Business Update Halfway Through 2020, What Is Up Next?

Mike is solo on the microphone today just updating listeners on the last few months since quarantine, “stuck in China”, Loadpipe and mask/PPE, and some new opportunities for listeners.

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[00:00:00] Episode 313, three, one, three of globalfromasia.com halfway through 2020. What a year it’s been. Just me on the microphone, giving you a little bit of updates of the last few months – what’s happening and what’s the future and hopefully some opportunities for some of you. Let’s listen in today. globalfromasia.com/halfway2020.

[00:00:27] Welcome to the Global From Asia podcast, where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down, into straight up actionable advice. And now your host, Michael Michelini.

[00:00:42] Do you enjoy the podcast? Do you enjoy what’s happening here? Do you like our team? We actually have few clients, contentinvestments.com. We can help you build out your blogs, your podcasts, build out traffic to your websites. We leverage our amazing team, same team, same processes, and we make things happen.

[00:00:58] You know, I barely got to see them, but I saw quite a few in the Philippines. We have people also in Vietnam, Canada, and other parts of the world, you know. We’re totally remote and we work on result-basis. So if you wanna check it out, contentinvestments.com. It means investing in content, investing in your business.

[00:01:16] Thank you everybody for choosing to download and listen to globalfromasia episode 313, 313 shows. That’s quite a few for us and we are halfway through 2020s, July. It’ll be July, almost July when they show us on the last day of June 2020 and 30th, we’ll go online. Actually we’re sometimes you might notice it even goes on line a day earlier.

[00:01:39] We’ve been really heavily investing in the content of the show. Uh, well, not just show it’s a website. It’s got a lot of traffic over the years and people always say they find us Google searching for all kinds of random things. So. We’ve been making some big upgrade upgrades because it’s always good.

[00:01:57] When traffic is down a little bit less people searching for cross border stuff. It’s less people searching for, you know, traveling into China and Asia. I mean the travel industry, the event industry has gotten a hit, basically decimated, even Airbnb is struggling. So, you know, I know a lot of us have been struggling these days and, uh, you know, today’s is just an update.

[00:02:20] There’s no interview, we’ve got the interviews coming up, eh, but it’s a little bit of a gap and it’s been on my list to give you girls and guys an update of what’s happening. So if you’re not interested and just want the interviews, you can wait until next week, you can just skip this little show. But if you want to kind of hear what’s happening here to Global From Asia world and, and, things here.

[00:02:41] Listen in all right. And hopefully there’s gonna be some opportunities, you know, I’m trying to engage with more of you it’s it’s been fun. Actually, I’ve got to know some of you a little bit more the last few months, uh, with the load pipe experiences. And I just want to keep you updated what’s happening. So let’s, let’s go down the list.

[00:02:59] Just, I guess the last update was I did like a solo on the mic and in, in, end of March and I was doing it on the quarantine bus when I landed into China and I got to Shenyang and I spent hours and hours in the airport going through all kinds of different lines and checks. So kind of update everybody how I got back to China.

[00:03:21] So this will be like a little bit of an update of what’s happened since I have been in China. Of course I have my blah, blah, blah sessions. And some of you’ve been catching tidbits here and there, but I just thought this would be a good time to update everybody. And. So then, you know, I got stuck in a hotel for two weeks, even got stuck in there on my birthday.

[00:03:41] And it’s always my birthday. I didn’t wanna know about all of you, but I just turned 39 and every year it goes by, you just realize you gotta make things happen. So everybody’s talking about masks. We had Ivan on the show, talk about masks, and everybody’s talking to me about masks and PPE stuff. So, you know, we launched the Loadpipe.

[00:03:57] We, it’s been a domain. It’s been an idea on my bucket list since 2007, since when I still lived in America, when I was still. They’re really clueless about sourcing from China. Clueless about I had done some orders already from directories back in 2006, you know, just the whole traditional Alibaba, Global Sources, Skype chat, sample, send to the fulfillment centers.

[00:04:20] All that. I had really no idea what I was doing. And I thought a Loadpipe is like a group, platform as an organized platform to help people buy from factories. So I built that while I was in the quarantine with our amazing team we have. And,we, we launched it. We sold masks. It was the craziest it’s been the last few months.

