Stuck In The Middle: Getting Past The Moonlighting Phase Of Your Online Business

For those of you bootstrapping your online business part-time and still maintaining your full-time jobs, there eventually comes a point where you reach a sales threshold where you have exhausted your ability to sell as a one person operation and still maintain your full-time job.  There are only so many hours in a day.  Add in family time, and you can quickly find yourself working into the wee hours of the morning trying to get your packages out, customer service emails answered, sourcing, marketing, keeping up the books, etc.  Not only that, but you can’t maintain this type of schedule for very long before you will burn out.

Should you find yourself in this position, this is a good thing. This means your business is headed in the right direction.  But for me, this was highly frustrating.  I reached this point before I was earning enough to replace my full-time job (circa 2002).  I struggled for awhile trying to figure out if I should just maintain the business and not try to expand it, thus keeping it a part-time income, or should I take a huge risk and quit my day job.  Other options included hiring outside help.  I was maxed out.

Ultimately, I broke past it and it did not require giving up the full-time job.  I was still early on in my ecommerce development and it was just too risky.  Here are some things I did to break past the personal time barrier (some will depend on your background skills as well as your business goals):

1.  Hire a stay at home mom or responsible “live at home” college student. -  I hired a stay at home mom in the neighborhood to take care of all customer service emails, shipping, eBay and Amazon listings, and trips to the post office.  Since I could not afford hiring a full-time employee,  nor did I feel I had enough orders at the time for a full-time employee, I found someone in the neighborhood looking to pick up some extra work for a few hours a day while their kids were napping, or their kids were in school.  If you have any neighborhood college students who are responsible, they can work out great too.   This allowed me to free up my time in the evenings to work on expanding the business more,  and I only had to pay for a few hours a day.  Hours paid depended on the sales.  Some days it was only an hour, some days is was 4-6 hours.   But it was based on actual hours needed, not set shifts.   This worked out great for me.

2.  I found ways to increase productivity – Some examples, include:

-Switching from printing out shipping labels on a ink-jet paper (which required me cutting and taping the labels on boxes) to purchasing a thermal label printer and special adhesive labels dedicated to shipping. It looks more professional too.

-Writing my own custom software to have a centralized database for inventory (This was back before other systems were affordable, and before most over the counter consumer shopping carts/accounting systems had built in inventory systems).  This software “pushed” inventory updates out to the websites to manage the on site inventory as well as tie in to sales to adjust inventory levels.  It was pretty crude, but it saved me from having to manually update inventory each day or risk running out of stock.  (Later I switched To Mail Order Manager, which handles most of my backend operations now).  I highly recommend not writing your own software now, as you can buy off the shelf software so much cheaper than what it was available for back then.  Shopping cart systems are also getting more sophisticated each year.

- Created a reorder threshold module within my old inventory system, to automatically report each day, what items in my inventory needed reordered so I did not have to manually check each day what the inventory level was.  I broke the report out by vendor, so I could just fax/email my resupply orders in when I needed to.

There are litterally hundreds of ways to make yourself more productive, but everything you do helps break down that time barrier. Once you establish these time saving systems, you can train others and that cuts down the hours you pay out in labor as the overall hours decrease, but since you are freed up, you’ll find that their hours really do not decrease, because if your doing your job, the sales should be going up.  As long as you keep a close watch on your bottom line and keep your labor costs in check, you should be able to slowly expand your hired help, while at the same time working on making your business more effective.