Why Didn't I Do This Earlier? The Importance of Customer Surveys

 In a previous post, I spoke about the importance of having a vision when establishing a business, and I explained why it was important. I said that it motivates you to stay the course when the going gets tough and serves as a reminder every day of why you have chosen the path you are on. 

But, a vision can also be a double edged sword, in the sense that it is very easy to assume that your views and attitudes match that of your customers, or to believe that your views are shared by most of the participants of the markertplace in which you are operating. Conversely, it is easy, when the going gets tough to pivot away from a solid idea because you have become convinced that the market is not interested in it, when in fact you were right to pursue your vision all along. 

I have always heard about the importance of surveying customers and explicitly asking for their feedback, and yet it is only just this week that I sent my first customer survey. So, why did it take me so long? More importantly, what have I learned so far? The answer to those two questions are the subject of this post.

One reason I didn't send a survey out was that I wasn't confident that customers would complete it. Another was that I didn't feel confident that I would craft the right questions to elicit the information I needed, and yet another was that I felt that because I had started a weekly auction, that the auction results and loyalty or attrition of customers would tell me how well I was serving their needs. My thinking was simple: if I was getting high realizations and doing well then I must be doing the right things. 

But I believe now that there was a much stronger reason behind my failure to survey my customers, if I am being 100% honest with myself: I was afraid that their answers would indicate that they wanted me to change what I was doing and to become more like my competitors, and that doing so would require me to abandon my vision, which had become my very reason for being in business, and I didn't want to change. A lot of us start businesses because we want to call the shots, want to do things our way. If we allow our customers to tell us how to run our businesses, then aren't we really working for them and not ourselves? I think that is a very natural way to view things and I'll bet that it is probably the true reason holding a lot of entrepreneurs from surveying their client base. 

In following my vision to offer weekly themed auctions, I have achieved some measure of success, but it has come at great cost:

• I often don't finish the week until 4:00am on Friday, which is really Saturday, and hence not sustainable, for a number of reasons.
• I have neglected most aspects of my business that do not have to do with the auction, and while the auction is imortant, so are all these other aspects of the business. 
• There are other potential money making ideas and ideas to solidify my presence as a leader in Canadian philately, such as producing my own catalogue or deluxe line of stamp albums, that are not moving forward.
• I am running out of higher value inventory and have to start buying more inventory.
• The retail section of the website is a mess, with old listings cluttering up the site and driving people away. 
• I wanted to start producing stamp videos for a Youtube channel that would discuss all manner of stamp related topics, but have had literally no time. 

So, it started to become apparent that running 2 themes a week for a 300 lot weekly auction is not sustainable, at least not unless we schedule some breaks in the schedule to allow us to catch up on other important tasks. Immediately, that realization set in motion a panic: what will my customers think? I can't scale back! I have an expectation that I must meet every week. Surely my customers have gotten used to my themes and will come to expect them. 

But all the above has made clear that for the business to survive and thrive and for me to find the right work-life balance, it would be essential to make some decisions around:

• Whether taking a break in the themes would be advisable.
• Whether or not to even have a retail section on the website.
• Whether or not to maintain the blogs, and other information resources.
• Whether or not to pursue the production of a catalogue or stamp albums. 
• Whether or not to produce videos. 
• Which inventory to buy. 

And so forth. 

Up until now I made all those decisions based on what I felt I knew about the market, and my customers. However doing that led me here. I pivoted away from retail after leaving E-bay because my retail inventory had so few sales, and the auction was the only way to jumpstart the business, engage the customers and make a level of sales that would make the business viable. I had started to conclude that maybe online retail just wasn't viable anymore. Maybe most collectors simply wanted to buy from e-Bay. I had assumed that my themes were what set me apart from my competition and that under no circumstances could I have minimum bids in my auctions, lest I drive all the customers away. Finally, because my sales have levelled off, I assumed that introducing higher value material was the only way to increase revenue.

I was also beginning to despair, because buying high value material is very expensive and highly competitive at auction these days and because of this, it is not really possible to buy at auction for say 10-15% of catlalogue, in bulk, anymore. COVID has increased demand for stamps so much that competition is pushing what used to be available for 10-15%, up to 25-35%. You can't buy at that percentage with a 20% buyer's premium and then put the material in an unreserved auction and expect to make money. For one thing, that 25-30% becomes 30-36% after the buyer's premium, 31-37% after adding shipping, and if it is a US auction, it becomes 40.3-48.1% after exchange. At this level, the bidding in an unreserved auction is unlikely to result in an overall profit, but instead a break-even on the purchase cost, in the best case scenario. Given other overhead, like wages and the like and you are looking at a financial loss overall. So, I started thinking that I wasn't going to be able to grow the auction once my better inventory ran out. 

But what if I was wrong?

Wasn't it time to go to my customers, the ones I have a relationship with and ask them? If they would all answer me honestly, then I could get definitive answers to some very key questions that would allow me to make the right decisions. Questions like:

• Do most of my customers actually prefer to buy their stamps at auction?
• Do they care about the information resources on the website and do they actually use them?
• If they do use the information resources are they happy with them?
• Are the themes really that important to customers? or just to me?
• Do customers only pay a fixed percentage of catalogue, or will they consider other factors?
• Do my customers actually want more high value material in the auction?

So, yesterday I sent an e-mail telling my most loyal, regular customers that I would be putting the themes on hold for 6 weeks in June and that I would be sending out a short survey and would offer them 10% off their next order if they would take the time to complete it. 

I went about designing a 16 question survey that was all multiple choice and tick the box style. I avoided any written questions, as I trust my loyal customers to not just pick random answers and to actually answer it honestly. But I wanted to respect their time and come up with something that a customer could complete in under 5 minutes. 

