Clothesline Apparel and More

The challenge to take my business more seriously

 

 

 

My Ebay Life

 

 

I keep telling myself that I need to, want to, will, take my Ebay business more seriously but today I actually want to sit down and evaluate just how I am going to go about measuring my success.  After all it is one thing to say you are going to do something and quite another to actually buckle down and do it.  I work from home where there are plenty of distractions and no one but the cats and dogs to give me a performance review.  And lets face it as long as the food and water dishes are full you don't really get a lot of feedback.  So it is left to me to keep myself motivated and more importantly working. 

At the beginning of this year I told myself that I would put in a minimum of 20 hours per week.  That is the only real measurable item that I have given myself.  It doesn't sound all that demanding really and yet here are my actual numbers.

Week 1 = 20

Week 2 = 20.5

Week 3 = 14.25

Week 4 = 20.75

Week 5 = 15.5

Week 6 = 17.75

Week 7 = 17.5

Week 8 = 17.5

Week 9 = 19.75

Week 10 = 18.75

Week 11 = 19

Week 12 = 12.5

Week 13 = 13.75

Week 14 = 9.75

Week 15 = 15

Week 16 = 16.75

Week 17 = 21.25

Week 18 = 14

Week 19 = 13.25

Week 20 = 11.5

Week 21 = 22.5

Week 22 = 22.75

Week 23 = 6.5

Week 24 = 10.75

Week 25 = 10

Week 26 = 6.5

Week 27 = 9.5

Week 28 = 19.25

Week 29 = 10.75

Week 30 = 18.5

Week 31 = 10

Week 32 = 6.5

Week 33 = 10.5

Week 34 = 16.5

Week 35 = 6.5

Week 36 = 16.75

Week 37 = 19.75

Week 38 = 12.5

Sorry to put you through that long list but it is the first time that I have actually reviewed all the numbers together.  Not surprisingly they suggest that I could use a bit more discipline wouldn't you say?  This week I am currently at 19 hours so sometime today or tomorrow I need to put in at least one more hour.  So I may make 20 hours this week because I am writing a blog post about putting in the hours that I promised myself I would work.  But what happens next week?  How do I stay committed to making sure that I put in a solid 20 hours every week for the rest of the year and how do I measure the success of that effort?

First to address the matter of putting in the time.  I have been keeping track of my hours in my day planner which I will continue to do but I also will now post them on Sundays on my Clothesline Apparel and More Facebook page. Just for th sake of clarity I do not count the time I spend on these blog posts toward my "Ebay time."  Even though I am hopeful that in some way writing about my business will help me to improve it.  I have read that sharing your goals publicly helps you to stay more committed to them so maybe this will help. 

As for measuring whether my efforts pay off, I do have some systems in place for the year to year and month to month comparisons but I imagine this will always be somewhat of a work in progress. 

The first order of business seems to be to get myself on track with the one solid measurable goal that I set for myself at the begining of this year.  So I had better go and put in that last hour.

Happy Ebaying,

 

Waiting for inspiration vs Starting it NOW

 

 

 

My Ebay Life

I saw this quote today.

"You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club."  Jack London 

I have to say that I have always been very passive in my creative ventures and while this is a blog about EBay it is also a creative endeavor to write and more importantly to come up with ideas on what to write about.  I have always felt that inspiration was it's own fickle entity and therefore something to be ready and willing to receive when it showed up.  But there is of course a problem with this in that it takes away ones control. 

For several days now I have been trying to come up with some topic for my next blog post and I have produced ziltch.  So this morning with no particular idea in mind I am starting this post with an imaginary club in hand ready to run down those pesky little seedlings of ideas and see if one of them will take us to a completed blog post idea. 

I think that part of my difficulty in coming up with an idea stems from the fact that I have been thinking my posts need to be directly about Ebay but that isn't completely true.  There is already plenty of information regarding how to sell and what to sell and how to get started selling.  I do certainly intend to write about Ebay as it pertains to my life.  To share things that have worked for me or new things that I want to try.  But this blog in a larger sense is about working from home, working as a solopreneur and working toward financial independence.