[00:04:39] I think anybody in his whole trading import export e-commerce world has just gotten rocked. I mean, Amazon stopped accepting shipments, you know, Uh, I’ll get to Alpha Rock in a second. And my, my relationships and the experiences there, but with the masks, like everybody was just getting rocked in their other businesses.

[00:04:57] Cause basically in March, like I think everything turned off, right? Like Amazon turned a lot of, not everything. Of course their inbound shipments turned off, you know, and it scared so many sellers. So, you know, everybody’s just going nuts about what to do, what, to what products. Well, how to make income.

[00:05:13] And everybody’s trying to get these government deals from like New York state to get masks. And it was just the most insane couple of months, like March, April, a little bit of May, was just totally insane. So we, we, we, you know, we launched load pipe. We got the, what we call some orders in. We helped some people and somebody you guys are listening.

[00:05:30] Girls are listening. Thank you for your trust in us and in me. And, It was really, really hell, I’ll say that basically. You know, I think we did a good service. We collected a lot of the year wholesale orders for these masks where the factories and people wouldn’t even talk to us. Most, most of the people buying a load pipe because they were, you know, rather small orders.

[00:05:56] We worked with Insight Quality, which has always been a really great partner. Andy Church and Ino and the team there have always been so supportive of what we do here. So I really thank them for that. Definitely use them, uh, or consider using them for your QC and other other needs or sourcing as well. They can offer you.

[00:06:13] So definitely check them out. If you don’t know about them already insight-quality.com. We got them on the podcast a few times. So they helped out so much, you know, it was a little bit of a hassle breaking down cartons and breaking down shipments into smaller orders. Getting it to fulfillment bridge, which is our service provider.

[00:06:34] We had used for breaking down these shipments into boxes and sending it to different people all around the world. And he’s, you know, basically breaking down bulk into like it’s called like the last mile shipping. So they, they send in smaller shipments and, uh, you know, and then you’re just watching this tracking number sitting in Schengen warehouse, sitting in Hong Kong warehouse, sitting in a U S customs.

[00:07:02] It was just painfully, painfully waiting for, uh, all of our orders. And we had quite a few, you know, I really appreciate that. And then people started receiving them. And, uh, the scary reality was a lot of these boxes got crushed. Okay. I was getting pictures of crushed boxes and it was really a nightmare.

[00:07:21] And, you know, I treat most of you and people might network as friends. And, you know, seeing [00:07:30] pictures of smashed boxes is a, is pretty, pretty stressful for me. So, um, uh, We are working on that still, you know, it’s three months since the orders even started, but we’re working on getting new boxes to those that had enough damaged boxes, a fulfilling bridge we’ll pay for the shipping of those boxes.

[00:07:47] And, uh, I think we’re going to just pick up most of the costs of the, of the box printing fees. A factory won’t give us boxes because they don’t want counterfeits, but basically it’s been months of, you know, Really stressful, uh, making sure everybody gets their masks. And now that the PPE stuff has slowing down, it is a holiday today.

[00:08:09] I’m recording this on dragon boat festival and just got a message. Wife and kids are waiting for me at lunch, but I want to do this. I told him, told him to do this. All right, back to the show. So we’ve been trying to figure out what to do after his PPE craze demand has seemed to have dropped off, you know, A lot of people were still waiting for this second wave of, of the pandemic, you know, and people then need masks again.

[00:08:37] And it’s kind of almost a little bit weird because you see these, some people I talk to, they’re just, I don’t want to say hoping, but you know, of course they’ll make either money or maybe they just want to break even, or just want to sell what they have, you know, and just trying to sell this, this PPE mask stuff, but it is a little bit scary around the world, you know?

[00:08:57] Looking at these numbers of cases and deaths is really, uh, really, really scary. So let me just finish this situation. So, you know, we try to do some non PPE products on Loadpipe, and it’s just, it’s just a kind of tricky to figure out how to move forward. I’m talking to some people. Some of our users, some of our members, some people in the community about, you know, working with us.

[00:09:22] But right now I’m going to say we’re kind of just, uh, we collected a lot of feedback. We collected a lot. I mean, now I’m totally clear what Loadpipe has to be to, to, to work, but we’re taking a little bit of a, you know, I guess a break or is there some people that want to invest in it? You know, maybe we’ll have some people joining it.

