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MythOfSisyphus

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June Revenue Goal: $155,000

Actual Revenue for June: $146,409.43

Annual Revenue Goal: $1,750,000

Revenue so far: $733,025.60


Didn't hit the target this month but managed to keep up the strong sales from the previous month. June/July are generally the worst months of the year so I should see some pretty solid growth toward the end of the year. I now need to average 169,000 in sales each month for the rest of this year to hit the target so it's important that I at least stay around the 145-150 mark for the next month in order to not have that average increase too much.

What went right:
  • The new products stocked in previous months continued to sell well and sales stayed solid
  • I began shipping internationally which saw an extra 3k or so in revenue. Not an impressive figure by any means, however building up repeat international customers will be a long game and I expect sales from overseas to increase month on month
  • Agreed to a deal to purchase a warehouse for the business to move into next year.
  • My small business that started in a 3 by 3 metre spare room, officially became a company.
  • Finished the financials for last financial year and realised I did just over 1 million in sales.

What went wrong:
  • I made the decision to stop sending items on ebay in envelopes and use the same system as our website orders in order to streamline our packing process. In order to do this I started charging a small shipping fee on ebay and sales on there immediately halved (ebay loves free shipping) so that cost about 5k in the short term and potentially might cost a bit more in the long term. I'm still weighing up my options here and may simply go back to free shipping (but boost the cost of my ebay products by 10% or so) and take a small hit in profit margins in order to get the revenue and potential of long term customers back up.
  • I paid a guy 1k on upwork to help set up an online accounting system. He is a charted accountant and charges $65 US an hour. He seemed to know what he was doing during the interview, but as time dragged on I realised I should have simply set it all up myself as most of the work he did was pretty straight forward and it wasn't possible to integrate with shopify the way I had hoped (and someone who claimed to have done this kind of work before should have been aware of this from the outset). Anyway, lesson learned and not a major issue in the end.
Plans for July

I've been making some pretty big changes over the previous months, however in July I'll be focussing on some minor improvements here and there including:
  • Hiring a marketing expert to assist with the ad campaigns (I ran out of time to do this in June)
  • Potentially installing a new website theme as the one I'm currently using is a little dated and doesn't have a lot of the built in functionality I want like built in currency conversion.
  • Spending some time reviewing and improving internal processes and putting rules in place for customer engagement. Reason being that I see the business expanding pretty rapidly in the next 12 months and realistically I will need to delegate many of the tasks I'm currently performing. I'd like to be in a position to have rules and processes around almost everything we do in order to reduce the potential for human error.


Revenue goal for July: $150,000

July is a very slow month traditionally so 150k will be tough to hit but I'm hoping international sales will continue to increase and might plan a sale toward the end of the month to try and get closer to the target.
 
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msufan

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Agree that free shipping, even with slightly higher prices to offset it, might be a good idea. People LOVE their free shipping and their feeling of getting some kind of "discount", even if the original full price amount is pretty much arbitrary to them.
 

MythOfSisyphus

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Agree that free shipping, even with slightly higher prices to offset it, might be a good idea. People LOVE their free shipping and their feeling of getting some kind of "discount", even if the original full price amount is pretty much arbitrary to them.

Definitely. It seems to give listings better visibility on ebay too which helps.
 

jcvlds

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June Revenue Goal: $155,000

Actual Revenue for June: $146,409.43

Annual Revenue Goal: $1,750,000

Revenue so far: $733,025.60


Didn't hit the target this month but managed to keep up the strong sales from the previous month. June/July are generally the worst months of the year so I should see some pretty solid growth toward the end of the year. I now need to average 169,000 in sales each month for the rest of this year to hit the target so it's important that I at least stay around the 145-150 mark for the next month in order to not have that average increase too much.

