Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (March 09, 2018) Entrepreneur |
- Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (March 09, 2018)
- I started a candle business as a side hustle with $50 that now makes $1000/month. It's early, and slow, but it's building.
- From Garage to 21,000 sq/ft building in 2yeara
- I have this idea (not eCommerce, online, or brick and mortar) related. No idea how to begin, help?
- My new little side business for vinyl
- How to get rid of mental masturbation while doing solo startup?
- FIRST DEAL - $4.4 Million with Seller Financing
- How should businesses prepare their employees for jobs automation?
- Side Hustle: Have Amazon sellers ship me thier products. I take amazing photos and background removal for their listing.
- An internet retailer wants to buy my products wholesale, need help!
- Very high engagement rate with Facebook ad but no sales! Help!
- population growth as a cause of a market growth
- HELP: Amazon experts. How critical is the style guide?
- Pursue a career and still open a business?
- SELLERS PERMIT IN CA, pls help if experienced or know!
- I'm gaining insta followers as fast as I'm losing them. What am I doing wrong?
- Need advice on approaching storeowner...would like to work for him.
- How do I sell products without owning them first online?
- Good businesses to fulfill screen printing/embroidery needs?
- Side Hustle: Fiverr Arbitrage... What do yall think?
- Should I register for an LLC once I start making money?
- Find a developer or find an investor without a working MVP?
- Rewarding Failure and Separating Truth From Nonsense
- Should I continue to invest or save my money instead?
- Question/Discussion about scaling
- Advice needed — Simple Social Media Management business, would love some thoughts on this.
| Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (March 09, 2018) Posted: 09 Mar 2018 05:07 AM PST Please use this thread to share any accomplishment you care to gloat about, and some lessons learned. This is a weekly thread to encourage new members to participate, and post their accomplishments, as well as give the veterans an opportunity to inspire the up-and-comers. Since this thread can fill up quickly, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Mar 2018 02:14 PM PST I know I don't have much to bring to the table yet as I am still growing this business but I thought this would be a good post for those always asking about home businesses or a side hustles all while still working a full time job. My daughter and I started this business two years ago and it is now bringing in around $1000 a month and still growing. A thousand dollars may not compete with some of the "we made it" posts that get added here but for most people asking questions about how to get started this might motivate a few to start. I also want to point out that my subscribers, followers, sales, that I am about to list are not high by any means. I hope this doesn't discourage anyone as well but help you understand that even with these small numbers we are making what many would consider a nice monthly side income to help out. This turned out really long, I am sorry and I hope this is useful The genesis This all started when we stayed at a hotel in Seattle a few years back and my eleven year old daughter and her cousin kept running to the bathroom to use a sugar scrub that was placed on the sinks. They must of used it at least a dozens times a day and as we left she asked to buy some. Once she purchased this small 1oz scrub for $7 I started to look at the product itself and the costs that went into it and mentioned "we could make this at home". She got excited and asked repeatedly over the next couple of weeks to make it, and then asked if it would be something we could sell. I looked sugar scrubs up online, found a couple facebook groups dedicated to this stuff and asked a few questions to get an idea of what I was looking at. Once we had a recipe we wanted to try we ran out and bought supplies, sugar, oils, jars, labels, all totaling about $50. We spent that night putting them all together, mixing, labeling, wrapping up so that I could take them to work the next day. I work in a building that has a lot of women who love this type of stuff and they're constantly bringing in their own handmade items such as quilts, sewing projects, baked goods, etc for others to look at and purchase. I grabbed all the jars the next morning and as I left my wife said "You really think you're going to make money off those?" I sold half the jars I took to work that first day for $97 to which my wife said as I got home "No shit, you actually made that much from those?!" Creating the product Once I got home that night I told my daughter that I think we have something here and we should make them nicer next time. I spent the next few nights searching wholesalers, suppliers, amazon, you name it, for cheaper jars, bulk sugar, oils, labels and started ordering. I found a nice plastic jar we could package them in, some labels, cheaper oils and sugars and we got to work on the labels ourselves. We spent maybe another $100 on everything and had a sugar scrub that we liked, jar, label, product. Selling the product I started selling to family and coworkers first, I think most people start there. I will say that I am