It took a couple of hours to design the right questions, but then I was done and I sent it out using my e-mail program as a live survey page. Within 15 minutes the results started to come in. As I write I have 35 responses out of the 70 names on my loyal customer list. Not bad at all. But what is most important are what the answers reveal and whether they comport with what I would have thought my customers would say:

• 90% use the website the most for the auction - no surprises there.
• 30% of respondents make regular use of the blog articles and other information resources - that is higher than what I thought.
• More than 50% of respondents named the selection of material as the thing they liked most about the auction, followed by another 20% that liked the lot descriptions best. Only 30% named price related considerations like a lack of reserves, $1 minimums and so forth as the thing they liked most - this was a huge surprise, as I had assumed that my no reserve $1 minimum bid was the key to keeping customers loyal.
• One third of the 70% above said that while it wasn't the most important thing, favourable bidding terms like no reserves and $1 increments were still important to them - this is not surprising.
• 65% of respondents were happy with the current size of the auction, with the remainder being evenly split between more lots and fewer lots. I didn't have any idea what to expect here. 
• 92% or respondents said that my current mix of high and low value material was perfect and did not need to be altered - this was a huge surprise, as I was convinced they were all wanting more high value material.
• Just under 50% of respondents said they wanted more pre-1950 VFNH Canada. The majority actually indicated they wanted to see more VF to superb used Canada. While twice as many wanted this material to be pre-1950, just under 20% of respondents want to see more VF used modern Canada.  - this was a surprise too as I would have expected VFNH to beat out VF used by a large margin and yet it used was in just as much demand as mint NH.
• 2/3rds of respondents want to see more Canada, but it doesn't matter what period it is from. In addition almost 50% want to see more pre-1952 British Commonwealth, and then about 1/3rd want to see more Western Europe and Elizabethan Commonwealth. These were massive surprises coming from a client base that I thought of as mostly experienced Canada collectors. First of all, they aren't wanting just earlier Canada, and secondly they have interests all over the world. Every region that I specified in the question was chosen by at least 2 people. This tells me that for many areas I will have to attract more bidders in order to have a successful auction, but that the potential market is there.
• Only 13% care strongly about the themes. The majority like them, but would still view the auction if there were no themes and almost a third don't care about them at all - this was a huge surprise again, as I could have sworn that the themes are a critical differentiating point. 
• Only 13% buy exclusively at auction. The remanider have indicated that they will buy at either auction or retail - another shock, as I had thought that retail for stamps was dead for any dealer that didn't already have a long-established customer base. 
• Only 23% determine a stamp's value based on a percentage of catalogue. The rest consider other factors, such as eye appeal, condition, budget etc. This was also a shock - I knew there were some collectors who considered other factors, but I honestly expected 80% to tell me that a percentage of catalogue was how they determined their bids. 
• 91% were happy with the depth of coverage in the blog articles and 65% would be happy with one article a month, with another 24% being fine with biweekly posts. This was not a surprise, in terms of the depth of coverage, but it was surprising that most were not expecting weekly articles.
• 75% didn't even know the community discussion forum exists, but those who did all found it useful. There wasn't a single respondent who said they didn't like the forum, or find it useful. Here I wasn't sure what to expect, but I thought most had seen it and just didn't find it useful. I was wrong. 
• 81% are very likely or somewhat likely to watch stamp videos if we were to offer them. No surprises here. 
• 57% are completely happy with the albums they have and would not consider buying a better one. This was a surprise, as I expected this figure to be much lower. 
• Only 1/3rd are completely happy with Unitrade as a catalogue. The rest are either very willing, or at least open to the idea of buying an alternate catalogue to Unitrade. Not a surprise really, but I did think that the percentage happy with Unitrade would be higher, like 55% or 2/3rds, rather than just 1/3rd. 

So, while some responses yielded no surprises, and validated my vision, there were some genuine surprises, which will prove invaluable in helping shape my future business decisions. Of course, all this assumes that the customers possess perfect self-awareness - that is to say that their behavior actually does match their beliefs. 

So what does all this mean for my business? Several things:

• The auction clearly is the core of the business, but customers have indicated that they would like to see the retail section of the website developed further. So, it will be important for us to carve time out of our schedule to do this. 
• While bidders like the fact that the bidding starts at $1 and progresses in $1 increments, this is clearly not the most important factor to them, and so it paves the way for me to begin phasing in minimum bids and stepped increments on at least selected items, without too much danger of driving people away. 
• There is clear demand for us to publish our own catalogue, which when combined with the other responses indicating that the most valued aspect to the auction is the descriptions, indicates that our KNOWLEDGE about stamps, and the willingness to disseminate it IS our core product, and this is what people are willing to pay a premium for. Up until now, we have given it all away for free. But we need to look for ways to monetize our knowledge, while giving away some of it for free. 

There are other things that will emerge, but we now have a basis on which to follow up with questions to further probe our customer's interests. Also, we can share the overall findings with our customer base, which will further strengthen our community.

So, there you have it. The reason why surveying your customers is so critical. 

The Psychology of Auctions - Why This Model Was a Game Changer

 I wanted to spend some time today to talk about the psychology of auctions and why the entire auction model was such a game changer for my business.

When I started the business I wanted to avoid auctions as a model, largely because that is what literally EVERYONE in this industry was and is doing. It seems that the retail model of stamp dealing has almost died out. It is at the point where I was unable to source very attainable stamps for clients of mine from other stamp dealers, because they had completely abandoned the retail model in favour of auctions. I didn't like this, because for me it seemed that the idea of being in service to collectors was giving way to purely financial considerations. The auction model is popular with dealers because it is 100% turnover, that is immediate, when there are no reserves, and it allows them to make a profit that is often as much or more than they would make in retail without having to invest a dime in inventory. But, the problem that I saw with all dealers following this model is: who is going to educate new collectors? Who is going to make the hobby accessible to new collectors? Who is going to help collectors who need specific items grow their collections? The problem that I saw with most stamp auctions is that they present the elite end of the hobby as being the norm, and they eschew the common and less expensive material, relegating it to being sold in ridiculously large lots that only a dealer would really want. 

So, this was why I avoided auctions and focused on retail. What I didn't consider though, was that it was possible to do auctions in a unique way that is different from what most businesses are doing, and in a way that address most of the concerns I raised above. 

As I explained in a previous post, I got into auctions by accident. I was trying to find a way to attract traffic to my retail listings on my website. I had tried everything: paid Facebook ads, Google Shopping and Google Adwords. Nothing worked to any great degree: I was just pissing money away, and with online advertising that is very, very easy to do, as there is absolutely no transparency in terms of how your budget gets spent, and in terms of providing you with actual evidence that "X" number of people actually clicked on your ad. 

The whole online advertising world is built upon the what I think is the completely false idea that all you have to do is attract traffic and if you have a good product it will sell. Go online and you will see all kinds of stats being presented about conversion rates being 10% and such. I think most of it is bullshit. The problem is that little distinction is made between the different levels of quality in online traffic. For example, high quality traffic consists of people who are specifically looking on Google for a product or service and are both willing and able to buy. For this traffic, I think the conversion rates quoted are probably accurate. But, for people casually searching Google, or who are scrolling on Facebook, or any other social media site, it is a completely different story. This is very low quality traffic, in the sense that there is no intention to buy anything. Heck, I have people on Facebook who like every single blog article link or ad that I post to my stamp groups, who have never bought a thing from me and never even placed a single $1 bid in any of my auctions. I'm not slagging these people off - they serve a very important role in helping me build my brand, so the term "low quality" is perhaps undeserved. However, the label fits if you are looking to this traffic for quick and instant success. 

