My Go Fund Me Campaign

It has been ages since my last post. I have finally completed most all of the translation work on my website and have something that I can be truly proud of:

www.brixtonchrome.com

But, I got it done too late - the Bed and Breakfast has wound down for the winter, and the process of building traffic and sales revenue will take much, much longer than I realized. So, I have had to take on accounting work on a part time basis to keep the bills paid.

But, if I really want to get this business off the ground, once and for all, I need about $5,000 to advertise on Google and Facebook. I am already starting to seek out organic opportunities to advertise by submitting my written content to stamp magazines and publications. But in the meantime I must advertise. I do not have the funds though to pay the bills and do this advertising. So, after much thought and consideration, I started a Go-fund me campaign:

https://www.gofundme.com/help-me-launch-a-truly-remarkable-stamp-website

In three weeks I have raised about 1/5th of my goal. I have made great progress toward the viability of my business, as I explain in the video below. The main problem has been E-bay: it's deceptive business practices and its lack of efficiency. After a year of hard work I have built a solid platform, I have built almost enough of a following to make a living, but I need a final push to get over the hump.

That is all I wanted to share for now. I will be back in the New Year and will explain what has happened since my website went live. 

Off On Vacation for 2 Weeks And The New Brixton Chrome Website Is Finally Ready

I must apologize again to my readers for another break in the continuity of my posts. I had resumed posting last week and had hoped to complete this week's post today before I go on vacation tomorrow for two weeks. However, the final content edits that I had to make to the my new website took more time than I expected, so unfortunately I did not get a chance to prepare this week's post.

However, the new Brixton Chrome website is now completely functional. The only thing I have left to do is migrate my Canadian and Nigerian stamp blogs to it, install the language translation app and connect all the social media sales channels. I will deal with all that when I return, as well as resuming my regular posting schedule. I do apologize for all the interruptions, but I can promise you all that I don't have any other plans, except possibly to take a week in January next year. So, you can look forward to at least 2 or three uninterrupted months of postings.

The website itself has been well worth the effort and the patience that it has taken to complete it. It is my belief that it has the potential to be a truly world-class website and resource for stamp collectors. In its pages you will find all the information you could be looking for regarding major topics of concern to intermediate and advanced collectors, and an entire section devoted to beginners. As I had alluded to in my last post, I am now trying to position myself to begin marketing the hobby to the population at large, and it is my hope that this new website will succeed in presenting the hobby in a less stuffy light.

So, while I am away, I would strongly encourage you to visit the new website and explore its pages. If any of you have any suggestions as to topics you would like to see covered, or issues that you think should be addressed, please send me a comment.

I look forward to resuming my regular posting schedule, once and for all starting on Tuesday, October 9, 2018.

Until then, you can visit the new website at:

www.brixtonchrome.com

Almost 4 Months Have Gone By, The Website is Finished and Major Life Lessons Learned

Wow, almost 4 months has gone by since my last post - the longest I've ever gone between posts. I had kept intending to write one, but so much has been happening, that I just haven't had time.

In June and July I was preoccupied with getting my website populated with all my E-bay listings, while at the same time trying to list new material on the website. Although the website interface had many good and useful features, the import of listings was not at all seamless. There was no way to import directly from E-bay. Fortunately for me, I had created everything after April 2016 on Auctiva, and the website interface was with Auctiva Commerce. Indeed, what had made me choose Auctiva Commerce was (1) a complete lack of awareness of what was out there, and (2) I was pleased with how simple Auctiva had made my life with E-bay. But, because of that, I didn't do my homework. I assumed that Auctiva Commerce would work well for me.

There were lots of good features and I could tell that when the product came out in 2009, it was cutting edge. But almost instantly, there were things that I noticed that I didn't like:

1. Even though I had created over 6,000 listings in Auctiva, the import from Auctiva to Auctiva commerce was not seamless. The item quantities did not import, the SKU's did not import, the meta data for SEO did not import, and not all of the images imported and often not in the right order. So, in order to bring the new website online I was faced with having to edit over 6,000 listings, even though I had created them on a product that Auctiva themselves had designed. FIRST MAJOR RED FLAG!
2. There was no integration with any social media channels AT ALL. In fact, to be on the website interface, it was as if social media did not exist. 
3. I had paid a high monthly fee - $120 USD for nearly 2 years because I didn't want to lose all the setup work I had done on the store before April 2018. There was no way to pause it, or downgrade it without losing my work. So I paid through the nose. During those 2 years I never saw Auctiva do an upgrade to the interface. Not once. 
4. There were other things that I couldn't customize, like the buy button, which was a small link rather than a large button. I was limited to 5 web pages in my navigation, so I had to pack a lot of information into them, making for very, very long web pages. 
5. The home page design looked dated. 

Despite all this, I decided to press on anyway, reasoning that my customer base would still like the site. I reasoned that I could use workarounds to deal with the lack of social media integration and other issues. I believe now that it was because I had forgotten the issue of sunk cost, and it never occurred to me that even though I would lose the work I had done to that point if I scrapped it and went with a more cutting edge platform, that I might gain far more in productivity. 

Finally about four weeks ago, I was doing some listings on the website. I had discovered the "variants" feature where I could pack all the varieties into one listing using drop down menus, which would allow me to replace what had previously been 25-50 listings, with one single listing. It would save time and would make shopping easier for customers. I was really excited, and I spent a day on listings for two Scott numbers, which would have taken me a week to do before. 

But then I went to test the listings out and it took 6 full seconds for the listing to respond when the option in the first of three dropdown menus was selected. Then it took another 6 seconds for the other two. So, it was half a minute before you could even see what options were available. I realized that there was no way that customers would ever put up with this. Then I started running tests on the web page speeds and on the shopping cart. They were awful: every page was taking 6-8 seconds to load and my traffic was bouncing terribly. I realized at that moment that the site was useless unless something could be done to speed it up. I contacted support and was told that nothing could be done ant it was suggested that I needed to use a different store theme. I decided to investigate further, bu looking online to see if anyone else with Auctiva had this problem. Lo and behold I discover that many, many users have complained about slow loading speeds from the beginning, when Auctiva went in this business in 2009. So, cleary they knew about the issues and had no intention of fixing them. They were charging a premium price for an inferior product. 

This brings me to my first life lesson learned:

Never trust a business to offer value for money, or assume that they will act rationally in this regard. They won't. Some businesses are only interested in milking their initial investment for as much as they can get, and do not care at all about what happens to you. Also, if you feel in your gut that you are working with an inferior product,  STOP, and look for an alternative. 