lucky with work and some small sales. I work in a building that has a few thousand people and it's easy to show alot of people. Don't get me wrong this is not a gold mine, it brings me around $100-$200 a month from regulars and new. I don't want to discourage anyone reading this thinking that I jumped into a work goldmine. Once I had products at work I started to walk around our town, which is a little tourist trap in spots, and shopped our sugar scrubs. I also posted in the local facebook town group and asked if anyone would be interested in selling our scrubs in their shops and had one lady say she would love too. About a month later she said that she hadn't sold a single one, even though I had a friend tell me she walked in and bought one from her. She never put them out on her shelves so I told her I would just come pick them up and thanked her for giving us a shot. I did this for a month or two, work, facebook, family and then finally started to wander around town for a place to set up a table display. I tried to think of some parks, town squares, anything that would have a lot of people walking through and everything took a city license to set up. Finally I drove past a local Whole Foods style grocery store and said fuck it, I'm asking these guys if I can set up and without hesitation they said yes. That first table set up should of been embarrassing but I didn't give a damn, I set up anyway and sold almost every single scrub I had and even the ones from the shop that said she couldn't sell them. I am normally a very quiet person out in public and don't often initiate random conversations with strangers but I hit up every single customer that walked in with a big smile and said "All natural sugar scrubs today if you'd like to test them" We made a little over $300 that day! From there I started to ask them every Saturday if I could set up again and they said "Absolutely" I was there every Saturday for about two months straight when one of the managers came to me and said they wanted to carry our products in store. During this time we also started to add some more products to our table. We made some body butters, lip scrubs, pretty much anything my daughter wanted to try out. My wife finally said "If you're going to make things will you make me some candles, I hate spending so much for them." Over the next couple of weeks we added candles to our table and made about $400. The first day I set them out we sold every single one. Expanding our business This is where we are now, we have some of our products narrowed down and are now solid sellers, candles being the top one. For the last year we have been doing anything we can to get our products seen and anything to make sales. I sell them on our website, still at work, random friends on facebook, facebook sale groups, a few new small shops locally, and two in other states. I started to send our candles to anyone that had a following on instagram and found a couple of influencers with a decent following, anything to get them seen and grab new followers to the instagram profile. Growing pains and mistakes From the top of the article, my first mistake was doing consignment with that shop that didn't sell a single scrub. I said no problem to this agreement in the beginning because we were small and I didn't have leverage to say no. Lesson learned. She actually did sell a couple scrubs, I know this for fact because a personal friend bought one. I gladly took my product and moved on. Consignment can be fine for some but if you do so you will have to keep track with your inventory, their inventory and you will even have to promote your own product for them as they really stand nothing to gain from selling your product like they would if they bought it from you at wholesale. Influencers is where I messed up next. I started to send my products to people with influence and didn't have a clear idea of what I was doing and no way to keep up with demand and offers since we were just starting. I reached out to a team member of Garyvee's that I followed at the time to see if she would take a look at our product and give us some feedback. She received our package and then asked if we would want to be one of Gary's sponsors for his weekly email he sent out back then. Gary's old email, and some still do, contain a sponsor at the bottom that offers free products or a nice discount for one of their products. I thanked her and another member that sets this up but had to say no because there was just no way I could meet this demand or even cover the cost for shipping 150 of anything for free. Huge miss. The next influencer I sent the candles too was a hit but it was a selfish send on my part. I noticed she used a lot of candles and asked her if we could send her some of our candles to try out. She loved them and said thank you but didn't post about them. After watching Garyvee for so long I wasn't disappointed, I knew that I didn't do anything too special to get a nice tag or feature. It wasn't until after I sent them that I realized there was nothing special about what I sent her, just a random product thinking she would use her giant platform for my gain. Very selfish without realizing it. A couple days later I finally pulled my head out of my ass and customized the candles for her. I had been following her for a while