Introduction
Neil Twa is an investor and operator who spent the last 17 plus years building and scaling e-commerce brands. He launched and exited 8-figure physical product businesses and raised $100 million to build an Amazon aggregator before walking away when the numbers stopped making sense. Today, Neil is a partner at Patriot Growth Capital where he combines patient capital, operational playbooks, and a mission to support veteran-owned businesses through strategic acquisitions in the $5 to $50 million range.
Founder Success Story QnA
What’s something about this journey that changed you the most?
Patience. Patience and perseverance are the first two things that come to mind when I was raising the capital and going forward. It wasn’t my first time doing that in business, but it was of obviously specific nature going to the physical products side. So as you just go through that process, you know, and having a relationship driven aspect of building the trust and the know and the like relationships that require to get people to invest in you or invest in your businesses or understand what you’re doing. It takes quite a bit of time to become an operationally proficient individual and in my partner and spending years doing this ourselves.
If we go all back where did it all started because there are so many different opportunities to pursue. Why this exactly?
Yeah well I mean I got into the physical products world because I was trying to solve a problem in business and business is nothing but a series of solving problems literally. You either solve the ones in your businesses or you solve it in somebody else’s businesses and that really creates opportunities for you and as I was trying to solve a problem in my business which was I was running affiliate offers. I was doing lead generation marketing and mobile marketing for lead generation offers. I did not own the offer at the end. So what ended up happening is if I’d get something going really well then the offer owner would want to change it or end it and kind of mess up all my marketing. So what it came down to is I was getting really good at doing that but I was getting really tired of kind of being on the hamster wheel in some ways I was still trading time for money. I hadn’t created any automation. I hadn’t created any force multipliers of my efforts and so I said what is the easiest way to start doing that with my knowledge and skill set and someone said hey have you ever thought about physical products building private label brands and owning the whole product brand and I said no actually I hadn’t but I went on the journey of figuring that out.
How do you define great business in the physical product space today? And what I want to understand here is today after doing it for such a long time, do you prefer to start brands, test ideas, find product market fit or you prefer to buy a business and then grow and scale?
Well, there are opportunity costs. You know, if you do a traditional SWAT analysis, strength, weaknesses or opportunities and threat on either one of those opportunities, there are pros and cons to either of them. There’s the, you know, build it all and keep it small so I own 100% of it and then work to build it into something greater or there’s to acquire greatness from a company’s brand and then take that brand and try to leverage it into new sales channels and new methods of marketing or opportunities to expand or grow it. Both of those are different challenges. I love the startup challenge, you know, aspect of it. I’m always a little bit of ADHD, maybe a little bit of self-deprecating pain, but there’s always that opportunity and fun to carve out a market where you see an opportunity with a product and you see a brand segment and you see your ability to come in and maybe slip into the number two position and boy, it just gets fun to go in there and do that hunting killing and go in there and really attack and go in and do what you know is really good and see that product start to raise up, see that brand mature.
Could you give us an overview of what type of businesses they were maybe what type of products and the idea that everything is to sell. Has it always been like this?
No, I actually adopted that process about 6 years ago. I actually went back a little farther 2016. I met a gentleman named Kevin Harrington and he’s the as seen on TV founder. He was original Shark Tank founder, whatever. And as I got to know him better through relationships and kind of expand my brain into the bigger, you know, business of acquisitions, growth capital, multi-channel sales, and big business, right, into the billions. It really kind of started to reshift my abundance thinking. It really started to get me thinking very differently. Not that I wasn’t thinking small scale, I just wasn’t thinking and I couldn’t quite see the forest through the trees. And in that conversation and time together, I started to see things a little differently. And as I saw them a little differently, that’s when I saw the opportunity to go out and run for acquisitions and get that capital raise that we needed to go out. The market just changed faster than we were able to finalize our capital raise.
Could you please give me a timeline of how has it been for you? I just trying to understand like when did you meet Kevin and what was the early days?
