Getting Punished For Being Honest

Here’s just a sampling of what I had to go through in order to install one piece of software that we use everyday for our business. Without this software, we can not sell personalized items in our store. So get this. Even though I completely reinstalled the program using my original and authentic installation disk, the software would not run because I needed to reactivate it!

With programs like Microsoft Windows, reactivation can be done completely online. However, this company required me to contact them directly to get a new activation code. Not only was this a major hassle but I also had to wait until Monday morning before I could contact support which meant that the weekend’s orders could not be processed.

So finally Monday rolls around, I get a hold of support and they inform me that my software was registered using a different address, email address and phone number than before and that they couldn’t reactivate my software unless I used the original information. But the kicker was that they also couldn’t tell me what info I had used in the past.

After arguing with the sales rep for about 20 minutes, she finally relented and gave me a new activation code. But the damage was already done. This ordeal wasted several days of my valuable time and caused numerous delays with our order fulfillment. The worst part? I paid good money for this software, so why was I getting punished and hassled just because someone else decided to copy it illegally?

More Ridiculous Copy Protection Shenanigans

Getting a new computer also meant that I was forced to upgrade my operating system to Windows 7 from Windows XP. And it just so happens that one of my software CDs only has the XP version which won’t run on Windows 7. So I contact support and they provide me with a download link to the Windows 7 version of the program. Cool! Everything is all good until I try and run the software.

The program requires the CD to be in the actual CD drive in order to run!!! Since I didn’t have the Windows 7 version of the CD, I had to contact support and have them send me another one. Another week lost and once again I was getting punished for paying for my software!

More Chaos And A Lesson Learned

In the midst of all the chaos, we also had to deal with one very annoying customer issue. The other day we received a surprise return in our mailbox. But it was not just any ordinary return. This particular lady had the gall to ask for a refund for goods that she had already used. Actually, the word “used” is a mild way of putting it. To be specific, she purchased a set of napkins and returned them to us completely filthy and then demanded a refund.

When we told her that we didn’t accept returns that are not in resell-able condition (not to mention nasty used napkins), she claimed that the napkins were this dirty when she received them. Yeah right…

Your return policy says 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed. I’m not satisfied.

Since it wasn’t worth having her throw a fit and getting all upset over 35 bucks, we begrudgingly gave her a refund.

The funny thing though is that this one isolated incident made my wife and I completely reevaluate our return policy. Currently, we offer a 30 day money back guarantee but this lady pissed us off so much that we seriously considered making all sales final. No returns period.

But once we calmed down, we thought about our ordeal with the sewing software companies and realized that we were probably feeling exactly how they felt whenever someone copied their software. And here we were considering some drastic anti-return measures to prevent future customers from cheating us out of money.

After a while, we realized that canceling our return policy just because of this one crazy lady was ridiculous. But man was it tempting. As a business owner and a human being, it’s really easy to overreact especially when you feel completely ripped off and taken advantage of. But it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture and focus on your main customer base, the customers that you care about.

Is your business making important decisions based on a few vocal customers? Are you making your business worse for the majority of customers because of a few bad seeds that are abusing the system?

Now I don’t want to discount the importance of protecting your business profits, but I just hate it when a small group of people spoil things for the rest of us. Let’s try to not to let that happen with our small businesses shall we?

Oh Tortoise, Oh Wise One

But something interesting happened to me during my late twenties after I got married. I started having less and less time to myself and I was forced to set a schedule in order to find free time for my side projects. When my wife gave birth to our first child, I had even less time and on top of everything else, I was sleep deprived as well.

But strangely enough, the busiest periods of my life coincided with some of my biggest accomplishments. The reason? The tortoise like mindset. Since I had much smaller blocks of time to work on stuff, I had to tackle every project piece by piece on a set schedule. Instead of working 20 hours over a weekend and burning myself out, I simply picked a pace that I could sustain indefinitely and all of sudden things started to click.

Working on my side projects became part of my lifestyle and I rarely felt pressured or frustrated due to a lack of time. For example, Sunday nights became my blog posting night. Sunday mornings before the kids got up became my online store improvement time. On Thursday nights, I would work on my online store course.

Tortoise Like Results

Most people who adopt the “hare” like mindset often make significant progress in a short period of time but then burn out and stop working altogether. The beauty of the tortoise is that even though you might not be fast, you are always making constant progress towards your goals. And if you manage to integrate your business related tasks into a consistent weekly schedule, you’ll be surprised at how much you can accomplish in a short period of time.