so I knew her colors, her styles, her likes and made a set of candles with a logo that featured her brand and made my logo very small in the corner of the label, she loved them! She promoted them on her profile, talked about them on her live stream and even used one as a giveaway item. I have sent her a few new version now and honestly I have not been sending her enough candles, I need to double down on this one! TheSkinnyConfidential has been nice enough to feature us many times now and I could not be more grateful. Not buying what I need, when I need it. Once I knew which products were selling well and I was making consistently, I should of bought items to help make this process more efficient. Soap molds instead of pans then cutting bars individually, jars, lids, commercial equipment, anything to help speed up production. I have gone months in some instances before I nutted up and bought something that would of saved me countless hours of time and made me money quicker because of cost and fear. When you know you have demand for something you know you will use such as a larger mixer, premade labels, more jars, back stock oils, whatever, buy it! Facebook ads is another growing pain. I am still learning this one and not gaining much traction but I see results in other ways. I have been playing with them for about a year now and I am starting to see what's working and what's not. I have spent about $500 so far but I have not gained one sale from that $500. I have picked up some subscribers but no sales that I can tie directly to the ads whatsoever. I am also not spending enough per ad to really grab the best clients I imagine. I only spend at most $20-$30 per ad just to test audiences and creative. Learning patience and unknown blessings in going slow I always wish I had an extra $10,000 only to be thankful a few months later that I didn't have it. What I mean by this is every time I have said to myself "If I only had X amount I would buy so much of X right now". I can think of a thousand things I need at this moment to make this go faster but I have to remind myself that I am still in the beginning stages of this still and I am still learning. Not having that amount I would spend far less, something like $30 on new packaging that I wanted to order a thousand off, praising the patience Gods later because it turned out to no the right one, right size, right color, etc and only being out that $30 and not thousands. I am the type to go full force without thinking or testing properly and I have made several packaging mistakes that thankfully have only added up to very small amounts. I would of wasted thousands if I would of had it at the time. Throwing away $30 in product because I was impatient is easier to swallow than $3000. Successes One of our successes has been starting a youtube channel doing howto's on everything we do. I noticed that when I was learning how to make candles the videos on youtube were pretty bad and didn't include alot of pretty valuable information that a beginner should know. The top video in candle making even says in the video "I won't show you exactly how I make these because I don't want you cutting into my sale" I told my daughter "we can make a better video than that!" So we did! We are now at 3000 subscribers and that how to make candles video just hit 100,000 views! We could not be happier about that. Last year we missed out on all of the local farmers markets just because we started too late to sign up. This year I jumped fast and I have the licenses needed and I am signed up for all the big ones. This year should be very nice for our business. Shameless plugs If I missed anything please let me know, I will try to answer everything. I hate to plug my stuff but just to show what we have been up too, here are the links to every thing mentioned above. IG profile with pictures of our first products till now. www.instagram.com/standleyhandcrafted Our channel www.youtube.com/standleyhandcrafted our website www.standleyhandcrafted.com [link] [comments]  |
| From Garage to 21,000 sq/ft building in 2yeara Posted: 09 Mar 2018 01:38 PM PST Today was a good day. My company was working out of my garage 2 years ago. Since then we've rented a location, rented a bigger location, purchased a 7,200 sq/ft building and now a 20,000 sq/ft building. It will take us a month to move in due to construction and remodel work, but everyone at our company is excited. Some exterior pics: https://i.imgur.com/OYJUU2s.jpg https://i.imgur.com/v2QJ8Xs.jpg The inside is just empty offices and warehouse, but will look awesome once we are done. For those of you plugging away at it, just keep grinding it out and you'll get there! [link] [comments]  |
