NEWSAC Hampton: Redefining E-commerce Excellence One Teachable Moment At A Time
Dec. 4 2022, Published 1:33 p.m. ET
AC Hampton has a vast vocabulary in business, bootstrapping, and believing in the best for himself. It is mainly because the definition of “failure” has only translated as “inspiration” within his lexicon since his earliest days as a self-made entrepreneur.
Whether it is sneakers or Sauvignon Blanc he is selling, Hampton has brought an inclusive drive that defies trials and tribulations to do anything but teach him something valuable that he can use to his advantage in the future.
Now a recognized leader in e-commerce, digital marketing, and dropshipping, Hampton would take his business endeavors from zero to generating seven-figure sales in months when he started, but those months were exceptionally dark.
However, the light did not wait until the end of the tunnel in Hampton’s success story; he carried it inside himself through the most hopeless moments and learned to turn personal hardship into a career highway by doing so.
It is now a philosophy he has built an entire brand out of sharing with others, and he continues to face forward at all times in his attempts to widen his reach on and off the official business clock.
Through formative experiences such as a shocking home invasion that left him bereft of most of his worldly possessions to a construction crane falling through the roof of his next apartment that left several in his complex dead and him temporarily without a place to sleep, AC Hampton has found a way to move forward.
Rather than allow that brief stint of homelessness to cause him to focus on all that he did not have, Hampton concentrated on what he did have at the time and let that guide his fateful next steps.
“The only thing I had to my name was a laptop and my body. I didn't have a car. I didn't have a house. I didn't have food. I didn't even have a pair of underwear. I was sleeping in a church, but I had my laptop and a hotspot,” he relays with matter-of-fact grit.
A deep-seated desire to do things differently initially drove Hampton to seek ways to make a passive income, which is still a great motivator for much of what he strives to learn and expand on within his industry.
Coming from a background where travel was limited to a nonexistent affair, he wanted to find ways to see the world and work that would let him do so. At a friend’s suggestion and starting on January 21, 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Hampton began releasing informative instructional videos on YouTube once a week.
His posts aimed to show others how they could achieve the successes he had manifested in the world of dropshipping. The interest in his tips and resources was sufficient to propel Hampton to create both a course and a mentorship designed to share his hard-earned knowledge with people who were openly clamoring to work with him.
With additional marketing assistance from an outside supporter who had seen his YouTube content and contacted him directly, Hampton began to get more calls and clients than he could manage, leading to his hiring his roommate as his first employee in May of 2020. By November of that same year, he had already hand-selected the first five employees to help him launch his dropshipping business to the next level.
Supreme ECom was born out of roughly 50 hard fails at the beginning of Hampton’s dropshipping days. His first true win inside the industry he would come to lead was a product that generated $18,000 in income for himself, enough of a small windfall that he could foresee moving forward with a fair degree of financial success.
The old saying “drop by drop makes a lake” has borne out beautifully in Hampton’s turnaround tale ever since. His YouTube subscriptions skyrocketed to a place of passive income in their own right because he never stopped teaching what he was living and practicing every day in his work.
Prioritizing mentorship of students and granting access to others like himself who are interested in e-commerce opportunities has made him a trusted source of usable information in his line of work and a respected teacher to many who come into e-commerce not knowing where to start.
Hampton would like other business leaders to realize the value of mentorship is a two-way street. “In 2021 alone, our students generated $13 million in online sales just in that one year,” he proudly shares. He also stresses to young entrepreneurs not to try and reinvent the wheel, offering the advice to look for products that already have high engagement and find ways to give successful items your spin.
Hampton’s approaches to business and public relations all hinge on the concept that good advertising and consistent service will get you everywhere. When asked the fundamental concept that has kept him clear-eyed through the most turbulent parts of his origin story, Hampton gives a response that is telling in its directness: “I just always remember that any situation is temporary. You could be just one day from success.”