[00:09:41] Actually, there’s some opportunities to enter this show data. We will talk about for people that want to get more formally involved with what we’re doing here in this empire. You know, we built a pretty big empire in community, the traffic on this site and other sites. So basically, you know, the second wave is not here.

[00:09:59] People are almost, I dunno, waiting for it to sell more of their product, but, uh, we’re on, we’re on hold right now at Loadpipe. I’ve talked to some of you and, uh, we’re gonna kind of talk to some of you in the community to take over, not take over, but take a part of it with me. And, uh, if you are, maybe are interested, wait till the end of the show and we can talk about that.

[00:10:23] A lot of you’ve been asking you what’s happened with me and Alpha Rock. You know, we had even a little podcast there. We had a, you know, a lot of different stuff. Basically after the, you know, the March pandemic am Amazon shutting their doors and just these huge changes. And there’s been a lot of policy changes there.

[00:10:43] It’s gotten to be already a huge investment company with sec and, you know, The short story is I’m still a shareholder. You know, I, I still am a part of it, but I’m not an active part of it. You know, I’ve talked to some people that invested in it through, through to finding out about it from me. I really appreciate those people.

[00:11:03] I think that they’re happy. They’re getting their monthly reports. I’m getting a monthly reports. Alpha Rock sends out a report every month to current investors. They’re they’re gonna open up a round in July, still really good friends. Everybody there just no hard feelings. It’s just really different, you know, that’s my style.

[00:11:23] I’m an early stage investor or an early stage person in a company. And, I’m, I’m a happy shareholder. I told them I can’t wait to sell my shares for, you know, multiple millions of dollars and met us and Alex and Mark and David and all guys are all really great and supportive and we’re friends. And I think that’s hopefully clear and no hard feelings, you know, that’s just the, that was always kind of the idea.

[00:11:50] Anyway. So that’s the story with Alpha Rock. Definitely if you want to invest in them, um, I’m a, I’m a most minority passive shareholder and, you know, it’s, it’s great to get exposure if you want to get exposure to Amazon FBA, um, without being involved in the operations at all. So. Another good friend of mine has been talking to me.

[00:12:12] He calls me the, he says a three C, Jeff, I don’t know. I think you listened to some of these podcasts. Maybe you listened to this podcast. Um, but he says, you know, I have to focus on what I’m good at. Right. Um, three Cs, He says content consulting and community, same with the Alpha guys. They say, you know, they really supported me to build my personal brand even more.

[00:12:34] If you ever check out Michaelmichelini.com. I’d love your feedback from people, but I built that out, uh, to make it more clear of who I am and what I do with the support actually in feedback of, of Alpha Rock. So thank you guys. And in Jeff said, you know, focus on content and content is pretty clear, right?

[00:12:55] I talked to my friend, Leon reading this recently and Content is this show. Content is blogs. Content is videos, you know, keep on creating and creating. I love creating. So that’s pretty clear thinking you guys all agree. I’m a content person consulting, you know, we. We do projects. I consulted actively with Alpha Rock.

[00:13:16] I, you know, I’ve, helped people, you know, with their website marketing. I still actually have a couple projects for people making their content at contentinvestments.com. So we do these kinds of content projects, marketing projects. And the third is community. Honestly, I don’t know. He says, I don’t know if I’m so good at community.

[00:13:38] We do have a membership gfavip.com. We actually just had another members call for mindfulness meditation, which was amazing. And it was a good group of nine people on that. So that was pretty awesome. But communities also just connecting with people like I talked to Nacho, Nacho says he really appreciate appreciates me.

[00:13:57] He, uh, he found out about a Cross Border Summit. In 2017, he attended, you know, he met a lot of amazing people. He was doing B2B trading and he got into Amazon, I guess he was looking to get into Amazon already, or maybe he was even doing it a little bit already, but from, I think he would agree. He was still early stage.

[00:14:19] He went to one of the workshops with Meir after we did it like a mastermind workshop and. I mean, he’s a hard worker, man. If I don’t know if he listens to the show, I think he used to be on a newsletter, but I was chatting with him and he just said, thank you. But he met his business partner there, Sean. And he, um, you know, what’s it learned that the cross border summit, he went to that workshop with Meir.