| I have this idea (not eCommerce, online, or brick and mortar) related. No idea how to begin, help? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 11:48 AM PST I'll bite and just say what my idea is. So for as long as I can remember, their has always been once complement I get more so than others, and usually on a daily basis. That is my white teeth. The first question I always get is "What do you do" or "What is your secrete?" The answer is, bleach. Nah, just kidding, don't drink bleach. I do say this to people as a joke, but I think people take me very seriously so I have to tell them it's a joke. I simply just say daily brushing, avoid coffee, tea, cigs, etc. I also haven't been to a dentist in YEARS, and never went to get my teeth whiten either. Here's the thing, I smoked for about 10 years, drank as much to almost considering I might be an alcoholic and coffee in the mornings and red wine with the ex for 11 years. However, I did have a secrete. I would simply cover my teeth using a "guard" to prevent stains. I don't have any real guard and what I have used... I just rather not say. So this is my idea pretty much. I want to create a product that people can wear on their teeth to PREVENT stains. I understand there are white stripes and what not, but that's to remove stains. I'm trying to make something to prevent them in the first place. I couldn't find much on this or if any product truly exists or not. However, that's why I'm here sharing exactly what it is, as I want feedback, ideas, critiques. I literally get told whatever you're using I'll buy it from you. I want to create that use, just need a starting point. Cheers! [link] [comments]  |
| My new little side business for vinyl Posted: 09 Mar 2018 09:38 AM PST
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| How to get rid of mental masturbation while doing solo startup? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 07:13 AM PST Hi, I don't know whether it is right platform for this or not, but I think I should spit it out here. I thought about an idea which is doable, good and is logical, but the problem is my mind start pumping millions of scenarios in my mind and somehow convinces that your life will be fucked if you proceed with it. Maybe it can be a combination of depression or some mental condition, but it's getting too much out of me.. Its stopping me to make a decision and bringing for me new distractions everyday. Any similar experiences? How did you cope with it? [link] [comments]  |
| FIRST DEAL - $4.4 Million with Seller Financing Posted: 09 Mar 2018 12:05 PM PST Where do I begin??? Last year I started my journey as a real estate investor. I had no experience in real estate other than my personal house. I had a very successful career. Then my son was born premature and he needed a lot of care. So I decided to leave my career and pursue real estate so I could have the flexibility to care for my boy. I consumed everything about real estate. Podcasts, book, youtube... everything. I even became a real estate YouTube vlogger myself to document my journey after I quit my job. 11 months later I closed on the biggest deal that I couldn't possibly have ever imagined doing! A 54 unit apartment complex in North Carolina for $4.4 MILLION. I negotiated the deal so that I only had to put down 10% and the seller agreed to owner finance 90%. The owner was willing to take $4 MILLION in seller financing from someone he never met and someone who had zero real estate experience. I don't think he even checked my credit. I would like to say that I am a pretty good negotiator but I am probably just "lucky". My experience has been the more time you put into something and hustle, the chances of you hitting that lucky deal increases. I am in the second full month owning the property and I feel confident that I am going to hit the numbers that I modeled. I underwrote the deal at a 25% IRR which is a crazy return. The other fact is that my boy is very healthy now so everything worked out. My next goal for 2018 is to acquire 100+ units. The crazy thing is I got another deal where the seller was willing to seller finance a $10 MILLION deal. The numbers didn't work for me on this one so I am still searching. The moral of the story is that it is totally possible to do this real estate thing in a big way. You just have to have the right mentality and the develop the skills over time. It's definitely a numbers game. How much work are you willing to put in before your get first big deal? [link] [comments]  |
| How should businesses prepare their employees for jobs automation? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 02:00 PM PST "Jobs are not going away with automation, they're just changing. Every company has the opportunity to rethink its own customer and employee experience, and apply technology to make it better. In some cases, this means changing jobs, but in most cases, it means making jobs 'better', reducing cost and mundane tasks, and adding more value to customer interactions", Deloitte. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Mar 2018 09:49 AM PST |
| An internet retailer wants to buy my products wholesale, need help! Posted: 09 Mar 2018 01:12 PM PST A little back story, I started an Etsy shop about a month ago, I've been getting sales trickled in week by week, and I have been working on developing a brand since then and getting together a good amount of product ideas to list. Well today I received a message from a retailer in the UK that they wanted to work with me to resell my products in the UK. They asked for some info, like wholesale price, RRPs (which I just found out means retail ready packaging), lead times and availability. [link] [comments]  |