Do not make the mistake of sticking it out - particularly with an IT or technological product. The reason is simply that whatever problem you have encountered is very unlikely to be the only one. Technology is constantly changing to the point that your E-commerce company should be making constant updates to the architecture. By the time you are able to clearly notice that an E-commerce or other technological solution is dated, it means that the company selling it is milking their investment. It is already too late. 

I had mistakenly assumed that speed of loading would not be an issue for my website, because I knew how critical this is to Google. I assumed that a company like Auctiva would not dare sell a product that would be so inferior as to doom their users to low Google search rankings. But I was wrong. I would have avoided this though if I followed my instincts and acted as soon as I noticed the first problems with the import from Auctiva, or the complete lack of social media integration. 

So, at the beginning of August, I was in a position of realizing that all the work I had done since February was all for nought. I had an incredibly sinking feeling. 

The following week, I started with Shopify and boy was in for a pleasant surprise. What I saw was an up to date interface, that was designed impeccably. I saw a platform which fully integrates every major social media platform you can think of. I saw an interface that is replete with apps and tools that will help you with the tedious tasks involved in migrating your content away from E-bay and other platforms. They aren't free, but for $230 US dollars, I was able to get all 6900 of my e-bay listings off E-bay and onto Shopify in just a few hours, with minimal errors. All the errors that I did encounter (about 30) were or missing pictures, where it is likely that e-bay lost the pictures in the past several months. Their customer support was amazing - you could call anytime 24/7, or you could live chat online. I did both, and made a new rule for myself, which I have followed religiously for the past 4 weeks:

If it looks like it will take more than an hour to do, STOP and look to see if there is an app that can do it faster, or google what you are trying to do, or call customer support. 

You will be amazed at the tools that are available out there. For example, I had decided that I no longer wanted my picture in my listings. I had Rohit, a manager at Shopify, delete them on the import, but then I discovered that some were still present in the listings. But the question now was, which ones? How am I going to check 6,900 listings quickly to see which ones have the offending picture? In the old days, I would have manually edited each listing, which would have taken weeks. Here, I found an app that will export all my inventory detail into an excel CSV file that is specially formatted to be editable, so that the changes can be re-imported to shopify. So using this, I was able to get a list of all the image URL's. But then I had a new problem: how can I tell which URL's are the picture I want to delete? 

The old me would simply start copying and pasting each URL into a web page to check which picture it is, for all 23,000 pictures! This would have taken days if not weeks to do. As it turns out, a little google search revealed that you can insert code into excel to run a subroutine that will download the images automatically and put them in the next column on the spreadsheet. The code was shown on a web page and it was simply a matter of hitting Cntrl F11 and then pasting the code in a box and hitting F5 sets the thing in motion. It took just over an hour to run, but at the end of it, I had a spreadsheet with all the images in it. So, then I could go through and delete the rows that had the pictures I wanted to keep, and then what I had leftover, was a spreadsheet containing all the pictures I wanted to delete. I simply changed the image command in one column from "Merge" to "Delete", re-imported it to shopify and poof, all 351 of those offending pictures that Rohit missed were gone! One day to do what would have taken me weeks before. 

So, after four weeks of work and having put my blogs on hold to focus 100% on this, I now have a superb website that is fully functional and contains all my E-bay listings. E-bay no longer has power over me. I processed my first order on the website earlier this week. There are a few things that I still have to do of course, but most of these are things that I couldn't even dream of doing with the old site:

1. Editing the listings to remove abbreviations from the titles and redundant text that I had to include in order to comply with E-bay's rules.
2. Migrating my blog content to the website, so that my customers who want to find the blog, can do so easily and so that my readers will be on my site and can shop there if they so wish. 
3. Installing multi-language apps to translate the content into every major language, so that the site will be truly international. 
4. Importing my mailing list and sending out e-mail invites to existing customers to activate their accounts. 

So, far from being gone, I am very much back and poised to really hit this business out of the park. One thing that this whole process forced me to do was re-examine my business plan. Up until now, my plan centered around appealing to existing baby boomer collectors by specializing. However, as I developed the websites and looked at the social media aspect, I had an epiphany:

The reason why the hobby's popularity is in decline is because (1) people don't get enough exposure to it, and (2) the collectors the do meet come across as too serious and this puts people off. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that every adult I have talked to about what I do is genuinely interested UP TO A POINT, after which I begin to lose them. That point is generally where I get technical. So, with an entire generation of people on their smartphones, I see a huge opportunity now to market the hobby on social media, by simplifying it and making it less intimidating. At the same time, I can continue to serve my customer base. 

So, this realization has made me decide to offer worldwide material, with a specialty in Canada and Nigeria, designed with a heavy emphasis on topical presentation, so that people can just scroll through the pictures on their phones. 

For those of you who are curious to see the site, here it is:

https://brixtonchrome.com/

It's good to be back!

Sometimes You Just Have to Burn the Ships

It is hard to believe that I haven't posted anything since the end of April, so a post is long overdue.

Since I opened the website on April 24, the date of my last post, I have had 338 visitors to the site and exactly one order. According to Google analytics, only 27.5% of those visitors are over the age of 65, while a surprising 23.75% of visitors are under the age of 44. The rest of the visitors, some 49% are between 44 and 65. So the hobby is far from dying: there is still a vibrant interest in stamps for many years to come, judging from the simple demographic information that I have been able to glean from Google.

It is easy to get discouraged at the lack of orders, which I did toward the middle of May. However, I had to remember that I have done no advertising for the site and that 100% of my traffic has been organic. Also, it takes time for Google to properly index the site content. My items are now beginning to show up in Google organic search thanks to the meticulous job I did in completing the meta tags and meta data for every item in my store. Finally, only a very small proportion of my inventory is currently listed in the site. As of today, there are just over 1,150 items. But these are confined to only a few issues and represent a very in-depth selection of these few stamps. So the lack of orders is likely a reflection of the relatively narrow selection of material at the moment. On a very positive note, I now have 45 VIP customers signed up out of the 200 or so brochures that I mailed out in April. So, roughly 25% of those I mailed to have acted on my offer, and I expect that some more of those that have not yet acted will do so as the July 31, offer deadline date approaches.

In general, the customer feedback about the appearance, layout and ease of use for the website was very positive.

So, there were plenty of reasons for feeling encouraged. But my the middle of May, I was super down to the point that I almost decided to give up. I wrote a post in my Canadian stamp blog titled "Is There Really Any Room In The Hobby Anymore For Professional Stamp Dealers?". The initial response to this post was from the negative, cranky collectors in the Facebook groups and this negativity almost prompted me to throw in the towel.

