We have had the honor of working with some of the most successful, smartest, and hardest working entrepreneurs in the Amazon space for the last few years.
To be honest, this gives me a tremendous business advantage. I get not only to see what works for my business but also the businesses of others. I get to look for commonalities of those who are massively successful. I also get to work with sellers who are stuck and looking move past those selling plateaus.
When you first start your business, the most important component is getting out there and getting inventory sent in. It is about spending time actually working your business. A coach can help, but honestly your money is better spent on inventory at first.
As you grow, at some point you start to max out what you can do. You start to work longer hours. You invest more in inventory. It never seems enough. The brute force it takes to get your business started and get that first $1000 in sales is a completely different skill set than what it takes to move from $15k a month to $80k a month in sales.
If you are a seller that is doing over $5,000 a month in sales it might be time to start thinking about changing the way you view your role in the business. Anyone that knows me knows that I am incredibly “frugal” (otherwise known as cheap). For a long time in my business, I didn’t like to hire because I felt I was saving money by doing things like accounting, packing, and data entry myself.
Now that was true in the first phase of my business. I needed to be careful with my capital. I couldn’t just hire anyone because I had to use every cent for inventory.
It wasn’t until I started to realize that I need to arbitrage more than just my time. In order to scale our business, that was mostly retail arbitrage at that point, I had to start arbitraging time.
This means that I needed to look at the tasks that I could outsource for less than I could earn doing other things in my business so that I could focus on the tasks that brought in the most revenue and profit in my business.
By hiring someone to help me pack, it allowed me an additional 2 days a week to source. That allowed me to scale my inventory a lot faster. Then when I hired someone to help me source, I freed up my time to be able to create systems. Those systems allowed me to grow the number of replenishable SKUS I had from about 30 to over 500.
The irony is that when you get to the point you really need to hire out, you are too busy to train someone. That means you feel like you are moving backward and running double time to get everything working. In fact, every time I hire I think “it would be faster for me to do this myself.”
I had to start to learn to think about not what is faster at the moment, but what will make my business more profitable in the long run. I would never hire a $200 an hour employee to pack boxes. However, since I could earn even more than that sourcing that was basically what my business was paying for its very overpriced warehouse employee.
My business has grown not because I am superwoman. I am far from it. It is because I have a great team. Even though that team has changed over time, it has changed with my business.
As I have coached thousands of people to move into wholesale I have found that those successful in arbitrage have a hard time pulling away from something proven to something that they hope they can make work. They know they can make a lot of money in stores, so it is hard to focus on the boring spreadsheets needed for wholesale.
We are announcing a new virtual assistant training program where we will train your VA in Wholesale Sourcing Support or Account Admin. The idea is that we want to free up some time for you in your business so that you can start spending more time working on your business and less time doing day to day tasks.
We are having a special that runs until June 5th, however, for Memorial day we have an amazing bonus if you by Tuesday, May 29th at midnight. You can find out more information at Bestfromthenest.com/VU
As always, we don’t just want to sell you services, and we want you to have profitable, professional e-commerce businesses. So if that program isn’t right for you here are some actions you can take to see if you are utilizing your best employee (you) efficiently.
Spend the week doing a work diary. Before you start the dairy decide how much your services as an employee of your business are worth and write that down.
At the end of the week review the work diary look at the tasks you spent time on and assign them a value to hire someone out. Look at the functions that are a combination of things you hate, low hourly value, and items that take a bulk of your time. These are things you might want to consider outsourcing first.
We also have some great information in our academy about outsourcing and hiring.
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