In actual reality, conversion rates for any traffic that is not looking to buy is very, very low. So, the only approach that really works is to use traffic to create brand awareness, rather than look for immediate conversions. Brand awareness leads to the willingness to sign up for your e-mail newsletters, and it is at that point, and that point only that a prospective customer enters your sales funnel. The average open rate on e-mails sent to a mailing list is around 15-20%, and of that percentage, only another 15-20% actually click on the links in the e-mail the e-mail. From there, only 10-20% will actually buy the item advertised, or will take the action in the call to action contained in the e-mail.

So, let's do some quick math assuming you have a mailing list of 1,000 people:

• 150-200 people will open your e-mail.
• 3-5 people will unsubscribe and most of those will say they never signed up when they clearly did.
• 0-2 people will report your e-mail as spam.
• 22-40 people will click on the link in the e-mail.
• 2-8 people will actually take the action, whether that is bidding or buying.

So, you need A LOT of names in order to build a following of 20-30 loyal customers, because those 2-8 customers will not all return, or if they do, they may not be regular customers. This is one of the main reasons why repeat business is so important to the long-term success of most businesses. 

To get those first 1,000 names is no easy task and it will cost you time and money in running Facebook Lead ads, blogging and other "work" on social media. I found that a $50 ad spend on Facebook might yield me 10 names, but 8 of those names would ultimately unsubscribe from my mailing list, so building up this many names is expensive.

After trying to attract traffic for a year or so, using the usual methods, I decided to try unreserved auctions with a limited amount of material. I knew that it meant that I would be giving most of my items away, as I had no loyal bidder base: everything would sell for $1 or very low prices. So, I had to consider the cost of these stamps to be an advertising expense. However, this form of advertising made a great deal of sense, for the following reasons:

• The irresistability factor is high: who doesn't want to buy a $20 stamp for $1 or a $150 item for $5? So, there is a high incentive to take the action of placing a bid.
• The auction becomes an experience as more people participate, and it is fun to bid and win the items.
• My actual cost is not as high as it may seem at first: if I pay 30% of catalogue for certain stamps and they bring 15% of catalogue at auction, my true cost is only 15%. So, for an auction with $5,000 worth of material, my cost at the beginning might be $1,500 and if the auction grosses $750, my true cost is $750 - high, but not bad when you consider that you can blow $300 on Facebook ads and get nothing. 
• If a bidder is successful in snagging a bargain, there is a very high liklihood that they will return, especially if they know that the auction is held regularly at the same time.
• If I am going to spend the money with Google or Facebook anyways, with no guarantee of any quality leads, why not spend that money on a customer lead that is very likely to come back and bid again? 
• Although prices will initially be low, due to weak competition among the bidders, they will rise as more bidders enter the fray and start to compete with one another. 
• However, my expectation was that unsuccessful bidders would go to my retail listings so as to not leave empty-handed.

It didn't quite go the way I planned: the last thing didn't really happen. Instead, what happened was that most bidders came back every week, and so fairly quickly the prices begain to rise. I lost money in the first 10 auctions or so, and from 11 to 20 I was breaking even. After the 20th auction I started to make a profit. I also begain getting new bidders, usually 1 new name every week or so. At first one or two bidders were carrying most of the auction, buying most of the lots, but over time this changed, and I started to find that when one bidder stepped back and reduced their bids or spending one week, another bidder would step forward and spend more. 

It dawned on me that this was actually a viable business model in its own right, even with my small lots, but I wanted to refine it and adapt it for the vision I had always had. So, I decded to pivot and de-emphasize the retail section of the website, and place all my focus on growing the auction.

I eventually decided to do auction themes, where most of my offerings each week would follow a particular theme that I would promote. This would have the advantage of being highly promotable, as opposed to a run-of-the-mill auction where there is no cohesive focus to the stamps being offered. 

Soon after I made the decision to focus on the auctions it became apparent that 40 lots a week was not going to cut it, and I would have to increase the number of lots if I wanted to grow weekly sales. The problem with leaving it at 40 lots as my customer base grew is that there would not be enough material to keep everyone interested and there would be few to no bargains to draw new bidders in. So, it became apparent that it was important to ensure that 10% of the lots sell for bargain prices. If the bargain percentage fell below this, it was time to increase the size of the auction. Of course, too many lots would result in prices that were too low as well. So, it is a fine balancing act, to grow the auction in lockstep with the bidder base. 

The main reason though why this was such a game changer for me is that it really forced me to focus on what works, in real time, and the auction results themselves do not lie. Now, one reality that has become apparent is that my bids will not be high the first time I run a theme, because I do not have enough of a base for that theme to generate sufficient competition to make it sucessful. Thus, the concept of investing in business development does come to the fore, and must be taken into account. Nevertheless, if a theme is run three or four times and it fails to make money, then it is time to seriously re-evaluate it, and the data to do that evaluation is freely available, and it is timely. I can analyze the bids, because I have people's maximums, and so if the prices are low, but maximums were high, then I know that there simply weren't enough bidders to make the auction a success. If, on the other hand, the maximums were also low, then I may be dealing with an area that is unpopular with my base of bidders, and therefore there may not be a viable way to continue offering it. 

With online retail, it is very difficult to do this, largely because the data available is open to interpretation and there are so many reasons why it could be the way it is. One of the problems is that there are simply not enough transactions to do any meaningful analysis compared to say 52 weeks of auctions where 300 items a week are selling. 

Now, when I speak of analyzing the results I'm not talking about spreadsheets or detailed analysis of individual bidder's bidding habits or anything like that. For one thing I don't have the time, and for another I don't want to misuse people's information, particularly when I have been entrusted with it. I want to make that very clear here. What I am talking about is a general sense that I get after running many weekly auctions back to back. After a while I will know if over all maximum bids were, say 20% or 30% higher than what the lots are selling for overall, that is enough detail to evaluate the auction. As a matter of fact, a 20-30% discrepancy is what you want in this case. You don't want bidders consistently paying their maximums - otherwise they won't feel they are getting bargains. But, if I were to find that the maximums are 50-60% higher than the realizations, then I know I need to attract more bidders if I want to narrow that spread to 20-30%. 