When my wife and I first started our wedding handkerchief shop, we devoted every Sunday to the business. In fact, it was penciled into our calendar as part of a lifestyle change that we both agreed upon until the store was up and running. We purposely did not schedule anything on that day and we worked on our store consistently every week. As a result, it took a little longer for us to launch but our store made huge strides every week. Today, we still maintain a set schedule where we add new content to keep our website fresh.

MyWifeQuitHerJob.com is also a great example of the “tortoise” mindset at its best. For the past 3 years, I’ve written at least one blog post per week and to tell you the truth, I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s subconscious. Writing blog posts has become a part of my lifestyle. It is ingrained into my schedule and if I don’t write, I get this nagging feeling of regret.

Even though the blog started out “extremely” slow (Things didn’t pick up until after well over a year), today this website attracts over 38K visitors a month and my email newsletter grows by 20-40 people every single day. In the back of my mind, I always knew that my blog would make it to this point but I had no clue how long it would take and I didn’t really care. I simply picked a sustainable pace and made blogging a part of my life.

Finally, my most recent “tortoise” like accomplishment has been with my Create A Profitable Online Store course. When I launched on March 2nd, I had no video content whatsoever. The first 25 students that signed up did so based on good faith that I was going to pump out some great video tutorials…and I delivered on a consistent weekly basis.

Today, there are over 60+ videos in my course library representing well over 30 hours of material on how to run a successful online store. Because preparing the material and shooting the footage takes me about 10 minutes for every minute of video produced, this means I’ve spent over 300 hours on my course in the past 7 months. Could I have done this in one straight 13 day span? No way! I can barely find a nice 2 hour block of time with 2 kids!

The Moral Of The Story

So what am I trying to say here? When it comes to starting a business, it’s not a sprint. If you try and cram everything in a mad rush to launch, you will burnout…guaranteed. Instead of being in such a hurry, simply pick a pace that you can maintain indefinitely and focus on the long term for a period of at least a year or more.

Being the tortoise is not glamorous by any means. You won’t be able to brag how you made X dollars in just a 2 weeks. You won’t be able to say that you started a full blown business in under a month. But you will make steady progress long after those rabbits have quit and moved on to something else.

Photo By Mary Anne Thygesen

The problem is that when I emphasize the enormous amount of work that is required to launch a company, I tend to turn people away from starting a business.

However when I emphasize the simplicity, people tend to harbor unrealistic expectations and expect a quick path to riches.

It’s unfortunate, but many would be entrepreneurs choose what business model to pursue based on how “easy” it is to start as opposed to considering the actual probability of success. In fact, every other day I get emails from people asking me why they should go through the hassle of selling actual products when they can just be an affiliate.

Why should they stock their own inventory when they can simply drop ship all of their goods? Why should they bother setting up a shopping cart when they can just put up a blog and sell advertising?

Easy Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing

Have you surfed the web lately? If so, you’ve probably come across a bazillion blogs out there. Why are there so many? It’s because it’s pretty darn easy to launch a blog. All you need to do is signup for a webhost, install WordPress and you are good to go. In fact, you can literally launch a blog in about 15 minutes flat if you have a general idea of what you are doing.

Not only that, but there are many courses on “blogging for income” out there that supposedly teach you how to “monetize” your blog for long term “passive” profits. Bingo! Sounds easy and it’s risk free too!

But why do you think that 99% of the people out there don’t make jack with their blogs? It’s because while it’s easy to launch a blog, it’s extremely difficult to make any decent money off of it.

The same goes with affiliate marketing. Whenever I get asked why I even bother selling my own products when I could just become an affiliate instead, a big smirk appears on my face. Sure on paper, being an affiliate sounds infinitely better. You don’t have to ship any product. You don’t have to provide any technical support. You just refer the sale and get paid.

Sounds like a great business model and indeed it is. But why the hell do most people fail at referring even a single sale? Setting up an affiliate site is easy. Actually getting people to click on your referral links and attracting an audience is hard to do. Most people give up at this point because their website is so easy and cheap to setup that they simply cut their losses and move on to something else. What requires very little work to start requires very little work to abandon.

The result of something being “easy” also means that there is usually a ton of competition if you choose to enter the market. One of the main reasons I like running an online store that sells physical products is because the barriers to entry are higher. Because I have to source products and establish relationships with vendors, that is one extra task that a competitor has to do in order to copy my business idea.

Because I manufacture many of my own products and control my own website, it’s much more difficult for someone else to carry the exact same products that I carry or to copy my site. The additional barriers to entry means that once my business is off its feet, it has more staying power in the long run.

Business Ideas That Come Too Easily Are Usually Too Saturated

I’ve been running my course on how to create a profitable online store for about 6 months now and every time a new student joins the course, they inevitably want to sell something in a highly saturated and highly competitive market.