What went right:
  • The new products stocked in previous months continued to sell well and sales stayed solid
  • I began shipping internationally which saw an extra 3k or so in revenue. Not an impressive figure by any means, however building up repeat international customers will be a long game and I expect sales from overseas to increase month on month
  • Agreed to a deal to purchase a warehouse for the business to move into next year.
  • My small business that started in a 3 by 3 metre spare room, officially became a company.
  • Finished the financials for last financial year and realised I did just over 1 million in sales.

What went wrong:
  • I made the decision to stop sending items on ebay in envelopes and use the same system as our website orders in order to streamline our packing process. In order to do this I started charging a small shipping fee on ebay and sales on there immediately halved (ebay loves free shipping) so that cost about 5k in the short term and potentially might cost a bit more in the long term. I'm still weighing up my options here and may simply go back to free shipping (but boost the cost of my ebay products by 10% or so) and take a small hit in profit margins in order to get the revenue and potential of long term customers back up.
  • I paid a guy 1k on upwork to help set up an online accounting system. He is a charted accountant and charges $65 US an hour. He seemed to know what he was doing during the interview, but as time dragged on I realised I should have simply set it all up myself as most of the work he did was pretty straight forward and it wasn't possible to integrate with shopify the way I had hoped (and someone who claimed to have done this kind of work before should have been aware of this from the outset). Anyway, lesson learned and not a major issue in the end.
Plans for July

I've been making some pretty big changes over the previous months, however in July I'll be focussing on some minor improvements here and there including:
  • Hiring a marketing expert to assist with the ad campaigns (I ran out of time to do this in June)
  • Potentially installing a new website theme as the one I'm currently using is a little dated and doesn't have a lot of the built in functionality I want like built in currency conversion.
  • Spending some time reviewing and improving internal processes and putting rules in place for customer engagement. Reason being that I see the business expanding pretty rapidly in the next 12 months and realistically I will need to delegate many of the tasks I'm currently performing. I'd like to be in a position to have rules and processes around almost everything we do in order to reduce the potential for human error.


Revenue goal for July: $150,000

July is a very slow month traditionally so 150k will be tough to hit but I'm hoping international sales will continue to increase and might plan a sale toward the end of the month to try and get closer to the target.

Awesome updates man. Rootin for you and really enjoying keeping up with your progress and achievements.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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Yussef

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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!!!
 
Last edited:

Yussef

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To be honest, in the beginning, no, I didn't have a branding strategy, and didn't really know what one would even look like. I knew a little bit about marketing and the importance of professional looking products, logos, websites etc but didn't have a strategy (although I have developed some strong rules around the brand along the way). In the beginning my basic strategy was to simply out-do all the existing competitors I could find in the niche in every way I could. I started off beating most of them on both product price and shipping price, and also made sure I had a more professional looking website, better copy, and more professional looking product photos. I also put a huge emphasis on customer service as this is a niche that thrives on repeat buyers.

I guess from these things I put importance on a brand kind of organically grew as opposed to being intentionally put in place from the outset.

If you read my intro thread (there's a link in the first post of this thread) I go into detail about how I gained traffic in the early months.


Awesome mindset man!!! I love how streamline you keep your strategy. I believe it was Earl Nightingale that said "get good at one thing at a time." Sounds like you identified competitive pricing as your first "thing" and pressed go. Love it!
 

MythOfSisyphus

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Awesome mindset man!!! I love how streamline you keep your strategy. I believe it was Earl Nightingale that said "get good at one thing at a time." Sounds like you identified competitive pricing as your first "thing" and pressed go. Love it!
Thankyou.

I've been asked a ton of questions since I first posted on here regarding all sorts of tiny details... "what was your initial branding strategy?" "what formula did you use to decide on your wholesale pricing?" "what lead gen strategy did you have in place?" "how did you set up your remarketing campaign?". And while these are all good questions and important considerations for a business they are honestly just things I pieced together along the way.

In my opinion there's only 2 basic things you need to worry about in the beginning...

1. Value... MJ harps on about this for a reason. If you can't offer the consumer a better option than what they already have then don't bother.

