Dan Meadors created The Wholesale Formula alongside Dylan Frost. He got started on Amazon with a $600 credit card, doing arbitrage. Once he was profitable, he told his longtime buddy, Dylan, he should get involved. And so he did. The two of ’em would drive around the Southeastern part of the U.S., hit up all the Walmarts, head straight for the clearance racks, scan each item with their phones (using an Amazon app), and try to see which ones they could flip for a profit.
Sounds about as fun as playing Bridge with an 89 year-old former lunch lady named Ruth. Believe it or not, though, they still managed to do about $1 million a year in sales doing that. Until they got burnt out. Then they tried opening a retail store. Bad idea. They tried setting up a Shopify store. That failed miserably. They tried Amazon private label. Didn’t know enough yet to make it work. Eventually they stumbled upon what they now call “reverse sourcing wholesale,” where they just order products direct from the manufacturer.
“So instead of doing traditional wholesaling, which is to use wholesalers and distributors to find products that maybe will sell well on Amazon, and then buying it from them? What we do,” Dylan explains, “is we look on Amazon first—that’s where we find our products to sell—and then we just go straight to the source. We call, we reach out to the brand owner of the product itself. And then we talk to them and get approval to be an authorized reseller of their product on Amazon.”
“And what’s really cool,” Dylan continues, “is once we prove ourselves, a lot of times, they’ll wanna work with us exclusively. So then we’re the only person selling their product on Amazon. We go under contract with them, to be their exclusive seller, and that’s when you realize the full power of our business model. Some of our contracts, alone, are worth, literally, $1 million dollars. (Based on the terms and how much profit they generate.) But at this point, we’ve done well over $30 million in sales on Amazon.”
How much work is involved if you approach it this way? “It’s really about what the brands want you to do and what they need,” Dan says. “Everything can be super custom—to be what they want or what you want. So it’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. You can do a whole lot for brands or very little, just depending on what makes sense and how much money you wanna make. You can always hire people, too. We started off with VAs and now we have really high-level people who run and manage everything for us.”
What about newbies? People who’re looking for a side hustle, just wanting to make an extra few grand a month? Is this a good model for them? “Absolutely,” Dylan chimes in. “We have some brands where we just sell one product for them. That’s it. Like we have this board game we sell. We updated the listing one time. All the work was front-loaded. Got the advertising done. There’s not a whole lot more that could be done after that. But their sales doubled. They’re happy, we’re happy. So there’s deals like that.”
Dan and Dylan created The Wholesale Formula course to help you follow in their footsteps, leveraging big brands, through the power of wholesale, to easily replicate what’s already working on Amazon. “This unique system allows you to support small mom and pop shops,” their sales page reads, “so that you become the Robin Hood of Wealth and still profit at the same time. Which is unlike most courses out there that promote small business competition, not cooperation.” Cost is apparently $3,000.
