So now we're going to talk about the real scaling phase how I went from making my first couple hundred thousand sales to then scaling past a million getting close to two million and selling the business because things changed a little bit at this stage and this content might seem a little bit more advanced for you if you're at the beginning stages, but I think it's important that you still watch it. So you can understand what a high level e-commerce business looks like from a bird's eye view. So we're gonna talk about a few things in this video. I'm gonna talk about the most common mistakes that people make in their Journey before they scale. These are things that I have done previously in the past that destroyed my first Drop Shipping Store, but I didn't do them this time around and it allowed me to break through my previous highs and then I'm gonna talk about the essential things. You need to set up before scaling your business and exactly how to implement those in your business the same exact way that I did in fact, if you do these things your business becomes pretty passive you Have to spend hours and hours per day managing it as these foundations keep the business afloat without you having to be there every single day. So now let's talk about scaling. There are two last tips that I recommend before jumping into the scaling phase. First is expanding your product lineup. Now, I know I already discussed this in the upsell section, but I just wanted to cover it very briefly here simply by having one extra product on your store that you can sell to your customers. You can grow your business much faster. It's great to just have that single product on your website, but I'm telling you having multiple helps you scale so much easier. And now that you have the agent on your side, you can actually get these products in a good quality with good shipping times. And the best part is that the agent can typically bundle both of them in the same package and now you're making amazing money because you're not paying two shipping costs like you were before and your customers are really happy seriously. Take the time to look for something that goes well with your product because this will add so much value. Your business and you will make more money and lastly a lot of people reach a certain level where they feel like their product is okay and they stop improving the product. This is something that I just wanted to speak about because I think it's so crucial that as you continue to go through this scaling phase you are constantly focusing on improving the product that really should be the top priority maybe second to getting the business profitable and having really strong cash flow but really focus heavily on improving the product as you go through this next scaling phase a lot of times people out scale what they can handle they scale their business way too high way too fast and they're not ready to deal with what comes with it. So seriously, I highly highly highly recommend that you take the time to focus on this it will pay off in a crazy way because eventually you will have the best product in the next section. I'm gonna be showing you how I went from this. In 2020 to this in 2021, we're gonna break down exactly how I scaled this business and what I learned along the way some of the biggest mistakes that I made and really everything that I wish I knew before I started scaling. Yeah, let's get into it. These four mistakes are the most common ones that I see that destroy people when they try to scale their business. I have experienced and went through each of these so I have learned how to handle them and I'm still learning how to handle them each day, but I have had the worst cases of all of these. So I've learned from these experiences. Let's talk about it. The first one is a bad agent, right so I can tell you guys a brief Horror Story. If you want to hear one. I had a agent for my General Store back in 2018, and I had a product that was flying off. The shelves is doing very well. And what happened was I found this agent that had sold me the dream that he was going to get my Product at the highest quality with the fastest shipping custom packaging. He's gonna everything it was like the red carpet. I was really excited, you know, and this guy had a good respectable name in the industry. He's not around anymore, but I trusted him and I wired him $30,000 to start our first purchase, you know, because we were ordering a bulk batch of inventory. We were making $10,000 a day. So we needed a lot and one week went by nothing two weeks went by nothing. He would reply to me but the products weren't showing up a month went by no product and I was like, okay what's going on? You're in China aren't you turns out this guy was just completely doing me dirty the products did arrive but it took forever for him to ship it took like two three months to get the product out. So I say all that to say a bad agent will destroy your business. There are so many vetted agents and companies that offer these Services out there. So just choose a rep. One like the ones that I've already suggested to you and if you can't get those cool find another one that is respected. But be careful the next thing is A bad team now. I feel like usually the bad team is the result of the leader. It's not always the result of the employee because you know, most people are very capable of doing anything but it's just the leader and the person in charge. So you have to be on point, you know, if you're having a team it's okay to pull back and let them put the work in but you can't just fully disappear like you can't be fully out of business you you have to still Work hard. If not harder than them. You still need to be showing up every day your team needs to see that you care about this, right but they're all there are also some bad eggs out there and what I mean by that is just people that are not all the way there mentally, you know, I've had to fire a couple people so far in this career of mine and it is a painful thing, but it's necessary. You got to do it. Like I had the first girl that was working first sleep band. She was doing a good job on paper, right? She's telling me every day. Oh, everything's gravy. All is good. Everything's good. And then I go check Zen desk like two weeks later and there's like 500 tickets 400 tickets and I'm like, what are you doing? And I'm reading the text that she's sending in there like short and rude and I was like, yeah see you later. You're fired. So, you know don't Fire somebody right away see if they're capable