It started as a side hustle. Will Basta was working in corporate healthcare tech enterprises and startups when his love for alternative investments led him to an underserved niche — people who want to invest in the booming eCommerce industry, without having to build their own eCommerce store.
“I’ll always believe in real estate long term,” Basta, founder of Ascend E-Com, said to Ricci Truong of the CamaPlan Podcast, “but at the end of the day, it’s a very inflated market. And the stock market is obviously volatile. [But] what is constantly growing through economic downturns is Amazon.”
“Who doesn’t want a piece of a $4.8 trillion eCommerce market globally?” he said.
Basta, who owns several Amazon stores in his own right, now helps investors diversify their portfolio and expand into eCom by building their Amazon stores for them, from the ground up.
Walking The Talk — Two Warehouses’ Worth
This isn’t a fly-by-night operation. Since quitting his job to make his side hustle a full-time business, Basta grew Ascend Ecom from 10 clients to 350 clients in roughly a year and a half, pushing over $30 million in revenue to client businesses.
They don’t just set up your Amazon store, either. They select and source products based on a proprietary data-scraping and analysis process, acquire the products, package them, and ship them to Amazon warehouses. It’s an end-to-end solution.
Ascend is actually a fully-realized logistics company. They operate a 15,000 square-foot warehouse in Grand Prairie, TX, a suburb of Dallas, and they just opened up their second Grand Prairie warehouse — this one 25,000 square feet.
And with a Texas-based staff of 80, that’s a lot of boots on the ground. Basta deploys those boots to add value to his clients.
“We go to liquidation centers throughout Texas for products that you cannot find anywhere online,” Basta said, “just to sell for our clients at 70% margins. Things like Dyson Vacuums and Sonos Speakers and things that are insane.”
Always Looking for an Alternative
Quite a shift for a guy who originally wanted to go pre-med … until he realized what clinical work was actually like. Basta’s entrepreneurial spirit has always pulled him in the direction of “alternative investments” — of the beaten path of stocks, bonds, commodities, and traditional real estate.
In addition to his eCom stores, his personal portfolio currently includes land in Bali, a stake in an independent film, 10% of a restaurant, and an impact investment to supply clean water to drought-prone Pakistan.
Basta encourages his clients (who range in age from 22 to 70, from their first eCom store to their 50th) to think of their eCom stores this way — as “alternative investments.” They get a “done-for-them” passive investment solution — including training on how to use business loans to leverage their equity.
“They’re essentially paying a premium to get a head start and skip the line in the industry,” Basta said, “and then have a team of experts handle the entire investment for them.”
Built to Sell
That’s the first 3-6 months of the client cycle, anyway. After six months, Basta and his team can use their experience to start creating — adding value to the Amazon store the way an Airbnb owner might get creating to add value to a short-term rental to attract higher-paying guests.
“This isn’t an investment that’s going to replace your income,” Basta said. “It’s supplemental …
but it’s a true digital asset”
This includes the underrated ability to sell the store once it has achieved stable operations.
“We build these businesses specifically in a way where if you wanted to exit in two, three years, it is sellable,” Basta said. “It’s a compliant business that has a model attached to it that is valued higher than just someone who’s selling outta their garage on Amazon.”
If he could go back in time and give his younger self advice, Basta would tell himself not to waste time on worry — there’s no such thing as a problem-free business, but when problems arise, he can handle them.
“It is okay to take a step out, take a deep breath,” he said. “The business is not gonna burn down.”