The original split into affiliate marketing that moved into the physical product world. As part of that process, I discovered Amazon and its logistics and system called FBA fulfilled by Amazon. And as a marketer who was affiliating products, the last thing I wanted to do was start filling my house full of physical products and shipping them every day. It sound like a nightmare, right? Because I was dealing in the digital world. So, it’s very different to move to a tangible product from a digital asset. I can move thousands of units of a digital product and not have them stored in my garage. So, what it got down to was I, when the FBA system became apparent that you could use it to move your product and not touch it, I’m like, “Okay, that’s something I can get into.” That was around 2012. Through 2012 to 2016, we built multiple brands. A couple of them hit seven figures. We had an event and that’s when I met Kevin in 2016. Got to know him a little bit better. From the years of 2016 to 2019, we had developed conversations, relationships and network that eventually led to hey, let’s talk about together getting into the aggregator space. Formed a company called Voltage Portfolios and then went out from 2019 to 2021 and raised about 50 million through two home offices. And that 50 was going to turn into 100 through the acquisitions. We were down to paper, we were down to the legal, we were down to the deal points in 2021 of November, I pulled it. It just no longer made sense physically for us to go there.
I want to talk a little bit about the meeting with Kevin Harrington and abundance thinking. Could you give us an overview of Neil 1.0 and then Neil 2.0?
Neil 1.0 was a working guy who literally went to college and dropped out so I could find out what to do on the internet because I was going to I was in a business a music degree which I realized at that point in time wasn’t going to take me anywhere. The internet came on and I so I dropped out of college to go figure out how to be on the internet and I ended up in a startup company called Sprint PCS which was launching mobile phones for the first time into the mobile space. And so I got to ride the Sprint PCS up from was a 5,000th employee when I got on board and I had five people underneath me and we were overseeing all the knowledge management, website and information for that company when it started up to about 25,000 reps and 80,000 people by the time I left. So it was a huge startup period watching the mobile phones. Got to see that whole company grow from the inside out which was fascinating. And then Neil 1.0 didn’t know what else to do just yet in business.
Between 2019 and 2021 you raised over 100 million to build voltage portfolios but you pulled back in November 2021. What did you see in 2021 that others didn’t?
So we have both been and my partner who started with me in 2012 is still with me today. He is more of my right-hand brain. Together, we kind of saw a holistic picture of both opportunity and then opportunity costs. When he came down to the numbers, after building the picture, the relationships, the connections, doing the meetings, raising the expectation and building up the expectation of what we were going to do and how many companies we were going to buy, where we were going to value them at, which ones we were going to target, he was running the numbers behind the scenes, making sure that we could do it operationally and control it all. With that having been very good operators of companies to date successfully through a number of major changes economically, we are very strong at operations. We run very lean. We don’t have a high overhead. We learned to do a lot through trained resources and structured resources that we spend a lot of time developing into our processes.
You had 100 million committed. How do you make the decision to pull back when others might feel trapped by the capital?
Well, you know, there were people I’d say the majority of them were pretty happy that I pulled back and explained, “Look, here’s the situation. I would be mismanaging your funds if we took them now and deployed them. Not because of operational controls or our ability to handle it because you’re buying an asset that is going to depreciate potentially in the next year by 30 to 40% below where it’s going to be purchased. It is going to flip-flop. This is a bad thing for both of us.” And there was only a few people as because we went to the home offices there were only a couple people versus like hundreds of investors. We only had three or four involved. At least one of them was upset. The other ones were like, “Thank you for not doing this to us.” Right? And those relationships were stable.
What about the timing? If this would have happened in 2015, how would things be different?
