Come and watch me make FU money: Over $100K/mo now.

[nelnhf]

You are an inspiration. Wishing you all the best. I'm beginning on the R&D of my own product right now, and hope I'll have some results to share in the not too distant future.

 

[SIDI]

UPDATE:

Finally moved the business out of my backyard shed and in to a warehouse. What once occupied a 3m x 3m spare bedroom now fills this space...

View attachment 29118

Congrats Ben. Can't wait to see how this helps you moving forwards.

 

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[Genius01]

UPDATE:

Finally moved the business out of my backyard shed and in to a warehouse. What once occupied a 3m x 3m spare bedroom now fills this space...

View attachment 29118

Great!
We'll be awaiting your update for this November/December period whenever you're chanced.

 

[Deleted74396]

Just read this whole thread, and wow I'm so inspired! Enjoy the warehouse, I'm rooting for you

 

[FeaRxUnLeAsHeD]

What got you into the salon business to start out? Curious how you identified the need. Was it an industry you were familiar with, or you somehow stumbled across it/the need for what you're doing?

Keep it up!

 

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[Minuz]

Its Really really inspiring reading your story!! Congratulations and thanks for taking the time to share with us! Go for more and keep updating if you can. Thanks

 

[MythOfSisyphus]

May as well provide a quick update while I'm here...

Sales this year have continued to be impacted by C0VlD-19 with many of our customers forced to close their doors.

During June and July while businesses throughout the country were operating as normal we had our 2 biggest months ever and even hit 260k revenue in July. Unfortunately it's difficult to gauge exactly what a normal month would look like now. I would guess however that we'd probably be somewhere around the 220-230k a month mark if covid was not an issue. We're currently around the 180k per month mark which is pretty good considering.

My biggest challenge has been staying motivated without seeing any real growth outside of June/July.

 

[abcdefgh]

I’m starting this thread to document my journey from “good money” (you can read my intro story here) to FU money.

I aim to do this in the next 5 years by getting my online salon supply business to the stage where it’s profiting 7 figures a year and then hopefully selling it for several million. I’ll then have enough money invested to live comfortably off interest and investments for the rest of my days. Or at least that’s my plan. Let’s see what happens.

I’m documenting this for a few reasons...

First of all I hope that sharing my successes and failures will be of some value to you on your own journey.

Secondly I see it as a way of holding my self more accountable to my goals. Not that I think I’ll slack off or give up, but I this will add some extra motivation for me in hitting my milestones.

Thirdly, because while I’m confident in what I’m doing , it never hurts to get a fresh point of view. Hopefully your feedback can help me see things I might be missing.

And lastly, all I seem to do lately is work on the business and learn about business. This thread will give me a much needed creative outlet.

I’ve decided that I won’t be giving away any major details about my business apart from what I’ve already stated in my intro thread but I will try and be transparent as possible regarding what I’m doing and my progress toward the financial targets I’ve set.

Goal for 2018: $1,750,000 in revenue
I aim to make $1,750,000 in revenue (a figure more than double what I made last year) and I’ll start setting financial targets to hit each month in order to get there.


Monthly totals so far:

January: $101,992

February: $103,041

March: $50,689 (At the halfway point)


Considering I need to average $145,000 every month to hit my goal I’m a long way behind where I need to be. But while the start has been slow, I think if I put in the hard work now, I will see my efforts start to pay off in the back half of the year.


I’ll set my goal for March at 108k which would be a good result considering my position at the halfway mark.

The goal for April will be 118k and if I can grow revenue at around 10k per month thereafter I might be able to hit the annual target by years end. It’s an unlikely goal, but why not shoot for the moon?


How I plan to grow revenue:

1. Hire & Outsource – Until 2 weeks ago I was handling everything on my own. I have since hired someone part time to assist with packing & shipping which will free me up to spend more time growing the business. I’ll also be looking for other opportunities to outsource work to VA’s and other contractors.


2. Expand the product line – I’m currently talking to 2 new suppliers in China after ordering samples of some new beauty products and am about to put in large orders with both of them for variants of some products we already stock that have been extremely popular. I’ve also just started stocking some new aftercare products (products that the salons we supply can retail to their customers) and so far they’ve generated around a thoursand dollars worth of sales within the first week or so.



