Once your business is up and running smoothly, it is surprising how easy it is to become complacent and allow your business to stagnate. Especially if you are already in the green and making a decent amount of profit, human nature inclines us to sit back, relax and just watch the money roll in.

On the flip side, your business can also stagnate even though you are working your butt off. One of the easiest traps to fall into when your business is extremely young is to work yourself to death just maintaining the business that you have no time to expand.

Our Story

Photo By Raindog

My wife and I fell into both of these traps in the course of running our online wedding linens business. Early on with our small business, my wife and I spent so much time trying to keep up with order fulfillment that …

The number one question that I receive from readers who want to open their own online store is how to go about finding vendors and suppliers. Do I purchase wholesale? Should I drop ship or should I contact the manufacturer directly?

When my wife and I first started our online store, we faced these exact same questions. But having done a fair amount of research on each of the above options, I’d like to talk about our experiences and our take on each of these ways to stock merchandise for your online business.

While our experiences are primarily related to wedding linens, what we are about to tell you should apply to almost anything that you choose to sell in your online store.

Photo By Slapjack

Drop Shipping
Most people fall into the trap of getting excited about drop shipping when they first open their online store. Drop shipping seems appealing …

Most people think that starting their own business has to be an expensive endeavor. While it is true that many successful entrepreneurs self-fund their startups by racking up massive debt on their credit cards, it definitely does not have to be that way.

Thanks to the internet, starting your own online business is as inexpensive and risk free as ever. In fact, I highly recommend that you create a business that is well within your own means rather than risking your life savings all in one shot. If you can handle it, it’s best to start your own business while you have a steady job or an alternative source of income.

Photo By Rob Lee

I’ve received many questions regarding how much we spent starting our wedding linens business and I’d like to enumerate all of these costs below. As you’ll find out from reading this post, we risked …

Last Friday, an engineer in the office complex where I work brutally gunned down the CEO, VP of Operations, and the Head of Human Resources of his company before fleeing the premises. This engineer, named Jing Wu, had recently gotten laid off from his job and decided to take revenge on the executives who were responsible.

Because this tragic triple homicide literally happened within 50 feet of my office, I’ve been thinking a lot these past few days about all of the things that I’ve been taking for granted. I’ve also been trying to place myself in the same situation as Jing Wu to figure out his frame of mind. What possessed him to follow through with such a heinous act? What caused him to become so desperate to think that losing his job meant the end of his life?

Photo By B Hernandez

While I’ll never know the …

Students often have to make certain sacrifices in order to earn good grades in school. I used to be a model student in both high school and college and I always thought that earning good grades would take me the distance in life. It was only when I graduated did I realize that my emphasis on getting good grades contradicted some of the fundamental principles of entrepreneurship .

First off, I just want to emphasize that the point of this article is NOT to discount the importance of getting good grades in school. My purpose in writing this article is to reflect on specific examples and experiences with my education in both high school and college where getting good grades had a negative impact on my entrepreneurial spirit.

Photo By Peasap

So how can getting good grades possibly be construed as a negative? How can getting an ‘A’ possibly …

Do you believe that money is the ultimate panacea? Have you ever thought to yourself, “If I just had more money, my life would be so much easier and less worrisome?” Most people tend to think this way until they amass some wealth and the opposite happens. Their life gets harder and more stressful.

During the dotcom boom of the 90′s, my stock portfolio did extremely well. I amassed a small fortune, got greedy and starting investing more and more into the markets. Sometimes I even used margin and other forms of leverage to increase my gains. Because I was risking so much money, I found myself obsessing over ever little up and every little down.

Photo By Kudumomo

I would wake up at 6:00am PST every morning and agonize over my real time stock quotes until 9:00am when I had to go to work. …

When I was a kid, I always wanted to buy what my friends were buying. I remember when the Reebok Pump basketball shoes first came out, all of my friends bought a pair except for me. I never was allowed to buy my own pair because they cost 160 dollars, enough to buy 4 reasonably priced pairs of shoes. I remember playing basketball and not getting picked to play because all of the “Reebok Pump” kids wanted to play on the same team. (I assure you that not getting picked had nothing to do with my basketball skills:))

My point is that your child’s spending habits are very heavily influenced by peers and other societal pressures. Take my Reebok Pumps story as an example. We all wanted the shoes because Reebok did an excellent marketing job. Kids who couldn’t afford the shoes wanted them even …

In a previous article entitled mistakes we made early on with our online store, we outlined 5 early decisions that hindered the growth of our business. While those mistakes slowed us down, none of them were showstoppers by any means.

