After almost 2 years of not writing new posts I felt inspired to revive this blog. When I started this blog over five years ago, I wanted to present a realistic picture of the trials and tribulations that an entrepreneur faces when starting and building a business.
In the beginning I wrote a lot of posts, largely because I could barely contain my excitement at this new lifestyle choice, but also because the rubber had not yet hit the road. What do I mean? Well, I had a bank account with my savings and so I was not under pressure to actually make money from month to month. I could afford to dream about all the possibilities and wonder that lay before me with my new business idea.
As my posts have shown, the reality turned out to be very different from what I had imagined, and the last substantive posts I wrote 2 years ago chronicled my attempt to turn my business model around and develop a business that could actually sustain itself.
Since then, I have been locked in a weekly routine where, a little over a year ago, I started a weekly stamp auction, and I have been steadily building that business into a business that can not only sustain Steph and I, but can also can provide a fulfilling job for a full-time employee. When I started the auction in August of 2019 I was selling 40 lots a week, for very low bids. My initial idea was to use the auction to attract traffic to my retail listings - as a form of cheap advertising, if you will.
However, in the process of running the auction, I began to learn something about why starting an online retail business is so difficult: buyers are both fickle and cautious. Without FOMO to motivate them to act, there is very little beyond impulse to motivate someone to purchase something they do not have an immediate need for. So, businesses that sell novelties and fad-induced one-offs, like fidget spinners can do very well in the short-term. But if you are trying to build a business that fills a long-term niche and makes your vision a reality, it is a very different reality. This is especially so where you are trying to build a business where you are dependent on repeat business.
Securing repeat business from a core group of people requires you to build a customer following. By customer, I do not mean merely a buyer. A customer is someone who identifies with your brand and actually prefers to buy your product or service, over your competitors. A buyer, on the other hand merely views your business as one of many suppiers, and they will buy from whomever offers the best value. It is very difficult to build a business on buyers, unless you have a very large product range and a massive amount of capital and the resources to be in a position to offer the best price. Of course, that is not the position that 99.99999999% of small businesses are in, so building a customer following is critical.
What I learned over the past six years though is that this is much easier said than done. You not only have to attract the attention of people, but you must stand out from the competition.
So, I think it is now time for me to begin taking the time to explain how I went from 40 lots a week and struggling to make sales of $3,000 per month, to 300+ lots a week and sales of $12,000-$15,000 per month in just under 2 years. In these posts, I believe will be the real value of this blog, for what I will share with you are the lessons that only 6 years of experience and staying power could teach. I will also share what inspired me to keep going when it seemed all was lost. Finally, as successful as the business is, it is not guaranteed from week to week, and I still deal with anxiety regularly. I also have an impatient investor, who at the beginning of the pandemic demanded all his money back. So, virtually all of my profit is currently going to pay him, rather than being available to re-invest in the business. So, there is always a fear that I may not have enough inventory left once I finish paying him to sustain the business. But, one thing that I have learned is: a lot can happen in 3 or 6 months, especially when you have forward momentum.
So, I hope you will join me as I resume my journey. If you are new to this blog, I would encourage you to go back and read some of my older posts, so that you can see for yourself what the process of starting a business and going through the initial struggles looks like - in real time. One of the things I vowed to do was write this blog as the events happen, so that the lack of posts for the past 2 years is itself indicative of an important reality: when you transition from survival mode to building mode, where you have some success and are now trying to meet the ongoing expectations of your customer group, you won't feel like you have time to write blog posts. Indeed, even now I don't feel like I have time, but I realize that I must make time.
So, with this, I will sign off, with a renewed commitment to begin sharing what I have learned over the past two years.
No comments:
Post a Comment