Miro Posavec: The Pigheaded Visionary
THE HOMEOPATHY ADVOCATE THAT SWEARS BY FAILURE AND A POSITIVE ATTITUDE
“Our modern society tries to shield people from failure,” frowns Miro Posavec, President of Bestmade Natural Products, a source for homeopathic medicine. “The sooner you get used to failure, the further you’ll go.”
The Amazon seller speaks with conviction. Dressed casually to beat the sweltering Florida heat, Miro’s bright smile offsets the serious brow of a Deep Thinking Man. He imparts his knowledge and experiences generously, without pause, peppered with many stories about his children. Miro’s one of the few eCommerce success stories that doesn’t own a single solitary business model on Amazon – he does wholesale, where he sells his products under a white label to other people. He sells outright. He also sells on Shopify and Walmart. And he funnels traffic back to a dedicated website. We go into his journey, his failures, the attitudes he’s changed up to improve himself and his business, and where he plans to go from here.
THE JOURNEY OF SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS
“I (got into e-Commerce) backwards,” Miro admits. Miro already had a whole line of top-performing homeopathy products. One year, he found himself in the middle of a “financial mental-emotional crisis,” so he took a good look at what had worked so far. He saw that the company had good fundamentals. He had products that a dedicated market would buy on a continuous basis.
“I thought I had a high-quality product,” Miro shares. The model started to evolve. He started off with selling wholesale on Amazon, which experienced incredible success in a short amount of time. Alarmed by the platform’s tendency to shut off accounts with little to no warning, he decided that it was time to diversify. So he put more effort into his website, then decided to sell on Walmart as well.
“We’ve gotten better,” he promises. “It’s been so helpful for us, having that ability to just become better.”
THE ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING
This focus on improvement boils down to two crucial values:
- A positive outlook
- An acceptance of failure
“I did everything — nothing (was) effective,” he admits. He starts to gesture with his hands. “I’m trying to do this, I’m trying to do that, I had probably 10 WordPress sites, nothing worked.” Nevertheless, Miro calls himself pigheaded. He learned early on (he started working at 18 years old) that if A doesn’t work, try B. If B doesn’t work, try C. “You have to be relentless!” he exclaims. “I’m on my fourth alphabet now.”
Miro learned to look at every failure as a win because each misfiring redirected him down the path of success. He calls that attitude relentless – pigheaded – stubborn. He says he doesn’t listen to people very often, insisting instead on what he thinks is the right path. And sure, he’ll make mistakes along the way. He’ll face challenges. He’ll get yelled at by his staff (which he admits with a gleam — of pleasure, perhaps? Pride? Amusement? — in his eye). But he’ll sit back at the end of a long day and find gratitude in the process. Failure is the stepping stone to success.
It’s almost as if Miro’s illustrious e-Commerce career is a journey, an unmapped world, and Miro is an avid explorer. For every stumble, another path is forged.
THE SECRETS TO SUCCESS
Don’t be deceived by Miro’s charm and easygoing nature; he’s a registered homeopath. Bestmade Natural Products work with one of Asia’s biggest suppliers of natural remedies, each of which is tested by a battalion of doctors. So, everything that Miro releases — on Amazon, on Shopify or Walmart, through distributors and wholesalers, or on his website — is thoroughly tested for safety and efficacy. We’re talking about a robust catalog of 3000 products. That’s no small feat.
“The running joke in the business is, oh, I got a remedy for that,” Miro winks. “Because we pretty much do have a remedy for everything.”
Nevertheless, starting his journey on Amazon took some convincing. Miro already had products that worked, with healthy margins and a dependable flow of sales. Then his friend reached out and told him to call Amy. “I don’t sell on Amazon,” Miro remembers replying. “It’ll dilute my brand.” His friend wasn’t interested in hearing this, so the reply that arrived with Miro was, “Just shut up and do what I tell you.”
May we all have friends that are so forthcoming with good advice!
“I went from two grand a month to 20 grand a month in a couple of weeks,” Miro said. Even though this happened several years ago, you still see a little of the surprise hidden deep in his eyes. “The whole thing just blew up, and we were scrambling. We had a small operation, a boutique shop.
“I’d just come out of a divorce,” Miro reminisces. “I’d gone from owning five businesses and having all this success come to me way too easy, to being down on my luck, living in an apartment that smelled of cat pee.”
So, Miro, with two other employees, hustled hard to accommodate the sudden demand he experienced on Amazon. A self-admitted “glorified hobby” suddenly got serious. Miro pulled up his socks, bent his head, and did the work. “I got to turn up the heat,” he remembers thinking. “I have four kids to feed.” So, the dedication of a father, the positive attitude of a stubborn self-confessed pig head, and shocking success all led to Miro’s success.
Not to mention some fantastic coaching from Amy Wees.
THE IMPORTANCE OF HONESTY AND LESSONS LEARNED
“There’s no magic bullet to success,” Miro assures us. “It’s a grind. It takes a lot of different steps. You pay attention to the details.”
That doesn’t come easy for a visionary like Miro. He smirks when I call him this, and says, in his characteristically self-deprecating way, that “visionary” is a nice way of saying “scattered and flaky.”
“My kids ask me, Dad, how come you never screw stuff up? I’m like, Are you kidding me?”
Miro attributes his success to hard work and that never-say-die attitude — but he also has Amazing at Home to thank. He has that honest friend to thank, the one who told him to just shut up and take the course, and leave his misconceptions about Amazon at the door.
“Amy’s big thing is she’s not putting filler in there,” he says. “She’s giving you what you need.”
So here are some truth bombs from Miro himself, whose success story is a fantastic paradigm for any starting seller – or anyone who needs to scale upwards.
First of all, there’s trial and error. Rather than big immediate wins – that magic bullet, that hack that doesn’t exist — go for incremental improvement.
Secondly, people connect to authenticity. “One of my most popular videos is some goofy video I did off my cell phone. And people just love it.” As the saying goes, don’t take life too seriously; you’re not getting out of this alive anyway.
Thirdly, know that you don’t know. Miro waxes poetic as he calls up Socratic philosophy. New sellers must be a sponge, sopping up new information wherever they can. Amazon is heading into “survival of the best margins,” as Miro likes to call it. It’s a crazy world out there — in order to compete, arm yourself with knowledge. Be in a constant state of learning and humility.
A MIDDAY STARBUCKS DATE WITH YOUR 7-YEAR-OLD
So, with this intense journey, riddled with failure and necessary redirection, what’s the point? What’s the benefit of all this? It’s obviously not the star-studded path to passive income that other would-be gurus like to claim it is.
Miro’s entire demeanor softens at this point.
He smiles, “Right now, I’m in a house I kinda use as an office, and my 15-year-old daughter’s in the back, packing special orders. I see her all day every day.”
He continues: “My 7-year-old was home for the summer, he had his own desk set up around the corner from me. We go out for Starbucks at 2 in the afternoon when we start getting slow.”
It’s the luxury of controlling one’s time.
It’s not the same as idleness. “I burn through two laptop batteries in a day,” Miro promises. “You still work. But you control your time, and that’s a luxury.”
Now, he can visit his son abroad at University 5 times a year. What a far cry from that apartment that smelled of cat pee.
SO, CHECK YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR.
Life lessons from this successful seller.
- Humility
- Authenticity
- Embracing failure
- Working hard
- Do it with love!
Perhaps it helps to start with a kick-ass product that’s already doing well off Amazon.
But all of that success becomes sustainable with the right attitude.
Tell us — which mindset is the most important for you? Which of Miro’s values do you think is the most crucial? We can’t wait to hear from you!
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