Episode Summary
In this Prime Talk Podcast Video Sponsored by GETIDA, Kellianne Fedio, founder of Amazing Exits, a resource center for Amazon sellers who want to perform an Amazon exit & financial freedom, by selling their Amazon business, and the host of her own podcast “Amazing Exits”, shares her life’s journey into eCommerce.
Your e-commerce business is likely one of your largest assets. But do you know how much it’s worth right now? This is something many e-commerce sellers struggle with: understanding their bottom line. You’ve put so much of yourself into this business, and you’re thinking you want to exit, but you don’t know the value of it. Yoni Mazor from PrimeTalk discusses how to properly understand the value of your business so that you can make the most profitable exit at the time that’s best for you.
In today’s episode, PrimeTalk has teamed up with Kellyanne Fedio from Amazing Exits, a podcast that provides e-commerce entrepreneurs with the tools they need to grow their businesses and then plan their exit strategies. Amazing Exits has helped many e-commerce sellers get maximum returns for the sweat and blood they’ve invested into their online businesses.
Kellyanne Fedio talks about her dramatic transition from high-powered civil litigation attorney to full-time mom to million dollar Amazon seller. If you’re an Amazon seller who is interested in growing your business, or you want to learn how to evaluate your business, or perhaps you’re ready to sell off your business, then this episode is for you!
Visit Amazing Exits for more information.
Learn about GETIDA’s Amazon FBA reimbursement solutions.
Find the Full Transcript Below
Yoni Mazor 0:06
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of PrimeTalk. Today I’m really excited to have a special guest. I’m having Kellyanne Fedio. Kellyanne is the founder of Amazing Exits. Amazing Exits is a resource center for Amazon sellers who want to sell their Amazon business. You can find her and tune into her show or podcast show also called Amazing Exits. So I’m really excited, Kellyanne, welcome to the show.
Kellyanne Fedio 0:30
Thanks so much for the wonderful introduction, Yoni . It’s a pleasure to be here.
Yoni Mazor 0:34
All right, awesome. So where are we finding you now? Where are you based out of?
Kellyanne Fedio 0:38
I am in Redondo Beach, California, which is in, it’s called the Beach Cities, within LA County. So it’s an awesome place to live. Awesome place to raise kids, live by the beach, live that whole beach lifestyle. So very fortunate to live here.
Yoni Mazor 0:52
I envy you. I do envy I’m here in New Jersey.
Kellyanne Fedio 0:54
I’m from New Jersey. I’m from New Jersey!
Yoni Mazor 0:56
Well we’ll get to that! We’ll get to that! Don’t spill the beans! Okay, so yeah, actually, you started to kind of the background story. So today’s episode is gonna be all about you. This is gonna be the story of Kellyanne. So you’re gonna share with us your background, you know, who are you, where you’re from? Where’d you grow up? Where’d you go to school? Graduated, begin your professional career? So I guess without further ado, let’s jump right into it.
Kellyanne Fedio 1:19
Sure. Well, I was born in New Jersey, northern Jersey, in a town called Belleville.
Yoni Mazor 1:25
Yep, not too far from here.
Kellyanne Fedio 1:27
Not too far from Newark. But I have such fond memories of New Jersey and still go back there to visit as often as I can. So all of my relatives on my mom’s side of the family are all from the east coast.
Yoni Mazor 1:40
They still also in Belleville, the whole family? Or they’re scattered around New Jersey?
Kellyanne Fedio 1:43
They’re scattered around between different areas and townships in New Jersey, and then New York as well. So I was just back there last year, and you know, would be making a visit this year. Just depends on the whole COVID situation. So I do like getting back there. I’ve always loved the East Coast, but I’m definitely a California girl now. We moved out to California when I was about seven, but then we moved back and forth a few times. So…
Yoni Mazor 2:08
What was the reason? Your parents? Their work? Or?
Kellyanne Fedio 2:11
Yeah, my dad was a math teacher. He’s from the Middle East. And he was a math teacher. And he wanted to start a business. So he thought that he could just try starting a business in San Francisco. So that’s where we first moved, when we moved to California was San Francisco and he opened up a deli, really close to the entrance of Chinatown.