“I want to sell t-shirts”
“I want to sell baby clothes”
“I want to sell wedding favors”
“I want to sell electronics”

What’s wrong with these product ideas? Nothing really, except that they are easy products to come up with. In fact, most newbies usually think of these exact same product ideas until they realize that there are a bazillion companies out there selling similar products.

The best online store product ideas tend to be narrow and extremely focused. All of the big commonplace products are already being sold by established players. The best product ideas are obscure, harder to come by and require a good amount of niche research.

Easy Is Often Not Worth Doing

The problem with easy is that it’s easy for everyone and not just you. As a result, what is easy is often not even worth pursuing at all. Therefore, your criteria for starting a business should not have anything to do with how “easy” it is to launch. Instead, you should focus on what needs to be done and how much money there is to be made.

Forget about the difficulty of implementation. Is your business idea even realistic? Do you even have a chance to make a decent profit? Think about the major hurdles involved and focus on those problems instead. Fundamentally speaking, the hardest part of any business online is how to get traffic to your website. And the less saturated the market, the easier it will be for you to stand out and grab your customers’ attention.

The Product and Service

Without wasting much time, I established relationships with the necessary folks (supplier /web developer, etc) and started an online business from where anyone can order designer fragrances at discounted prices. The individual can order bottle X for $30, which was always 20% or more cheaper than the mall, and the reseller could order everything at my cost.

How did I make money? Similar to Sam’s club, I charged a yearly membership fee of $39 to join the “club”. Therefore the product became the designer fragrances, and the service became my promise to provide a supply source for the reseller at my cost.

Obstacles Encountered

Though the overall business experience was rewarding for me, the road wasn’t free and clear of obstacles, as with most things worthwhile pursuing in life. Some hurdles included technical challenges. I am not very technical, thus when I needed website work done, I had to shell out big dollars for every single small change. Later down the road, the developer disappeared on me, leaving me hanging and helpless.

There were some other challenges as well involving logistics and administration, but none bigger than the obstacle of managing too fast of a growth. You read that right, I was growing too fast for my own good, which may be a good problem to have for many but not for others. It was specifically difficult for me because I was not prepared for this growth, which I think would happen much later down the road.

Here is an example of what I mean. Resellers started ordering in amounts in the $4,000 to $8,000 range, and the number or resellers grew exponentially month over month. There came a point where the website was processing an $8,000 order, and then me having to refund back $2,000 because I wasn’t able to fulfill it due to logistic and supply chain challenges.

This hurts because not only am I paying a credit card processing fee upfront, but also on the return processing, thus hurting the overall bottom line. Thus the larger transactions were ending up costing me more money than I was bringing in. Not a winning equation is it?

The $250,000 Sale

Two years later the business was generating $60,000 in annual earnings. That said it could have been generating much more. The business grew organically through proper search engine optimization and internet marketing (this was huge for me) and virally through word of mouth. A good deal is a good deal, and word does spread.

Not knowing the internal challenges I was encountering, a large Power Seller from the Ebay marketplace had approached me to purchase the business. This was a completely unsolicited offer (God sent), and the approach made me contemplate the sale really hard. When I finally decided to sell it, we agreed on a price just under a quarter million dollars, which puts the deal roughly at an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of four.

I was relieved to say the least, but did not regret the overall experience and ride at all. The business was eventually dismantled as the buyer was mainly interested in the underlying customer base, a common practice for big sharks acquiring little ones. The shark that acquired me was the second largest Power Seller on Ebay at the time.

Best Word of Advice from Me

We are always learning from our experiences, but we miss the chance to learn if we don’t try out new experiences. So my first advice would be to get out there and start it up. Whatever you are thinking about, just do it and let the market dictate how good your offer is.

My second piece of advice is to plan for growth appropriately. Do not underestimate your business idea. In my case, I grew faster than I could handle. I am not a big advocate of extensive business plans so I am not suggesting that. However, plan as best you can at least on a high level.

I hope you found my story helpful

All the best to you and your business initiatives

Sunil

Daddy, I don’t want to go swimming anymore!

I didn’t really blame her for saying those words. After all, it was clear that she didn’t have fun and neither did I because she was fighting me the entire time. And even though it was just her first lesson, my wife and I questioned whether she was too young to learn and whether swimming lessons were going to work out for her.

But since we paid for a package of 8 lessons, we kept taking her and with each subsequent lesson, she started fighting us less and less. In the beginning, we had to drag her into the pool but by week 3, she started having fun out there. It all started with her kicking her feet and splashing me with water which made her giggle. Then she started blowing bubbles in the water and getting her face wet.

