My wife just closed the books on our mid year numbers (January – June) and I’m proud to say that year over year profits are up in the double digits yet again. Running the store these last 6 months was much harder for a variety of reasons which I’ll outline below. But what’s remarkable about this year’s gains is that my wife and I have barely touched the business. Essentially, the business has grown all by itself through word of mouth and without our intervention.

Normally, I wouldn’t be proud to say that we did “nothing”, but this past year was all about survival. Late last year, our second child was born and we also had this crazy notion that moving to a bigger house at the same time was a good idea.

In fact, there was this short period last December in which our timeline was …

Embarassing as it was for me to write my last article on how I was a neurotic mess when our business first launched, there were several points that I wanted to emphasize…

There is always a struggle and a period of uncertainty with every business until you make it over the hump. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it. If you hear a story that sounds too easy, chances are that it’s a sales pitch.
Some amount of neurosis or craziness is required with every business because it’s an indication that you have the necessary passion. The key is to channel that energy to the right place.
Sometimes you have to do whatever is necessary to get the job done even if it means sucking up your pride.
Someone needs to take one for the team. If my embarassing stories make you feel better about your own …

Whenever you read about an entrepreneur who has a made a large sum of money in a short period of time, there is always this misconception that their path to success was quick and smooth.

Photo By Derek Miller

Take John Chow for example. If you read his blog and his tips, it seems as though he can make tens of thousands of dollars per day by barely lifting a finger. What you never hear about though is the pain and hardship he went through to get to this point.

The fact is that once your online business is up and running, life does get easier and we tend to forget about the early stage pain. Looking back at our online wedding linens business, there were several times when I was a neurotic mess and I did a lot of stupid things. (Notice the use of the word “I”. …

Over the past several years, our online wedding linens store website has undergone 3 major revisions. In the beginning, I was lazy, didn’t know what I was doing, and launched the store with more or less the stock OSCommerce shopping cart layout. After several months of very few sales, I decided to redesign the entire site to make it more aesthetically pleasing. Finally during the 3rd revision, I redesigned the site based on customer behavior to maximize conversions and sales. Here are a few things I learned from all of these changes.

Photo By The Fox And The Polar Bear

Don’t Use The Stock Template
I repeat, do not use the stock, out of the box template for any shopping cart or website package that you choose to use, because it will suck. You might think that the engineers designing the software did so with an optimal …

Happy New Year! My wife just closed the books on another year of business and we are proud to announce that we have achieved double digit growth yet again. The profits for our business increased by 41% and we’re really happy with our accomplishments despite the down economy.

Most people consider 41% a pretty good increase in business so why the “only” in the title? The reason is because our profits could’ve been much much higher had certain fortunate and unfortunate events not transpired during the latter half of the year. If you recall, I posted a mid year update back in July and profits were up 75% at that point in time. Since our sales are usually heavily weighted towards the holiday season at the end of the year, we initially projected our profit numbers to be a lot higher than they were.

Before I …

Whenever I mention to anyone that I work a full time job, help my wife run our online store and maintain MyWifeQuitHerJob.com all while having two kids in the house, one of the first questions I always get is how I find the time to do all of these things.

Photo by Morbuto

Believe it or not, even with all of these items on my plate, I still feel I have time to take on even more. The secret is being more efficient with your time and managing your day a little bit better. I know. It’s easier said than done. But I’m going to describe in this article how my wife and I organize our time to run our online business and and how we manage to cram a ton of activities into a single day. The reality is that there’s plenty of free time …

As the due date for our second child rapidly approaches, my wife and I are battening down the hatches for the impending damage to our finances, rest and well being. As I mentioned in a previous post, we are in the midst of purchasing a brand new house. In addition, we’ve also decided to go ahead and purchase a mini-van to help transport the kids around.

What! A minivan?!? I’ve been getting a lot of flack lately from my friends making fun of me for wanting to purchase a minivan, but you know what? When I’m cruising in the parking lot with an arm full of groceries in one hand, pushing a stroller and carrying a baby in a sling, I’ll have the last laugh when all I have to do is hit one button to open up all of the doors. Honestly, I can’t …

Several of my friends and acquaintances that follow MyWifeQuitHerJob.com find it hard to believe that our online wedding linens business can possibly make 100 thousand dollars a year in profits for selling to such a tiny niche. And they are correct. We don’t make 100K a year. We make much more than that now that our business has expanded and we are more established.