[00:14:43] He made a business deal business partnership with Sean and they sold their company for $1.7 million. That’s pretty amazing. Right. I think that’s community right. I love those stories. I love connecting people and letting, enabling people to make a better life for themselves. And there’s lots of stories like that in the community.

[00:15:01] So thank you Nacho for appreciating how, uh, how we helped you. And, let us go to the next point. Are those, those are three C. What’s next. Right? What’s next? What everybody’s asking me. What’s next for you, Mike? What are you doing now? What are you doing now? I don’t hear much. Have one Loadpipe, you know, Alpha Rock.

[00:15:22] What are you up to? You know, so I have been reallocating resources and, um, so was, you know me. I have lots of websites. I don’t think I ever said loadpipe’s on the shelf, sitting there since 2007, you know, I think as Zach Franklin jokes, how much I must pay for my domain renewals every year, but they are active.

[00:15:43] I mean, they have traffic, they’re not just sitting and domains. They have content and they have traffic and some are making money every month on, you know, Amazon associates, Amazon affiliates. There’s almost like a hobby, but I’m trying to take that hobby and I’m going to make it a little bit more of my full time thing.

[00:15:58] Honestly, I spent all morning this morning. Building up a few of these new websites, not new, or just, just dustin’, dust off, you know, checking the Google AdSense, checking that as Amazon associates fees, figuring out how to put on Amazon associates on the Amazon links. Cause they’re, they’re just blank, blank, Amazon links, you know, they don’t have the tracking code.

[00:16:21] A lot of my friends laughed at me or like Mike, you have so much money here. So I’m going to try and make this like something interesting. I’m going to kind of clean up some of my five to 10 top sites with a, you know, making decent traffic, you know, a multiple thousands per month with not totally, really properly monetized sites.

[00:16:39] And I am going to build them up for the rest of this year. And some of my friends, like Leon in Australia was talking to me. He says, you know, I have this, you know, I still do this podcast. My wife’s like, what, why are you going to just do that by yourself. You know, why or why we have an amazing team?

[00:16:56] You know, like the little team’s last as long. Now we have about seven or eight people on this team. So of course I’m working with a team, but you know, when he’s like, and Leon and anybody else I talked to was like, Mike, you got to involve the other people in this community with what you’re doing. Right.

[00:17:14] And, you know, we want to get back to Loadpipe. We’re still working on Loadpiping. It’s not like I just, you know, It’s just a getting in. It’s gotta be redeveloped. You know, we got to kind of collect all this feedback and reposition it. So I want to make some of you more successful. I, I’m not trying to pitch anything.

[00:17:32] I don’t really have a solid pitch right now, but, uh, basically the idea is, Hey, I got this podcast and, you know, I’m going to keep doing these interviews. And if some of you want to get involved with me in like a pilot program, to work with me on building up these sites and monetizing and selling some of them.

[00:17:50] But I dunno, I’d like to, I’m a pack rat. All right. I like to kind of have sites, but I’m going to force myself to sell some of these by the end of the year. And, uh, at least a couple of them. And they’re, you know, basically e-commerce or affiliate sites that need a little bit of TLC and of course, a lot more content.

[00:18:09] But if you guys know me by now, We can make content and we can generate traffic. So the idea is if somebody you want to work with me on these, um, I’m a hustler and we’ve got a great team. I just feel like building these up. It seems like a great time. The multiples just keep going up and up and up for these sites, you know, there’s more and more brokers.

[00:18:29] There’s more people asking me also, if I know people that are selling sites, if they, you know. So, I just want to get to know more people in this industry. We’ve had, you know, great people, even Matt Diggity was on this show last year. He’s doing amazing things, as you know, so I’m going to be working on that and I’m going to try and make a little bit of a program.

[00:18:49] Maybe this one will be a test, but I can’t, you know, with Sisitano, we put it up totally public. We did the e-commerce gladiator series and it worked, but I did feel like there were some competitors popping up, but I guess that’s normal to Amazon. But I don’t know if I’m going to be so transparent about what the sites are.

[00:19:10] I think it just seems like from what I listened to with everybody, and most people don’t share to sites. So I think I only share the sites to people in the program. Maybe even make some NDAs and, uh, you know, I, I, in an exit by the, at least a few by the end of this year, maybe even earlier, that’s the plan and I want to keep podcasting.