| Very high engagement rate with Facebook ad but no sales! Help! Posted: 09 Mar 2018 01:11 PM PST I have started a teespring campaign, and I'm quite frustrated... There's high engagement on the post but its not getting sales. Not sure what to do so I'm turning to you reddit to give me some insight. I have tested out a teespring campaign, and on only 15 dollars ad spend, my post has gotten 140 likes, 55 shares, and 10 comments where people are tagging their friends (out of exposure to only 1500 people). The likes/comments/shares are continuing even after the boost post has ended. It seems like the shirt itself has potential to go viral but I have not garnered a single sale from the shirt. The shirt itself is text based, funny, and a little controversial (but not too over the top), and resonates with Bostonians. People seem to be finding the shirt funny, but are not purchasing. Perhaps its funny to share/like online but people dont want to wear it? Is this an ad that's worth killing or pumping? Is viral-ability not translatable to sales? Seems like I could get thousands of likes and hundreds of shares if I dump a little more money into the ad. I've also considered lowering the price, currently the shirt is 19 bucks Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm new to this Facebook marketing thing and not sure what to take away from the results of this test. [link] [comments]  |
| population growth as a cause of a market growth Posted: 09 Mar 2018 12:27 PM PST Lot of businesses and startups are looking for global sales, not just in US. I questioned myself what if it is possible to form a list countries where will be a high "organic" growth in next 10 years. Luckily, United Nations (UN.org) is publishing their prospects about the population change in a form of large spreadsheet file According to their prediction about 730 million people will be added to the total population until 2028. If you work on a startup then just imagine that everyone of them will have Internet access and a mobile phone or a computer. Top-20 countries by a population growth in absolute numbers: Countries predicted to decrease population are led by Japan where population will decrease by -4 million on 2028. It is followed by Russia with -2.5 milllion, Ukraine with -2.5 million and Poland with -1.23 million decrease accordingly. And here is the chart I've made with numbers for 2028 year for 239 countries. What do you think? Can we safely link the population growth to the market growth when planning a new startup / new venture? [link] [comments]  |
| HELP: Amazon experts. How critical is the style guide? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 12:26 PM PST I'm in the Beauty Category and a lengthy call with an Amazon rep told me the following: Remove "pipes" | from the title: these pipes will actually block any words after them from being indexed. I cannot use any symbols at all in my bullet points. Including commas, periods, hyphens etc. This would make formatting impossible. The style guide "disallows" these but how would it effect me if I used them? Also, why do the style guide examples use these symbols? All help is much appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Pursue a career and still open a business? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 12:13 PM PST I'm in highschool (freshman) and I have quite a few choices on what I want to be when I get out of college. I plan on being an entrepreneur, but I also want to pursue something in the medical field... my school is an academy school and I picked the "leadership" academy because it has an "entrepreneurship pathway" for classes. I didn't pick the medical field because it didn't have anything I was interested in it only had nursing and some other things. So could I go to college and major in the medical field and become a doctor, psychologist, etc, and still own a business? [link] [comments]  |
| SELLERS PERMIT IN CA, pls help if experienced or know! Posted: 09 Mar 2018 12:08 PM PST I'm having to pay taxes in CA for shipping goods there but i know if i obtain a sellers permit i can avoid this. My goal it to get the sellers permit, then resellers permit afterwards (from my knowledge, I need sellers before in order to obtain a resellers) I go to get a permit and its asking for a ton of information i don't think i have: SEIN FEIN CA Secretary of State # Do I need to register an LLC in CA in order to get the permit? I'm confused because I have no information for SEIN and FEIN. Also the CA Sec or State thing, I go to get one and it asks for CA information BTW, I am out of state, [link] [comments]  |
| I'm gaining insta followers as fast as I'm losing them. What am I doing wrong? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 06:05 AM PST Every week I'm naturally gaining about 15 followers but I seem to lose 10-15 every week as well. I post about 5 times a week and I'm slightly active liking and commenting on bigger accounts I follow. My posts get about 100 to 200 likes for 3k subscribers so I can't figure out why I'm losing followers as fast as I'm gaining them? [link] [comments]  |