Photo by Borman818

While a six figure profit number might seem like a lot of money at first, getting to 100K a year is actually not an insurmountable task when you look at the number in smaller, more manageable pieces.

In fact, my wife and I initially chose 100K to be our profit goal for the first year because we felt that it was a number we could actually hit. That, and 100K per year was roughly the salary that my wife left behind when …

Embrace disaster. When things go wrong and your customer is angry, take advantage of the situation and make things right. Don’t make excuses and take responsibility! After all, the reputation of your online business is defined by how you deal with adversity and unfortunate circumstances rather than how you handle day to day operations.

Photo by Alan Clark Design

Take our online store as an example. 90% of our customers complete their purchase from our online wedding linens store without ever contacting us. And whenever this happens, it’s difficult to make a strong impression. We have not personally interacted with the customer in any way and the point of sale is just another sale. Sure, the customer might like our products and they might mention our business to a few of their friends. But most likely, their purchasing experience just blends in …

My wife and I jumped right into our online business with a “whatever it takes” attitude. We were excited. We were enthusiastic. And we were ready to make money by any means necessary even if it meant catering to our customers. Looking back, this was not necessarily the wrong attitude to have. But this no holds barred policy got us into a lot of trouble and wasted a lot of our time early on in the life of our business.

The truth was that we felt desperate. After countless hours of work, we launched our online store but didn’t have the customers to justify our efforts. Our website was a ghost town and we practically jumped on every customer that came through our virtual doors.

Photo by Stoo Hopwood

As a result, we went out of our way to do special requests for anyone that …

While our online wedding linens store doesn’t get a ton of inquiries, we do receive our fair share of customer calls throughout the day. And after you’ve answered the phone long enough, you begin to develop a certain sixth sense about the type of customer you’re dealing with.

My wife and I have only been running our business for 3 years but I would say that I can get a pretty accurate read of the customer within the first 30 seconds of the conversation. And within that 30 seconds, I can usually tell whether the customer will make a purchase and whether the order size will be decent.

Photo by KrystalChu

You Can’t Always Listen To The Customer!
What’s funny is that I’ve always been told that the number one rule of customer service is to always listen to the customer. But the reality is that sometimes the …

I’m not sure why, but my stumbleupon toolbar has been sending me mostly articles lately on entrepreneurship. In just the past few days alone, I’ve probably read more than 5 or 6 articles focusing strictly on the traits of successful entrepreneurs.

Even though I love articles about entrepreneurship, after reading just a few of these they all started to sound generic and blended together in my mind. “Learn to fail”, “Learn from your mistakes”,”Understand your weaknesses” etc… Don’t get me wrong. These articles all offer great advice but it is difficult to truly comprehend and describe these character traits in words unless you’ve truly worked with and experienced them first hand with real people.

Over the years, I’ve had the luxury of working with and hanging out with many successful entrepreneurs, most of whom I became friends with in school or through various clubs and projects. …

My wife just closed the books on our mid year numbers (January – June) and sales are up significantly! Once again, we both are amazed at how our little wedding linens store has managed double digit growth for the 3rd consecutive year.

Of course our growth has slowed from last year when we managed to increase profits by 147%, but a 75 percent profit increase isn’t anything to sneeze at either. I admit that it is a bit early to start celebrating since only half a year has elapsed. In the back of my mind, I know that many bad things can happen during the latter half of the year that may negatively impact sales. But I am optimistic that we can maintain this pace since our busiest months (November and December) have yet to come.

Here are some of the highlights of our half …

I’m proud to announce that our online store Bumblebee Linens is featured in this month’s July/August issue of Brides magazine. Being included in this major publication not only lends credibility to our business but it also exposes our store to millions of potential customers as well!