[00:19:31] Cause I love to do it. Honestly, I just look at this is just, I just pay him, you know, I think, you know, it’s like, know we pay about a few hundred dollars or so a month for this podcast, creating it and doing all the work. Maybe a little bit more like maybe, but I don’t mind, you know, I like to create this show.

[00:19:51] I like to network with you, meet you guys sometimes in other parts of the world. Say you guys listen to this show and the numbers are increasing, you know, we do have downloads and listeners, but, yeah, I don’t want to think about how to monetize you guys. I just like to share with you and maybe no Cross Border Summit this year.

[00:20:12] I know we were thinking about it, but it’s probably gonna be no offline event this year, at least for us. So this is what I’m going to be working on and it’ll be cool to work with some of you. And then if you’re in a GFAVIP membership, you’re going to get to see those happening here. Um, And see how you can get 

[00:20:30] more involved if you are not in the membership and you do want to get involved, I’m going to put a link to a form on this podcast, and it’ll be, you know, a little bit about you and what you want to do.

[00:20:44] If you want to be an active investment, you know, active partner contributing to the content and to the development of these sites, or you want to kind of just put some cash in and hope you get some cash out. It’s what we did with Sisitano. And, this is what I like to do. I like to pool some resources together.

[00:21:04] I’ll be talking to some people in the network too, and I’ll probably give you more firm ideas in the next few shows. So honestly, this is just like a midway through a year update and, uh, Just thought I would share. It’s what, 20 minutes now it’s almost lunchtime and the phone is going to probably buzz again.

[00:21:28] I think that’s all I got for this week. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope you enjoy these shows. And if you do want to get involved with these affiliate sites, you know, I’m not doing drop ship, you know, or even e-commerce or FBA right now. I mean, I do have an, now it could be with my friends at Alpha Rock and FBA, but I feel like anyways, I want to work more on affiliate sites.

[00:21:56] I guess Amazon would probably be the main one. It’s just easy, but I know the rates are going down so we will have some others. We’ll diversify some of our revenue streams and it’s what I’ve done. And I have quite a few resources in the toolbox and, uh, active team of people that make content all day.

[00:22:14] So that’s it. I guess if you’re, if you want to be early in on this, we’ll probably have a call. I know some people even wanted to have a call about being part of Loadpipe, investing in Loadpipe which could be part of it, but that’s also being developed right now. Excuse me. But that’s it. I’m going to cut it off now.

[00:22:34] I gotta go. So thanks so much for listening. I hope this show is interesting to you. Just a quick, quick one is yeah, I went down to my wife and kids came to China cause her parents were sick. I was here for Christmas. I went to the Philippines, work with Alpha Rock closely to kind of accelerate my relationship with Alpha Rock.

[00:22:56] Covid happened. Barely made it back to China. Back in China, quarantine. No transition. There did Loadpipe, PPE, PPE is down, Loadpipe, I’m trying to figure out where to go next, work with some people there, if you want to get involved with that. But the main thing I’m going to be planning to do is building up more media sites, content sites, um, potentially most likely at least sell a couple of them, uh, have quite a few, but, I think I got to at least sell a couple by the end of the year.

[00:23:24] And I think if I work with some of you. You can help me push me to do that. So I think that’s it for now. Thanks again for listening. And I hope to hear from you again, the click, the link on the show notes. There should be a link on all the podcast apps, and, uh, and that’s it. Thank you. Bye bye. Do you want to get more insights of what’s happening with me and the Global From Asia team check out GFA, vip.com are a golden familiar VIP members program.

[00:23:55] As I talked about in today’s episode, we’re going to be sharing more information about some of the sites for building up, some of the sites we’re investing in. If things, I just, sorry, I can’t share with in the show. You know, we did, Sisitano pretty publicly and had a great little exit and, uh, things happened.

[00:24:10] But I think in the next stages of what projects we do here with our community and those that want to be part of it, we’re going to be a little bit more private. So if you want to get insights of what’s happening with what we’re building, check it out at gfavip.com, members calls, forum insights, and more see you on the inside.

[00:24:32] To get more info about running an international business. Please visit our website at www.globalfromasia.com. That’s www.globalfromasia.com. Also be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed. Thanks for tuning in.