not the way I wanted to live my life,” said Walsh. “I closed down and sold what I could, scaling back down to four locations. By focusing on the best ones, I could make just as much, if not more money from a single location than two, with fewer employees and less to worry about.”
This experience taught Walsh that he never wanted to get into a business again that he couldn’t automate in some way, mitigating his risk.
“We still had our personal lives and living expenses, so we continued to pay ourselves out of the business, even though the money wasn’t there,” explained Walsh. “In turn, the cash we paid ourselves was now not available to cover our debts. Our business credit cards exceeded $250,000, and we had a line of credit from the bank for $100,000. We went from living the life to drowning in debt in less than a year.”
Facing this crisis, Walsh completely changed his business model and managed to build the company back to its formal glory. The thing that truly saved him was his pivot into Amazon FBA. Amazon selling got him completely out of debt, and today he is a multiple 7-figure Amazon seller.
Out of all the options available on the internet, why did Eric Walsh choose Amazon FBA?
“Amazon FBA is a completely automated business with infinite scalability,” Walsh said. “I sell millions of dollars annually which only requires about 20 hours of work per month. People work 40–60-hour work weeks just to make ends meet. I feel terrible for them, and I knew I could do something to help by offering up my knowledge.
“I decided to create the Genius Academy, a comprehensive course where I share everything I learned and teach others how to build and scale a successful business selling on Amazon. The Genius Academy is my step-by-step blueprint to building a successful Amazon business, and doing it the right way.”
If you want to build a passive income that can lead to total financial freedom as a successful Amazon seller, learn more and sign up for Eric Walsh’s Genius Academy Masterclass here.