Yoni Mazor 2:31
Hold on, I’m a little confused. You mentioned he was a math teacher, so you were teaching math and running a business?
Kellyanne Fedio 2:35
No, he decided he didn’t want to be a math teacher anymore, because that’s not how he was going to, you know, make his way in life and support a family.
Yoni Mazor 2:42
And he immigrated to the United States?
Kellyanne Fedio 2:45
Yes, he did. He’s from a country called Bahrain.
Yoni Mazor 2:48
Oh, wow. Yeah, of course. It’s a very wealthy, it’s a very wealthy….It’s a very wealthy kingdom.
Kellyanne Fedio 2:56
It is a wealthy country. It’s a wealthy. He did not come from wealth, he came from poverty. He was raised as a missionary, his grandmother was a missionary. And so …
Yoni Mazor 3:05
By missionary you mean Christian?
Kellyanne Fedio 3:06
Yes. She’s Christian, actually,
Yoni Mazor 3:08
Got it. Okay, so it was, so they were in a Christian mission in Bahrain. And then when she finished the mission, they moved back to the states or what was the…
Kellyanne Fedio 3:16
No, she never moved. So he moved with his mother, my grandmother, and also his brother and sister followed. So they were the ones that made it out. And I think his, you know, uncles and a few other relatives had also moved to the United States. So yeah, so he’s lived here for a long time, but still has that heavy Arab accent.
Yoni Mazor 3:37
Nice. So my father, full disclosure, is from Tunisia, not too far. Okay, from Northern Africa, Tunisia, but he, they went away from Tunisia when he was two years old, and they went to Israel. I was born and raised there. And after I finished my military service, I moved to the States, you go to school, but my mother is American. So I was oh, you know. So I always have family here and felt very natural for me to come back. And so you also had the family here also, right?
Kellyanne Fedio 4:04
Yeah. So my mother’s American. She was born and raised in New Jersey. So my dad was, I think, in getting his master’s and he met my mother. And, you know, they said,
Yoni Mazor 4:17
Same as my parents. Yeah, my father was doing his master’s, he was…to be a lawyer, and he met my mother and university. So Middle East, with an American…Middle East with an American.
Kellyanne Fedio 4:28
So well, they didn’t stay together. You know, they divorced. But, you know, that’s 50% of the population in this country, really? So..
Yoni Mazor 4:35
Yeah, but you’re still here with us. So you’re, you’re you’re pretty much the story here at this point. So that’s good. Okay, so you were seven years old, and you’re bouncing back and forth between San Francisco there’s a deli, but what made you come back? The deli? There was another deli here or?
Kellyanne Fedio 4:49
No, just back to New Jersey, just not sure where we were going to, you know, really plant our roots. So ultimately, we ended up staying in California and we moved out of San Francisco to the North Bay. And so I spent my high school years in Northern California. And then after that, I went to college in Sacramento. And then I went on to law school, also in Sacramento and then practiced my early part of my career, which was being an attorney. I practiced law for 10 years, all in Sacramento, all in northern Cal. Yeah.
Yoni Mazor 5:21
Wow. So you’re a lawyer by trade, right? So what kind of law?
Kellyanne Fedio 5:24
I was a litigator, civil litigation.
Yoni Mazor 5:26
Oh, wow.
Kellyanne Fedio 5:27
Yeah.
Yoni Mazor 5:28
Tell me a bunch of cases. Give me a few examples of…
Kellyanne Fedio 5:34
Well, I can tell you the types of cases I worked on. So I did a lot of, on the civil side, it’s mostly insurance defense work. So you’re basically hired by an insurance company to represent their insureds that are sued. So I did a lot of medical malpractice, I did a lot of construction defect cases, a lot of personal injury cases. So you know, a lot of them with pretty catastrophic results, you know, people who were killed or anything, you know, they’re trying to hold someone liable.
Yoni Mazor 5:57
And this is in California or nationwide?