Well, you know, there’s a thing called mass adoption in any market segment. You’re familiar with this. There’s a bell curve of mass adoption. There’s early adopters. There’s middle market adopters that start to take on a segment. Then there’s mass adoption that occurs, right? In any early adopter stage tech startup, you know, otherwise starting up a business, there’s always that growth period where it’s the highest risk period. It’s the most costly aspect of the business. Any money taken during that period is the most costly money that you will ever spend in the business. As its value comes up in a market like e-commerce, it was on a pivotable upturn. So, what we had not seen yet was mass adoption through internet and e-commerce because retail sales, right, other sales not online were still much greater than e-commerce sales, right? Everybody sort of understood it. Many people thought it was a novelty and they didn’t really see it as a normal part of their daily life.
How did that experience shape your view on capital allocation in the crowded markets?
Yeah. Well, one of the things is of course he who has the gold makes the golden decisions, right? So, if you’re the one with the capital today, we’re able to do more creative financing than ever before. And one of the things we really look for is an operator who’s willing to stay on with the business and look at a creative financing option over five or seven years as we move that business into a second acquisition position. Right? So as we know that then every investor who’s getting involved in say a PGC business is going to know that their capital has a potential for return rate but not in the first 12 months not even in the first 24 on some of these but their equity stake in it will then mature years 3, 4 and 5 as we move to an exit and the majority of their opportunity is at the next exit.
When it comes to the structure, you mentioned leaving the owner with 10 to 15%. Is it always the case to always buy majority?
Yeah, it’s always the case to buy the majority. We are capable of operating the company so we don’t need the owner but if the owner has done really well and in a specific area of the business we see opportunity for them to stay involved because they’re very strong at it and we see other opportunities where we can bring our strengths to the table it makes sense to leave the operator in place. They have a lot of intellectual capital sitting in their head that isn’t always defined during a transition process. Well you can say well Neil give 12 months that should be plenty of time to transition. It’s not always the case. It may take a few years for the intellectual capital, the what ifs, the gotchas, the whatevers could have been fixed to be addressed in a business of that size over a few years, not just a few months.
Who is the typical seller?
We in our world from the e-commerce it is somebody who’s typically has a multi-channel type of business model. A lot of times they’re individuals, sometimes they’re partners, sometimes they’re family people whose wives or husbands have been involved in growing it up. They are typically not in a large operational capacity. Sometimes they are depending upon the size like they’ve got 20,000 foot of warehouse and seven people in a warehouse shipping products and dealing with operations. And then you find, usually the management teams are only two, three, four people deep. So they’re not extremely employee burdened types of businesses because of the e-commerce world. Unlike other types of businesses that might do 5 million a year with 50 employees, you can do 5 million a year with one person and a couple VAs. You can do 10 million with three or four operational staff for e-commerce companies.
What does your perfect acquisition target look like?
Well, we have three in line right now. So we’ve gone through about 400 companies in 18 months just to give some people some scope. There’s a lot of due diligence that’s required to do this. This is not an overnight process. This is not like in 3 months we have a $10 million company. This is the old adage, 18 months, 18 years to an overnight success, right? There’s a lot of time and diligence and conversation that has to happen. So I actually have one of those that we missed the boat on. One other one, actually two of them we thought were really close and we were ready to go to a letter of intent and in one instance the owner backed out and was like, “No, I think I want to do this on my own.” And in the other instance, they kind of lolly gagged around a little bit and they’re sort of ghosting us, but still communicating and they really haven’t pushed to the end.
How has your approach to buy and build versus buy and hold changed over time?
Yeah. Well, I actually have all the operators in my capacity now that I need. So, I’m actually turning down the consulting side of our business and we’re slowing down on taking on any clients that might want to build with us as a one-on-one people who might be, typically in their 40s to 60s and they want to build and they’re looking to build up an operations. They want to get out of something they’re doing now. And we help train them up as operators to build their own companies. And that’s one of the things we’ve done to build our operator base. So, we’re kind of pulling back on that a little bit because we’ve actually innovated a really cool software in our niche in our market space that is I believe speedboat to the Titanics that are currently out there and so we are finalizing development there with the use of AI systems.