Several years ago I was interested in learning more about copy writing and I purchased some materials from AWAI.  Well I started the course but I never took full advantage of the program.  I do however still get a news letter from them and I usually enjoy reading the information even though it is geared toward copy writing it is also usually geared toward motivation and self starting.  Today's letter was about the power of NOW and the detrimental effect that tomorrow thinking can have on the projects that we believe are important. 

I believe that this blog is important quit honestly in a very self serving way.  I believe that it helps me to look at my business in different ways and to think about ways to improve upon it and to constantly be learning and setting new goals.  If if helps or amuses someone else, well that is even better but really it is a place for me to clarify and hopefully improve my business.  And remembering the lesson and the power of NOW is a very powerful place to start.  Even if you have to chase down the inspiration to get started with a club.

I suffer from being a cronic planner which isn't always a bad thing but as I write this post I am reminded that more often than not we don't get to visualise projects through to their end.  Usually we need to start, see were the path leads and make adjustments along the way.  For me it remains difficult to start when I can't see the end of the road but I know, that more often than not, it is better to move than to stay stuck pondering which direction to go in.

Sometimes we just have to pick a direction, grab a club and go for it.

 

Happy Ebaying,

 

Ebay Selling - Do I Have What It Takes?

My EBay Life

 

You would think that after selling on EBay for 6 plus years the answer to that question would be a resounding yes.  But self-doubt is a part of life and perhaps it even serves a purpose if we can keep it in check.  And as I am feeling a bit of the self-doubt bug right now I will endeavour to find some silver lining in my current gloomy outlook.

  

The reason for my gloominess you ask.  Well I believe that it mostly steams from my underwhelming sales numbers of late.  The feeling is compounded by the fact that I am trying to grow and not just maintain my business.  It is sometimes a difficult line to tread to keep an eye on your sales but not to loose sleep over them.  And so with some trepidation I will face this nagging fear and really examine the numbers for the last two months.

The first bit of news is actually good.  Looking at July's numbers and comparing this year to 2011.  My unit sales are up 58% and my profit per item is up 1.4%.  Comparing August to August the numbers are: unit sales up 14% and profit per item is up 33% over last August.  I guess if I left it at that it would sound pretty good.  But the down side is that July units sales were down 15% from the average of the rest of this year and August unit sales were down 19%.  There is more good news in that my average profit per item for July and August was actually up from the average of the last 6 months.  13% in July and 8% in August.

I used these fancy formulas to calculate my numbers.

Percentage increase = (new amount - original amount) / original amount X 100

Percentage decrease = (original amount - new amount) / original amount X 100

 

I am sure that this just seems like a big jumble of numbers that you can slice and dice in an infinite number of mind boggling ways.  But now that I have forced myself through the exercise I do feel a little bit better as the news wasn't all bad.  I do also have to remind myself that the summer months are usually slower and that we are heading into the holiday season which should bring an increase in sales.

 

That is if I can get myself to get some listing done!   I haven't been very good lately about feeding new items into the system so it isn't that surprising that my sales were also a little slow.  This is undoubtedly a big contributor to my self-doubt. I know that I should be listing more but I do find it easy to get distracted by other things. 

 

I have read that one secret to success is to state your goals publicly and while I do agree that this is probably a good idea I am not sure that I am at a point where I know what my number goals are.  What numbers should I concentrate on?  Should I have a listing goal? A sales goal?  Should these goals be based on number of units or dollars?  Should I work on incremental percentage increases?  Should I have a year end goal, a monthly goal a weekly goal?  I fear that I should have answers to all these questions but I also fear that it would be easy to get bogged down in all of the numbers and become deeply depressed when I missed my targets.   Sometimes (in fact I would argue that most of the time) it is better to keep working on the revenue generating work ie: listing & sourcing new items than it is to worry about how all of your numbers are stacking up.  Don't get me wrong I think it is important to track how you are doing but when you are a one person enterprise sometimes you have to forget all about the numbers and just buckle down and do the work.

It's a balancing act that sometimes makes me wonder if I have what it takes to grow my business and be successful.  For now I will continue, accepting that I will do somethings wrong and that there will always be new things for me to learn.

 

And now I will try to take my own advise and go do some listing!!

 

Happy EBaying,