2. Traffic... If you can't get people to see the value you're offering, again... Don't bother.

It's really as simple as having a solid strategy for these 2 things. Everything else can be figured out along the way.
 
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johnnyfriendly

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A couple of annoying issues that cropped up yesterday:

1) A shipment of new products Im expecting has been held by Australian customs due to a dispute over the price of the goods and their slice of the import tax.

2) A shipment of another new product from a different supplier arrived from China which is great, however the labels have a printing error. Some only a minor error but others it is fairly major and they can't be sold this way (we're talking around 2000 products). I got pretty pissed about this and ripped into the supplier. They will be sending replacement labels, however doing the relabeling will take a few days and cost me hundreds, if not thousands in wages for my employee to fix.

A very frustrating day over all.

Slightly confused here MOS. You mentioned that the products are mostly your own brand. Do you have a massive manufacturing plant? Beauty/Salon products are generally produced in fairly hefty industrial factories, no?
 

MythOfSisyphus

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Slightly confused here MOS. You mentioned that the products are mostly your own brand. Do you have a massive manufacturing plant? Beauty/Salon products are generally produced in fairly hefty industrial factories, no?
I have the products made to my specifications in factories in China and Korea, including our logo and packaging etc.
 

MythOfSisyphus

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July Revenue Goal: $150,000

Actual Revenue for July: $151,089.57


Annual Revenue Goal: $1,750,000

Revenue so far: $867,268.41

Just reached this months target. June/July are the quietest months of the year so I was happy to stay around the 150k mark. From here on out though I'll need to average around 175k per month to reach the end of year target of 1.75 million in sales.

August is off to a decent start already so hopefully I'll be at least around the 160-165k mark for this month and then should really start to see sales peak in the months after that.

What went right:
  • New products introduced in previous months continued to grow in sales
  • International sales continued to grow
  • I returned to free shipping on eBay which boosted ebay sales.
  • Streamlined some internal processes around customer engagement that should make handing over some of the customer service workload a lot easier when it eventually happens.

What went wrong:
  • A lack of time to implement new changes I'd planned.
Plans for August

I've just hired a part time bookkeeper and part time digital marketing specialist to help free up more of my time, however I'll need to spend a bit of time this month handing over my workload and planning some goals with them both.

I'll also focus on expanding the product range even further so that I'll be in a position to really cash in on the busy months at the end of this year.

Revenue goal for August $165,000
 
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Tanu1234

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June Revenue Goal: $155,000

Actual Revenue for June: $146,409.43

Annual Revenue Goal: $1,750,000

Revenue so far: $733,025.60


Didn't hit the target this month but managed to keep up the strong sales from the previous month. June/July are generally the worst months of the year so I should see some pretty solid growth toward the end of the year. I now need to average 169,000 in sales each month for the rest of this year to hit the target so it's important that I at least stay around the 145-150 mark for the next month in order to not have that average increase too much.

What went right:
  • The new products stocked in previous months continued to sell well and sales stayed solid
  • I began shipping internationally which saw an extra 3k or so in revenue. Not an impressive figure by any means, however building up repeat international customers will be a long game and I expect sales from overseas to increase month on month
  • Agreed to a deal to purchase a warehouse for the business to move into next year.
  • My small business that started in a 3 by 3 metre spare room, officially became a company.
  • Finished the financials for last financial year and realised I did just over 1 million in sales.

