Keep on keeping on everyone.

[hamhock89]

Some of you might remember my first post:

EXECUTION - So its starts right here. Right now. Long Post.

This is when I thought I knew a lot. Well, silly me. I didnt know alot at this point in time, I LEARNED alot at this point in time and didn't even know it. So with that being said, here's a new status update in the latest adventures of hamhock89.

Last December I learned how to import something and ship it to Amazon FBA services. Since its kind of in the dirt at around 1 sale a day and breaking even, it was time to try something else, something less competitive and something with greater demand. The particular item I was selling on Amazon were these little glow in the dark phone charger cord protectors. Pretty neat I'd say, you get four for $4.99. Yeah, I didn't know jack shit about what I was doing but LET ME TELL YOU, It paved the way for more experience in the import and PL game.

I'm not in the fast lane yet, but damn if I can see the road leading to it, and I'm going to tell you why. Because I'm not finished here on this forum yet.

After the cell phone accessories, huge market by the way and highly highly competitive, how cute it was of me to even attempt it knowing jack shit about supply chain management and margins. Throw some shit on the wall and hope it sticks right? I did just that, and its slowly falling off of the wall, bummer. It lets me break even every month with FBA fees. Speaking of FBA, its a good resource but damn Bezos needs to cut down on those fees. Wait though, he can't do that because he's in a race with Musk to Mars. So whats the second approach? RETAIL STORES.

I was working my mundane a$$ J-O-B one day and realized that there was a certain small product that goes out of the doors every weekend in medium to high volume, its an accessory needed for certain products. Interesting facet, the company that provides those products is in the middle of an issue because of a realignment. Tough shit huh. Thinking about this, I took to my experience in what I know best, the field that I'm in, so I started doing some research.

I found a product LINE, awesome. I can also sell these items to these stores for cheaper than what they already buy them for on the corporate level, and my headercard looks pretty dang cool too. So lets look at the costs.

$130 investment.
100% return on investment
$130 profit. Easy.

Que starting a business that will HOPEFULLY be on target. Luckily this time I did the math, sat up for hours on end, not getting sleep some nights and designing spreadsheet after spreadsheet until I could hit a good target and maintain good margins. Whats next? Some more heavy lifting. I hired a graphic designer to make my logo, then I designed my headercard myself and inserted the logo where I wanted it. Got some insight from some people with marketing degrees and went with it. Everyone was impressed with the final results. The store I work at ended up purchasing a small order. I remember spending two hours manually making my header cards at $0.44 cents a pop.

F*ck, that's not fast lane mentality is it? Nope. Off to talk to the supplier I go. Now I'm SAVING $0.30 cents per headercard by having them print them, and tag and bag my product line, with my product numbers and descriptions.

So now what do I do? I intercept the product and ship them out to my customers with brick and mortar stores. How'd you find these customers that you knew might be interested in your product hamhock89? Good question. I sat on the computer, for hours on end finding every single chain store in the United States and I sent a Bcc email to all 150 of them at the same time. Within two days I got my first order, one was very small $50. The next day however, $580! Woohoo! But thats not enough, so now what? Some of these stores aren't chains and are independently owned and operated. Hmm, lets dig deeper. Another 8 hours of research on the computer later and scrolling through Google Maps, getting every email address I could find from every state, the Entire South East Region of the US now has an email waiting for them in their inbox tomorrow morning to read. So we'll see if I get any bites there.

Of course I'll have a status update for you down the road, could be good, could be a shit show but its a hell of alot better than glow in the dark cell phone charge cord protectors.

What I'm saying is, eat peanuts for a couple of weeks (literally), stay up all night and go to work the next day and throw your bait into the water. You'd be surprised if you get a bite. I'm not stopping.

 

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