of doing a better job, but if they're consistently doing a bad job cut them get somebody else because there's a lot of good people out there. The next one is product quality. So obviously with a bad quality product, you're gonna get bad reviews. You're not gonna have Word of Mouth you're gonna be getting charged backs and refunds is not really a good situation. There is nothing good about it. Even if you make a lot let's say you sell a garbage product, right? And you make a bunch of money you make a million dollars in two months off the product. You're gonna have to give back. 150 in tax first off then you're gonna have to give back 300 400 in refunds in chargebacks and then because half of your money was charged back you're gonna be banned from the payment processor. So it's over with the journey is over. So if you if your goal is to have like a hot like six month run and then just never be popping again. That's you know, that's the strategy. But otherwise you need to focus on the product quality and I really stress that in the last video. So I think it already got through to you guys and the last mistake that your boy has personally dealt with on a major level and I have learned from and you know, a lot of people don't really understand this but the cash flow is really the most important thing when you're scaling because it's a lot of money in and a lot of money out like you guys will see when you start to do $10,000 days and Beyond it's weird like, you know, you're gonna have a $50,000 deposit hit your account, but then are also going to have a $20,000 bill and another 15,000 bill from the agent, you know, so like it's a lot coming in and a lot coming out and if you're not really on top of that. One bad month of you blowing Cash and The Business not generating the cash back. You're back to zero again. I have seen this happen to people even at the seven-figure level. So cash flow is very important and you know some tips I can give on that is really just hire a bookkeeper. It's it's not expensive and there are really cheap like online services. That'll do it. Personally. I like having somebody local do it, but there are online services that do it and you need a professional to do it. Like you can do it you're yourself every day, but you need a professional to do it. So Yeah, really stay on top of that and you'll be alright. So these are the most common scaling mistakes that I've dealt with that I've seen in the thousands of people that I worked with. These are what people deal with so Don't do this stuff. So now that you know what not to do. Here's what you need to know before scaling your business. At least for me. These were the things that I did before scaling. I'm sure some people will say there's more things you should do or you don't have to do all these things. But remember this is just me documenting and sharing my experience what you guys these are the most important boxes that I tried to check before. I scaled my business past $3,000 a day four thousand dollars a day before I was at that 5K a day 10K A Day level this is what I was doing. All right. So the first thing that we need is one to two great products and a reliable agent. I don't need to go any further into this. I've covered both of these you already know. The next one is a support team for the email and for the phone now, this is again kind of obvious but a lot of people do not have a phone number on their website and I'm telling you is a huge booster and conversions and in customer satisfaction and in terms of the email you need that you should have had that already. You know, so no excuse you cannot skip these two if you skip these two you will ultimately fail. You will get some sales maybe doing your scammy little game, but you will fail ultimately overall. The next thing I would recommend is an email and SMS marketing team. Now when I say team you literally could just have one person. I literally have one person and she does an amazing job. I worked with an agency where they had like five people like they had one person that did copywriting and one person I did images and like no one person is sufficient for this job find the expert work with the expert and I actually can recommend her to you guys. If you are looking for somebody to work with she is available. I don't blow this up now because I really like working with her and she pretty much only works with me, but she reaches she recently asked me if I go shout her out. So shout out to Julia and E Vision marketing her company we like them. credit card credit cards are very clutch when you are scaling because like I talked about last time with the cash flow. It takes a couple days to get this money from Shopify and from PayPal especially worth mentioning here. When you start scaling your store when you get to 20K a month 30k a month Shopify is going to put a reserve. Hold on your account. So what this means, is that for the next three months. 90 days they are going to hold 25. I don't remember if it's 25 or 30% of the money, but they hold about 25% of your money for the whole three months at the end of three months. You get this fat check you get all the money back that you've accumulated so it will come back but then cash flow can get a little thin in those times, especially if you're scaling in those times. So the credit card super helpful, I would recommend Amex gold or the MX plat. I do have a link down below. You know, it feels like a YouTube video. No, but for real if you guys want to get the AmEx card and get a bunch of points on signing up if you use the affiliate link like we both get points. So, you know, if you want to show some love and support and also you get points too. So it's a win-win next up custom video content. We already discussed this one in depth, but again, a lot of people don't do this and then it comes back around to bite them and when it when when they ultimately get banned, okay, and then they they got nothing. Left now. So use your own videos people. If you are not capable of filming a video because you have like only two fingers or something then go and find somebody that you know that can do it because you need this if you're gonna really scale there's not one big brand that I've ever seen that is ripping content. They may have did that in the day one day month one. But like none of the big brands do that now, it's not the move. There's a couple bonuses as well. These are not essential but for me they kind of were and they really helped so first is a SEO expert. You can hire these people on a contract for them to work for you