By week 4, something must have clicked inside of her brain because all of a sudden she started jumping in from the side of the pool. She started going down the water slide. She started dunking herself in the water and propelling herself forward. The rest is history!

Nothing Will Change Unless You Work At It

You can’t start something new and expect to become an expert right away. The problem with human nature is that we tend to stick with what we are already good at and practice what we already know. When my daughter first started swimming, she hated it because it was foreign to her.

The water made her eyes hurt and she kept choking and gagging whenever she forgot to hold her breath. When my wife and I contemplated taking her out of swim class, little did we realize that we both experienced the exact same feelings when we first started our online business.

I still vividly remember the grand opening for our online store. Actually “grand” is the exact opposite word to describe that day. We didn’t make a single sale and we second guessed ourselves the entire time. By the end of week 1 and zero sales, I wondered whether this whole online thing was going to work out for us.

My wife questioned whether she would be able to stay at home with our kids without making major sacrifices. We both thought about closing up shop and calling it a day in order to save face! After all, it was both disheartening and embarrassing to tell our friends that we hadn’t sold a darn thing whenever they asked.

But since it was so cheap to maintain the website and we didn’t have any better business ideas, we stuck with it. And slowly but surely our fortunes started to change. We kept the information mill churning and experimented with different customer acquisition strategies whenever we had free time.

We made subtle tweaks and constantly improved our product selection and our website. Then at around the 6 month mark, something clicked and we started getting both search engine customers as well as large orders from event planners and buyers with large spending budgets.

No One Is Born An Expert

While I would love to say that my wife and I are special and that we simply have an innate talent for business, that would be a big time lie. In fact prior to launching our online store, we had zero experience at running a business or putting up websites. We had no knowledge of web development and we had never started a business before.

As a result, we struggled big time early on. But you know what? Eventually, things sunk in and we started seeing the big picture. Whereas we started out by copying other people’s strategies, we eventually started coming up with some of our own and going with the flow.

The point I want to emphasize is that our success didn’t have so much to do with talent or smarts as it did with actually trying something new and learning from our mistakes.

Not Being Good At Something Is Your Choice

We are all humans and by nature we are programmed to stick with things that we are comfortable doing. We tend to put more effort into our strengths and we “like” doing what we are already good at. But at some point, you have to take a step back and remember how you became good at the things you do.

I absolutely hate it when someone emails and asks me something along the lines of “Steve, I’m comfortable with creating websites and the technical stuff but I’m just not good at marketing and sales. Can I still succeed?”

Well S#$%, if you are not good at marketing and sales then you need to start learning or hire someone to teach or help you out! Just because you aren’t good at something now doesn’t mean you can’t become good at it later. You just have to have the right mindset and keep an open mind to learn.

So what am I trying to say here? Instead of resigning yourself to “not being good” at something, why not give it your best shot and try to learn? If you are willing to put in constant effort for many months or years instead of giving up after a few weeks, you will go far. I guarantee it. If my little 3 year old can go from choking and sinking like a rock in the swimming pool to the doggie paddling toddler she is today, so can you!

It’s Difficult To Differentiate Your Etsy Store From The Rest Of The Pack

Back in the good old days, I used to sell a lot of stuff on Ebay. Whenever you have a large marketplace like Ebay or Etsy and you want to sell something, you have a tendency to look at other people’s shops and listings to get an idea of how to structure your own product listings.

At the click of a button, you can pull up sales statistics and other useful information about other shop owners in order to try and emulate their success. And that’s when the copying starts. On Ebay and Etsy, there is always going to be rampant copying of product descriptions because it’s so easy to do so. Joe Shopkeeper sells a ton of handmade bags? He must know what he’s doing. Perhaps I will borrow his descriptions. No big deal.

The result is that a whole bunch of other product listings will look and sound exactly like yours. While it’s true that getting plagiarized can still happen if you have your own website, it’s infinitely easier and more likely to happen on Etsy because all of the shops are within the same marketplace.

The other problem is that the format of all Etsy stores look the same and feel the same. Sure, you can customize your store header a little bit but in the end, almost every single Etsy shop looks identical which makes it hard for you to stand out in the crowd of other users. The double whammy here is that Etsy’s shopping format makes it very easy for consumers to comparison shop your products with other listings which tends to focus the consumer’s attention on price as opposed to quality.

To further illustrate the point about how hard it is to make your listings more visible, here’s a quote from a frustrated Etsy user I found on the forums.

As you already know there is a problem getting your items seen on etsy these days. With the batch loading system and the the increase in the number of shops.. it makes it difficult to get views. The scenario goes like this… you list/renew on item and another shop batch loads 30 items right after yours… your item then gets sent to the 3rd page… not a good place to be for views.