But later in the weekend came the groundswell of positive feedback from my loyal customers and other strangers telling me to please not give up. These people reminded me that there is indeed a very large place in the hobby for someone with my attitude and knowledge. So, within a few days I was back to normal and energized. I decided though to take a much needed trip to Vancouver to rest, see my son, my mom and my friends. It was after this trip that I came to a stark realization.

During this trip my thinking was on how to solve the immediate problem that was stressing me out so much: insufficient cash flow. Not insufficient my very much, but insufficient nonetheless. The shortfall was predicted to hit in October. So I was trying to hatch all kinds of plans to generate another income stream to supply this cash through October 2018. I had come up with ideas to offer my accounting and business knowledge through online courses and seminars. The ideas I came up with seemed really good until I realized one very important thing:

The potential cash shortfall was a symptom, and not the underlying problem.

The implications of this were profound. I realized that taking my focus off the business to go off and do something else might solve the immediate problem of a cash shortfall. But it would create an even bigger problem: the loss of almost all the forward momentum that my business has attained over the past three years. It takes a long time to build that momentum, and it drops off, very, very quickly if you stop working on the business.

I further realized that the reason why I am experiencing these difficulties is that I am attempting to execute my business plan with too few resources. I need help from employees to get my inventory listed for sale online so that I can sell it to the customers that I have who already trust me, as well as attracting new customers. I also need to start travelling to stamp fairs and shows. Finally, I need more inventory to replenish the better material I have now sold and to expand my selection. I cannot do any of this without additional investment. I hadn't considered seeking additional funding because I had this idea stuck in my head that I am a failure if I cannot fully execute my plan using the capital I started with. Hogwash! I achieved great success with what I had to start with. I built a customer list of over 1,500 names. I have managed to generate a steady cash flow stream that has become less and less dependent on E-bay, and I have established a large online presence in all the major Facebook groups through my blogs. But the time has come to seek more resources - to take on more risk and not play it safe so much.

This realization made me remember something from my days as a history student in university. When I was at university in 1989, one of the courses I took was Latin American History. One of the required books was Bernal Diaz's "The Conquest of New Spain". It was a first hand account of the conquest of the Aztecs by Bernal Diaz, who was one of the conquistadors that served under Cortes. In his book, Diaz describes battle after battle in which the Spaniards were nearly wiped out. The men followed a ritual after every battle though: retreat to camp, tend to the wounded, eat and pray to the makeshift shrine of the Virgin Mary. At the end of one particular battle though, Cortes ordered all the ships that brought them to the New World to be burnt to the waterline. It was an all-in moment, a clear message that this was do or die. The conquistadors pressed on knowing that there was to be no return to Spain, and the rest is history.

Thus in business, sometimes it is necessary to go all in, to burn the ships so to speak.

You hear all the time about how it is important to know when to quit in business, but you rarely hear people write about going all in. There is of course a fine line between the two, but when your business plan is fundamentally sound and all the indicators are that it will succeed over the longer term, then you owe it to yourself to burn the ships. In my case:

1. The demographics show that the market for stamps still has a lot of years left in it.
2. My business so far has been highly profitable for the amount of material I have been able to process and list.
3. I have built a loyal customer following that trusts me, is spending more and more with me and is growing.

E-bay was manipulating my ability to grow and I have now taken steps to solve that problem by moving away from them. But the business has been a success fundamentally. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason not to pull out all the stops and seek the money I need to take it to the next level.

Thus, this month, I am preparing a new business plan to present to the Business Development Bank of Canada to seek financing which will finally allow me to hire the help that I need.

Our Website Is Now Online and Open For Business!!

When I originally started designing my website over a year ago, like all perfectionists, I thought I would wait until it was completely finished before unveiling it to the world. But as time has worn on it became clearer and clearer that if I didn't get it online and actually start signing up customers and building traffic, it was just never going to happen.

So last week, I made a push to get all of the essential functions on the site working properly, and to edit enough listings that had been imported from E-bay, to at least make a start.

So I started with the item categories. Previously, I had designed a basic one-direction tree structure for  product categories that listed all of the stamp issues from 1851 in order. This is better organization than one usually sees on most stamp websites. But I realized that it could still be made even better. I wanted a navigation system that would allow the customer to casually browse as many different categories as possible, without having to rely on search. So I spent the next few days adding catalogue numbers to the titles, creating additional layers of categories and adding entirely different classes of product, such as collections, year sets and complete sets. My goal was to ensure that no matter what a collector is interested in, they can find it easily. I am particularly proud of what I came up with. A collector can now browse:

1. By issue.
2. By condition and grade.
3. By price range.
4. By catalogue number - both Unitrade and Stanley Gibbons.
5. By lot type - single stamps, FDC's Covers, Cancels, complete sets, year sets and revenues.

They will be able to look through enough items to interest them, but not so many as to overwhelm them.

After completing the item categories, I verified that the other pages were all correctly set up and functioning, and then I re-directed my domain name to point to the website. We were now online and open for business.

Then I began setting up the Google product feeds, and the Adwords account. Of course there have been some hiccups, as there always are with these kinds of changes. But I haven't worried about E-bay now for well over a week. I still had some sales there this past week, but I am done with getting angry at them or worrying about what they are going to do next. It has been wonderful not having to care about them or think about them.

At present, there are only a modest number of stamps listed, but over the next 8-10 weeks, I will be transferring some 6,000 stamps from my E-bay store to the website. So lots of new items will be appearing continuously. After this is done, I will continue listing items until all my inventory is listed, which I expect will be about 2 years. When it is finished, this will be one of the largest, if not the largest online retail source of Canadian stamps in the world. I have also considered the possibility of expanding beyond Canada as well eventually. But for the moment, my focus will have to be on Canada.

I would encourage you to take a look at the site to get a feel for it. These sites are a lot of work to set up, but it is nothing that most people with a computer and the ability to follow instructions can't handle. It just takes a lot of patience.

The Website URL is www.brixtonchrome.com, and can be accessed by clicking the following link:

www.brixtonchrome.com

Also, customers that sign up for a customer account through the login screen on the site, and do so before July 31, 2018 will become a VIP customer automatically. VIP customers benefit from enhanced order discounts, which never expire and are as follows:

Orders under$10 USD: 5%.

Orders between $10-$20 USD: 10%.

Orders between $20-$50 USD: 15%.

Orders between $50-$100 USD: 20%.

Orders over $100 USD: 25%.

I believe this is an excellent enticement to a prospective customer. I am hopeful, and am looking forward to building this site and making it a success. 

I Have Decided to Take Decisive Action Against E-bay For It's Anti-Competitive Business Practices

So, this week I have decided that the time has finally come to take action against E-bay, not just for myself, but for other sellers, and for buyers who will eventually see their privacy and consumer choices eroded by this company's complete disregard for the rights of indivduals.