Kellyanne Fedio 6:00
These cases were in California, mostly that I had, but, you know, because obviously, you have to go to court, wherever the venue is, and that was in California for those cases. So yeah, we were a big firm in Sacramento, but it was solely based in Sacramento, a big civil-lit firm there.
Yoni Mazor 6:18
You got it. And you said, the 10 years you worked there, what were those years?
Kellyanne Fedio 6:22
What were those years? The actual years? Yeah, I can’t do that. Because that’s gonna reveal my age. And I never reveal my age!
Yoni Mazor 6:27
Maybe you started when you’re nine years old?
Kellyanne Fedio 6:29
No, no, it was a long time ago. Let’s just put it that way. And
Yoni Mazor 6:33
I want to know, because I want to know, which year you hit the, I guess, the Amazon world, that’s
Kellyanne Fedio 6:37
Okay. Well, no, I can fast forward to that without divulging my age. So I’m a Gen X’er, or that’ll give you some clue. But I practiced law for 10 years. And then towards the end, of the tail end of the career, I met my husband, and we got married and had our first daughter. And then basically, my life changed forever in terms of “oh my gosh, I cannot be doing this career and raising a small baby”. And I tried to hang on for probably about, I think it was about 18 months, working, you know, as a civil litigator and dropping my daughter, who was just a baby, off to daycare, I think I only took like five weeks off maternity leave, it was crazy. And so I was pretty miserable in my career after having kids, it just wasn’t something that I could see myself doing forever, and not really seeing my daughter. So I was really fortunate that I decided to just leave the practice of law, I tried something else for a while for a year in a different, whole different area of law. And so it was kind of hard for me because I went from being a litigator, and you know, like Senior Associate at my firm, to like now starting something new. And I still found it to be just too taxing. I just didn’t have a lot left of me when I would get home at the end of the day. And my daughter at that time was just a baby. And all that was going through my mind was okay, well what about when she gets older, and she’s in school, and she needs me for, you know, help with her homework? And stuff…How am I going to help her when I’m so exhausted getting home from work? So well,
Yoni Mazor 8:02
And what about your husband? He’s also tied up at work most of the day?
Kellyanne Fedio 8:05
Yeah. My husband started out as a physical therapist, then he got into bio, pharmaceutical sales. But then that led to his new career, which is in medical device sales. So he’s in sales, which is very stressful and taxing. He’s amazing at it. And he does very well. But it’s still you know, it’s trading your time for dollars. It’s a lot of work.
Yoni Mazor 8:26
So it’s a tough, tough point to be on. Because you’ve invested so much into your career. You said 10 years in litigation, it’s no joke.
Kellyanne Fedio 8:33
It isn’t, it’s not easy to walk away from something like that. So back at the time, I can remember that being like, such a hugely monumental decision. I mean, it was not something that I just decided one day, I mean, this took me like almost two years to finally decide because it was like, I spent my whole, you know, young adult life, not only pursuing the education, doing the career, and your whole identity is wrapped up, and that my identity was being a lawyer. So it was really, really difficult to think, Okay, how am I going to reinvent myself now, you know, I’m in my 30s. And I have, you know, a small child, and, you know, we want to have more kids. So it was, it was a hard decision, but I’m so grateful that
Yoni Mazor 9:11
So deep down in there, you think there was a shift, realizing, okay, I’m an attorney, I’m a lawyer, I’m a successful career woman, but essentially, I want to be a mother, I want to be, you know, that was kind of the internal shift inside. So this is pretty much where I rather prefer being, even though I invested so much into that, I rather invest more into being a mother. Because with this, you reap endless dividends, you know, by raising good humans into the world. And hopefully, they’re, oh, they’ll bring more humans and you have grandkids and you grow. And that just there’s generations to come. And I guess, I guess your natural, you know, inner being, you know, push you to that direction and didn’t take, you know, two minutes or two to two months, it took a course of 24 months, you mentioned about two years. So your transition into a position will hopefully enable you to become more of a mother the way you see but nevertheless, I guess, still do business or have an income. So, you mentioned that you did a year off with, I guess another firm or another type of, you know, legal work. But what was the next station after that?