What this illustrates is that as the number of Etsy users continues to grow, you will have a much harder time getting exposure for your goods. Today, it appears that some users are resorting to relisting items prematurely in order to gain more pageviews for their goods.

Etsy Stores Are Hard To Rank In Search

Lately, there have been a number of forum threads from Etsy sellers complaining about a big drop in views and sales. My guess is that the latest Google update completely removed many shops from the search rankings due to duplicate content across listings. Now no one knows exactly how Google decides which content is original and which is the duplicate which puts you at risk of getting penalized by Google if someone else steals your content.

Even if you write completely original product descriptions, it largely depends on the order in which Google crawls your site and the page strength of the other shops in determining who possesses the unique content. The fact that copying occurs so often in marketplaces like Etsy makes it harder for you to rank in search.

The other more important point to emphasize is that the search rankings are largely determined by the volume and strength of the backlinks pointing to your site. It takes a lot of hard work and patience to build backlinks back to your shop so you have to ask yourself whether you want to be doing all of this work for a site that you do not even own.

Sure, you can build backlinks back to your Etsy shop but all you would be doing would be strengthening Etsy’s position in the search rankings. If Etsy were to ever screw you over by increasing fees or closing up shop then guess what? All of that hard work would go down the drain. When you own your own website and domain, you own the fruits of your labor and no one can take that away from you.

You Are Completely At The Mercy Of Etsy

Recently, a similar site to Etsy called Artfire abruptly decided to cancel all of their basic accounts. And what was the result? Many shopowners suddenly got the boot without much warning at all.

Here’s a quote from one Artfire user who was lucky that he hadn’t invested too much time yet.

Just found out that Artfire is discontinuing all of their basic accounts… really frustrating after spending two days setting up my shop over there to try it out as a second venue. Anyone else know of this? Glad I found out before dedicating yet another day to making more changes I had planned. Heads up everyone!

The truth is that companies like Etsy, Ebay and Artfire don’t really care about you. They care about making money for themselves. So when the sh$t hits the fan, guess what? They are going to do whatever it takes to stay profitable.

So what are the implications for you? At a moments notice, Etsy could raise their fees dramatically and put you out of business. It doesn’t matter how much work you put into your store. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve made in the past. All of your hard work could be flushed down the drain because of factors outside of your control.

It’s Time To Take Charge

So you need to ask yourself why you are building up a shop that is controlled by someone else? Do you want to be in control of your own business and costs? The only way to do this is start your own web property. So stop relying on the Etsys, the Ebays and the Artfires. These sites are good for getting your feet wet but will prevent you from ever growing.

It’s about time you started writing your own rules. I’m not saying you should abruptly stop using Etsy. Instead, you should plan on transitioning your business away from a model where you call the shots and are in control of your own destiny.

Any Etsy users want to share their thoughts?

Affiliate Marketing Sites Are Fragile

As Amazon has demonstrated with the cancellation of their affiliate program in many states, affiliate marketing is fragile. You are entirely at the mercy of the company you are marketing for. At a moments notice, the company might decide to lower their commissions or cancel their program altogether. Is that the way you want to try and make a dependable income? Don’t you want to be in control of your own destiny?

Very few people can make a living as a pure affiliate marketer and if you ask, most of them will advise you to diversify your affiliate sources in order to not put all of your eggs in one basket. The problem is that most niche websites are specifically created to sell a specific type of product. That and it also takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to get your niche site ranking in Google.

Sure, you can put up multiple affiliate sites but that requires a lot of effort, effort that you could be spending building a real business for yourself. After all, wouldn’t you rather concentrate all of your efforts on your own products that you have full control over?

Let’s be straight about one thing. Affiliate marketing is not a business. A business is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers. When you are an affiliate marketer, you’re just a salesman.

Online Store Income Is More Predictable

When you are deciding whether to quit your job, predictability of your income is important for proper financial planning and your sanity. Having run our business for almost 4 years now, I can tell you when our busiest months are and when business will be slow. In addition, based on the first 3 or 4 months of the year, I can usually make a fairly accurate prediction of how the rest of the year will play out.

Why is this important? It’s important because predictability allows you to plan out your expenditures and to know what to expect. I don’t have to worry about the income from my store drastically fluctuating from month to month. I generally know when certain products are popular and I can base my purchasing decisions based on data as opposed to pure guesswork.

In the event that I’m having a slow month, I can also make the necessary adjustments. The biggest advantage is that online stores get to set their own prices. If I need income, I can artificially increase demand by having a sale. If there’s a ton of demand for my products, I can raise prices accordingly. With affiliate marketing, you’re stuck with the terms and conditions of your affiliate which can change at any time. You have to wait for your affiliate to have a sale in order to have a sale.