I am currently researching the competition law in Canada, with the full intent of launching a complaint with the Monopolistic Practices Directorate. I have started another blog urging buyers and sellers alike to come forward with evidence of these practices. You can read my first post here:

https://escapingebay.blogspot.ca/2018/04/the-reason-for-writing-this-blog-to.html

I am also going to report E-bay Canada to the Canada Revenue Agency for their failure to correctly handle the HST they are charging sellers. They are charging Canadian sellers HST on the gross amount of their seller fees before any seller discounts. Then they give the seller a discount is 10% of the pre-tax fee amount. This is incorrect, as HST is supposed to be applied to the final amount of an invoice. Therefore E-bay is actually only giving top rated sellers between 9.5% and 8.5% discount on their fees, depending on which province they live in. At best, if they are actually sending all this money to CRA, they are merely not in compliance with the provisions of the Excise Tax Act. At worst, if they are pocketing the difference between the HST they collect and the HST they are supposed to remit, they are engaged in tax fraud. I have pointed this out to 5 different customer service agents over the last 6 months, in a very friendly manner, and they have consistently refused to address it.

Oh well, if they won't listen to me, maybe they will listen to CRA.

The Evacuation From E-Bay Commences and A Hard Won Sales Result for March

Well, E-bay must have caught on to my plans, because this March was undoubtedly the most difficult and anxiety ridden month I have had for a long time. Almost overnight, my sales on E-bay dropped to a trickle, even though I was continuing to list new material and nothing had changed in my customer base. I decided to test a few of my theories about E-bay hiding my listings again, just to make sure that I was not paranoid.

What I did was I went to incognito mode in Chrome and went to E-bay from there and searched for my items without logging in. While I did not see any evidence at that moment of my listings being hidden, I did notice that the appearance of my listings was different that what I was seeing when I am logged into E-bay. For one thing, when I was not logged in, I could not see my user name or feedback rating on any of my listings. It would show that I was a top rated seller, but other than that, if you were a buyer searching on E-bay, you wouldn't know one seller's listings from another until you click on it. That was a new thing that just came into effect, as I don't recall seeing it before. That might explain why a very large chunk of my E-bay sales for March came from new customers.

It was nerve wracking to see the magnitude of the slowdown. It was very noticeable, and felt almost as if the powers that be at E-bay had flipped a switch and just stopped showing my listings. Fortunately, I had enough offline sales from my established customers that we still did just over $4,500 in sales - not as good as last March, when we sold the Canada #2, but as good otherwise.

This was a remarkable month in other ways. Most importantly, it was the month when I began to execute my plan in earnest, to finally get out from under E-bay's death grip once and for all. It started with me designing and printing a brochure for all my customers, which clearly explained the benefits of shopping on my new website, as opposed to E-bay. I coupled that with a letter that I carefully crafted, which would go out to all my customers, explaining my decision to leave E-bay, and to explain the benefits of the new website. Here is a copy of it:

I am pretty proud of this. It took me several afternoons of writing, and rewriting to come up with copy that I was happy with. But in the end, I was extremely pleased with the result. Vistaprint had a 50% off sale that week, so when I was done, I was able to print 1,000 of these, and 1,000 new business cards for less than $400.

I realized though that as good as the brochure looked, I needed a way to gauge how many of my customers are actually going to come to my website, or at least express the intention of doing so. But how could I entice them to actually reach out and call, or send an e-mail? I thought about it long and hard, and finally it hit me: I need to offer them a real incentive. I thought about the standard 10% off your first order that a lot of places give. Then I thought, nah, this is not enough of an incentive to convince people to act - no I need something more compelling. Why not give them most of the savings that would come from not paying final value fees to E-bay? Beat E-bay at their own game. So I decided to offer any customer who registers with me before July 31, 2018, an extra 5% discount on any order they place FOREVER.

I received the completed brochures in the middle of March and began mailing them out in stages the following week. So far the response has not been high, but it has not been bad for a direct mail campaign. Response rates for all forms of marketing are usually low anyway, and it is still early yet. I have only mailed about 1/4 of all the brochures, and I still have four months to get the rest out, and additional letters to customers reminding them of the extra discount, and the time limit for claiming it. This way, if the response rate is really poor, or there are other indicators that leaving e-bay will not be feasible, I can always abort the decision. But, I do not think that is likely, as a lot of my customers are now repeat buyers, and even through a large number of them do not engage me, they keep coming back. Not only that, but a larger and larger number of my customers are becoming repeat buyers, as compared to before.

Toward the end of the month, I turned my attention to two other pursuits. The first was getting material organized to sell on consignment to raise cash flow for the tight months ahead. I fully expect my sales on E-bay to continue dropping over the next few months, so I need to have an alternate source of cash flow to tide us over until the B&B gets busy, which it will in the next few months. So, I began gathering together the non-Canadian material that I have on hand, that I know I will likely never get around to listing in my store, and I began to organize it for sale. I have engaged three different auctioneers to handle the material. This allows me to establish three separate cash flow streams, and it allows me to match the quality of the material to the auctioneer who will get the best results for us.

The second pursuit was to start seriously working on the website and getting it ready to go live. I already had some 7,000 listings in the inventory module from before, but now I went and imported all the listings that I had produced since the last import into the website, and began editing these listings, to get them complete, so that the website features would work properly. This turned out to be way more work than I thought. So, after a full 18 hour day of doing these edits, I finally came to the conclusion that I would need to hire some help.

This problem kept me awake for several nights as I realized that the work that needed to be done was going to take at least 6 weeks of someone's time, and that there was no way I was going to be able to afford to hire anybody local to help me. This conclusion did not sink in right away, mind you. I spent many hours looking at every government placement incentive and workforce expansion program initiative available to small businesses, and there was really nothing suitable for what I am trying to do, which is a large volume of very boring, tedious and relatively low level work done over the next few months.

So, finally, after much agonizing, I remembered the site Fiverr, where you can hire foreign based freelancers to do graphic design, programming, writing, web design and other work. Usually the rates are much more reasonable for the work involved. So, I went on there and posted a job description and had no fewer than 9 responses. I requested quotes, evaluated them and chose one of them to assist me with the website edits.

I also began sharing my blog content this month with the various stamp groups on Facebook, and have seen my blog traffic more than triple, compared to what I was getting before. Each new post that I put out there creates more awareness of my brand, and I am confident that it will eventually lead to the blog becoming a source of new customers. I have already had a few this month, and I also had my first customer engage me to provide an opinion about a stamp. It was a fellow living in the Netherlands, and he sent me a Lagos stamp, seeking my opinion on it, after reading an article in my Nigerian stamp blog.

