I think I’m straying from the 4 hour work week goals

May 12th, 2008 by Kenric

8 hour work week

I took a step back to see if I was traveling in the right direction. 6 months ago when I started my first ebiz it was a very simple business plan.

Get order
Send order via email to dropshipper
Tracking shipment
Done

This was a fairly easy process which took about 1-2 minutes per order.

Somewhere along the line, I decided to doing the following things:

Take phone orders
Carry inventory, combine orders
Expand to multiple suppliers
Offer free shipping / increase sales volume / lower profits
Add Ebiz#3 (same product) change packaging

I decided to carry inventory because I hated when my dropshippers didn’t have a product in stock. So at first I carried a few products at home. To ship an order from home, it takes me about 10 minutes to pack and make a trip to the UPS store. While this isn’t alot of time, it is alot of time for a $50 profit, versus the 1 minute email forward.

My extra room is starting to look like a big storage room with product and boxes. It’s looking like real business. So I see this thing slowly turning from a quick small little dropship business to a home based business. I don’t mind this change if it also meant that proportionally the income was increasing with the time increase. But it’s not. The reward isn’t worth the extra work. I may just go back to the simple dropship business it was in the first few months.

I shouldn’t have strayed from my initial plan. It was running great out of the gate, but I thought I could do better. And honestly I probably could. But is it really worth it. If I can make $1,000/mo consistently the easy way, and I can make $1,300 the harder way, is it worth it?

Autopilot

When I first started ebiz#1 I had to spend alot of time on SEO, blogs, PPC, etc… The truth is that I no longer have to run adwords for it. The site is ranked in the top 20 on Google, pulling in decent organic traffic and PR3. As long as it continues to rank up there it could really be a perpetual money machine with virtually no maintenance.

I have to tweak a few things, like getting rid of free shipping. With gas prices increasing, shipping prices are very high now and I don’t think consumers care. $12 shipping is very common now for many online stores. The other change I’d like is to make checkout more user friendly.

I think I need to get Ebiz#1 back onto autopilot so I can go hands off and concentrate on the other ebizes.

Posted in Ebiz1 |
Stumble it!