for like a month two months and they just grind out a bunch of Articles and backlinks and really just make your name solid in Google's algorithm. I don't know all the way how SEO works, but I know that after I hired this guy from Fiverr we were getting ranked Higher and Higher and Higher and Higher and now we're rank number one for our name and for some Search terms around our product like, you know, if we go to incognito and then we search sleep band. We will pop right up. You know, we're the first this set. We're the first the second and the third. And we have this so, you know the SEO is important for sure. Yeah, next up. I would say I'm not even gonna open this up again because then I gotta click through everything the next up I would say is a Google ads agency just like I said with the SMS and email people you could have one person. You don't need an agency. I don't know why I put that word in there. You could have one person that focuses strictly on that. I think it's good to have an expert focus on a different Channel while you focus on your main channel, of course, you could always learn it for yourself too. Like you don't have to have an agency right especially if you're tight on cash don't do that. Just learn it for yourself the point that I was trying to make though when I'm saying these other things like SEO Google social media is that now right before you really start going hard on your budget on your main ad platform now is when you really want to start branching out in these other worlds because it will help Fuel That Fire like you're throwing your money at this thing and it's catching. Lame and when we boost it up with some SEO when we boosted up with Google ads when we post every day on tiktok and on Instagram this thing really starts to roll roll and next thing, you know, you got a blaze, you know, you're making a bunch of money. So these are the most important things that I would recommend you do before you start really scaling your business because this will allow you to scale it and maintain it for some time. That's pretty much everything I did before I started really scaling my brand and now I want to break down what sort of happened after we did that. So let's jump into the Shopify dashboard and look at the following months after we made these changes to the business. Let me just pull this up here. So I've shown you this date range of July all the way to August. But if we continue going past that and we now go to September and October the first two months where we were really applying this stuff we were able to do a big jump. So you see we did about 50,000 in August I took Want to make the changes get everything as good as we possibly could I hired the agent right? I got the customer service rep in place and we were able to scale more aggressively and you see we went from 43,000 in a month to 94,000 a month really just from making those changes. That's what allowed me to scale and you know the same thing reflects like inside of the ad account. So if we go from August and we go all the way to October you see that we were consistently spending here but across many campaigns we spent a good amount of money, but you can see right here. We were able to make 200,000. So we spent around 75 80 thousand dollars and we were able to double that up with our profits. That was great and that put some money in the account to continue this process of improving the product and working on the ads and consistently testing there was a lot of testing in that time period you see there's now a instead of new ads of V3 ads campaign. So you see I was making Vari To the ad, this was the next version that I tried. So the audio is not playing but you can imagine what she's saying. It's literally she's just giving a review of the product and she's really saying the same benefits that we put in the original ad but now, you know, we have our own again custom piece of content. Nobody else has a review like this. This is our own video and this video was also working. So now we had three creators working. This one was performing well, but our original was still doing a little better but this is literally just a friend of mine. I asked her I said hey, do you think you can help me film this video for this product real quick? And she said sure not a problem. So I pretty much wrote a script out. I told her what to say to get the video going and she reviewed the product and that was a good ad for us and you guys can do that. You know, you can do it more genuinely to have somebody actually use the product for a month and then give you a review but at the end of the day these things were things that we were taking from the reviews of our customers. So yeah, that's what we tested after that but overall the big Was what I said before of optimizing everything because you can see I was really just firing away. I was testing everything possible. I was testing completely broad campaigns that was working pretty well. But if you if you really look at it from a bigger picture, it's like because I did those things up front. Then I could really test anything at this and get it to work. So it's not so much about all these intricate little details of what I did inside of these campaigns. It's more so building a funnel that can consistently generate results. No matter what traffic you throw at it right? So that's the point that we reached at this level and the brand was pretty consistent, but there is another level that we went to so if we go from October if we go past that maybe to the end of the year, you can see that there was a drop off and I'm gonna explain that we're gonna talk all about that in the next section, but if we could apply Again, it dropped off. So it was like we were going and we were doing well, but then boom we had our highest month ever at the end of the year in 2020. We had our hundred thousand dollar month. So from nothing in July. To a hundred thousand dollars in revenue and you know about six months little less than six months. So we did it and in the next section, we're really gonna break down how we got past that level this really showed you guys how we got to that level you can see what we did to get there the to get to the last hundred thousand. It's just introducing the Sleep band Pro so running a lot more ads to sleep bam Pro. So now we have a second product that's running and then ultimately scaling up the original product as much as you can while improving it constantly, but we're gonna dive deep into it in the next couple of videos. So you guys want to listen out for these next videos.