Another thing that is valauble about doing auctions is the information they teach you about buyer psychology. Retail is based on the idea of a motivated buyer who knows exactly what he or she wants and appreciates the opportunity to shop for those things. But that model is based on people having the time and the patience to actively browse, and then the motivation to complete the purchase. The reality today is that most of the time one of these things is missing. People these days are largely overwhelmed with the number of choices and options out there, which has made retail very difficult. The other thing is that auction sites and marktplaces like E-bay and Amazon have created a perception that no matter how good the price appears to be, there is always a better deal just around the corner. 

A good auction addresses these issues by providing an experience that is structured. People are far more open to find time for scheduled experiences that they enjoy, such as TV shows and nights out. A weekly auction can mimic that, and at the same time it can provide structure by narrowing down people's choices and still satisfy their desire to grow their collections and learn about stamps. So, in that sense, if it is run properly, it has the potential to build a captive audience of people who regularly return to the website, and in fact this is exactly what has happened. On any given week now, I usually have between 50 and 60 active bidders and about 40-45 of those bidders are successful. Most of these bidders - at least two-thirds of this number bid every week, or every second week. 

Auctions provide bidders with validation about their perception of value, because other people are willing to pay as much or more than they are. So, when there are other bidders competing with them, they can often feel more comfortable that they paid a fair price for the thing they are buying. In retail, buyers are forced to comparison shop to gain that comfort. 

Retail also has no time limits, and so many customers of online businesses will fill their shopping carts and never check out, or at least not do so for a long time. An auction, on the other hand, with a definite end date forces a decision: either bid, or not. Fear of missing out or FOMO can motivate a customer to bid in the auction, and quite often, they wind up paying more than I would have sold the item on a retail basis for. That has happened at least 4 times and I am not sure as to why. 

What I have noticed in the past 2 months is that retail sales from the website have now begun to pick up, and most of these sales are coming from, you guessed it, the bidders. So, what has become apparent is that retail can work when you have already built up a devoted following of customers from other means, of which the auction has proven to be a very cost-effective way to build a customer base that is loyal. But, to try and build a retail business from scatch, with no hook to draw customers in, is in my view, virtually impossible -  at least not without a massive investment in online advertising to create brand awareness and build a mailing list. But, as I have said before there is no guarantee that such an investment will bear fruit. 

So, this explains why things were so difficult for me in that first year after I left E-bay and how what started off as a marketing gimmick turned out to be the thing that saved my business from certain ruin. 

The Importance of Vision: Drawing Inspiration From Frank Lloyd Wright, the Great American Architect and Applying it to My Stamp Business

 "I wouldn't expect that the architectural establishment would treat me fairly. Why should they? My methods directly threatened everything they believed in back then. In circumstances such as this, one knows what usually happens. I had my position determined very early in life. I knew where my star was and so I had a choice to make: honest arrogance, or insincere humility. I chose honest arrogance."

- Frank Lloyd Wright, in a 1953 interview, when asked whether he thought that the architectural establishment treated him fairly. 

For the past year or so I have become fascinated by Frank Lloyd Wright. I knew of him for many, many years, and I was vaguely aware of the innovative nature of his designs. What initially struck me were the glass houses and brick homes built in 1906 that looked like they could have been built in 1950. But beyond that I knew very little about him. Then, one evening while I was working on the auction, I began watching, or rather, listening to a documentary about him and his life's work on Youtube.

Wright was a master manipulator of light and proportion: many of his buildings look larger on the inside than they do on the outside. Many also make use of the natural features of the landscape they were built on, bringing the outside in. He referred to this as organic architecture. But let's look at some of his work:

Falling Water, considered one of Wright's masterpieces, built over a waterfall in 1937, with most of the house being cantilevered over the falls.

The inside of one of his many homes. Note the use of natural light. Does this look to you like something built in the 1930's or 40's?

The Neil's house in Minneapolis. Note the wedge shape and extensive use of windows wo make the space appear larger.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York City. This was Wright's last building before he died in 1959. It's genius lies in it's continuous corkscrew design where you start at the bottom and work your way up. You always know what exhibits you have seen and what lies ahead. You won't miss any with this design, unlike many other museums. 

The great workroom in the SC Johnson Wax building. Lloyd tested the strength of those columns with twelve tons of material, and it actually took 60 tons before any cracks appeared in the test column. The genius with this design is that this expansive space had no walls, yet the columns create the same effect as a wall, the "lilypad" tops to the columns create the effect of a ceiling, and the space between them mimics a series of skylights, letting in a soft light. Would you believe that this building was built in the mid 1930's?

What is clear to me when I look at these images, is that this is a man who had a clear artistic vision. He was not merely content to design buildings that followed established conventions and norms. Rather, he wanted to express himself in his work. 

And so it is with what I do with my auction and my business. When I put together one of my themed auctions - a concept I will soon explain in another post, I am not merely putting a random group of stamps up for sale. I am attempting to inspire collectors by showing what a collector can do with a particular topic, or a particular period. A key consideration in this regard is to embrace the essence of the period whose stamps are being featured, and to not fight it. It is to work with what the period or topic offers, rather than comparing it to an earlier period, or an area where the material is scarce, expensive or rare. I firmly believe that this is a hobby that should be open to all, and not just the wealthy collectors, and so some of my themes work with material that is, by all accounts common and inexpensive. I treat this material with the same degree of seriousness as classic rarities. This, I also believe is essential for this great hobby to continue to thrive.

Like Wright, my beliefs about this hobby and its future do not square with what many of my contemporaries believe. Most of my fellow dealers believe that most all stamps issued after 1945 are only good for postage, and most of them will continue to use stamps from the 40's through the 80's on their mail, rather than studying and preserving this material for future collectors. Like Wright, I have chosen honest arrogance as well. I make no apologies for being different and for pursuing my vision. I know it is not for every collector, but I also know that for the small group of collectors who value what I do, it is an approach that they support. If I can make it my life's work to supply the needs of these collectors and to show the philatelic world an alternate way to view and interpret the stamps of various countries and periods, I will be truly fulfilled. 

I have talked before about the importance of having a vision, for it is your vision that underpins your brand. It is your vision that will keep you going and keep you motivated when the going gets tough. Now, of course you have to determine whether your vision is likely to yield some long-term success if you execute it. I am not suggesting that you cling stubbornly to a vision that nobody else will buy into. For example, if my auctions were unsuccessful for an extended period then I would know that it would be very difficult, if not impossible to justify continuing to pursue that vision. So, it is important to be realistic, but at the same time it is important to understand that it takes time, effort and repetition to influence established thought patterns and gain traction. So, to survive you find other ways to raise money to pay the bills while you pursue this vision. For me, it was doing accounting contract work that got us through to the point where it was clear that the vision could succeed. I say could, because many of my themes will not do well the first time I offer them. I know this. But I have prepared for it as well. 