Kellyanne Fedio 10:11
Well, it was actually just focusing on being a mother. So at that point, after quitting law, I didn’t have any grand plans of what I was going to do. In fact, all I knew, all I wanted to do was to just be a stay-at-home mom and be able to raise my children to, to at least when they went off to elementary school, and so that was my only plan there. And I enjoyed every minute of it. And, you know, never saw myself, I always, you know, my whole teenage years and college years, I always was like, oh, I’m gonna be this attorney, and I’m gonna be, you know, this high powered, you know, career woman. And that was always my identity. And once I had my first daughter, it just really changed. And…
Yoni Mazor 10:49
I think the reason we’re able to make that change, because you achieved that, you achieved, you knew what it was like to be a successful career woman. But I guess you didn’t know you’re what was the, what would be like to be a successful mother. And that was so important to you, as you made the change. But I guess, another angle on this, you can probably always come back to litigation, it’s not something that, you know, that’s completely gone for you, you know, a year from now, or 10 years from now, if you ever get the passion again, you have the training, you have the experience, and you is and the moment you have the mindset, you can probably go back to that. So it’s a calculated, you know, bet or gamble or not even a gamble. It’s just your life, it’s the decision was a calculated decision.
Kellyanne Fedio 11:24
Yeah, and you’re absolutely right, I could go back to it, I can’t, in a million years, imagine that I ever would. But if I wanted to, I could go back to it. Or I could do something, you know, within the realm of law, I mean, I love the education, I love the skill sets that I developed, becoming an attorney, being very analytical, being able to analyze tons of information and have to make an argument and a conclusion from that information. So that’s all served me very well in the future. But, you know, I really was, I don’t want to say just a mom, but I, I was blissfully a mom for several years, you know, had another daughter and just spent, you know, all that time with them in their formative years. And there I was, I’m just so grateful for that. But there came a point where yeah, I was like, Okay, I’m ready to get back to something, you know, my mind needs stimulation, you know, obviously, we could benefit from having another source of income. And so that’s when the whole entrepreneurship bug just kind of hit me. And I didn’t know what form or shape that was going to take. I researched and dabbled in a lot of different types of business models, but I knew that whatever I was going to do had to be something I could do location independent, that I could do it from a computer, so it had to be something online. And it wasn’t far from having that realization that I realized, okay, e-commerce is really the industry that I want to get into.
Yoni Mazor 12:47
Now, so I guess, how many years were you, I guess, that time period of being a mother was how long? That stretch?
Kellyanne Fedio 12:53
Um, I would say probably about five or six years, because then I had my second daughter, and then, you know, once they were both off to first grade-ish is kind of when I started dabbling in all this new stuff. And you know, it…I did, I did it all, just like most people, I go down that whole trail of starting something, starting an internet-based business, you know, affiliate marketing, blogging.
Yoni Mazor 13:18
So what year did you actually get into the beginning of doing online business?
Kellyanne Fedio 13:24
Um, I would say probably, like, in terms of making money, probably it wasn’t until 2013.
Yoni Mazor 13:33
Seven years ago, you actually started generating, you know, income or substantial income or significant income?
Kellyanne Fedio 13:42
When I first started, when I first started out, I started out dropshipping. And so I was doing online arbitrage. And I was actually making a really good amount of money, but it still felt like a job. It felt like I was, you know, trading, what
Yoni Mazor 13:55
And what was the model? Basically, you’re selling on eBay, Amazon, or just Amazon? Or what was the…?
Kellyanne Fedio 14:00
At first it was mostly eBay. But then I started selling on Amazon as well. But I was just drop shipping from, you know, every other site where I could see that there was an arbitrage play there.
Yoni Mazor 14:08
So you actually did between sites, not like suppliers, because I know some of them are that they find a few suppliers and they get access to their catalog and they do drop shipping. Did you do that as well? Or?
