eCom Dave On Growing Your Own Business While Working for Someone Else

Entrepreneurship is a lucrative calling, offering riches and rewards beyond imagination. And each year, more and more people are joining these exclusive ranks because they simply want to quit their jobs and be their own bosses. According to a recent Guidant Financial report on entrepreneurship, around half of US small-business owners say that not having to be accountable to anyone is the reason they became entrepreneurs in the first place.

However, putting in the resignation letter isn’t as easy as it seems, and most people would probably like to play it safe and not take much risk. After all, every aspiring entrepreneur is risking their livelihood until they are made. As eCom Dave explains, there is some merit in taking the safe road, as too much pressure and frustration can ruin the chances of success.

“You are choosing entrepreneurship because you want to get away from the usual work-related stress. You want to own your life and your decisions. And it’s okay to do a slow transition, even though it’s a slower path,” he says. “I didn’t quit my job until my eCommerce hustle went off, and I still made it.”

eCom Dave is a successful Miami-based entrepreneur, eCommerce specialist, and founder of The AMZ Academy. And before Dave built multiple multi-million dollar businesses with his own hands, he was working odd jobs before ultimately settling down in a role of a bartender. But Dave wanted more out of his life. He knew that he couldn’t physically be working that kind of job for the rest of his life, so he started to search for a solution.

“The reason why I started my Amazon business was that bartending wasn’t going to cut it in the long term. I was working, from six in the afternoon all the way to six in the morning. Every day, every week,” says Dave. “Even though I was making a six-figure paycheck, I realized that living such a lifestyle for long is deadly. It was okay because I was still in my mid-20s, but I knew that I couldn’t work all night when I get to my 30s.”

But Dave was faced with a huge conundrum – he couldn’t leave his job just like that. The job was exhausting, but he still needed to pay the bills, rent, and food. He started looking for a safe option, for a way to build and grow a business while working his usual job. That’s when Dave came across an inspiring video of Gary Vee (Vaynerchuk), which completely changed his life.

“I’ll never forget those words as long as I’m alive. He was talking about building and growing a dropshipping business from the comfort of your home couch. At first, I was a bit skeptical, but when I started researching, with each new article, it seemed like a better and better idea,” says eCom Dave. “Best of all, it was passive income. The idea started to develop in my head, and I started my grind.”

Four years later, Dave almost forgot how it’s like to bartend all night long, as the grind paid off. He is currently managing a highly-profitable Amazon store that is racking in 6-figure paychecks. And in the meantime, he founded The AMZ Academy as a way to help aspiring entrepreneurs achieve their dreams more easily. As Dave explains, he just wanted a way to share the lessons he learned the hard way so that others don’t have to fall for the same mistakes.

Selling on Amazon seems simple, but there are a lot of strategy and marketing tricks involved. For example, when I started selling, I thought to myself – ‘Oh, I’ll just undercut the competitor’s price.’ But what happened is that they matched my price, and my strategy failed because we still had the same price, but they had better reviews,” says Dave. “Then I decided to switch the approach. I kept the price but I bundled the item with a cheap additional item that customers get for free. It worked, and the lesson there was to find and add value. That’s what we are trying to teach our students at the academy, to give them the fresh insights and relevant knowledge they can actually use.”

Dave managed to turn his dreams into reality and proved that taking the safe road yields the same result as taking a huge risk. For the last piece of advice to all aspiring entrepreneurs out there, Dave says, “Find your passion, and that’s what you need to chase. But you need to work hard for your dream, and take your time. Safe may be sometimes slow, but it will get you wherever you want to be.”