So, this was one of my first lessons during these past 2 years: the importance of having a clear vision if one is to have any hope of building a loyal customer base. In my next post I will discuss the psychology of auctions and explain why the auction model was such a game-changer over retail, or at least why it was the perfect compliment to a retail model. 

It is Time to Revive This Blog! - I Now Have a Viable Business, After Nearly 6 Years.

 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. 

I Couldn't be Prouder. Another Long Overdue Update

Last time I sat down to write a post, it was early in the morning at a Starbucks in Toronto in November. Things were beginning to turn around and I wrote at length about how important it is to have a vision and to have the staying power to see that vision through no matter what. As long as you know that there is demand for your product or service.

I now look up and realize that another 3 months have gone by. A lot of my readers must think that I've gone out of business and disappeared. That's not it of course. The reason I don't write very many posts is because I am working flat out to execute my vision. My typical day lasts for between 12 and 14 hours and 100% of this time is spent productively. There are no stupid, pointless meeetings, no memos, no reporting to anynone other than CRA, no TALKING about work. Just doing. And even so, it is a real challenge to get everything done on time. If you ever want to understand how valuable you really are to the companies you work for just try to start your own business. You will get a very realistic perspective as to how difficult it is to get a business off the ground without help from other people.

Now, three months after the last post, things have really started to come to fruition. I completed my listing template for one major section of Canadian stamps - the complete booklets and I have started using it to list 10,000 booklets that I have in stock. My listing system changes the way stamps are sold online and brings the retail of these items in line with what every other industry selling online does. I'll explain: when you go online to buy a pair of shoes, a dress, or a suit, you go to one product page and you select your options from drop-down menus. Then, when you have made your selections and are happy with them, you checkout.

This has historically not been the case with collectible stamps. Despite the fact that there are a lot of variants with stamps, such as grade, colour, paper, perforation and other attributes, most all sites that sell stamps force sellers to list everything in a classified format. Thus, if you looking for a specific variety in a specific grade, you may need to scroll through hundreds of similar listings. While this may not be a big deal for 1 or 2 items, it is a very unweildy way to shop for a lot of items. What my website will now start doing is allowing collectors to shop for a lot of different items from a much more limited set of listings. This has never been available in my industry before.

Related to this is a large purchase that I was able to make, of the stock of booklets from an Edmonton based dealer, who I met at the 2019 Royal show in June 2019. I had hoped to buy them with the proceeds of my ill-fated loan from BDC that never came through, but even after the financing fell through I continued the dialogue with this dealer. So finally in January he offered to finance my purchase in $1,500 monthly payments, and what started out as a $14,000 deal, turned into a $33,000 deal. All of the sudden, I overcame the financing problem, at least for inventory.

My weekly auction has continued to gather momentum, and while I did not make a lot of money on the early stamps I sold through it, the past few auctions have yielded some very excellent results for the modern material, which is what I have chosen to specialize in. It has also resulted in the building of a small, but dedicated core base of about 30-35 customers who bid every week. Most of them spend between $25 and $400 a week, or more. So, I now have the evidence to go back to potential financiers and explain better how the business model actually works. Now that the emotion has long since dissipated from my last attempt, I have been able to reflect and understand that while my last business plan was extensive, it was too much, and it didn't do a good job of addressing the most critical question an investor would have: what is the nature of the demand and what about the future of the market? I can now answer that question well and I can boil the entire model down to 5 or 6 key points.

One important thing the auction and being on social media has done for me is it has shown me what is happening with the hobby and it has shown me that the hobby is NOT dying. The number of collectors on social media is vast, and a lot of them are between 25 and 45. These collectors are new to the hobby and they are still figuring out what they like and what they are willing to pay for items. They are currently spending most of their money on large, bulk lots of stamps, which is the smart way to start. It isn't particularly good for my business at the moment, but what it does mean is that eventually as these collectors mature a lot of them will gravitate toward professional, trustworthy dealers like me. When they get to the point where they are looking for specific items that they don't have and want, they will move away from bulk lots to individual items. When they do, they will look for a trusted brand. That is what I am building now. So, my challenge has been serving the demands of the older collectors to keep the bills paid, while developing my brand.

By buying these booklets, and putting together a very focused and deep listing, I can now do two concrete things to drive traffic to my listings and promote my stock:

1. I can write a comprehensive blog post or series of posts on the material I have just worked on, since it is fresh in my mind, and I have the material all identified and scanned. I publish that post and draw attention to it in my newsletter e-mails and share it on social media. This post will contain links to my permanent stock listings, so that someone who wants to shart collecting the items discussed in the post can do so.
2. I then divide the material to be listed into 2 groups: The first of course are the permanent stock listings that will always be live. These are all items that are in the spreadsheet template that I developed. The second group are one-off, oddball varieties or grades that do not fit neatly into the template and are better suited to auction. 
3. Then, I list all the retail stuff using the template and so far I have found that the process is easily 10 times faster than what I did before. The retail listings will contain a hyperlink to the blog post.
4. Then, I divide the auction material up into small lots of 3-10 items each. I divide them up so as to list between 2-3 lots each in each weekly auction over the next 10-12 weeks. The auction lots and the retails are 100% complimentary, with no overlap. The auction listings will contain a hyperlink to the blog post and to the retail listings. 

What this plan does is capitalize on good SEO practices and builds traffic through cross-promotion. I've learned, in designing my template that permanent product listings containing lots of photos and structured information is exactly what Google is looking for when they rank web pages. Every time you post a product for sale online you create a web page. But if you create hundreds of similar listings that differ only on 1 or two attributes, Google regards that as either boilerplate or spun content and they won't rank those pages highly. That is why most stamp listings cannot be found online through a Google search. So, by having permanent listings that stay up that contain a lot of information, they can eventually rank, which will eventually draw outside traffic to them. Of the 5 or 6 key factors to this business plan, maintaning visibility online is critical: if customers can't find your listings, your sales will be limited. 

The blog post sows the seeds of interest. Some of my long time customers have already told me that they are reconsidering whether to collect an issue of booklets that they had previously decided not to collect because of my article. Then, the auction gives my existing customers a chance to get their feet wet. Finally, as the interest takes hold there is an easy way for them to shop for what they want. 