So, I am scared to death, but at the same time I am hopeful and optimistic for the future. One of the most notable things I have experienced since starting to execute this decision is that I am more relaxed, despite the stress. The reason is that I am back in control, and I am following my own path, and not giving some faceless, unaccountable public company complete control over my future.

Onward and forward!

My Dunkirk Moment - The Move to Escape the Clutches of E-Bay and Best February Ever

My apologies for the lack of frequency of my posts. I have been so busy lately, that I just haven;t been able to get as many posts written as I would like.

The stats for February 2018 are in, and it was the best February we have had so far, with total sales of $4,639, with a whopping $4,257 coming from repeat customers. We even had some guests at the Bed and Breakfast that stayed for more than a week. So all was looking good until I read rumours about the latest changes being planned by the powers that be at E-bay.

Then it hit me...

That moment, when I finally realized that continuing to be dependent on E-bay was eventually going to destroy my business and I was going to have to get the hell out of Dodge, and do it quickly - much more quickly that I had originally thought I might have to.

What has and will ensue is the entrepreneurial equivalent of the Dunkirk evacuation by allied troops in 1940. I recently watched the movie by the same title and thought it did a fantastic job of portraying that pivotal event in WW2 very realistically. That evacuation has always fascinated me as a student of history, because the Allies came so close to suffering losses so heavy that they may never have recovered. There were almost 400,000 soldiers trapped on the beaches of France and the Germans decided not to mount a full attack, reasoning that since they were trapped anyway and surrounded, there was no need to rush the attack. What they didn't count on was the resolve of the British and the willingness of every single boat owner in the UK to allow the use of their vessels to rescue the soldiers from those beaches. As a result 85% of the stranded troops were rescued within the 3 days during which the Germans halted their advance, and the Allies had a another chance to turn things around, which they did, in spectacular fashion, as we all know.

What does this have to do with my post?

Well I finally realized that E-bay has complete control over my business and is now the single largest threat to its survival. It's not the state of the hobby, the state of the economy, or even my competitors, but E-bay. For the first time, I am really scared that I may fail, despite all the successes I have experienced so far. If I am going to survive, I must get out from under E-bay's control, and I must do it quickly - before they make another policy change that wipes my business out overnight.

This post started over two weeks ago, and originally it was going to be a long post about my reasons for reaching this realization, and how I intend to defend my business. But I think that at the present time, given my dependence on being able to sell there, that it would be unwise for me to post all of those details now. I do think this is an important topic to come back and re-visit when all the dust has settled, and I am successfully selling from my own website. So once I am in that place, I will for sure complete and publish that post in its entirety.

Basically at the moment I am somewhat trapped. I cannot just take all my effort off E-bay and focus on developing my website, because I would lose the sales on E-bay that are sustaining the business, and at the same time, I would lose all my customers. So I have to figure out a smart way of finding time during the week to develop my website and actually get it finished and operational, so that I can start developing customer relationships on the new site.

This is why I compare my situation to the Dunkirk evacuation: I am trapped, but I am not being attacked - at least not yet. But I can clearly see the direction that E-bay is headed in. What I see tells me that many, many livelihoods are going to be destroyed as a result. So I have to get out. This realization and my ability to execute a plan to deal with it, rationally, calmly and professionally will make or break my business.

So the lesson of this post is this: just because your business is doing well today, does not mean that you can stop being vigilant for threats to its survival. By all means, it is important to celebrate the successes, but it is also vital that you develop the ability to recognize critical threats long before they actually threaten the survival of your business, and you develop the ability to respond to those threats calmly, and without letting emotion rule you.  

Sales For February 2018 Exceed $1,100 After 7 Days and the Similarities Between Business and "Risk"

Today's post comes on the heels of a fantastic start to February, which has, at least historically been a very slow month. Sales after just a week are $1,176 and whopping 89% of that total is from repeat customers, some of whom are returning after relatively long absences. So there is an opportunity to strengthen the relationship with them by giving them the new marketing materials and enhanced levels of service that they did not receive 2 years ago.

I have had a thought churning around in my head for months now about the similarities between the board game "Risk" and how to survive in business. For those of you unfamiliar with this classic world domination game, it looks like this:



As you can see, the object of the game is to take over the entire world by attacking other countries. Each turn, a player receives additional armies that they can use to attack other countries or defend the ones they have. The number of armies each player gets depends on how many countries they hold, with players who hold entire continents receiving additional armies. Asia, Europe and North America are worth the highest number of armies in this regard, while Australia and South America are worth the least number. Each time a player is successful in taking a country, they get one of the cards shown per turn. Those cards have a different soldier type shown on them, and whenever a player gets three of a kind or one of each, they have the option of "cashing" them in for additional armies. At the beginning of the game, these sets are worth relatively few armies, but as more and more players trade them in, the number of armies increases, until by about 10 sets, it is 100 armies or so per set.

What is significant about all this is that the rules of the game are designed to punish the seeking of instant gratification, while rewarding those who play the long, strategic game. I used to always lose at this game and for the longest time, I could never understand why. Then one day my dad, who had a very mathematical mind told me: "Son, you have to have at least 3:1 to attack and win. If you don't have at least 3:1, you don't have enough armies." I thought he was mistaken, since I had often been able to attack and take over countries with 1.5:1 or 2:1, but then I would lose them within 2 or three turns as the same player attacked me back, or another player did. I now understand what he really meant, which was that you need 3:1 in order to successfully attack, but also to successfully defend against follow up attacks.

Most rookie players of this game immediately try to go for Europe and Asia, and to a lesser extent, North America because they are worth 5, 7 and 5 armies each respectively. But the problem is, all three of those continent contain a lot of territories. Asia for instance has 12, while Europe has 9 and North America also has 9. In addition, each of these continents have many borders and thus many territories that must be defended continuously in order to keep the entire continent intact: Asia has 5, while Europe and North America both have 3. So the upshot is that these continents require far too many armies to be able to capture all the territories and adequately defend them. What most players thus do is spread themselves too thin in trying to take these continents and then they cash in their cards early in a vain attempt to get armies to defend them.

Meanwhile the smart players focus on getting Australia and South America, for while they are only worth 2 armies each, they have far fewer territories and far fewer borders. South America is 5 territories and 2 borders. Australia on the other hand has 4 territories and 1 border. So it is by far the easiest to get and defend. Smart players focus on these first, and this gives someone who holds both a minimum of 7 armies per turn, which they can concentrate on the few border territories that they have. They can then attack just one country at the periphery of their border, re-distribute their armies back to their border country, at the end of the turn and take their card. They can do this every turn, while all the other players weaken each other and bid up the value of the card sets. Generally, most players won't attack them because they are too strong, and what they hold doesn't seem to the other players to be worth the risk. Then, when the sets are worth 70 or 80 armies each, these players can cash in their multiple sets, one turn after another, and sweep across the entire board, winning the game in about 3 or 4 turns.