What went wrong:
  • I made the decision to stop sending items on ebay in envelopes and use the same system as our website orders in order to streamline our packing process. In order to do this I started charging a small shipping fee on ebay and sales on there immediately halved (ebay loves free shipping) so that cost about 5k in the short term and potentially might cost a bit more in the long term. I'm still weighing up my options here and may simply go back to free shipping (but boost the cost of my ebay products by 10% or so) and take a small hit in profit margins in order to get the revenue and potential of long term customers back up.
  • I paid a guy 1k on upwork to help set up an online accounting system. He is a charted accountant and charges $65 US an hour. He seemed to know what he was doing during the interview, but as time dragged on I realised I should have simply set it all up myself as most of the work he did was pretty straight forward and it wasn't possible to integrate with shopify the way I had hoped (and someone who claimed to have done this kind of work before should have been aware of this from the outset). Anyway, lesson learned and not a major issue in the end.
Plans for July

I've been making some pretty big changes over the previous months, however in July I'll be focussing on some minor improvements here and there including:
  • Hiring a marketing expert to assist with the ad campaigns (I ran out of time to do this in June)
  • Potentially installing a new website theme as the one I'm currently using is a little dated and doesn't have a lot of the built in functionality I want like built in currency conversion.
  • Spending some time reviewing and improving internal processes and putting rules in place for customer engagement. Reason being that I see the business expanding pretty rapidly in the next 12 months and realistically I will need to delegate many of the tasks I'm currently performing. I'd like to be in a position to have rules and processes around almost everything we do in order to reduce the potential for human error.


Revenue goal for July: $150,000

July is a very slow month traditionally so 150k will be tough to hit but I'm hoping international sales will continue to increase and might plan a sale toward the end of the month to try and get closer to the target.

Really inspirational.
 

MythOfSisyphus

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August Revenue Goal: $165,000

Actual Revenue for August: $176,447.97


Annual Revenue Goal: $1,750,000

Revenue so far: 1,043,716.38 (as of today, not end of August)

Sorry for the lack of updates lately but August was a massive month, much bigger than expected so I'm now well on my way to that FU money. Still need to average around 175-185k a month for the next 4 to hit the target but I think it's pretty achievable now.

The bookkeeper and digital marketing expert have helped free up some more of my time and hopefully I'll start seeing some additional revenue coming in from our adwords campaigns. I've also advertised for a 2nd picking/packing assistant to aid with the increase in orders expected over the busy period from November through February and also to cover for my existing assistant who will be having 3 weeks off during the peak period.

I'm finding it hard to set new goals or know exactly where to take this business next. There are a tonne of small improvements I can make to everything, but apart from 2 or 3 new products which I'll be getting in soon there aren't a lot of other popular products in this niche to target.

I've been considering starting a 2nd business in the beauty niche. Different products, however many of the salons we already sell our existing products to would also be using these as well so I could leverage the existing customer base.

I've also been spending a lot of time learning about investing so that I'll actually know what to do with all this money once I've done the basics like pay down our debt.

The funny thing is, I'm earning around 60k a month now after expenses and still haven't splurged on anything for myself (I did just take the wife away to a fancy hotel for the weekend though). I love the feeling of freedom and the excitement that comes with seeing the bank account increase but stuffed if I know what to actually do with the money. I still drive a second hand car and we still live in a modest house in one of the poorer parts of town. We're looking to build a nicer house but even with our current means it will still be relatively modest and should be paid off in a number of years (I still stress about borrowing an amount that I can easily repay)

I'm keen to invest the money and snowball it into even bigger monthly income, but I wonder at what stage I'll actually feel secure enough to start and spend it more freely. And yes, I'm quite aware of what a stupid problem that is to complain about. I just find it interesting how my mind hasn't quite caught up with the reality of the situation.

Revenue goal for September: $165,000
 
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ALC

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@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

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Great thread.

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

MythOfSisyphus

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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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SROWE85

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The funny thing is, I'm earning around 60k a month now after expenses and still haven't splurged on anything for myself (I did just take the wife away to a fancy hotel for the weekend though). I love the feeling of freedom and the excitement that comes with seeing the bank account increase but stuffed if I know what to actually do with the money. I still drive a second hand car and we still live in a modest house in one of the poorer parts of town. We're looking to build a nicer house but even with our current means it will still be relatively modest and should be paid off in a number of years (I still stress about borrowing an amount that I can easily repay)

This mentality has clearly reflected itself in your success.