In this article, I’d like to talk about decisions that nearly put us out of business. Sadly, most of these early choices were made due to greed and human nature. Many of our actions were downright stupid and I’m quite ashamed to even share them with you. I’ll try and start with the dumbest ones first and work my way up.
We Didn’t Accept Credit Cards Directly

Photo By Zach Klein

Have you ever heard of an ecommerce shop that didn’t accept credit cards? Early on, we tried to save money by using Paypal as our sole payment processor. Paypal basically offers 2 different account …

I just wanted to take the time to introduce my wife Jennifer who will be guest posting for today. Jennifer is the heart and soul of our online business. She basically manages 90% of the operations on a day to day basis in addition to taking care of our daughter. She is the brains behind all of our products and the buying choices we make.

Technically, she’s not a guest poster since she does own half of everything I do including this blog, but I think it’s only appropriate since this site is called “My Wife Quit Her Job”. I’ll let you know how she feels about being called just a “guest” after I publish this article. Without further ado, I present her first post.
Ebay As An Exploratory Tool

Photo By Matti Mattila

Though we don’t recommend opening an Ebay store, we do think that selling on Ebay …

Whether you are freelancing or running an online business, your net profit is largely dependent on the prices you charge customers. Pricing is difficult to get right. If you set your prices too low, you won’t make any profit whereas if you set them too high, you’ll drive customers away. Because pricing is such an important topic for businesses, I’m going to devote several posts to exhaustively explore ways to help you find the pricing sweet spot within your niche. This particular post will help you detect whether you are setting your prices too low.

Especially when your business is just starting out, you won’t have many data points to work with and the lack of data will make setting prices especially hard. Because you may be forced to rely on guesswork or extrapolations from comparable products to determine price, chances are you’re not going to …

Everyone wants to build wealth but why do very few ever succeed in doing so? It’s because most people don’t take the time to establish a proper game plan on how to grow their money. Building wealth requires planning, budgeting and an awareness of how money can work for itself. The sooner you can amass even a small amount of money, the easier it is to accumulate wealth in the long run. It all starts with the proper frame of mind.

Most people try to take shortcuts and end up wasting their time or squandering what little wealth they have. Make no mistake, there are no real shortcuts unless you get lucky and win the lottery. The foundation of building wealth starts with establishing the right mindset and following through on a few basic principles.
Compound Interest
One of basic keys to building wealth …

Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur. When I look back and analyze some of the startup companies that my friends tried to start and why they failed, I can immediately recognize certain character traits and decisions that doomed their companies from the start. All of my friends possessed the drive and passion to succeed and they had great ideas to pursue as well. So what went wrong?

You can have all of the discipline and focus in the world, but there are just some character traits that are incompatible with entrepreneurship. If you can recognize these traits in time, they can be rectified, but otherwise you are doomed to fail in the long run. Do you possess some of these character traits? Ask yourself these questions.
Are You A Perfectionist?
You might think that being a perfectionist would be a great character trait to …

Let’s face it. There are only 2 ways to build wealth. Either you can make more money or you can save more money. In a previous article, I already discussed why you should worry about your topline more than your bottom line. But just because you’re focusing on making money doesn’t mean you should neglect saving either. For most people, saving money is easier than making money because all aspects of saving it are under your control.

So why is it so hard to cut back for most people? Unfortunately, the answer is not clear cut. There are many personality issues and external factors involved that can not be easily controlled. However while you can’t change your current disposition, there are many steps that you can take to mentally prepare yourself to save. Unlike other articles on how to save money, …

Starting and running a successful business is enough of a challenge as is. Add working with your spouse into the mix and you potentially have a recipe for disaster. It might appear like the ideal situation to start a business with your spouse. After all, you have the rare opportunity to work with someone whom you implicitly trust. You know their strengths, their weaknesses and that their interests are directly inline with your own.