And so it is in the business world: you can think of your market as the board and resources as your "armies". Your cards are the milestones that you reach with your market: new innovations released, positive social media responses, positive reviews received, customer relationships established and so on.

In my business, the world of dealing in stamps for collectors, the "Asia" or "Europe"are the expensive, blue-chip rarities that trade for hundreds or thousands of dollars. Most dealers try to deal exclusively in these stamps because of the perceived ease of selling and prestige, and they ignore the "Australia" of the stamp world, which are the modern issues, that can be acquired in quantity with limited resources, but at the same time are very complex and require a lot of work to identify properly and sell. Competing successfully in selling the classic stamps requires a massive amount of money - more than most dealers have at their disposal, so what happens is that no one dealer ever becomes the largest in these markets. On the other hand, by focusing on becoming an expert in the modern material, specializing in just one country (Canada) and offering a second-to-none selection, I am able to afford my stock with the resources at my disposal.  I can also easily defend myself against competition because it would take my competitors years to catch up to me in terms of my level of knowledge and the depth of my stock, and by the time they do, I will have already expanded my offering and knowledge level to another area. As I gain more customers, more followers on my blog (my cards), my resources will increase, as my sales grow. Having more resources will enable me to expand at a controlled rate and increase the chances of my survival, to the point where survival is practically assured.

You can easily adapt this analogy to almost any business you have or want to start. The first thing you need to do is identify the "Australia": that product or idea that you can develop with the resources you have, or can obtain, that you can defend, and which will allow you to grow your resource base. Then you go about developing your product or service and collecting your "cards" and learning as much as you can as you go. Sometimes you have to re-distribute your armies (re-evaluate your business strategy), but if you start with enough resources and are patient, you will ultimately take the continent successfully. It is important to be able to recognize the "cards" for what they are and take them where you can. Any opportunity to engage with a potential customer is a card. There is no such thing as an annoying "tire kicker". Tire kickers are often over time, the source of your best customers. You just have to be patient. Sure there are many that will never buy, just as it is possible in Risk to keep acquiring cards and never getting a cashable set, though it is very unlikely over the longer term.

Once you have that continent and a growing resource base, all you have to do is slowly expand your reach, either by adding additional products or services, or going after different markets. Your resources will then grow. It doesn't matter if the rate of growth is not quick. As long as your competition cannot significantly erode your resource base, your resources will continue growing, and time will be on your side. 

Sales for January Are $4,119, A Very Successful Year and Why Competing on Price is No Strategy Most of the Time

January finished with sales of $4,119, bringing the total sales of stamps for the fiscal year ended to $65,970. Of that total, $49,864 came from repeat customers - some 75.6% of the total. The year before, total sales were $41,197 and the proportion represented by repeat customers was just $18,736 or 45% of the total. So not only did total sales increase by $24,773, or 60%, but the proportion of the sales coming from repeat customers went up as well. If you look at sales from new customers, it was roughly $22,400 in fiscal 2016-2017 and $15,900 in fiscal 2017-2018. So the sales from new customers did decrease slightly in terms of dollars, but not in terms of volume. I am still adding roughly 50 new customers a month to my customer base. So what all of this means is that a larger and larger proportion of the new customers are becoming repeat customers. That is amazing news because it generally means that as long as I continue to list new material and I continue to attract new customers, that sales will keep increasing. This all brings me to today's topic, which I alluded to in my last post about the importance of having a vision: competing purely on price is a non-strategy most of the time.

I don't have to look very far among my competitors to see the following:

• Selling perfectly good stamps for 25-30% of catalogue value.
• Not charging sales tax and including it in the price.
• Offering free shipping regardless of the size of the order.
• Bragging on E-bay that they are the cheapest on E-bay.

All of these things point to a pervasive tendency by businesses to try and compete solely by offering the lowest price. The thinking behind such a strategy is obvious: if they offer the lowest price, then people will keep coming back and the increase in volume will make up for the lower prices. 

There are many, many problems with this strategy for most businesses, which I will get into. But for the moment, let me start by discussing those businesses that have mastered the low-price, high volume strategy. The best one that comes to mind is Wal-Mart. They make billions of dollars and are all over the world. But lets stop and think for a minute about what they sell and how they execute their strategy:

1. They sell essential, every day household goods and now groceries. The merchandise itself is all stuff for which the demand is relatively inelastic in the sense people need it, and will surely buy it. The question is simply where they will buy it. 
2. Their supplier relationships are extremely tightly controlled such that they have complete control over all their input costs and they can replenish stock quickly and easily.
3. They spend a lot on advertising to reinforce the perception that they are the cheapest.
4. They have such large financial reserves that they can afford to operate at a loss at a particular store until the local competition has been all but eliminated and then they can raise prices slightly, or they can leave them and the increase in volume from the now vanquished competitors will be enough to make them profitable at that particular location.
5. They have access to an almost infinite pool of cheap, unskilled labour.

In short, Wal-Mart follows very well executed and deliberate strategy that works primarily because the merchandise can be obtained easily and it is the type of merchandise that can sell in very high volumes.

Such is not the case with collectibles:

1. Most of the expensive collectibles and stamps are scarce. You can't simply call someone up and order 1,000 units to replenish stock. So inventory has to be built up over time if it is to be sourced at the best possible price. You can't sell what you don't have, and if you sell material too cheap and sell out, then you may be depriving yourself of the opportunity to sell that item more profitably later to someone who really wants it.
2. Collectors are picky and are looking for very specific varieties much of the time, or very specific grades.
3. Collectors generally buy when they want a particular item, though some do buy when the price is so low they can't resist. 
4. The market for collectibles is limited to small percentage of the general population, but that market is one of repeat buyers. Collectors generally never finish collecting per se. 

So what a lot of businesses, many of my competitors included, fail to recognize is that if they pursue a low price strategy, it doesn't generally result in a high enough volume to compensate for the lower price. All that generally happens is that they sell their material at a lower price and they attract that small percentage of the market that only shops when the price is low, and that segment of the market isn't loyal to anybody. Plus, when your margin is already very low, i.e. less than 50%, it doesn't take much to cause you to lose money on an individual sale, and once that becomes a pattern, higher volume actually leads to higher losses. 

