As I have recently been discussing on Midlifeentrepreneur, wantrepreneurship is a big issue for many of us. Being recently semi laid off from a gold handcuffs type job I find myself at the tender age of 37 showing up for my first day of work as a full-time entrepreneur.
Luckily I already have something to work on. The only problem is that I really have a hard time delineating the boundaries of what I should be doing. Should I be prioritizing my work day? Should I be sticking to a particular framework? Do I need to SOP everything or should I start hiring?
What I have found interesting about the process of starting and running an e-commerce business is that, unless you want to there isn’t really a whole lot to do. A couple of factors are important to note here.
- First being, that I got pretty lucky first time around and chose a niche and a product that did pretty well right out of the gate.
- Two, it is a fairly expensive item with higher margins so I really don’t have to sell all that much to do pretty well. This also means that there is lower all around customer service for a given dollar amount.
Reflections on the first day of work:
It is hard to get anything done and I really need to be better about carving out a time and place to work.
I need to be better at prioritizing what I am doing and better at capturing a workflow that has a visible history and a definable future.
My makeshift conglomeration of Trello, Asana, Kanban, Google docs, and habit apps is not going to cut it. Things need to be improved if I am going to get anything done in the future and be able to progress to the next level.
I currently am working on:
- 2 e-commerce hardgoods businesses with another one in the works.
- An art site
- A drone services business
- Helping my wife finish a book and run through a book launch sequence.
I am very familiar with the Pareto principle but also recognize that in my business it seems that it is skewed more towards the long tail of 95/5. The interesting thing about this that the 5% has already been done. It is such a minuscule aspect of my current business that I don’t have to continually revisit it. Therein lies the challenge. . . It is hard to replicate that same 5% when I didn’t even know if it was going to work in the first place.
Many modern business books would have me only focus on the 5% of the business that is actually working. But the truth is, that is Blockbuster Video thinking. Blockbuster made the majority of their money off of late fees, people hated late fees. So, when Netflix came along and reinvented the model Blockbuster was too focused on their 5% to see that pretty soon Netflix would have taken 100% of their business by introducing a new and better model.
Sometimes by focusing on only what is working we blind ourselves to all of the other opportunities.