How do you manage it all when it comes to focus now launching a SAS software, having a fund?
Very smart use of capitalization. Literally, you have like my partner for example, running the operational controls, raising up some of these individuals from the other locations and training them to become great operators and discovering, well, you have other talents that you can use and what if you did some of these things who have now stepped up and because they’re successful from Voltage’s brand, they’re like, “Hey, I’ll do whatever else. Let’s do some other things. I’d love to partner. What else can I do?” because they’re good and trained and motivated. I don’t have the employee mindset to deal with. I don’t have the payroll or money an employee mindset and I don’t have the healthcare problems. What I have is people who are anxious to earn and learn and do more things and grow bigger.
Do you consider yourself being an operator or investor?
I have moved more into the management investor role as the CEO of the company. It’s something that I have had to work myself up to as we’ve gone through this process with Aaron being more CMO level Reed being more COO level at the operations control finance level. They don’t need to get in their business about that. They know exactly what they do and I trust them implicitly. So now I have moved more into the relationships and building. I’m at the top level of the acquisition process for the companies we’re evaluating. If they’re good, if we see the upside potential, if I understand the vision and the numbers as I go through and look at that tactically, then I turn it to the team and say, “Hey, this is something you should guys should dig into the weeds on and figure out if this is something we should really do.”
What’s one lesson from being deep in the trenches as an operator that gives you an edge today?
Well, that is a great question. There isn’t just one thing. You know, right now a lot of operators are feeling that the tariffs are a completely destroying effect to our business. And I don’t actually see that. I see them as a method by which and a tool by which change is being forced. Change that I see and I had saw coming. So, as we were looking at businesses in China and other things and where our supply chain is, we made a lot of movement of products out of China. We have a few and then so do our clients that still are being manufactured in China. And so, we’re working through that. But we have also done quite a bit of sourcing outside into other locations prior to even getting to the tariffs. Just kind of seeing the writing on the wall.
What is something you’re struggling with today?
Something I’m struggling with today, allergies, because it’s April, so my head’s swimming and my mouth is dry and my eyes are watering and that’s what I’m struggling with personally right now is allergies. What am I struggling with in business? I’d like Amazon to play better on our marketplaces products there. Amazon, we’re struggling with a bit of realization. This is one thing that has been exposed in the tariff process is how many Amazon based companies that have some connection to China are being allowed to do just unchecked things in the marketplace outside the terms of service even outside of legalities that are kind of being exposed in this process. Like the cover’s been pulled back. They’ve been hiding for a while. Maybe Amazon’s been protecting them.
Where do you want all of this to be in 2030? Your fund, your SAS, five years from now.
What’s my five-year goal? I’d like all 20 of our brands to be doing more than a million a year in profit or greater minimum in the next 5 years. That’s a great minimized goal, I think, for 3 to 5 years. I would like all of our acquisitions to be strong and have at least five to 10 of those under our belt in the next 5 years that are strong acquisitions putting us somewhere around 100 million in total managed business. That’s what I’d like to see in about 5 years. And either one of those are in a position to have, you know, law of averages. We acquire five or 10 of those companies. Two or three of them are just going to explode. That just happens. It’s just a law of averages that you do a great job. Two or three are going to outpace the other ones.
What is your favorite book?
You know, I constantly reference Good to Great by Jim Collins. There is just so many fundamentals of learning about what makes a great business and then how now if you look past the book, even though there’s the 80% of it is 100% applicable to today, the 20% that changed were what happened to the companies that were great and how do you see them in the market? So as you read the book and then you look out and find out what happened to Walgreens, you’re like, “Oh, a great company that completely lost control. What happened to them? What made them a great company and why they fall?” So that’s just a great book now to see past when it originally came out and learning the process of who goes on the bus and where they get on the bus and who stays and who goes how you become a hedgehog.
What is the best investment advice you’ve ever received?