This is one of the best progress threads that i have read so far. Thank you for taking the time to share and answer everyones questions. Being able to witness a live process is invaluable to me at this moment in time.

Thanks again
 

MythOfSisyphus

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This mentality has clearly reflected itself in your success.

This is one of the best progress threads that i have read so far. Thank you for taking the time to share and answer everyones questions. Being able to witness a live process is invaluable to me at this moment in time.

Thanks again
Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad I decided to do the progress thread, although I do wish I had spent more time updating it.

I'm really glad to hear it's helping others.
 

Tanu1234

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August Revenue Goal: $165,000

Actual Revenue for August: $176,447.97


Annual Revenue Goal: $1,750,000

Revenue so far: 1,043,716.38 (as of today, not end of August)

Sorry for the lack of updates lately but August was a massive month, much bigger than expected so I'm now well on my way to that FU money. Still need to average around 175-185k a month for the next 4 to hit the target but I think it's pretty achievable now.

The bookkeeper and digital marketing expert have helped free up some more of my time and hopefully I'll start seeing some additional revenue coming in from our adwords campaigns. I've also advertised for a 2nd picking/packing assistant to aid with the increase in orders expected over the busy period from November through February and also to cover for my existing assistant who will be having 3 weeks off during the peak period.

I'm finding it hard to set new goals or know exactly where to take this business next. There are a tonne of small improvements I can make to everything, but apart from 2 or 3 new products which I'll be getting in soon there aren't a lot of other popular products in this niche to target.

I've been considering starting a 2nd business in the beauty niche. Different products, however many of the salons we already sell our existing products to would also be using these as well so I could leverage the existing customer base.

I've also been spending a lot of time learning about investing so that I'll actually know what to do with all this money once I've done the basics like pay down our debt.

The funny thing is, I'm earning around 60k a month now after expenses and still haven't splurged on anything for myself (I did just take the wife away to a fancy hotel for the weekend though). I love the feeling of freedom and the excitement that comes with seeing the bank account increase but stuffed if I know what to actually do with the money. I still drive a second hand car and we still live in a modest house in one of the poorer parts of town. We're looking to build a nicer house but even with our current means it will still be relatively modest and should be paid off in a number of years (I still stress about borrowing an amount that I can easily repay)

I'm keen to invest the money and snowball it into even bigger monthly income, but I wonder at what stage I'll actually feel secure enough to start and spend it more freely. And yes, I'm quite aware of what a stupid problem that is to complain about. I just find it interesting how my mind hasn't quite caught up with the reality of the situation.

Revenue goal for September: $165,000

Congrats for your achievement.

Please update us when you buy new house. I think one treat to wife in fancy restaurant is ok. Lol

We are excited to know more about your journey!
 
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Lucious

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Nice to see an Aussie doing so well in eCommerce. This thread has helped me keep focus on my eCommerce goals.

MythOfSisyphus what are your thoughts on Australia's Amazon so far?

I started a new business 2 months ago have made sales on ebay and just recently my first sale on my website. But so far 0 sales on Amazon.

Feels like it could be years before Aussies make the transfer to Australia's Amazon. I personally dont know anyone that shops on amazon. Also just browsing through Australia's amazon listings there is a very low percentage of reviews.
 

MythOfSisyphus

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MythOfSisyphus

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Nice to see an Aussie doing so well in eCommerce. This thread has helped me keep focus on my eCommerce goals.

MythOfSisyphus what are your thoughts on Australia's Amazon so far?

I started a new business 2 months ago have made sales on ebay and just recently my first sale on my website. But so far 0 sales on Amazon.

Feels like it could be years before Aussies make the transfer to Australia's Amazon. I personally dont know anyone that shops on amazon. Also just browsing through Australia's amazon listings there is a very low percentage of reviews.

I was expecting big things from Amazon, but their foray into Australia has been extremely underwhelming.