So my strategy has come into laser-sharp focus now. I list the booklets one issue at a time following the above and then I move on to single mint stamps, plate blocks and first day covers, expanding the auction and advertising through lead generation ads on Facebook to grow my mailing list. As I pay off the booklet purchase I can begin talking to other older dealers about buying their inventories on the same basis. 

This month, I will have sold just over $8,000 in stamps, getting very close to that magic 10K a month number that I had dreamed of when I started out. I have paid upfront for attendance at two major shows in June and May, and will be paying for an April show next month. I am now a known name in the dealer circuit, with my own distinct brand. I have made the first payment on this booklet purchase and I head into March with a $2,500 reserve, and almost $25,000 in sales lined up. You see, while all this was going on I have been quietly processing that large collection of Centennials that I brought back with me on consignment. I pulled out all the valuable material and made up an excel list with prices and made scans of all the good items. After vetting it with my consignor, I sent it out to all my customers at the end of the week. Already, I have had expressions of interest totalling some $25,000, with more to come this next week. I'm only making 13% commission on this lot, but still, that's a full month of e-Bay sales from before, for a week's work. I am also doing a little bit of accounting work as well. So, I am heading into March with a considerable amount of momentum after surviving the move away from e-Bay.

It's been a huge learning process and I have to thank those who helped me in January last year when things were very dire. I couldn't have done this without all of you. I have to say that I am immensely proud of what I have been able to accomplish through determination and a lot of HARD work. I believe that anyone with the determination and some start-up capital can do it too. But you have to be adaptable, while still sticking to your vision. You have to understand that much of what you see online is heavily manipulated and often not the truth. For me, this was the most diabolical thing about e-Bay: their psychological war on their sellers. They manipulate your visibility, which affects your sales and then they blame you for it when you complain. It's total nonsense, cooked up to make them more money by sucking in as many sellers as possible into a stagnant market that they refuse to invest in trying to grow. I've written at length about this in other forums and most people think I am crazy, but if you really peel back the layers and take the time to understand how lucrative this is for e-Bay, then it doesn't seem all that far-fetched all of the sudden. 

I very likely won't be writing a lot of posts going forward, because there is not a lot more to say. I will, likely write when I have something to report or a major milestone has been reached. But, the day to day work of running the business is pretty boring to write about. If you are reading this and want to read more frequent updates, I would encourage you to go to my website and sign up to be on my mailing list. There, you can receive my weekly newsletter, and in this I talk about the new developments for the week. You can access my site here:

www.brixtonchrome.com

A Long Overdue Update - Struggle Slowly Turns to Victory

I have been meaning to write a new post for a long time. But every time I get ready to log in and write, I have had something else that has demanded my attention. So, I am now in Toronto surrounded my my team that is working with me on a temporary contract and I am going to make the time to fill you all in on what has been going on since January and what my takeaway lesson has been.

This year has been all about persistence and survival. I've written at length before about how many do not understand how difficult it really is to establish and build a business that is successful and pursues a vision through to fruition. This distinction is important because pursuing and seeing a vision through is not the same thing as making money. Most e-commerce sites and social media emphasize the "flash in a pan" types of businesses, like drop shipping, where the only motivation is to make money through arbitrage. There is no real focus on value creation and the emphasis is on quick and dirty success. All this can give the impression that building a business should be easy and quick if you have the right product at the right price, and that if it isn't happening quickly for you, it is because you are doing something wrong. Over the past few years I have had many commenters who have pointed out to me that they think I am wasting my time, since I could just go work for a large company and make 6 figures and why wouldn't I do that, and what if my business never makes me that much?

My answer to that is that true entrepreneurship is about filling an unmet need and filling it well. The part that is not often mentioned is that it is not necessary for that need to be felt by the masses. It can be a small group of the population. That is what it means to have a true niche. It can take years to develop and perfect a product, and this indeed is part of the difficulty in building a business. But the true difficulty lies elsewhere I find. Even if you have the perfect product, or all your inventory on hand, you still face the challenge of getting people to buy it. That challenge is a series of challenges that starts with creating awareness and then winning trust. Unless you are selling novelty products such as 99c fidget spinners, you cannot get around the process of building trust. Unfortunately too, the process takes a lot of time and persistence. The internet is awash with consultants, agencies and "gurus" promising you a "quick fix" to this problem for a fee that will "put you in front of the right audience". After months of experimentation, I have come to the conclusion that almost all of it is a scam, designed to relieve you of your money. The harsh reality is this:

There is no way to shortcut the process of building your client base.

The reality is that this takes a lot of time and effort, and so the real challenge for the entrepreneur is how to keep the bills paid while this development of the client base is being undertaken. Many imagine that the way to do this is to save a bunch of money to act as a war chest and to declare the whole business a failure if that war chest runs out before the business gets off the ground. Giving up at this point is indeed the reality for a lot of businesses. However, the true entrepreneurs realize that it is not just a possibility that the war chest will run out, but a liklihoood, since the timelines in the business plan are always arbitrary. Thus, the mettle of an entrepreneur is tested when they run out of money and lies in how they handle this setback.

This is what happened to me in December last year. e-Bay decided, as they always do to established sellers to throttle my traffic, which caused my sales to stay at between $2,500 and $3,500 a month, which was not quite enough to stay afloat. After a year and a half of this, my credit cards were all maxed out and I was out of options. So I decided to turn to my skills as an accountant an offer myself to the local accounting firm to do file reviews. They were happy to have me, but their work didn't start until late January and by December I was broke. So, I started a Go Fund Me campaign to raise money for December. Fortunately for me I had enough friends and people who believed in me that I was able to raise enough to get through the month until I could invoice the firm.

In late January while I was doing the accounting work and running my business I decided to apply with Business Development Bank (BDC) for a loan, since I had a good business plan and needed money to hire an employee so that I could finally list all my inventory on my website and have a marketing budget to promote the site. I spent almost a full month on my business plan, had meetings with the local BDC representative, and was told that yes, I would qualify for the full $175,000 I was seeking.

This was in late February. About 2 days after I received this news my phone rang. It was Hammad, a partner with my old firm in Toronto. His senior manager had just given his notice - at the beginning of tax season. Hammad was right royally screwed. He asked me if there was any way I could consider coming to Toronto for 2 months in March and April to help him out. Now, at this point I'd been through enough shennanigans and bullshit with lenders to know that until I had that $175,000 in my bank account I had diddly squat. Besides, I knew what Hammad must be going through so my wife and I looked at each other and thought "Why not?". So I said "yes". I packed up my inventory, rented a large SUV, loaded everything  into it, kissed Steph goodbye and set off for the 14 hour drive to Toronto. It was a crazy 2 months: between continuing to do file reviews for my local firm, running the stamp business and working for Hammad I was going full bore 7 days a week and was getting 4 hours of sleep on a good night. BUT, I made enough in those 2 months to last through to now (end of October) AND I was finally able to figuratively tell e-Bay to fuck off by closing my store and yanking all my listings off there. My wife joined me in the last week of April and we had a nice trip back to Saint John, through Boston.