The best investment advice I’ve ever received, invest without expectation.
Neil Twa Business Stats
Neil Twa has built an impressive e-commerce empire over 17+ years, launching and exiting multiple 8-figure physical product businesses. He raised $100 million to build an Amazon aggregator before strategically pulling back when market conditions didn’t make sense. Today, as a partner at Patriot Growth Capital, he focuses on acquiring and growing e-commerce businesses in the $5-50 million range.
- 17+ years building and scaling e-commerce brands
- Launched and exited multiple 8-figure physical product businesses
- Raised $100 million for Amazon aggregator (Voltage Portfolios)
- Partner at Patriot Growth Capital focusing on $5-50 million acquisitions
- Currently managing approximately 20 brands
| Milestone | Year | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Started in E-commerce | 2012 | Built multiple brands, some hitting 7 figures |
| Met Kevin Harrington | 2016 | Shifted mindset to abundance thinking and acquisitions |
| Formed Voltage Portfolios | 2019 | Started raising capital for Amazon aggregator |
| Raised $50M | 2019-2021 | Planned to turn into $100M through acquisitions |
| Pulled Back from Aggregator | Nov 2021 | Market was overvalued, saw bubble coming |
| Joined Patriot Growth Capital | Post-2021 | Focus on strategic acquisitions with veteran-owned businesses |
Neil Twa Method
Neil Twa has developed a systematic approach to building, acquiring, and scaling e-commerce businesses. His method combines operational excellence with strategic acquisitions, focusing on building assets that can be sold or scaled efficiently. Here’s how he does it:
- Building with the end in mind – Everything is built to be sold eventually
- Focus on physical product brands with strong margins ($100-$500 retail price point)
- Develop operational playbooks that can be replicated across businesses
- Train operators rather than hiring employees to maintain lean structure
- Look for multi-channel businesses with upside potential in market share
Neil Twa Tools
Neil leverages various tools and systems to manage his e-commerce operations efficiently. His approach emphasizes automation and data-driven decision making across all aspects of the business. Here are the key tools and strategies he uses:
- Amazon FBA for logistics and fulfillment, allowing him to scale without physical infrastructure
- Cayman Data – A proprietary SaaS software that provides customer intelligence and product opportunity data
- AI systems for data analytics, forecasting, and operational controls
- Third-party logistics partners to streamline operations and reduce overhead
- Network of trained operators who function as partners rather than employees
Key Notes
Throughout the interview, Neil shared several key insights that have contributed to his success in the e-commerce space. These principles guide his approach to business, acquisitions, and partnerships:
- Patience and perseverance are crucial for long-term success in e-commerce
- Building relationships is essential for raising capital and finding opportunities
- Market timing is critical – he pulled back from the aggregator when he saw a bubble forming
- Focus on products with higher margins ($100-$500) to withstand market fluctuations
- Train operators rather than hiring employees to maintain a lean, efficient structure
- Always be building assets that can eventually be sold or scaled
Get Started in Just 5 Steps
If you want to follow in Neil’s footsteps and build a successful e-commerce business through strategic partnerships, here are five key steps to get started:
- Identify a problem in the market that you can solve with a physical product
- Focus on products with higher retail price points ($100-$500) for better margins
- Build operational systems from day one that can scale and be replicated
- Develop relationships with potential operators and partners early in your journey
- Always build with an exit in mind, creating a business that’s attractive to acquirers
Conclusion
Neil Twa’s journey in e-commerce offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs looking to build and scale physical product brands. His approach of building with the end in mind, focusing on operational excellence, and knowing when to pivot based on market conditions has enabled him to achieve remarkable success. By partnering with operators rather than traditional employees and focusing on higher-margin products, Neil has created a scalable business model that withstands market fluctuations. As he continues to expand through Patriot Growth Capital and his new SaaS venture, Cayman Data, Neil remains focused on strategic acquisitions and helping others succeed in the e-commerce space.