I’ve been out sick for the past two weeks so I apologize if I haven’t responded to any of your emails. The fact is that I hate seeing the doctor and it was only after a week of unbearable headache pain that I finally buckled and decided to go to urgent care. It was there that I discovered that I had a bacterial sinus infection that required antibiotics to cure. If only I had known this earlier, I could have saved myself from a full week of illness. UGH! In any case, I’ve been taking my medication for 3 days now and my head is starting to become lucid enough to resume writing. Here are a few email questions that I thought I’d answer in a blog post. Question: I encountered your blog last night when I did a Google search for ‘running an online business and having a baby’, and found myself reading through pages and pages of blogs. Your story struck a real resonance with me! My husband and I (who live in the UK) are planning on starting a family shortly, and I have been struggling in my mind to think how I get get the business and a baby to mix! This is especially so when I know how hard I work at pushing the business forward on a daily basis! However, your blog has given me a bit more confidence that it can be done, which is a big reassurance. I launched my website in April this year, which is an online bridal accessories boutique. I’m running the business full-time, having left the comfort of a secure income working for a design agency as a business development manager. My husband works as a project engineer for a construction company, and we’re relying primarily on his income at the moment as I’m only drawing a small wage. Having got the business of the ground, I am trying to find answers to two key questions: – How can I mix the demands of having a baby with running the business on a day-to-day (e.g. responding to customer enquiries – esp telephone ones! when baby is crying/wanting attention.) – How big do I need to grow the business/what’s the best way of scaling the business so that it can afford to buy in help (e.g. employing someone – then, would they be full-time/part-time? Would it be best to employ someone I know or someone that I don’t??) And, of course, another one that you’re familiar with:- – As we’re now moving away from wedding season, how quiet will it go??? Friends tell me that ‘it’ll be okay’, but, of course, it’s not so simple as that as I know that you have to always forward plan! Anyway, I just wanted to get in touch to say thank you for your blog. I will be coming back to visit to read your stories and have subscribed to your e-book. Many thanks Answer: First off I just wanted to say “Congratulations” on launching your business and having a baby! I can only imagine how excited you are to be making these enormous changes to your life. My wife and I had similar questions when we first started out but gradually found ways to get by. In terms of answering customer inquiries, there are a few things that you should do. For one thing, you should pack as much information as possible in a very obvious place on your website such that customers can answer the majority of their questions online without having to call. I would include a FAQ page that contains all of the questions that you can think of and display a link to this page prominently on every page of your store. Make sure you include vital information like shipping times, shipping costs, delivery times and your return policy very clearly as these are the most common questions that you will receive. The second thing you should do is to sign up for a virtual phone service like Ring Central. A virtual phone service will allow you to do several things.

  • You can place customers on hold automatically
  • You can route calls to any phone number anywhere
  • You can route commonly asked questions to automated recordings
  • Depending on urgency or the category of the call, you can route the customer either to a live person or to voicemail.

In case you are interested, I wrote an entire blog post on this topic on how to handle customer service with little or no staff. Finally, I would setup several reasonably sound proof workstation zones within your house. That way when a customer calls and it’s urgent, you have a quiet place to answer phone calls without your child screaming in the background. In terms of hiring employees, I would advise that you hire outside help as soon as your revenue grows enough to support it. My wife and I used to be so concerned with profits that we took our time hiring outside help. And ultimately, this was a horrible decision because we were using the majority of our time on tasks that we could easily have outsourced. Please don’t make that same mistake. Also, make sure that you hire all of your employees by the book and follow all of the necessary rules and regulations that are involved. Unless you can trust your employee implicitly, handling things under the table can lead to lawsuits later on down the line if things don’t work out. Finally, since the wedding business is very cyclical, I recommend that you find additional products to sell so that your business is not completely dead during the off season. For example, when the wedding season slows down in October/November, we sell linen napkins and towels to event planners for holiday parties. As a result, our business is fairly balanced throughout the year. Question: I actually came across your site after having a conversation with my brother about how he didn’t have the time to start anything on the side, but he did want to escape the corporate world. I thought someone must have written a blog post about how you can find the time if you really want it- and I found it on your site! I’m in the planning stages of starting an online business and I’ve found your site to be a great resource. One of the questions that I have is when starting out, how did you decide how much inventory to carry? I am struggling with that right now. All of my items will be imported, so dropshipping is not an option for me. Not sure if you covered that in one of your posts, but if you did please point me in the right direction! Thanks for the great blog! Answer: Sounds like we share something in common with our online stores in that we both import all of our items. In terms of inventory, it takes a while to understand the supply, demand and cyclicality of your business. Therefore, you should carry as little inventory as possible until you see the patterns. In the beginning, my wife and I carried very little inventory until we figured out what sold well and what didn’t. The 20% rule applies here. 20% percent of your products make up most of your revenue. So once you find out what sells, carry a lot of that item and keep a small amount of the other items to fill out your store. Hope this helps. There’s a lot of situational criteria that comes into play that I can’t describe unless I understand your business better. Just don’t make a huge order of any one item until you are confident it will sell. Question: Hi Steve, Is it worth selling anything with only a 10% mark up? Of course if it were a $100,000 sale I would be more than happy to accept 10%. I am looking for $50-$100 price point products and I don’t think it is unreasonable for a keystone mark up. My challenge is finding products where there isn’t so much competition and other sellers are marking it up only 10%. If it is quantity that is giving them a better price, I cant compete with that either because I cant afford to risk buying a container full of products that might not even sell. Any suggestions? Thanks for your time. Answer: A 10% markup sounds really low to me. In general, your margins should be between 35-50%. If you import your goods from Asia, the margins can be 2-3X higher. The disadvantage of only a 10% markup is that you won’t have as much room to play around with prices and discounts. If all of your competitors are pricing their products such that you can only make 10%, then I would strongly consider another product category. However that being said, the lowest price doesn’t always win. Many of our products are priced higher than our competitors but we still get the sale. If you can manage to take the top spot in the search engines, you will make sales even if your prices are higher.

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