Take for example, a stamp dealer on E-bay who is selling stamps for 30% of catalogue value. Chances are that unless that dealer is literally low-balling estates and picking up collections for 5% of catalogue, they are probably not paying less than 10-15%. Let's take a specific dollar example. Suppose they sell a stamp cataloging $100 for $30. Their cost on that stamp is somewhere between $10 and $15, lets say $12.50. E-bay's final value fee at 6% will be $1.80 and Paypal will take another $1. If they offer free shipping, then that is a minimum of $1 again. Envelopes and packing material including a 102 card are another $0.10 or so. So their total variable cost before labour is between $15.40 and $16.40, leaving a gross profit of between $13.60-14.60. Initially, that might sound high, but the problem is they haven't even covered their fixed costs yet:

• labour
• rent
• E-bay store rent

E-bay charges around $350 a month for an anchor store. There are cheaper store formats, but those require you to pay a listing fee of up to 25 cents per item. So to avoid these fees and improve visibility an anchor store makes sense where the breadth of your inventory is large, as it would be for stamps. To cover just that fee, the seller in the above example would have to sell 22-23 items. So to cover labour and rent the volume required is much, much higher. 

Many sellers do manage to sell enough volume to cover their costs, but they get locked into a treadmill-like situation where they are always scrambling to meet their sales targets in real time. Everything they list sells as they list and so they are always having to spend time sourcing new material. Finally because they are selling volume to the types of customers who are price conscious, they cannot get top dollar for that rare and elusive item when they do get it because the types of customers who pay top dollar will not perceive them as sufficiently expert to know how scarce the item is and its true value, so they are forced to sell these items for less as well. While they may do a significant amount of repeat business, that business is heavily dependent on their ability to keep offering cheap material that their customers do not already have. 

So how do you break out of this type of race-to-the bottom treadmill? The answer is to focus on value creation. While some customers are only concerned with price, there are many for whom shopping is an experience itself:

1. They enjoy interacting with a salesperson who treats them well and remembers what they like.
2. They like being offered special merchandise that they weren't aware existed. 
3. They like to get a reasonable price, but for them dealing with someone that they trust is more important.
4. They like the convenience of being able to buy what they want, when they want. 

A business that can focus on the total customer experience is creating value, and because it does so, it does not need to focus on price. It can focus instead on offering the best selection of inventory and the best service.

This is what my business does. When you buy a stamp from me, it is fully described to a level of detail in my e-bay store that allows you to be completely confident that what you are buying is the exact stamp you want, even if you are an extreme specialist and you collect to a level way beyond the standard catalogues. If you want a deal, you can make an offer and most of the time it will be accepted, provided it is reasonable. My stamps are consistently graded and I usually have most grades in stock at different prices, so that you can get an appreciation for the price-quality trade-off and can chose a grade that is most suitable for your needs. All of this is before you have even bought the stamp. You will also see a very extensive stock so that if you are looking to buy several stamps, you don't have to go to several sellers and pay postage several times. You can do all your shopping with me and save on shipping.

When your stamp arrives and it is the first time you have bought from me, you will receive a tri-fold brochure from me giving you an overview of my specialties, my blogs and a never-expiring 10% discount that will apply in certain circumstances. You will also receive a welcome letter outlining all the services I provide that go beyond the sale of stamps such as opinions and consigning, as well as what my blog post for the week is. You will also receive a copy of my yearly philatelic programme which tells you which topics will be covered in my blog for the year as well as which issues I am going to focus on listing for the year. The stamp itself will be packed in cardboard wrapped in plastic to protect it from bending and water damage. So, from the time my stamp arrives you should feel welcome to contact me with questions, you are aware that there are online resources you can access for free and you have advance notice of offerings coming up so that you can look forward to them.

If you come back your selections will include personalized letters that will change to suit what you are collecting and are designed to let you know that I am thinking of you and keeping a mental note of what interests you. This is fully personalized service.

When I list material I focus on one issue at a time and I take all my existing stock, all my consigments and I buy as much of it as I can before I list it. Then I spend the time to properly identify it and grade it, before listing it all en-masse. It then becomes the largest single offering of that material anywhere on E-bay or online for that matter. So my customers, as they get to know me begin to understand that when I do these listings, they are very likely to have many items of interest. I write blog articles on these issues before I list the material usually to create awareness and interest in the material. 

Because I do all of this, my customers regard me as an expert who has the largest stock online. I do not have a complete stock, far from it. But I am always improving it and as long as I am the largest, then I will always be in a position to charge a little more than my competitors. When my customers are ready to sell, they know they can come to me and trust that I will help them get top dollar for their stamps because they have seen that I do not low-ball material, but rather I sell it for what I believe it is worth. 

This is how you can focus on the total customer experience. A low price strategy does not generally do this and focuses on only one aspect of the customer experience. For some things it works, but for many goods or services, it fails. As a business owner you have to really understand your business and your customers to determine if a low price strategy is really suitable for your business. 

Sales in December 2017 Surpass $6,400 and The Importance of Vision In Business

It has been a while since I posted - over a whole month! My GoFundMe campaign was a complete flop, raising absolutely nothing. But then again, I was too busy working to spend any time promoting it. My efforts over the past six months to develop the Brixton-Chrome brand have continued to pay off big time, resulting in sales for December 2016 of $6,589, making this one of my best months ever. This brought total sales for 2017 to $63,234, up from $37,593 in 2016. That represents year over year growth of $25,641, which in percentage terms is 68%! That is a fantastic growth percentage, and my prediction is that this will only continue to improve as this year progresses. We are only 9 days into January, and sales for January are off to a fantastic start at $1,500.


All of this is due to one very important thing: my vision, which I have never abandoned, and which has been the driver of everything in my business. I want to take some time now to share my thoughts about why a clear vision is so important, what having one can do for your business and how you go about developing your vision.

What Is My Vision?

My vision is simply to provide the best selection of stamps and service to collectors of Canadian stamps and postal history. Initially, that vision included British West Africa as well, but as I began to realize that Canada involved more than enough scope to fully occupy all of my resources, I narrowed it to just Canada.

When I say the "best" I mean several things:

1. The most consistent grading and descriptions on the internet.
2. The most accurately described material on the internet.
3. The most extensive overall selection of Canada.
4. The most in-depth selection of Canadian stamps overall, of any online dealer.
5. To be a trusted resource for Canadian philatelic knowledge.
6. To provide a way for collectors to sell their unwanted stamps when they are ready to sell.

Notice how, "be the least expensive dealer" is NOT on the list. I am aiming my business model at collectors who fall into one of two groups:

• Collectors who are generalists, who are looking for individually priced, less expensive stamps, but who nonetheless want them in top quality and are willing to pay a little more to get the exact stamp they want, when they want it.
• Specialists who are looking for very specific paper, shade, perforation, gum and fluorescence varieties, and who want to be able to buy them individually and rest assured that what they are getting is exactly what they want.