I arrived back in Saint John in early May, ready to get the $175,000 that BDC had promised me. Remember that? I paid the commitment fee of $1,750 and got the last of the paperwork in and waited - for 2 weeks and nothing. Finally the BDC guy got back to me and said "just 2 more weeks" and so I waited some more. Then, at the end of May, came this "Yeah about that. I'm sorry but I've hit a snag. Seems your business does not meet our eligibility requirements. You see you are a speculative business." WTF? What are you talking about? I thought. I'm not speculative. I have regular customers who come back all the time, I write and publish a blog, I carry an inventory. Speculative is the LAST thing I am. I tried to reason with them, but to no avail. The bottom line, as I would learn in talking to other banks is that they just don't "like" businesses that sell collectibles. They see them as too risky and they just don't want to get involved with them period. It doesn't matter if your inventory is bought and paid for. It doesn't matter if you a world class expert. It doesn't matter if you are a CA with 25 years of experience. None of it matters. They don't care.

So, very quickly it became apparent that I was never going to be able to borrow the money I needed to hire staff. The only way to move forward was by myself. It was at this point that my wife agreed that after B&B season, which was just beginning, that she would re-join the business to give me the help I needed. I realized that in the stamp business model, the labour component is the biggest hurdle, and if I could gain mastery over that, I could significantly improve my ability to compete on price and reduce the need for staff. But I also realized that I would likely never have the marketing budget to be able to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars with Google and Facebook. So I would have to find a better way to generate traffic to my website. So I devoted my summer months to four things:

1. Attending stamp shows to get my name out there. By May I was too late to get into many of the larger shows like Mississauga and ORAPEX. However, I registered for what I could - the 2019 Royal, the Polish Cultural Centre and CANPEX, and put my name in for the others, for next year. I spent money getting professional banners for my booth, as well as a series of informative brochures about all the collecting opportunities that exist with Canadian stamps. These I would hand out at the shows. My attitude was that my goal in attending these shows was to be pure advertising. They weren't cheap, and I went all out, getting double booths and paying for a full page ad in the show programmes. BUT, I met a lot of my long-time customers and cemented that bond, met a lot of customers and more importantly I stirred up the pot, big time. I can tell from the varied reactions that many long-time dealers had to me that this was the case. 
2. Engaging more closely with the customers I do have by making a serious attempt at filling want lists, actively, rather than just being passive about it. I had to sacrifice my margins, but I was able to get a lot of business this way - $3,000+ per month thoughout June through September. One of my best customers now started getting serious with me this way and several others, who were previously just casual e-Bay buyers have become regular customers just by my providing them SERVICE. 
3. Working on completing a master Excel listing template. One of the problems with marketplace interfaces like e-Bay and even Shopify's product creation page is that it takes forever to fill out all the information for a listing and to make and attach a scan - about 10 minutes, on average, per listing. That is if you are working flat out focussed. On a good 16 hour day you would be lucky to get 100 listings up, which in the scheme of my inventory is nothing: it would take a decade to list everything at that rate. But Shopify allows sellers to create listings en-masse using delimited Excel spreadsheets. Then it hit me: I DON'T TOUCH A SINGLE STAMP UNTIL I HAVE A MASTER LISTING TEMPLATE THAT CREATES THE LISTINGS FOR ME. That is the key to being competitive. Create a template so that all the information is there and all I have to do is identify what the stamp is, grade it and enter the quantity into the spreadsheet. Then, at the end of the day, I upload the whole damn thing to Shopify and it creates the listings for me. So I have been working diligently on that when I have time, and now I am a few weeks away from being finished and having 15,000+ line items created for Canada and Nigeria. 
4. Finding a way to generate website traffic in anticipation of having (3) above complete. In May my average number of daily organic website visitors was 20-25. I had tried paid Facebook ads with a $300 monthly budget, and while I did get clicks, they did not lead to a single customer. I had tried sharing my blog content with many of the stamp collecting groups on Facebook, but again, I found little engagement. I had tried using Google shopping and after spending about $600 I had one sale for $10. I could see that even if I were to scale upward, I wasn't going to get any traction this way. So I started thinking of alternatives. I had to be creative. I needed to find ways to get people to engage with my content. So, one of the first things I did is I bought and installed an app to create a community forum on my website. It hasn't had a lot of activity - YET. But there have been some fruitful discussions between my a few of my customers on there, and they have a safe, ad-free environment in which they can engage with each other. Second, I got serious about making better use of Outfy. Outfy is an automated social media sharing tool, kind of like Hootsuite. But the main difference is that you can set up autopilots to do your sharing for you. If you set them up right, you can control whether your content gets repeated and what gets posted with it. You can share products and blog posts. So I set up autopilots to share my content to Facebook, Tumblr, Juxtapost, Fancy, and most importantly Pinterest. I spent a lot of time upgrading my Pinterest page. I saw my traffic jump from the social media networks to 30-40 visitors a day, which was good. But I needed more. So I got serious about setting up a regular e-mail to my customers that were on my mailing list, as well as getting as many of my former e-Bay customers to opt-in as I could. 

This was all going well and I could see things beginning to improve. But, by August, I could see that if I didn't do something more that I would run out of money by October when B&B season was over. So I came up with my last bold move: a weekly auction. I borrowed heavily from my past experience working for Weeda stamps and decided to offer 40 of my better inventory items each week for no minimum bid. I made the rules really simple: no set increments, so that customers could bid whatever they wanted without having to try and remember what increments were in effect. I varied the offering and sacrificed some of my best material. I knew that for at least the first few auctions that they would be suicide: I would get very little for the items being sold, since there would be few bidders. But my reasoning was this: it would be cheaper in the long run to advertise this way, since I would get engaged customers this way for the same price or less than I had been paying Google or Facebook. It has proved to be a very powerful hook to engage customers, because you have the opportunity to buy a $200 stamp for $1. You are going to want to check that out if you are serious. And so, as expected the first few auctions were slow: my total realization was around $300 for the first sale - a $500 loss. But every week I have seen the number of bidders grow by 2 or 3 new bidders every week. More importantly though, the unsuccessful bidders from one week will still come back and try again, and the regulars bid and buy every week. I've gotten regular, weekly customers from this auction that before were only buying once in a while on e-Bay. 