For those of you who are curious, we were contacted out of the blue by Brides magazine several months back because they wanted to feature some of our linens in their magazine. Turns out that giving linens away as wedding favors is the latest trend! So we shipped them whatever products they wanted to see and felt very honored to have our items chosen to grace the pages of their magazine.

Needless to say, my wife and I feel very lucky to have gotten the attention of Brides magazine. In a previous article entitled Starting Your Own Business: How To Improve …

Sometimes a seemingly insignificant change to your website or online strategy can pay huge dividends. And in many cases, the answer to improving sales requires very little effort to implement.

In this article, I’m going to discuss the slight tweaks and minute changes that we made to our website that had a dramatic impact on our business.

Before I get into the guts of what we did, I just want to stress the importance of obtaining quality metrics for your website. It is especially vital that you accurately track the way a customer navigates through your online store. Do they leave your website from a particular page? Are they having problems finding a particular product?

Photo by Gare and Kitty

As long as you periodically evaluate how your customer interacts with your products and website, you can usually spot and make changes to allow them to find your products …

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from starting our online wedding linens business, it’s that good planning can only get you so far. You can spend hours and hours putting together the most intricate and well thought out plan only to have it blow up in your face because of one false assumption.

In order to be successful, you have to be open minded. You have to be willing to change. You have to accept that your plans might be complete garbage and that you need to start over from scratch.

Photo by dotbenjamin

Looking back, my wife and I had a ton of things that didn’t go according to plan. Come to think of it, if we had proceeded down the path of our well laid out plans, my wife would still be working right now and this blog probably never would have existed.

Recently, my wife …

I admit it. I used to be ashamed of telling other people about our wedding linens business. When we first opened our online store, not only did we not receive many orders in the first 4-6 months, but the idea of opening an online wedding linens store seemed almost silly compared to what my other entrepreneurial friends were up to.

You see at the time, a good number of my friends and acquaintances were starting their own businesses and they were all quite impressive. One of my friends started his own cellphone gaming company. Another friend started his own web development software company. And a third friend started a small consulting firm. Whenever we saw each other, we would ask each other how things were going with our respective companies.

Photo by Nina Frazier

Friend: So Steve, how’s the linens business? Is it fun?
Me: Linens …

There’s a point with every successful business where the level of sales slowly begins to exceed the infrastructure required to support it. While this generally indicates that business is good and fundamentally strong, the volume of customer support issues can be overwhelming especially if you don’t have the necessary manpower or capital equipment.

Overwhelmed is exactly how we feel about our online store at the moment. As we struggle to grow to the next level, our business is currently going through what I call “Growing Pains”.

Photo by Tavallai

Now if I didn’t have a full time job and if my wife didn’t have to take care of a cute little 14 month old during the day, we could devote our full efforts into expanding our business and these growing pains would not be as much of an issue. But under the current circumstances, my wife and I only have …

It’s ironic, but sometimes age and experience can actually prevent us from achieving our full potential. The main problem is that we all develop biases and poor habits over time that can severely limit our success. Even worse, as we get older, many of us close our minds, become set in our ways and are less willing to change.

There is something magical about youth and innocence that constantly amazes me. My 14 month old daughter (pictured below) is my first child and I’ve already picked up a tremendous amount of wisdom by just observing her actions. In fact, she has completely changed my outlook on both life and business in just a short span of time without even being able to say a word.

How can a 14 month old possibly teach a grown man about business? She’s not a child prodigy. She can’t even …

In my last article entitled How Dedicated Hosting Can Actually Be Cheaper Than Shared Hosting, I discussed the reasons why I finally decided to switch from shared hosting to dedicated hosting with our online store.

After publishing the article, a number of readers subsequently emailed me to ask which provider I finally chose and how I made the decision. Ultimately I chose to go with ServInt and here are the reasons why. Depending on what needs you may have with your own website, some of these criteria may not apply.
I Didn’t Want To Pay A Ton Of Money
As I mentioned in my last article, our online store doesn’t really require too much bandwidth or CPU resources at the present time. As a result, I wanted the cheapest dedicated hosting solution possible. The most reasonable dedicated plans out there are the virtual dedicated hosting plans.

For those of …