3. Improve marketing campaigns – I’ve been spending around 5k per month on advertising on adwords and facebook but haven’t put in the time and effort required to really test and tweak the campaigns. I spent my nights over the past 2 weeks doing an online adwords certification and completely overhauled the old campaigns and set up some new ones. They’ll need time to settle but once they do I’ll continue to tweak and adjust to get a better ROI which will mean I can increase the overall marketing budget and generate more traffic and more revenue.


4. Increase Social Media Presence – This has probably been the most neglected area of my business. I keep meaning to post more regularly but always seem to find other things to work on instead. I think this is partly because as a guy selling beauty products, marketing them doesn’t come naturally to me and I’m not an avid social media user outside of work either. Having said that, Instagram is huge in my niche and other brands are taking advantage so I need to step up my game here. I did try to outsource the social media work by advertising on upwork however I couldn’t find anyone with knowhow in both B2B and the beauty industry.



5. A heap of other stuff - I use Trello to track all my various to do lists and I probably have well over 100 changes planned for the business from website tweaks to improving my email campaigns to improving ad copy. Basically anything that will 1) Increase traffic, 2) Increase conversions, 3) Increase order value. These are the things that will grow revenue.


So that’s my first post done. I’m not sure how often I’ll be providing updates. I’ll at least do a run down for the end of each month documenting how I measured up against the financial goals and what changes I made. What went wrong, what went right. I’ll also try and provide updates and answer any questions each week as well.


The plan is to keep coming back to this thread and setting new goals each year, all the way through until I make that sweet FU money and drive off into the sunset in my new lambo.

I love the title of this thread. XD

 

[MythOfSisyphus]

Just finished reading the tread and it's amazing. @MythOfSisyphus I wish you much success. Thanks for taking the time to write this

Thanks. Really glad to hear it's still helping other people

 

[MythOfSisyphus]

Subbed. Amazing content in here.

@MythOfSisyphus how does your product development process (new products and new SKUs) work with your factories? Do you hire out development, or do it yourself? How have your factories been with innovation and change?

We do the product development ourselves. We work with a number of different factories and some are better than others. We have a really good relationship with the factory that supplies the largest percentage of our SKUs and they are really responsive when it comes to changes. They'll even make suggestions to us based on what their customers in other geographies are doing with similar products.

The basic process though is that I'll usually approach a factory (or several factories) for samples. Once we receive them my wife will test them out and provide me with feedback on them.

If it's a product that we have other varieties of already, or if it's very similar to something we already stock (this is usually the case) then I will already have an idea of what other changes to request from the factory based on customer feedback. (We have been considering using some of our regular customers as product testers which we would involve at this part of the process).

After this I will provide the factory with very specific details on what we need changed and any product packaging graphics (I still do most of this myself, however have often outsourced more complicated packaging). It's important to be super specific here especially with some of the Chinese factories as they can make some horrendous mistakes when things are left to their own imagination or judgement.

The final step is having them send us detailed photos to verify that the products and packaging look correct before shipping (also very important) in order to avoid any horrible surprises on arrival.

My wife will then do another test before we launch, although if anything is wrong at this point (very very rare) it's usually an expensive mistake to fix.

 

[GravyBoat]

You're welcome. Just really happy the thread is still helping people.

Also... I'd love to see your product once you've launched and would highly recommend doing your own progress thread if you haven't got one already.

In fact I will. We have 3 samples on the way now. Appreciate it and will report back!!

 

[ItsAJackal]

We do the product development ourselves. We work with a number of different factories and some are better than others. We have a really good relationship with the factory that supplies the largest percentage of our SKUs and they are really responsive when it comes to changes. They'll even make suggestions to us based on what their customers in other geographies are doing with similar products.

This is all fantastic, well done. I actually had a question that you kind of touched on here. I might have missed it reading through everything else, and if I did I apologize.