Opening An Online Store Will Make You More Money

Selling your own products will make you more money simply because you get to pocket more of the profit. The combination of being able to set your own prices coupled with the fact that you are purchasing your goods at wholesale prices means that you are in full control over how much you can make in a given sale. The other side benefit is that you can freely re-market or re-position your products in a different light in order to command premium pricing.

If you look at our online store, we sell handkerchiefs. But since we market our handkerchiefs as wedding hankies, we can charge an extra premium on our products. With affiliate marketing, you have to abide by the terms and rules of the affiliate. Most of the time, the affiliate will not allow you to get too creative with your ad copy. In addition, most affiliates expressly forbid you from purchasing PPC ads using their product names in the ad. That means that the only way to get traffic to an affiliate site is through search or by blasting your affiliate links to your email list or followers.

The ability to set prices and the freedom to market your store in any way you like generally leads to higher income and revenues if you play your cards right.

But Wait, Doesn’t A Online Store Cost More To Open?

Most people are afraid of hard work and high startup costs. Opening a niche affiliate site costs almost no money at all which makes it extremely attractive. But most people aren’t aware that starting an online store can be just as inexpensive. My wife and I started our online store for around $630 including initial inventory costs and we managed to make $100K in profit during our first year of business.

If you are concerned about shelling out too much cash up front, you can try drop shipping which requires no inventory costs at all. In fact, you can open up a drop shipped store for the same amount of money it takes to start a niche affiliate site which is about $7 a month.

Either way, if you want to make a significant income in a shorter amount of time and quit your job, opening your own online business trumps affiliate marketing every time. With your own online store, you’ll never go out of business because someone else decides to cancel their affiliate program. You’ll never go out of business because someone else decides to lower their commissions.

While nothing is guaranteed in business, having your own online store is more viable in the long run. Does it require more work than a niche site? Definitely. But along with hard work comes higher profits and greater barriers to entry.

Photo By SashaW

While the businesses that I encourage readers to start on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com are not crazy startups where you’re working 16 hour days, trying to hit a home run and earn millions and billions of dollars, there are many parallels between a lifestyle business and a venture backed startup.

In other words, many of the same traits that make a venture backed startup more likely to succeed apply to small businesses as well. Here’s my take on David and Ron’s findings.

Get A Partner

According to Ron and David, startups with multiple cofounders are far more likely to succeed than companies with just a single founder. This is a no brainer in my book. When my wife and I first started our online store, we took turns encouraging each other to push forward with the business when sales were slow or nonexistent. Running a small business is a tremendous mental and physical burden to take on by yourself. Without my wife, I probably wouldn’t have been able to stick it out long enough to experience success.

Whenever I was down about the business, my wife was upbeat, patient and encouraging. Likewise, whenever she was feeling negative, I was there to cheer her up. What’s funny is that we both got depressed about different aspects of the business. In general, I was discouraged whenever we had a bad day of sales. On the other hand, my wife became discouraged whenever we received a product return or a customer complaint. But overall, we kept each other going during the early stages of our business.

What also made us a great team was our complementary skill sets. My wife has a finance and operations background whereas I have a technical background. As a result, the lines of responsibility are drawn very clearly for the business. Whenever there’s an issue with the website or something computer related, that’s my domain. Anything related to finance or product is my wife’s area of expertise. And while we both share the marketing responsibilities for the business, we’re pretty good about not stepping on each others toes.

The other reason why things work with my wife as my partner is that we can be blunt if we need to. If I have an idea that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, my wife will let me know. Likewise, I don’t have any problems voicing my opinion when my wife is off base.

Of course, expressing my opinion sometimes results in me sleeping on the couch for a night but in general it’s all good:) Overall, I strongly believe that finding a good, reliable partner is the way to go and will greatly increase your chances for success. Find someone who you get along with and complements your skill set

Get Some Experience Under Your Belt

There other statistic that David and Ron disclosed was that repeat entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed than new entrepreneurs. Once again, this is a no brainer. These days, I have the utmost confidence that if my wife and I wanted to start another online store, we would definitely be successful. We learned so much from the early mistakes of our first venture that we now know what it takes to run a profitable business.

So if you want to increase your chances of success, you need to start a business now and kick start the learning curve. Just because it’s your first business doesn’t mean you are going to fail. But even if you don’t initially make as much money as you would like, you’ll learn a ton of things which will add to your foundation of knowledge.

While making mistakes is a part of entrepreneurship, I personally hate it when I feel like I’ve wasted a ton of time learning something the hard way when an expert could’ve pointed me in the right direction from the start. My time is precious which is why I’m a strong proponent of paying money for training courses and other learning materials which expedite the learning process.

