There’s always a way to figure out anything you want to do. Once you know what you want to achieve, you just have to work backwards to figure out the HOW.
Have you ever attended a marketing conference? I’ve been to so many I’ve lost count! My husband and I started going to marketing conferences back in 2006.
If you have ever attended a live event, you know that it takes a lot of work to get there. You have to buy plane tickets, take time off work, figure out babysitting arrangements… there are a lot of logistics to juggle.
But, when you finally get to the live event, you’re pumped. And when you finally get into that seat, you’re beyond excited.
Take a time to watch this video…
It’s time to learn how to grow your business!
Have you ever been sitting there, listening to the speakers, to all the people you’ve invested so much time and money to hear speak, and thought to yourself, “Well, that’s great… but I don’t think that applies to me.”
If not, let me tell you, it’s not a great feeling. After going to so much work and paying so much money, the last thing you want to do is walk away from a conference feeling like the lessons didn’t apply to you.
I went to a conference once with my mom, a very successful realtor in Southern California. (I always like to travel with somebody.) We were sitting in the second row, right in the middle, which meant that the speaker was right in front of us.
He was speaking about a very important topic for business owners:
#1. How To Build An Email List
#2. Why It’s Important To Have A List
#3. The Different Ways You Can Use An Email List
#4. How You Can Capture Your Leads
#5. How You Can Send Out An Offer And Have People Opt- in
#6. How To Build A Funnel, And On And On
While the speaker was talking, my mom started searching around for something in her purse. Maybe she was looking for a pen to take notes?
Nope! She pulled out a Better Homes and Garden Magazine. She opened it up and started flipping through it while the speaker – my mentor! – was right there on stage.
I quietly told my mom to put the magazine away and she asked me why. I told her she needed to pay attention to the speaker. She responded, “No, I don’t. This doesn’t apply to me. I sell houses.”
But, it did apply to her! She just didn’t realize how it could.
And this is a situation that so many of us find ourselves in at one time or another. We can be listening to something, a topic that could be a perfect fit for our business, something that could help us tremendously, but we don’t see how it applies — at least, not yet.
In order to be successful:
- You need to retrain your mind.
- Instead of jumping to the conclusion that something doesn’t apply to your business, try switching your mindset.
- Instead, ask yourself how you can make it work for you and your business.
- How can you take some of the steps and principles and apply them to your business, even if you have to alter them just a little bit?
In our e-commerce store, we used a drop shipper, a company that buys products from different types of companies and holds them in their warehouse. When you work with them, they give you an excel file of all the different products they offer with wholesale prices. You’re then able to take those products, list them on your website, and sell them at retail prices.
When you get a sale, you tell the drop shipper to send the product to your customer and ship it with your name on it, as if it came directly from you. It’s a fantastic way for you to build an e-commerce store without actually having to invest in inventory.
Within the first month of opening our e-commerce business, we started selling about $3,000 per month. As we grew, I started to learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A few months later, we were #1 on Google for every single one of the keywords we were targeting. Our sales went up to $30,000 a month!
I remember staying up way into the middle of the night trying to process orders because the drop shipper didn’t have all of the products. I was sending emails to customers to tell them their orders were out of stock and would offer an alternative. I manually emailed every single person because I didn’t want to lose a single order that we had received.
One day we got an order for 500 cooler hinges. That may not seem like a big deal, but back then the hinges cost me about a dollar and I sold them for $12. That was a lot of money for that one order. But I had a problem. My drop shipper only had 12 in stock, and I needed 500! I didn’t know what I was going to do. Maybe I can just buy direct from the manufacturer? But, where am I going to ship it to? Most manufacturers won’t ship directly to a consumer. Remember, this was all pre-Amazon fulfillment centers!
Desperate for a solution, I called up the manufacturer and asked if I could set up a wholesale account and what the minimum order requirement was. They said the minimum was $500 and they connected me with Ray in the sales department. I told him I needed 500 hinges. He sent me a few forms to fill out and asked me where I would like the hinges to be shipped to. That was the easy part. I then called my dad, who at the time was a VP of a credit union, and asked him if he’d be able to help me ship out a few items, 500 cooler hinges to be exact. Thankfully, he said yes!
The manufacturer shipped the order to my dad’s house and he re-shipped them to the customer. We made a huge profit! We were so excited. And after seeing how well this worked out, I asked my dad if he would like to help me a little bit more. So, we started to order more items directly from the manufacturer and had them sent to my dad’s house in California.
At one point, it wasn’t just a couple of boxes showing up on my dad’s front porch. There were pallets — pallets and pallets of stuff!
My dad did this for us for a few months. He worked his full time job Monday to Friday and then spent his nights and weekends printing out orders, packing goods, and shipping products. He created a system that made it all work. But, after a while of pulling 60+ hour weeks between his day job and his volunteer work for my company, we decided to hire a family member to stock and ship the inventory full time. They worked with us for several years until we outgrew their garage and had to get a warehouse!
Finally, when Amazon Fulfillment came around, we started moving our inventory to an Amazon Fulfillment Center, which made our lives so much easier. If you don’t know how Amazon Fulfillment Centers work, you basically can order products from anywhere in the world, have them shipped directly to an Amazon Fulfillment Center (which works like a drop shipping company), and have the orders sent out from there. You don’t ever have to touch them!
Whatever your situation is today, you have more going for you today than I had back when we started our business with dial up from Mexico. But, even with so many obstacles in our way, we were able to build a six figure business in a very short amount of time. How? We kept our mindsets focused on answering the question, “How can I make this work for me?”
Despite your situation and circumstances, you can always solve any problem.
- Sometimes you’ll have to think outside of the box,
- Leaning into a little bit of creativity.
- But this is how you become successful: You know there’s always a way to figure it out.