The rewards can be great, but when things go wrong, you can potentially sacrifice both your marriage and your business. Even though my wife and I get along really well, working with her on the business was extremely challenging. We never used to fight at all, but we had some pretty bad altercations over the business on many occasions. Fortunately, we were able to work things out …

Even though you should always be on the lookout for new customers and new markets to pursue, it’s important to not neglect the customers that got you to where you are today. According to the Small Business Administration, it’s much easier drum up additional business from previous customers than it is to find new customers. The SBA even goes as far as to say that it’s 65% easier to convert a sale from someone you sold to in the past. I have no clue how they came up with this statistic, but what this implies is that your marketing dollars and marketing focus is better spent appealing to your existing customer base.

In a previous post, I already covered innovative ways to get new customers and grow your online business. This time around, I’m going to discuss ways to sell more to your existing clientele. As …

All of the books I’ve read on how to start a business always focus on writing a thorough business plan prior to taking any other action. Having read quite a few of these books and having written a fair share of business plans, I’ve found that writing these documents have largely been a waste of time, especially for small businesses.

While the principle of writing down a business plan is fundamentally sound, I’ve found that things rarely go as planned and that your business plan practically goes obsolete the minute you are done writing it. Sure, you are supposed to be diligent and update your business plan as changes are required, but realistically there are much more productive things that you could be doing other than amending a document. Business plans are really only useful when looking for funding or when pitching your business to a third party.

Don’t …

Is your business growth starting to plateau or stagnate? Once your business is making a good profit, it’s easy to sit back, slack off and watch the money roll in, especially if you are satisfied with how well you’re doing. But keep in mind that if you slack off too much, your competitors will soon catch up and eventually put you out of business.

With that in mind, you need to be constantly innovating and making active efforts to grow your business. There are 2 main ways to do so.

Find new customers and new untapped markets to pursue.
Sell more to your existing customers

The focus of this article will be on finding new customers. While all of the books say that selling to your existing customers is much easier than finding new customers, we’ve found that finding new customers is the best way to grow the business significantly. …

Before you begin any sort of implementation, it’s important to assess the viability of your business plan. Is there a large enough market for you to take a small slice of the pie? Are there too many competitors for you to be successful?

Determining your target customer and the size of the market you are pursuing is crucial in determining whether you can make enough money to sustain a profitable business. Instead of just guessing, you should try and make a concerted effort to quantify your earning potential as best you can.
Figure Out What Your Ideal Customer is Like
The first step is to write down in great detail what your target customer is like. Here are a few questions to ask yourself about your target market

What demographic are you targeting? For example, ask yourself what age group, income level, gender, sex, education level, race …

Entrepreneurs love creating businesses from scratch because of the excitement and unfettered determination of starting something brand new. I remember when my wife and I first started our online store, we ate, drank and slept with the business 24/7. Practically every meal, we discussed at length our products, our strategy and our execution plan. Even in bed, we constantly came up with new ideas and discussed our goals for the following day. The atmosphere was intense, almost too intense.

Intensity is good but there’s always a fine line that you must not overstep or you risk burning yourself out. This is what happened to us. Don’t let it happen to you.

We Tried to Do Too Much
The early stages of our online store could best described by a single word: impatience. We were eager to launch the store as quickly as possible so we worked ourselves …

Because you will be purchasing many items throughout the life of your online business, it is inevitable that you will run into a dispute at some point in time with a store, vendor or service that you regularly use. Especially in the early stages of your business, you’re likely to have very little clout with your vendors which makes even showing up on their radar screen a challenging task. The unfortunate reality is that small business owners and individuals often get screwed by customer service reps of larger companies because they simply do not know how to negotiate and appear larger than they really are. This article will help you successfully negotiate with your vendors even if you’re a small business or individual. Special thanks to Anita “the Negotiator”, for contributing to this entry.
Find The Person Who Has Decision Making Power
No negotiation tactics …