When news broke about their Australian launch I signed up as a seller as soon as I could and began researching what I'd need to do so that we could prepare to sell our products on there from day 1 and beat our competitors to the platform. Unfortunately however selling on Amazon (particularly beauty products) is nowhere near as straightforward as it is on eBay and I simply gave up in frustration (but also partly because it soon became apparent that Amazon would take a long time to see the kind of popularity in Australia that it has in the US).

So I'm not surprised to hear you haven't made any sales on there yet and to be honest, I wouldn't expect to make many in the near future. Your efforts would be better focused on eBay and trying to rank your own website, assuming you have one.

With all the resources they have at their disposal I'm sure Amazon will make inroads eventually, but it doesn't look like happening any time soon.
 

Paul David

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Great story so far. Congratulations on your success.

I like how you prioritise your tasks. I really need to do something like this (I use asana) but i always struggle to put them in the right category. I will try to implement your method this week as i'm spending too much time procrastinating.

Regarding moving to your own warehouse, i had one for 15 years (well more like a shop front with two large rooms) and the cost price was pretty low due to my Father owning it. When i went to look at bigger warehouses the cost increase was dramatic. Now i use a 3rd party fulfilment centre to handle all our orders. The more i sell the more i pay etc. We're paying flat rate of £0.65p a single item and extra £0.10 per unit for same order.

I would highly recommend using a 3rd party company because firstly it makes you get your sh*t together and prevents having stock lying around the place under boxes and paperwork (like i did) and secondly the amount of time it frees up enabling me to concentrate on growing the business is a lot.

No need to worry about staff sickness, utility bills, staff sourcing etc. And the amount of times i was called out over the years at 3-4am for the alarm going off armed with a baseball bat in case of intruders is now all a thing of the past. You're also not burdened with large monthly costs and tied to any leases. Now i can be anywhere in the world and know that day in day out by parcels are going out the door.
 

Paul David

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Sure.

I just use the one board, however I have that board divided into several lists...

Reminder List - This contains a card that displays a visual display of my revenue goal for the year, and then my revenue goal for the month. Undearneath these are simply a few ongoing reminders (with due dates set) that I need for the future.

To Do List - This one is the most important. This is where the tasks I'm currently focussed on are kept. When they're completed they get moved into the next list

Completed - Pretty self explanatory. This is where my completed tasks go. I archive the contents of the list at the end of each day so that each day I can see it filling up with the tasks I'm knocking out. This helps me see what I've acheived.

Project Lists - I have about 10 other lists for the various projects I have going on. For instance I have one for the Amazon migration I'm doing at the moment (adding our products to Amazon Australia). I also have ongoing lists for things like website updates, social media, ebay, advertising etc.

Prioritising the tasks - This is what makes my system really effective - Any task that is tied to my goals of increasing revenue is marked with an 'IMPORTANT' label, so for instance something like setting up a marketing campaign for an upcoming sale will have a direct impact on revenue and therefore be marked with the important label. Anything that requires immediate attention (can't be put off until tomorrow or next week etc) will be given an 'URGENT' label.

So what I do is grab all the tasks listed as both 'IMPORTANT & URGENT' and add them to the top of my To-Do list. I then grab any listed as urgent and do them next. After that I prioritise anything listed as 'Important' to do next. Things listed as neither urgent, nor important i just get to when I can.

This is basically just a simplified version of the Eisenhower decision matrix but I've found it works really well at keeping me focused on only the most important revenue raising tasks and helps keep me organised and motivated.

I hope that's clear. Let me know if it's not though.

So using this decision matrix i have a listed my tasks below and the prioritised them as follows, would you agree with these?