When you started, you said your wife was a beautician and you saw an opportunity in the market. To start did you simply find existing products that were selling well and find a supplier that could provide you with the same? Or did you end up finding the factories that manufactured it and worked out your own deal to provide the products in your own packaging?

At what point did you start doing your own product development to make your own new products? That seems like such a leap from being an online reseller to developing your own line of products.

 

[BAUCE]

@MythOfSisyphus going through the thread and I really appreciate how you've documented the journey. At any point did you think about using a 3PL instead of getting space plus employees to pack? If you considered it would you mind explaining why you chose to get space plus someone to do that part? Im not ready to make this decision yet but I really want to stay small as long as possible so am considering using a 3PL over having to manage someone to pack my stuff. Thanks

 

[dabelge]

following, nice work so far

 

[Cruze]

Really nice story man! I sell beauty products, too. In Germany and Europe. I build my own nature cosmetic brand at the moment. Maybe we can connect us and talk about problems in this niche?

 

[Michał Kóska]

You've opened my eyes to something new- thank you

 

[jcvlds]

Mini progress update: Revenue for the month currently sits at $77,460 which means I'm potentially on track for my biggest month ever but will most likely fall short of my goal for the month of 108k. The Easter break may have a negative impact on sales as well.

Im considering a sale early next week to see if I can't boost things along to try and hit that target.

Hope you reach it! [emoji1376]

Do you also have profitability goals alongside your revenue goals?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

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[NanoDrake]

Hey Man,
If I can help with hairdressers, count me in, plus, I had a little bit of experience with Oz distributors
Good luck with all! take care

 

[Yussef]

Thankyou.

Yes, I started exclusively online and still am. We sell to quite a few salons and businesses in my town and are often asked by customers if they can buy in person but I really don't want the hassle of having to do face to face sales.

Yes, I had private labeled most of our products (I still sell some from other established brands)

To establish trust there were a few things I did...

1) Registered with NICNAS (Australia's body for importing chemicals into Australia) and advertised this fact on the website.
2) Advised our customers that all products were safe to use and had been hand selected and tested by a professional.
3) Made sure the website, copy and product photos were all top notch.

Before I went into this venture I noticed there were many other sellers doing well, despite not being reputable or recognisable brands in the industry so I knew gaining customer trust wouldn't be too difficult.

Thanks for your answer. Simple yet essential. It makes sense to sell other brands (like you are doing) for a number of reasons. Keep killing it man!!!

 

[ALC]

@MythOfSisyphus Congrats ! Maybe next step would be to sell all the product missing to your shop, like this people would only buy from you, if you got anything they need in one place.

Maybe investing is the best option for you, either in your business / an other business as you said !

 

[Megaman9]

Great thread.

How are you handling your inventory management ? With hundreds of SKUs, that must be a nightmare.

 

[MythOfSisyphus]

Great thread.

How are you handling your inventory management ? With hundreds of SKUs, that must be a nightmare.

Thanks. There's an awesome Shopify plug-in called inventory planner thats been a complete life saver. It uses past sales history to predict how much stock I'll need to order and probably saves me at least 5 to 10 hours and thousands of dollars a week in lost revenue. There's no way I could handle that many SKUs with the basic Shopify inventory management

 

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[ericaung]

September Revenue Goal: $165,000

Actual Revenue for September: $158,217 (Down 18k from previous month)

Annual Revenue Goal: $1,750,000

Revenue so far: $1,201,933 ($548,067 to go)

Average per month required: $182,689

So September was a bit off where I wanted to be at this stage but the target is still achievable (just). October will hopefully see a spike in revenue and November is traditionally a very good month, as is most of December, however the Christmas period hurts sales at the end. Hitting this target will basically mean that the business is capable of earning around 1 million (profit) a year going forward which is staggering considering where I was only a few years ago. I'm also looking forward to a couple of weeks after Christmas driving along the coast with my family and planning what will come next.

What went wrong:

Some of our search engine rankings for major keywords went downhill. Some investigating revealed that we lost positions on a few different keywords to the same competitor. They look to have outsourced their SEO to someone or some company that is using a bunch of spammy blogs to create artificial banklinks. I won't be doing the same, however I will be putting a focus on SEO and doing what I can to get the rankings back.