Kellyanne Fedio 14:17
No, I didn’t, I didn’t do that. I didn’t do that model. I did start going down that road. But I realized pretty, probably within six months of just having that sense of Okay, I can actually generate money online. That’s what it took for me to really become hooked. And so I was able to do that. But it didn’t feel like a real business. Right. It wasn’t something that I created. And so I really knew that I wanted to create something and then I really do look at it as kind of being Kismet that I received an email from a very popular course through one of their affiliates called Amazing Selling Machine.
Yoni Mazor 14:51
ASM.
Kellyanne Fedio 14:52
Yeah. And it was ASM and it was all about, you know, how to create your own brand and sell on the Amazon platform and So
Yoni Mazor 15:00
And what year was that when you got that email notification?
Kellyanne Fedio 15:02
It was two, I would say 2013, 2014. Yeah. Because…
Yoni Mazor 15:07
So like 6 months into the online retailing mix, you all suddenly get, you know, presented with this opportunity with Amazing Selling Machine, also known as ASM. That did wonders for many, many entrepreneurs out there throughout the years. So you took the course? I would assume?
Kellyanne Fedio 15:21
I did. I did. And I was in a great group of other entrepreneurs that…
Yoni Mazor 15:25
Was that the first class? I do believe it was the first year right?
Kellyanne Fedio 15:28
No, this was….I was in ASM3. So there was, I believe, obviously, ASM 2 and 1. And then before that, I think it was called, like, Amazing Money Machine or something…it was called something else. So
Yoni Mazor 15:39
‘Cause I know many good generations or a good class, I came in 2013. I heard him a lot. You know, I’m already familiar with a lot of that. That class of 2000,
Kellyanne Fedio 15:48
The graduating class
Yoni Mazor 15:49
Yeah, it seems like, there was a good…the good year.
Kellyanne Fedio 15:52
Yeah. So I mean, that’s when really this business model of, you know, creating a brand selling physical products through the Amazon channel became like, super, super hot, and it, it really hasn’t died down, it’s still something that a lot of people are trying to cash in on as far as teaching the model. But the challenges and the things that you need to do to be successful certainly have evolved over the years since 2013.
Yoni Mazor 16:19
The platform has completely become much more demanding and much more sophisticated, robust in terms of all the inputs needed, and so many levels to make it a successful journey for entrepreneurs. But 2013, you take the course, you pivot into, you know, creating your own brand, your own private label. And then you I guess, you found a supplier to source products and then get a trademark and started selling your, your own brand. And that happened or that transpired around 2014 already?
Kellyanne Fedio 16:45
Yeah. 2014. I launched my business in August, my first product. And by that Q4, I had hit seven figures in revenue with my first product.
Yoni Mazor 16:59
Hold on, hold on. So within what, 90 days, you already had seven figures?
Kellyanne Fedio 17:02
Yeah, I’m pretty crazy. I know, it was pretty crazy, completely unexpected. And luckily, the supplier that I found for my first product, and I ended up sticking with him for a very long time, but we just developed this really good relationship early on. And he was able to supply me with products without me having to pay for it until at least 30 days after. So that’s how I was able to fuel that growth in the beginning.
Yoni Mazor 17:29
So were you rotating your goods faster than 30 days? The moment is within a week or two?
Kellyanne Fedio 17:34
Yeah, I mean, it was because I was air shipping the product at that time. And so the, you know, I launched in August, but that Q4, the product just really took off. It was in a relatively, at that time, I would say low demand niche, but I just knew that I was a product that I could build a brand around, that it could be my flagship product. And I just had a hunch that demand for this product would increase over time. And so…
Yoni Mazor 18:03
What was the price point of the product?
Kellyanne Fedio 18:06
Nowadays, it’s around $14…$14/$15. But back in those days, and the good old days, I think when I launched it was around $18. But at Christmas time I was selling it for like $28. So pretty crazy margin
Yoni Mazor 18:21
Pretty comfortable price for any consumer. So it’s probably appealing to the brand market. Alright, so 2014, you had seven figures and take us to August 2015-16.