In both cases, it is the convenience of being able to buy exactly what is needed, the peace of mind that comes with knowing they won't be disappointed with the quality, and the knowledge that they when they shop with me they will be looking at the most in-depth selection of stamps, when the country is taken as a whole, that rules the roost here. My business model recognizes that collectors can buy stamps in bulk lots, at auction, for much less than I am charging, and it also recognizes that many of my competitors will sell specific stamps for much less than me. That is completely fine, because my target collector will still reach a point in their collecting where buying more bulk lots will not significantly improve their collection, and it is better to just buy specific stamps, or they will tire of hunting around and going to 10 different dealers to find what they want. 

The last two elements of my vision however, involve the creation of value for collectors which other dealers are not offering: namely a way to get more for their stamps when the time comes to sell, and a way to get easy access to in-depth information about Canadian stamps online. 

It is a simple vision, but one which focuses on value creation, and for which price is not the primary differentiating factor. That is very important for reasons that I will save for another post. 

How My Vision Developed

My vision developed over a 30 year period, as I experienced various frustrations in dealing with stamp dealers, as a collector. Some of my pet peeves were:

1. Not being able to find an in-depth selection of the stamps I was interested in.
2. Receiving stamps that were not as described when I ordered through the mail.
3. Being forced to buy complete sets when I already had part of a set.
4. Dealers offering sets in mixed quality so that I would have to buy several sets if I wanted a shot at putting together a superbly centered set.
5. Not being able to buy some stamps individually unless they were over a certain dollar amount in the catalogue.
6. Not having any way to sell my duplicates without having to sell them all at once, at a deep discount from catalogue value.
7. Not having any online access to in-depth information about the stamps I was interested to help further my collecting interest.

In each case, I often thought "What I would give to find a dealer who would...". I was a budget conscious collector, but I was never fanatical about obtaining the lowest price. I approached my hobby in a very holistic way, with the assumption that over time, my purchases would average out: some would be bargains, and others would be more expensive.

Now, I assumed that there would be enough other collectors out there, just like me, who would have similar pet peeves, and who would be willing to pay to deal with someone who addressed most or all of them. However, what is critical in business, and a step that most unsuccessful businesses fail to take is to test this kind of assumption before they go all in and invest all their resources.

What I did, is I started an e-bay store in 2010 dealing in superb classic stamps from around the world issued before 1870. It bombed. After six months, I had only 1 or 2 sales. In hindsight, it probably would have done OK, if I had stuck with it, although I will say that lack of inventory was one problem that a business like that would have had, as superb pre-1870 stamps are very hard to come by. But I decided to try my hand at opening a second store, this time dealing in Canada. I started it with about $10,000 worth of 1920's and 1930's mint stamps that I had from my personal collection. Instantly, I saw some success, with sales in my first week. I realized I was on to something , and I closed the other classics store to focus on the Canadian store.

But I did not go full time. I kept my job in public accounting for another 5 years. During that time, I worked on the store when I could and I experimented with listing different issues, to different levels of detail to see what would sell. I found that nearly every period would sell eventually and that customers liked my style and that although fewer customers were willing to pay my prices as compared to my competitors, there were enough customers to justify expanding the business to a full time operation. However, when I made that decision, I had not yet started my blog. I was not yet writing letters to customers and engaging them with each order, and I was not accepting consignments. Also, my online presence was limited to only about 700 items - 10% of what I have listed now. So, in a nutshell, I had really only addressed pet peeves 2-5 when I made the decision to become full time.


How My Vision Has Shaped My Business

The great thing about having a vision like this is that it has provided an excellent framework with which to make decisions about the business. With each decision or activity, I ask myself "Does doing this contribute to addressing one of those pet peeves or does it contribute to the achievement of my vision?". If the answer is "yes" then I take the action. If it doesn't. then I don't.

One of the problems with being a stamp dealer, is the temptation to spread oneself too thin and to become a schlepper, by pursuing every possible avenue for profit. This is particularly acute in the early stages of the business when sales are not enough to pay the bills. It is very, very easy to buy a collection that is not within my chosen area, or to broaden out and start dealing in other countries because there are so many opportunities to make a profit. It is also very, very easy to focus on cutting prices to increase sales.

But if I go back to my vision and remember that one element of my vision is to maintain the best overall stock of Canada, so that when a customer is looking for a specific stamp to buy, I actually have it to sell, it becomes easy to see why a low price strategy is not in my best long-term interest. The reason is because the stamps will sell too quickly and it will be next to impossible for me to maintain a comprehensive stock. I will be doing far too much work for too little. Similarly, branching out into other areas or offering one-off lots that do not contribute to building a stock that I can sell from over the long term simply wastes time that I could be spending to build my long term sales infrastructure.

Each action that I have taken, or every major decision that I have made stems from some element of my vision:

1. The decision to offer items in the smallest possible unit, to give customers maximum flexibility when they buy.
2. The decision to use a numeric grading system.
3. The decision to scan both sides of every stamp issued before 1952.
4. The decision to write and maintain the blog, and post one-in depth article to it per week.
5. The decision to accept consignments from customers.
6. The decision to describe all varieties, whether of not they are listed in Unitrade.
7. The decision to engage customers by ensuring that they receive a personalized letter with every order that changes as the relationship develops.


How My Business Has Benefited From The Vision

I am now 2.5 years into my full time business venture. I am still probably 2 full years away from having all my inventory listed and probably another 5-10 years away from having what I would call a comprehensive inventory of every single Canadian issue. However, as of now, I do have one of the largest on-line inventories overall. Sure, many of my competitors have a vastly larger stock of some issues than I do. However, very few have a larger stock in every area compared to me, and none of them publish a blog or accept consignments on a retail basis.

So even though I am still a long way from where I want to be, I have been able to build a loyal customer following that is growing every single month. What I am noticing is that more and more of my new customers are becoming repeat customers, and more and more of these customers are spending larger and larger amounts. In addition, there are a significant number of instances where I am getting full price for my items. So clearly, price is not the deciding factor to a significant number of collectors.

I am now in a position where I can continue to systematically execute my long-term vision, creating a business that actually has some resale value, as a going concern. Without that vision, I might have been able to make a living, but I wouldn't have been able to build a business that I could actually sell beyond the value of the inventory. It is quite conceivable that I could wind up selling this one day to an auction house that is interested in opening an online retail store, or to an individual that wants to become a dealer, but does not want to have to build all the infrastructure from scratch.