We also had some delays in restocking products due to switching the supplier for our bestsellers. Some variants of the products we supply were new to them and took longer to deliver. Hopefully they'll be faster moving forward.

What went right:

The campaign manager I hired to work on our adwords campaigns has done well so far by attaining roughly the same revenue as we had previously but cutting the monthly ad spend by around 3-4k. No impact on revenue, but there's a full time wage worth of savings there.

I negotiated a new shipping rates contract with Australia Post which didn't seem to be great value initially, however they have just announced that there will be price changes to their standard delivery costs very soon (which I am assuming means a price hike)

I finished reviewing resumes and interviewed for a new picker/packer who should start in the next week or so and once trained up should free up an extra 2 days a week for me to focus on more important matters.

The loose ends of transition from a sole trader to a company have pretty much all been tied up now (this was quite a time sink for me over the past couple of months)

Thanks to the tax man and mortgage brokers I no longer have that pesky issue of all that surplus cash sitting in the bank that I was learning how to invest

Plans for October:

Apart from a sale or 2 and some good marketing there's not a lot I can do to impact sales over these last few months of the year. I basically have to hope that the hard work I've done throughout the year pays dividends. So this month will mostly be about long term planning...

• Getting the new employee hired and trained up before things get hectic around here
• Rearranging what little room we have left in the backyard office and storage facility to make space for said employee
• Contacting suppliers about new products to stock early next year
• Focusing on SEO to regain rankings on the more competitive keywords in my niche
• Continuing to focus on social media

October Revenue Goal: $180,000

Hey mate,

How was your initial capital to start this business? I am not sure you posted this in this thread.

Thank you.

 

[ericaung]

September Revenue Goal: $165,000

Actual Revenue for September: $158,217 (Down 18k from previous month)

Annual Revenue Goal: $1,750,000

Revenue so far: $1,201,933 ($548,067 to go)

Average per month required: $182,689

So September was a bit off where I wanted to be at this stage but the target is still achievable (just). October will hopefully see a spike in revenue and November is traditionally a very good month, as is most of December, however the Christmas period hurts sales at the end. Hitting this target will basically mean that the business is capable of earning around 1 million (profit) a year going forward which is staggering considering where I was only a few years ago. I'm also looking forward to a couple of weeks after Christmas driving along the coast with my family and planning what will come next.

What went wrong:

Some of our search engine rankings for major keywords went downhill. Some investigating revealed that we lost positions on a few different keywords to the same competitor. They look to have outsourced their SEO to someone or some company that is using a bunch of spammy blogs to create artificial banklinks. I won't be doing the same, however I will be putting a focus on SEO and doing what I can to get the rankings back.

We also had some delays in restocking products due to switching the supplier for our bestsellers. Some variants of the products we supply were new to them and took longer to deliver. Hopefully they'll be faster moving forward.

What went right:

The campaign manager I hired to work on our adwords campaigns has done well so far by attaining roughly the same revenue as we had previously but cutting the monthly ad spend by around 3-4k. No impact on revenue, but there's a full time wage worth of savings there.

I negotiated a new shipping rates contract with Australia Post which didn't seem to be great value initially, however they have just announced that there will be price changes to their standard delivery costs very soon (which I am assuming means a price hike)

I finished reviewing resumes and interviewed for a new picker/packer who should start in the next week or so and once trained up should free up an extra 2 days a week for me to focus on more important matters.

The loose ends of transition from a sole trader to a company have pretty much all been tied up now (this was quite a time sink for me over the past couple of months)

Thanks to the tax man and mortgage brokers I no longer have that pesky issue of all that surplus cash sitting in the bank that I was learning how to invest

Plans for October:

Apart from a sale or 2 and some good marketing there's not a lot I can do to impact sales over these last few months of the year. I basically have to hope that the hard work I've done throughout the year pays dividends. So this month will mostly be about long term planning...