Re-stock Amazon FBA SKU's - URGENT
Find New Products to sell - IMPORTANT
Increase Facebook Followers - NEITHER
Increase Instagram followers - NEITHER
Set up Shopify site - IMPORTANT
Set up customer follow up for sales - IMPORTANT
Design product bag for particular SKU for factory in China - IMPORTANT
Re-Order Stock - URGENT
Check Stock Performance - Slow/Non selling SKUS and act on results. - IMPORTANT
Check Google PPC performance - IMPORTANT
Check Amazon PPC performance - IMPORTANT
 
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MythOfSisyphus

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So using this decision matrix i have a listed my tasks below and the prioritised them as follows, would you agree with these?

Re-stock Amazon FBA SKU's - URGENT
Find New Products to sell - IMPORTANT
Increase Facebook Followers - NEITHER
Increase Instagram followers - NEITHER
Set up Shopify site - IMPORTANT
Set up customer follow up for sales - IMPORTANT
Design product bag for particular SKU for factory in China - IMPORTANT
Re-Order Stock - URGENT
Check Stock Performance - Slow/Non selling SKUS and act on results. - IMPORTANT
Check Google PPC performance - IMPORTANT
Check Amazon PPC performance - IMPORTANT

Looks pretty good to me and quite similar to my lists. Only suggestion I'd make is to go more specific than 'Increase Facebook Followers'. I've found that when I don't write down specific actionable tasks that I often procrastinate with them. I would have it broken down into things like 'Schedule 8 instagram posts' or 'Research ideas to increase facebook followers'. And don't forget to re-order things in order of...

1. URGENT & IMPORTANT
2. URGENT
3. IMPORTANT
4. NEITHER
 

Xeon

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Hi @MythOfSisyphus , just came across your thread. How could I have missed this!
It's so inspiring to know you are making 6 digits monthly.

I read in one of your posts that you're using AfterPay. Does AfterPay greatly increase your sales and orders?

From a theoretical point of view, it seems like a magic potion, because it totally tempts customers who're hesitating to part with their wallet. A product that's $80 might be hard to swallow for some, but what if it is just monthly installments of $20? Sounds like it will attract customers like bees to honey, lions to meat. I assume it significantly lowers your cart abandonment rate.

And the best part is, merchants get the payment upfront fast with no risks, and that small commission that AfterPay charges seem reasonable. Heck, we can even add that fee to the product cost to offset it.
 

MythOfSisyphus

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Initially I resisted adding afterpay as the merchant fees are quite high compared to competitors and I also assumed that as we sold to business owners that the need for pay later options wouldn't be as high as it would for general consumers. I was completely wrong though. After adding afterpay sales jumped around 10-15% immediately that month and we now do around 30k in AfterPay transactions every month.

For anyone on the fence about it I would recommend just pulling the trigger (assuming your margins can cover the merchant fees). You can always remove it if it doesn't work out. My only complaint is that their support team are absolutely terrible to deal with.
 
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I love this thread, thank you for sharing. I’m amazed at your numbers with afterpay, this is interesting. Are perhaps more of your customers actually individual employees renting chair/booth space at a business.

I like your idea on adding stickers for your customers on the bottom flap of the box.

The other day I ordered packaging and received a note my order was packaged and awaiting pickup WITH a photo of the package at the warehouse. The tool used was “visual confirm”. As a consumer this stood out as being different - just an idea.

Tim


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

MythOfSisyphus

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I love this thread, thank you for sharing. I’m amazed at your numbers with afterpay, this is interesting. Are perhaps more of your customers actually individual employees renting chair/booth space at a business.

I like your idea on adding stickers for your customers on the bottom flap of the box.

The other day I ordered packaging and received a note my order was packaged and awaiting pickup WITH a photo of the package at the warehouse. The tool used was “visual confirm”. As a consumer this stood out as being different - just an idea.

Tim


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Thanks Tim.

The majority of our customers are individuals operating their own beauty business, often from their homes as opposed to a salon. But we sell to businesses of all sizes, all the way up to beauty schools and colleges.

Afterpay, Zippay and paypal tend to be more popular with the smaller businesses and smaller orders while the larger ones generally use credit cards
 

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