In fact, I spend thousands of dollars every year on books, courses and other training materials which make me a better entrepreneur, web developer and small business owner. Whether you choose to fumble around and learn things on your own or take a training course, you should know that every minute you spend learning something new will increase your chances of business success.

It Only Gets Tougher The Longer You Wait

The last interesting tidbit from the video was that David and Ron found that younger entrepreneurs were more likely to succeed than their older counterparts. In fact, they found that 25 is the optimal age to start a successful business. While I can see why this could be true for a full blown startup company, with lifestyle businesses I strongly believe that you can start at any age and still be successful. However the longer you wait, the harder it will get.

For example if you have kids and a family, it will be more difficult to find the time to commit to your business. But in reality, it doesn’t take a large block of time to start a small ecommerce store on the side, especially if you go the dropshipping route. Consistency is the key. If you can devote just 4-5 hours per week on a regular basis, you have the necessary time to give your business a fighting chance.

So is age 25 the optimal age? Perhaps…but part of being an entrepreneur is defying the statistics. The key thing to realize is that you don’t have to swing for the fences. Unlike a venture backed startup company, you can start your business and go at your own pace and the sooner you start, the better off you’ll be.

• How do I know when to shut down my business?
• It’s been over 8 months now and I’m not still not making that much with my website yet. Should I change my niche?
• Why is my site not getting any traffic? Should I start over?

After taking a closer look at a few of these websites, I noticed one glaring commonality between all of these online businesses. They’ve all been around for less than a year!!!

While my wife and I were able to make a six figure salary in a short period of time, making significant money with your business can often take longer depending on your niche and your ability to adapt to the market. In fact, the longer you stick around, the better off your business will be as long as you are constantly changing up your tactics and testing different strategies to see what works.

One of the hardest parts about being an entrepreneur is that you have to force yourself to stick it out even though things are not going as planned. You have to give your business a fighting chance to succeed because things take time to evolve and grow.

Would you throw your child out of the house if he or she wasn’t advancing as fast as you would like? Much like having a child and raising a family, your business is a long term commitment and you have to be patient.

For my wife and I, we were close to giving up on our online store after just a few months but I’m glad we stuck it out. In fact, several fortuitous events happened to us that had a drastic effect on our business and all we really did was stay open for business. Seriously, good things tend to happen to those who wait. But you have to be open in order to reap the rewards. Here are a few ways our business improved just for staying alive.

Our Online Store Made The Google Blog

When I first started working on our online store website (this was many months before we actually went live), I made the mistake of paying for a submission service to submit our store URL to thousands of directories. At the time, I desperately wanted backlinks in order to improve my search engine rankings and I was willing to do whatever was necessary to obtain them. But since my domain was very young, Google saw the sudden influx of backlinks as spam so our online store was sandboxed immediately. And during this period, you couldn’t even find our store if you typed in our URL directly into Google.

I knew I had royally screwed up but I had no idea how to rectify the situation. So at this point we contemplated just calling it a day since we didn’t think we could succeed without support from the search engines.

But then something lucky happened! A friend of mine got assigned to write a blog entry on the Google Webmaster Tools official blog. Since we used Google webmasters tools for our store, she volunteered to mention our store in the article! Within a week of the blog entry going live, our store got un-sandboxed and just like that, we were back in business.

We Got Featured In Real Simple Magazine

For a long time, my wife and I struggled to gain credibility for our store and our products. One of our main problems was that no one knew who we were so customers were a bit hesitant to make purchases from our store over some of the more established brands. Business was slow in the beginning for several other reasons as well but the bottom line was that customers weren’t putting our products in their shopping carts.

One day, my wife and I were discussing some new marketing strategies to improve our store’s credibility when we received a call from Real Simple magazine. It turns out that they wanted to feature some of our napkins in the next issue of their magazine! Naturally, we took advantage of their offer and all of a sudden, we were able to add a magazine logo to our online store! Not only that, but the Real Simple website linked to our website as well which gave us a boost in the search rankings.

We Got Featured In Brides Magazine

While the Real Simple magazine feature gave our napkins and home textiles a boost in credibility, we still didn’t have any publicity for our core product, our wedding handkerchiefs. But during this time, our site had been silently climbing the search rankings. Did you know that the simple act of keeping your website up and running can improve your standings in the search engines? In fact, Google uses the age of your domain as one of the factors in determining where your site appears in search.

One day, Brides magazine found our site in Google and wanted to feature some of our products in their next issue. This was huge for us because it instantly gave us credibility in the wedding space. Most companies pay a lot of money just for a small ad in Brides magazine but here they were contacting us to be featured for free!