• Getting the new employee hired and trained up before things get hectic around here
• Rearranging what little room we have left in the backyard office and storage facility to make space for said employee
• Contacting suppliers about new products to stock early next year
• Focusing on SEO to regain rankings on the more competitive keywords in my niche
• Continuing to focus on social media

October Revenue Goal: $180,000

Any updates for October??

Cheers,
-Eric

 

[_abuelreem_]

Hit the monthly and overall target a few hours ago while on a cruise around the bay. And only 3 days to spare. It's been a good year.

Congrats man, very well deserved indeed

 

[yungmillionaire]

Just dropped by to say thank you so much for sharing your progress.

Considering you are doing B2B sales, I have a couple questions:
1. How do you decide how much inventory to hold?
2. Why not use a pre-order system so that you do not have to hold inventory? So for example, you bring a sample of your product to a customer. If they like it, they order 500 units. Only then, you order 500 units from your supplier and ship it to them. This way, you are cash flow positive.

 

[Striver]

Great job! Congrats!

 

[Genius01]

I had a few people ask for progress updates so here goes (I'll try and do at least a couple more before the end of the year)...

Progress Update:

The business is still going quite well although month to month revenue hasn't changed a lot since the heights we hit late last year. Having said that, this is pretty standard as in previous years sales are fairly consistent from Jan through Oct before jumping massively in November. At the moment an average month is around 195k in revenue.

Despite not setting a solid goal revenue-wise for this year I believe I said that around 2.6m would be a pretty good result. It's currently sitting at around 1.7m so it's highly unlikely that I'll get there. Having said that, the business is now 4 years old and still experiencing pretty solid year on year growth so I can't complain.

Changes This Year:

The re-branding, while a pain in the a$$, went really well and the new logo and products with it look fantastic. Looking back, branding is something I would take more time to completely nail in the very beginning to avoid having to go through this process a couple of years into the business.

The move into the warehouse still hasn't eventuated as the build took far longer than expected. The warehouse is now basically finished but I still need to wait on some formalities before I get the green light to move the business in. This delay has probably cost me quite a lot of money by preventing expansion into as many new products as I would have liked and looking back I should have either purchased or rented an established warehouse. Lesson learned.

A couple of months ago my second employee (who handled shipping and inventory control) resigned. This however turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The new employee has been much faster at packing orders, rarely makes mistakes and always shows up on time. So I now have 2 extremely dependable employees who I can trust to do 90% of whats required to keep the business moving day to day. I also have a team of contractors that I rely on for many of the other tasks.

I recently branched out into a new type of product that's not exactly in the same niche we're currently in but a very closely related one that many of our customers buy from. The manufacturer would only agree to a minimum of 1000 units and they have an expiry of 12 months. This was at a cost of around 65,000 AUD so a pretty big risk to take for an untried product.

But, in business everything is a risk, and it's all about playing the odds the best you can. I figure if it falls flat and I only sell a few hundred units then I lose maybe 30k and learn something. If it does really well and we sell out ahead of schedule then I'm potentially making an extra 100-200k a year in profit. The end result will most likely be somewhere in between so that kind of risk sits pretty well with me.

Lessons Learned:
The idea of taking smart risks is something that's really hit home with me the past year. Almost every decision I make in managing my business has risk involved and I've found that being successful comes down to how you decide to play the odds. Not everything comes off but if your potential upside is always bigger than the potential downside then in the long run you come out on top despite a few losses.

Great update!
Wow, if your doing 195k in average month currently, then your November/December monthly sales will likely be way beyond 200k, probably closer to 250k than 200k per month.
FU money edging closer and closer.

Really inspiring thread, had to read it all over again just now.
Thumbs up!!

 

[ecommercewolf]

Very informative thread. Congrats!

 

[MythOfSisyphus]

What got you into the salon business to start out? Curious how you identified the need. Was it an industry you were familiar with, or you somehow stumbled across it/the need for what you're doing?

Keep it up!

Basically I'd been dabbling in online businesses for several years but took the plunge into this particular one because my wife is a beautician and knew the products pretty well. I looked at the competition that was around, spoke to a few suppliers and saw an opportunity to get into the market.

I explain everything in a fair bit of detail in this thread if you're interested