| Need advice on approaching storeowner...would like to work for him. Posted: 09 Mar 2018 11:58 AM PST Hi all, I wanted to say thanks in advance for all your help. Need your help with the following: There is a local men's clothing store in my town that I would really like to work at. The founder seems like he would be an awesome mentor and works with pretty high-profile clients. As a male in my mid-20s who is passionate about entrepreneurship and fashion, I would love to work for this person and help grow his business. I seeking advice on how to approach this person and making the most of this opportunity. Some background, I have a formal education in accounting (M.S. and B.S.) and two years experience in management consulting. I believe I could help the founder in a variety of ways (social media marketing, business development, finances, etc) I was thinking of shooting him an e-mail to chat over coffee. I have been brainstorming improvements to the user-experience of the company's site, as well as over social-media marketing ideas. If the conversation went well, I was going to ask him to be my mentor and potentially ask if he would be willing to let me intern there and learn the ropes from him. Reaching out to this community for advice/thoughts. I really appreciate all the help. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| How do I sell products without owning them first online? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 11:29 AM PST I am in the process of starting an online store to sell merchandise for a band. I have designed part of our website already and want to add merch to it with our name and logo on it. I do not want to purchase the shirts, hats etc, before people have bought them online, because I can't cover the expenses currently. Do you all know of any companies or easy to use websites, that will allow me to put my logo on their item and sell it on my site where they do all of the shipping and handling, and the difference in revenue goes to me? How should I go about setting this up. I am using freewebstore.org for my website. I have heard of cafepress but I think I have to set up my store on their website with their color scheme..I have also heard of teespring but you have to yield a certain amount before they create them. I do not know how to code, so I am looking for a more web3.0 approach to this. [link] [comments]  |
| Good businesses to fulfill screen printing/embroidery needs? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 11:12 AM PST Hey guys, Just wondering if anyone here can point me in the direction of a couple companies that could help fulfill my screen printing/embroidery needs for my clothing start-up. I've been planning on launching a small start up myself for the past year or so. I have designs and a general idea of what I want, but with my research I've had trouble finding companies that offer the services I'm looking for. To give you a basic rundown of what I'm looking at doing, I should start by saying that my first run would just be used to test the waters and gage interest. I'm thinking something like 20 t-shirts, 20 hoodies and 20 embroidered hats with my logo/badge. It would be nice to have the option of doing custom tags for these garments as well, which I've seen on a number of other clothing start ups. Ideally, I would love to make use of a single company that would be able to fulfill all of these needs, but I'm not opposed to separating the clothing and hat fulfilment across 2 companies if I have to as I understand that this may be difficult to find. Finally, I live in Ontario, Canada and would love it if I could find a semi-local company to help me out with this, if not in Ontario at least in Canada. Otherwise, I am open to international options as long as their work is absolutely stellar and doesn't totally blow my budget out of the water with fees. Any help/advice would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Side Hustle: Fiverr Arbitrage... What do yall think? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 11:01 AM PST I do not have the skills to do any task on Fiverr however I feel like many profiles are lacking. I want to create a welc crafted profile. Get higher priced gigs due to a more professional profile and farm it out to the cheaper guys. [link] [comments]  |
| Should I register for an LLC once I start making money? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 10:48 AM PST Creating an E commerce store. I've heard from many people that I should leave all the legal stuff to when I actually start making money. I don't want to have setup everything and payed all that money for LLC and licenses then realize that my business is not working. What do you guys recommend? [link] [comments]  |
| Find a developer or find an investor without a working MVP? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 10:29 AM PST Hi guys, thank you a lot for passing by! We're looking for advice. We got a pretty interesting idea going around and we're aiming to get 1000 positive responses + e-mails to our survey to validate the idea. We got one guy from marketing, graphic design and 2 guys with MBA. We're trying to find a developer now to make a working MVP. All we got right now is:
We're going to try to get followers in our social media too. What do you think is easier if we don't have enough resources? Find a developer to make the first MVP in exchange of company equity or find an investor without a working MVP to get resources and pay a developer? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Rewarding Failure and Separating Truth From Nonsense Posted: 09 Mar 2018 10:02 AM PST I started my morning listening to a cool talk by Udacity's VP of Careers and People Ops that I think is important for any founder or manager to listen to. Basically the concept is growth through failure and learning, and celebrating those failures because at least good ideas are being tried out. VP, Kathleen Mullaney says: "Rewarding failure means reassuring people that they're not going to be penalized for mistakes." Here is her bulleted advice:
It sounds simple, really, but I think it's so overlooked. I know that I definitely am guilty of this with my own team. The overview and audio can be found here for anyone interested. How have you seen failure rewarded at your company? [link] [comments]  |
| Should I continue to invest or save my money instead? Posted: 09 Mar 2018 08:19 AM PST I just would like to see everyone's opinion on this. Im 18 years old and right now my current goal is to save up for braces. To do this I have my own online business and another income stream that brings in $945 a month. The only problem is I keep pouring money that I could be saving into my business and although I'm not making money now, other people using this business model are and I feel I'm only a second away from achieving success. (I took a course and have been learning from my mistakes) but instead of spending more money on my next product I'm thinking of saving it and putting it towards my goal. I'm tired of making these expensive mistakes in my business and im starting to doubt whether or not it's worth all the money I'm spending on it. don't want to give up but tired of losing money as well since I'm doing this to MAKE money, not lose it. What should I do? Continue to risk it and see if it works out? Or save my money instead? [link] [comments]  |
| Question/Discussion about scaling Posted: 09 Mar 2018 07:26 AM PST Hello, So, despite my better judgment on such a failure-prone industry, I've decided to team up with an experienced chef and a friend and start a restaurant in my city (premium delicatessen). I have been experienced in the industry as a marketer for food manufacturing, with special focus on branding, trade marketing, and consumer insights for foodservice customers for about a decade. He has about the same experience as a chef for everything ranging from food trucks to being a sous chef at a Michelin-rated restaurant, and has had a few years of actual management experience. None of that is very important other than "we are well aware of what we're getting into." We have been good about breaking the "wantrepreneur" habit. Setting goals, demanding accountability, building timelines. To make a long story short, we have decided to take a longer approach to raising capital and start the enterprise off as a small business offering a limited menu at a local market. We've done all the business registration/tax stuff, etc. I have been tweaking a pro forma cash flow sheet as we get more information, learn to manage our needs and costs, and forecast our reach/sales. The intent is to raise enough cash to cover 15% of total capital needs and 3 months operating costs for an anticipated full-launch in 2019. We believe we can reach that based on what we know about our local market, our costs, gap closing plans, and more. I have a few questions: 1.) How often do people take this approach? We are literally going from a $500 investment in basic equipment, tables, food safety, and branding with the hopes of being able to raise 15% of $500-700k. 2.) I know some people are all about raising funds strictly through equity (and some debt) - is raising $75-100k ourselves through the smaller version of the business to reinvest and grow the business a reasonable approach? If not, what would you recommend? 3.) For the type of business we're targeting, what are your thoughts about debt:equity ratios? We want to keep both numbers as low as possible, and we definitely want to keep the ratio itself low. For those who've had difficulty getting capital through investors, what was your experience with getting loans? For those who have had difficulty securing loans - what was your approach for investors? [link] [comments]  |
| Advice needed — Simple Social Media Management business, would love some thoughts on this. Posted: 09 Mar 2018 06:46 AM PST I've come to realize that there is a plentiful amount of small business in my area who are very good at what they do but lack the time or expertise to run their own social media outlets. I particularly want to run IG's and FB's for companies that work with their hands. My business summed up will be scheduling and photo edits along with other basic services, but the key is scheduling and consistency. The two questions I have are: 1. For a small business who need social media help but can't hire a salary worker for it, how much a month should I charge them? Then for a medium size company, etc. 2: Since my model is heavy on photography content, is it too much to ask for businesses to take pictures every so often of what they do and place them in an online bucket for me to take from? For businesses who simply can't take their own photos, is it logical for me to send a photographer on site? Thank you for any comments. If you more information, specify and I can provide. Note: The biggest hole for me is obtaining the raw content at a consistent basis. [link] [comments]  |
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