I had underestimated the tremendous power that auctions have: to get people in the mood to spend money. One side benefit to them is that several customers will go to my retail listings if they miss out on an item they were bidding on, or they will buy complientary items. The other thing is that they now give me something to talk about and promote in both my e-mails and social media that is time sensitive and plays on people's FOMO (fear of missing out). It's one thing to run a Facebook ad that takes someone off Facebook and offers them nothing immediate. It's quite another to run an ad that allows them to stay on Facebook and obtain an immediate benefit: notification of the bargain auctions. So I created a series of Facebook landing page ads to encourage people to join my mailing list for the weekly auction. These ads have been much cheaper and more effective: for $120 or so a month, I have been able to add 50 names to my mailing list each month: much, much more effective than chucking $300 a month down the drain for likes and clicks. I watched my daily traffic exceed 100 visitors and 500-800 pageviews a day. My bounce rate fell to below 50% and sometimes as low as 35%-40% and average session duration went over 5 minutes per visitor. 

So, now in my 11th week of auctions, I am averaging $1,000 a sale and now my auctions are attracting a flurry of bids as soon as the material is up and at the very end. Many items go into overtime bidding and it allowed me to get through October with very little B&B revenue.

But as October approached, I had both the Polish show and CANPEX coming up. So again, I made preparations to rent an SUV and pack everything up. Hammad and I had discussed the possibility of him needing my services again in October, back in April and so I got in touch with him. Lo and behold, he did need me again and so we decided I would come out for 6 weeks from October 17 to November 30. This necessitated 2 trips to Toronto: one for the October 6 show and then again on the 17th. But I made the drive both times and now I am in the middle of my contract with Hammad. The hours are still busy but less crazy. I have time to continue the auction and work on my spreadsheet to get it finished for December when I am back. 

As if that wasn't enough, a major break came at CANPEX. Jim Watt, who is a leading collector of modern Canada - well all Canada actually, whom I had met and agreed to work with at the Royal show in July, came to my table and asked me to sell his Centennials. I said yes, thinking it would be months down the road. Then last week we had several discussions that led to me going to his residence and picking up the entire lot. I went out with the intent of itemizing everything, and spent 9 hours, but only got through 2 of the 11 bins containing material. It was the most amazing collection of this material I've ever seen - easily $150,000 to $250,000 worth of material, and here I was being asked to handle it for him! Every successful stamp dealer has their story of THAT collection - that first collection that got them on the "map" so to speak. Well, I think this is mine. 

So I have my work cut out for me, but I will head home with enough cash to get through the winter and a monthly cash flow that is almost sufficient to get through anyway, which means I can either begin reinvesting in the business, or reducing some of my debt. Either way, it looks very much like I will ultimately succeed despite all the hardships I have faced to get here. 

Just before I made the trip out here I read an article in a leading business magazine about how long it takes to establish a business and the author said that it takes a minimum of 4 years just to get your bearings and to know what works and what doesn't. He laid out a 4 year timeline as follws:

YEAR 1: EVERYTHING IS A SMALL VICTORY

YEAR 2: OK, WHEN DO I START MAKING MONEY?

YEAR 3: OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE? I HAVE SO MUCH DEBT

YEAR 4: OK, IF I STICK WITH THIS I MAY BE OKAY

In year 1 everything is a first and therefore a victory. You are also operating on your savings or borrowings, if you were lucky enough to get a loan. So, the lack of revenue and customers is not really a concern. You are so happy to be "in business" that everything feels like a victory. But in year 2, as your resources start to dwindle and the setbacks begin, you start wondering when the customers will come. Many give up even at this stage, when the customers don't start coming right away. In year 3 your resources are almost fully exhausted and you have customers, but not enough to sustain the business. Your finances get stretched to the breaking point and many business owners do not have the bravery to stick it out past this point or they are not fortunate enough to have a backup skill that they can fall back on. I've been fortunate to have my accounting skills and to always have left my clients and jobs on excellent terms so that when I need them, they are more than happy to give me work. But not everyone is that fortunate. Getting through year 3 might require putting the business on what I call "slow simmer" and taking another job. Slow simmer is not the same as putting it on hold. It is essential to your professional credibility that you remain available to your customers during the day, otherwise you run the risk that they will see your business as nothing more than a hobby that you do in your spare time and you will miss the opportunity to build a close relationship with them. 

To put a business on slow simmer means that you don't launch any new initiatives. You fill existing orders and you answer any e-mails or telephone calls that come in, while you earn enough money to save so that you can eventually quit and come back it it full boil. Contract work is perfect for this. 

Then, in year 4, where I am now you reach a point where the cash flow from your business is enough to pay the bills without additional borrowing or additional income for 2 months in a row. It is at this point that the realization begins to set in that if you continue on the same path and remain adaptive that you will be okay and have a viable business. 

So that's it, that is everything that has been going on since January this year. 

My Revised Business Plan and New Youtube Channel

Gosh, it has been almost 2 months again since my last post. I feel like I've almost let this blog die, which I don't want to do. My original intention was to show people ALL the ups and downs of becoming a self-actualized entrepreneur. But I've been so incredibly busy trying to keep the business afloat while the developing the website, that I just haven't had time.

My GoFundMe campaign did quite well in December, with several people stepping forward and offering their assistance, for which I am eternally greatful. It seems to have wound down now, though I will keep it going for a little while longer until I can present my revised business plan to the Business Development Bank of Canada.

On that note, it became apparent to me that trying to get the website established would take a lot longer than I had realized, and it would probably not be possible to do it without some involvement in E-bay, as much as I hate them. So, as I began to realize this, I started to understand that to really get out of this hole that E-bay put me in, I would have to come up with financing to be able to hire employees, replenish my inventory, pay down high interest debts and essentially get a fresh start. To do this is no easy task and would require a thorough business plan.

So around Christmas I started re-writing my original plan, taking everything I have learned over the past 3 years and additional research into account. I have now completed it and am ready to present it to lenders.

Along the way, I have posted videos on my Youtube channel which I uploaded to keep my donors apprised of my progress. However, I think I may continue it and use it to supplement this blog, as it is relatively easy for me to shoot a quick video and to upload it.

Here is a link to the video, I posted this morning:

For those of you wishing to check out my GoFundMe campaign, the link for it is here:

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

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!