Good Things Happen If You Stick Around

All of the events described above happened to our store even though we did absolutely nothing. Essentially, we were in the right place at the right time. Good things happen to those who stick it out and find a way to succeed. There are other good reasons not to give up on your business as well. For example, even if you take the money out of the equation, our little online business has been rewarding in many other ways.

For one thing, our wedding linens shop has given us the opportunity to be a part of our customers’ lives. This sounds cheesy, but I really enjoy being a part of the wedding planning process and we get sent pictures and thank yous from our customers all the time. And in some cases, we’ve even helped a few guys plan their wedding proposals.

Because we stayed in business, I also got the inspiration to start this blog and to launch my course on how to create a profitable online store. My wife and I have also used our business as an excuse to travel to various foreign countries tax free and I’ve learned how to be my own boss and manage a small scale business. Not bad for just sticking around eh? Don’t give up so easily.

Photo by Clover_1

Because he was a hard worker and extremely focused, his discipline and dedication to his day job at the electronics store eventually paid off and he was promoted to manager of the car stereo installation department. While this promotion carried with it a decent raise, he still found himself struggling to save money and meet the ever increasing needs and costs of raising a family.

Even though the electronics store where he worked became the top selling car stereo store in the area due to his efforts, he found that he had reached a plateau in terms of salary. In order to increase his net worth and make more money, he had to think of another way to make ends meet…

Taking Action

So one day, he sat down and brainstormed. Looking over the cars he’d worked on for the past few years and all of the car stereo installations he’d performed, he started noticing some trends with certain makes and models of cars. In fact, he discovered that he was doing an unusually high number of repairs for one particular American made car model.

And strangely enough, they all had the same problems…. As it turned out, this one particular car model had reliability issues with its tweeters. Over the span of a few years, these tweeters would blow out and have to replaced with the same faulty set of factory tweeters which would then blow out again 1-2 years later. In fact, there was always a constant line of these cars getting their tweeters replaced on a regular basis.

One day on a whim, he decided to create a set of replacement tweeters on his own to see if he could make something better and more reliable than the original factory made speakers. Sure enough, his speakers not only produced better quality sound but they weren’t plagued with the poor reliability problems of the factory tweeters. And on another whim, he decided to throw up a website to see if could sell these tweeters online.

With just 6 bucks and a free 100 dollar gift voucher for Adwords, he launched his website with a small PPC campaign. And within a day, he sold 6 kits for 100 dollars a piece! Because his costs were extremely low, most of that money was pure profit. After noticing that his Adwords conversion rates were through the roof, he decided to max out his Adwords campaigns and managed to make over 60K in his first year of business with just a single product.

With the success of his first product, he decided to launch several more car related products based on his car stereo expertise. Today, he earns 5-6 times the salary of his day job with his small side business alone.

His Killer Niche

Because this man happens to be my brother-in-law (technically he’s the brother of my brother in law), I’m really happy to see how well he’s done for himself these past 3 years. Just for fun, I did a quick evaluation of the small niches that he now dominates with his store. According to the Google Keyword Search tool, only 36 people search for his tweeter product on a daily basis but since it’s such a tiny niche, he converts at well over 20% because he dominates it completely.

The other products that he sells have similar conversion rates because his customer is so targeted and so laser focused that he owns almost the entire market. His success clearly demonstrates why opening a niche online store is so powerful! Unlike people who launch niche informational sites and try to make money with affiliate marketing or online advertising, you don’t need a large niche at all to be successful with an online store.

Whereas you typically need to target keywords that yield hundreds or even thousands of searches per day to make money with a niche affiliate site, you can easily make a decent profit with keywords that yield just 50 searches per day with an online store that sells real product.

Because you make significantly more profit for every sale you make with an online store, you can get by pursuing a much smaller niche. And because you have to source your own product in addition to creating a high traffic site, the competition in the online store space is much less than running a niche advertising site where anyone can just throw up a WordPress site in a matter of minutes.

Many Opportunities Are Still Out There

The reality is that there are still many opportunities to be had. Not every niche is taken and the market is far from saturated. If you sit down and think hard enough, you can find your own profitable niche, start your own side business and take control of your life. My brother-in-law is the perfect example of someone who was tired of the rat race and decided to pursue a little something something on the side. And the best part?

• He knew absolutely nothing about the web and how to launch a website when he first started
• He did not invest a huge amount of money to launch his side business
• He picked something he was knowledgeable about and went with it
• He is way better off and much happier now than when he only had his day job

Today, my brother-in-law lives in a much bigger house, has no problems providing for his family and owes it all to his side hustles. If you can relate to his story, now is the time to get off your butt and take a chance.